What is the effect when parents hate their children from a very early age, though, even if they only rarely express it through overt verbal or physical violence?
You lack that sense of order and safety which most others take for granted in healthy homes.
But here is the thing: when Hitler said he would kill the Jews, he meant it. Those who believed him, though, were considered paranoid. They were not. They simply had a category for insane violence, which people who had not been exposed to it lacked.
Those who believed that Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Mao intended mass death and political violence would, at various times in the careers of all these men been considered delusional. Castro and Ho were, in my understanding, more or less openly supported by many academics and journalists in the mid-1950’s (hell, Stalin in the 1930’s, along with Mussolini in more cases than they now admit) and that even though Ho had helped found the French Communist party all the way back in 1920 or so, and become an almost immediate Comintern agent.
Let me put it this way: the POSSIBILITY of paranoid thinking creates a much broader array of possible understandings of data with which one is presented. Logic and factual analysis can put many fears to rest in a reasonably well ordered mind, but such a mind is in my view much better equipped to handle liminal, unusual, aberrant data than one which has seen little suffering, and complacently assumes that because things always have worked out, that they will continue to.
Put another way, I wear my paranoia–as many would call it–with pride.