Impotence fear as the root of the luxurious tree of grandiose delusions is sometimes directly demonstrated by the obvious nature of the invention on which the individual is engaged. The mysterious perpetual motion machine turns out to be a crude version of the sexual organs.[37] Shortly after C left the hospital, he was busy on the stump, haranguing large audiences as a presidential candidate on a protest ticket. C would not be taken seriously by many people of much culture and discernment, but there are paranoid types who are plausible enough in their accusations to win the support of discriminating men. Many of them are “litigious paranoids,” and, as implied by the term, they are characterized by the legal and agitational means which they exploit for the redress of grievances. They succeed in rationalizing their motives so adroitly that they are very dangerous troublemakers. Even when psychiatrists diagnose them as psychotic, they are able to put up a front so successfully that they are often released from custody by judge or jury. Were the data available it would be interesting to calculate how much this active and by no means uncommon element in society costs in terms of litigation fees and damaged reputations. One of the smoothest customers of this description is D. After leaving high school because of his ambition to earn money, he presently became a traveling salesman for an electrical company. He was very successful and soon accumulated enough to start himself in business, aided somewhat by the money of the woman whom he married. From the beginning he was involved in numerous lawsuits with big corporations. He was finally sent to the penitentiary for having assumed the name of another company which was already operating. Since the address of the new company, as well as the name, was so similar to that of the older concern, he received mail and checks intended for the corporation. His own story is that he was persecuted by a certain big corporation, which tried consistently to ruin his business, even poisoning the mind of his wife against him (who soon divorced D). Whenever a suit was being tried against him, he claims always to have found a representative of the big corporation in town. These ideas of persecution extended through the trial, which he asserts was unfairly conducted, and to the penitentiary, where he claimed that officials were in league with the corporation to keep him imprisoned. His conduct was such that he was finally transferred from the prison to a mental hospital, where his attitude was that of contemptuous superiority. He collected evidence against the hospital, listening to all who complained of any sort of cruelty and incompetence, and constantly occupied himself with schemes to release prisoners and expose his persecutors.