Wednesday, July 15, 2009

THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM


I invented the word bioneer to describe Dr. Wilhem Reich.

The Russian-Soviet and German-National-Socialist and Italian-Anarchist reorganizations of society following the Second World War of the 20th Century all turned into fascist oligarchies in which irrational political claims, popular suppression and events of mass slaughter. This is hardly what Marx envisioned as the self-overcoming of Capitalism into a paradise of ease, freedom and happy work. Why did social reformations so often go horribly astray? Why do mobs riot when they win or when the loose and cause us to do what we would net ourselves do personally?

The suicidal enactments and self-thwarting vision of nations, of groups generally, is the major impediment to the quality of life on Earth. Reich insists upon the intrinsic compatibility of Rationality, Pleasure-in-Work & Ecstatic Intimacy and does profound, if slightly dated, distinction between historical examples of pathological socius and the general principles upon which a society might have to function in order to be spontaneously capable of seizing and perpetuating freedom, love and wisdom.

Many people have been confounded by the disparity between Young Reich -- the radical solider-turned-psychoanalyst who rejected Freud's death-drive, promoted sex-education for children, and revolutionized psychiatric practice with physical interventions based on the immotility of segments of "muscle armoring" which we use to assert or "character" against the world and other people and animals -- AND the Late Reich whose philosophic assertions about atmospherics, cosmology & massless electricity are often interpreted as a classic proof of the moral perils of flying too close to the sun. He enacted the fate of Prometheus and wound up in Hades.

Between these two, the venerated social psychoanalyst and body-therapy pioneer and the Rogue Physicist who so provoked the American government that his books were publically burned, there is Middle Reich.

This Middle person, or "third Reich," was an innovative social theorist, political activist & biologist who claimed that proto-biological vesicles could be observed under controlled laboratory conditions with extreme magnification in darkness. This man, admittedly brilliant, was fixated upon two things -- the rise of massive social toxicity and pathological group-actions all over the world, destroying every possibility to more naturally reorient society according to our ideals, and this vision of organic bodies as being filled with streaming torrents of pleasurable generative electricity, pulsating waves and living tissues that are subject to emotional suppression, starvation and mutated self-destructive growth.

In this book he looks simultaneously at the bodies who make up the Social Field and the Body of the Social Field Itself as in a war of morphologies fought between Healthy Reason and Hysteria.

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