In the last post I mentioned some interesting research about the psychological tendency to fixate on enemies, inflate their powers and imagine that they are behind most of our problems.
There is an obvious status explanation for these phenomena. Admitting that you are struggling against the chaos of life can appear as very low status since each aspect of the chaos is generally some minor obstacle that by itself should not be much of a problem. However, if the problems are all caused by a great enemy plotting against us then it is higher status both because the powerful enemy decided to focus on us and because the problems are not a combination of minor issues. Even if this was only going on inside a single person's head (as opposed to being a constant theme of the media and blogosphere), lying to others starts with self deception.