12
OUR INTEREST IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF FREEDOM
This chapter will deal with the biologic miscalculation that, as history proves, all freedom movements have made. It is a miscalculation that nipped freedom efforts in the bud or frustrated satisfactory regulations of social life, which had already been attained. This endeavour is prompted by the conviction that only work-democracy can create the basis of genuine freedom. My experiences in social discussions lead me to believe that the exposure of this miscalculation will very likely be taken amiss. It imposes the highest demands upon the will to truth of each and every one of us. In actual practice it implies a great burden in the daily struggle for existence, for it transfers all social responsibility to the working men and women in factories, on farms, in clinics, offices, laboratories, etc.
We have found that facts of a fundamental nature, i.e., facts that, over and above the political hubbub of everyday life, relate to the ancient history of the human species, relate, indeed, to man’s biologic constitution, are rejected with various arguments. At bottom, however, the motive is always irrational. When peace reigns, when everything is proceeding at a leisurely pace, then it is said: ‘Everything is quite all right as it is; the League of Nations is a guarantee of peace; our diplomats settle conflicts in a peaceful way; the generals are only decorations. So why pose questions that would be relevant only in the event of a war? We have just ended a war to end all wars - there is no need to get excited.’ Then, when it is shown that such arguments were based on illusions, when the League of Nations and the diplomats have given ample testimony of their inability to cope with pressing problems, when a new war rages - this time one that is worldwide and more brutal than anything known in history, then all attention is concentrated on ‘winning the war’. Then it is said: ‘We have to win the war first. This is no time for profound truths. We will need those when the war has been won, for then we will also have to secure peace.’ Thus, a clear-cut distinction is made between the conduct of war and the winning of the war, between the termination of hostilities and the conclusion of peace. Only after the war has been won and the peace concluded, does one want to proceed to secure peace. One fails to see that it is precisely in the heat of the war that those deep social convulsions take place that destroy old institutions and remould man, that, in other words, the seeds of peace germinate in the devastations of war. Man’s intense longing for peace is never so strong as it is at a time of war. Hence, in no other social circumstance are there so many strong impulses intent on changing the conditions that produce war. Man learned to construct dams when he suffered from floods. Peace can be hammered out only at a time of war, then and only then.
Instead of learning the lessons of war on the spot, so that a new world can be built immediately, important decisions are put off until diplomats and statesmen are so involved in peace treaties and reparations that again there is no time for ‘basic facts’. In the transition period from the cessation of hostilities to the conclusion of a sham peace,
we hear statements like this: ‘First the damages of war must be repaired; the war production has to be converted to peace production; our hands are full. Before dealing with these basic facts, let us arrange everything peacefully.’ In the meantime the lessons of war have been forgotten; once again everything has been arranged in such a way that in the course of one generation a new, even more horrible war has broken out. Once again there is ‘no time’ and one is ‘too busy’ to concern oneself with ‘basic truths’. The emotions of wartime rapidly give way to the old rigidity and emotional apathy.
If someone, as I myself, has gone through this procrastination of essential questions and heard these same arguments for the second time in forty-five years of life; if he recognizes in the new catastrophe all the characteristics of the old catastrophe; he has to admit, however reluctantly, that no essential change has taken place since the first catastrophe (unless one considers the improvement of the means of destruction and a more widespread development of human sadism as essential changes). Slowly and surely the conviction takes shape in such a man that: For some curious reason or another, masses of people do not want to get to the root of the secret of war. They fear the truths that could bring them a painful cure.
People like to think of war as a ‘social thunderstorm’. It is said that it ‘purifies’ the atmosphere; it has its great benefits -it ‘hardens the youth’ and makes them courageous. As far as that goes, people say, we have always had and will always have wars. They are biologically motivated. According to Darwin, the ‘struggle for existence’ is the law of life. Why, then, were peace conferences organized? Nor have I ever heard that bears or elephants split up into two camps and annihilate one another. In the animal kingdom there are no wars within the same species. Like sadism, war among one’s own kind is an acquisition of ‘civilised man’. No, for some reason or another, man shies away from putting his finger on the causes of war. And there can be no doubt that better ways than war exist of making youth fit and healthy, namely, a satisfying love life, pleasurable and steady work, general sports and freedom from the malicious gossip of old maids. In short, such arguments are hollow chatter.
What is this fact anyhow? Why do people fear it?
Is it possible that in his inmost self every man knows this fact, but is afraid to admit it to himself and to his neighbour?
It boils down to this: As a result of thousands of years of social and educational distortion, masses of people have become biologically rigid and incapable of freedom. They are not capable of establishing peaceful co-existence.
As cynical and hopeless as these two succinct sentences may sound, they contain the answer to the three above questions.
No one wants to acknowledge the truth they contain, or even listen to them. No democratic statesman would know what to make of it. Every honest man knows it. All dictators have built their power on the social irresponsibleness of masses of people. They have made no bones about consciously exploiting this fact. For years on end, far more than half the civilized German people heard the assertion that the masses merely regurgitate what has been funnelled into them. They reacted to this with slavish loyalty.
They themselves brought about this ignominious situation. It is ridiculous to contend that the psychopathic general was capable of oppressing seventy million people all by himself.
‘How’s that?’ the suave politician and philanthropist will ask. ‘You say that the Americans are incapable of freedom? And what of the heroic rebels of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the British Commandos, the martyrs in Norway, the armies in Soviet Russia? How can you dare to cast a slur upon democracies?’
We do not mean military groups, governments, minorities, individual scientists or thinkers! But genuine social freedom is more than a question of groups. The trend of society is determined solely by the overwhelming majority of working men and women, whether they passively tolerate or actively support tyranny. Are the masses themselves capable of administering society without their statesmen or parties telling them what to do and how to do it? They are, to be sure, capable of enjoying given freedoms, of performing assigned work, of being against war and for peace. Thus far, however, they have not been capable of safeguarding work against abuse, regulating it through their own organizations, promoting rapid development, preventing wars, mastering their own irrationalism, etc.
The masses cannot do these things because until now they have never been in the position to acquire and practise this ability. The self-administration of society by the masses, their administration of the organizations in charge of production and consumption, can be the only possible answer to this war. One who takes the masses seriously demands their full responsibility, for they alone are peacefully disposed. The responsibility and the capacity to be free must now be added to the love of peace.
As bitter as it may be, the fact remains: It is the irresponsible-ness of masses of people that lies at the basis of fascism of all countries, nations and races, etc. Fascism is the result of man’s distortion over thousands of years. It could have developed in any country or nation. It is not a character trait that is confined specifically to the Germans or Italians. It is manifest in every single individual of the world. The Austrian saying ‘Da kann man halt nix machen’ expresses this fact just as the American saying ‘Let George do it’. That this situation was brought about by a social development which goes back thousands of years does not alter the fact itself. It is man himself who is responsible and not ‘historical developments’. It was this shifting of the responsibility from living man to ‘historical developments’ that caused the downfall of the socialist freedom movements. However, the events of the past twenty years demand the responsibility of the working masses of people.
If we take ‘freedom’ to mean first and foremost the. responsibility of each individual to shape personal, occupational and social existence in a rational way, then it can be said that there is no greater fear than the fear of the creation of general freedom. Unless this basic problem is given complete priority and solved, there will never be a freedom capable of lasting more than one or two generations. The solution to this problem will require more thought, more decency, more conscientiousness, more of an economic, educational and social readjustment in the social life of masses of people than all the efforts which were made in former wars (and will have to be made in wars still to come) and post-war reconstruction programmes taken together. This one problem and its solution contain everything that the most audacious and most agonized thinkers of history have tried to grasp by the idea of international social revolution. We are the protagonists
and bearers of a stupendous revolutionary upheaval. If one must indeed suffer, then ‘blood, sweat and tears’ should at least have a rational goal, namely: the responsibility of the working masses of people for social life! This conclusion follows with hard logic from the following statements:
Every social process is determined by the attitude of the masses.
The masses are incapable of freedom.
When the masses achieve the capacity to be free through their own efforts, this will be genuine social freedom.
What prompts me to depart from the usual policy of veiling such generally known facts, especially as I make no claim to political leadership?
There are several motives. For years I demurred from pursuing them, simply because I feared the consequences. Again and again I hesitated to put my ideas down on paper. I tried to extricate myself from this perplexity by telling myself that I of course was not a politician and that political events were no concern of mine. Or I evaded the issue by persuading myself that I had more than enough to keep me busy with my orgone biophysics and saw no reason why I should burden myself with an embarrassing, thankless basic social question, which seemed hopeless for the time being anyhow. I tried to make myself believe that it was my secret political ambition that was prompting me to get involved in the turmoil of irrational political ideologies. I demurred to give in to such an ambition. The responsible politicians and statesmen were bound to come out with these facts sooner or later!
After years of painful and harassing oscillations and attempts to fight shy of these facts, I had finally to yield to the pressure exerted on me as well as on all my co-workers by our investigation of the phenomena of life. A researcher has an allegiance to truth, over which no other allegiance, however highly esteemed, can take precedence. What makes it particularly difficult to fulfil this allegiance is the fact that communications of truth, instead of being looked upon as natural, have a highly dangerous potential as things now stand.
Basically speaking, this is merely a summary of facts, which, in an isolated way, have been well known to us for a long time:
Mankind is biologically sick.
Politics is the irrational social expression of this sickness.
Whatever takes place in social life is actively or passively, voluntarily or involuntarily, determined by the structure of masses of people.
This character structure is formed by socio-economic processes and it anchors and perpetuates these processes. Man’s biopathic character structure is, as it were, the fossilization of the authoritarian process of history. It is the biophysical reproduction of mass suppression.
The human structure is animated by the contradiction between an intense longing for and fear of freedom.
The fear of freedom of masses of people is expressed in the biophysical rigidity of the organism and the inflexibility of the character.
Every form of social leadership is merely the social expression of the one or the other side of this structure of masses of people.
It is not a question of the Versailles Peace Treaty, the oil wells of Baku or two to three hundred years of capitalism, but a question of four to six thousand years of authoritarian mechanistic civilization, which has ruined man’s biologic functioning.
Interest in money and power is a substitute for unfulfilled happiness in love, supported by the biologic rigidity of masses of people.
The suppression of the natural sexuality of children and adolescents serves to mould the human structure in such a way that masses of people become willing upholders and reproducers of mechanistic authoritarian civilization.
Thousands of years of human suppression are in the process of being eliminated.
These are more or less the results of our research on the character and its relationship to social processes.
We have a threefold interest in the development of a free world: personal, objective and social.
The personal interest is determined by the threat to our existence as members of this mortally sick society. Those, like myself, who lost their home, family and possessions, who experienced three and a half years of murder in war at first hand, who saw many friends die and go to pieces, who witnessed mass migrations and destruction of property, etc., in the First World War, understand what millions upon millions of men and women are going through on this planet today. We want an end to this ignominy! It is ignominious that a handful of Prussian crooks and perverse neurotics, functioning as the ‘fuhrer’ of one thing or another, are able to exploit the social helplessness of hundreds of millions of industrious and decent men and women. The ignominy is all the more poignant in view of the fact that these same millions of men and women unwittingly and naively allowed themselves to be taken in by these political swindlers (and this was the case not only in Germany, but elsewhere also). All we want is to be able to perform our work in peace, to love our wives or husbands without danger, to raise our children free of the miasma of the plague. In short, we do not want to be bothered, deceived and led around by the nose by a handful of political swindlers in this short life of ours. Our lives have been crushed by politics long enough! We want an end of it! Once and for all!!
The protagonists of the fascist plague have looked through the incapacity for freedom of masses of people and have declared that it is an absolute biologic fact. They have put alluring irrational race theories into the world, have divided mankind into biologically immutable superior and inferior races and have conferred upon themselves, who are the most sick and most vicious, the biologic title of ‘superman’. We have the answer to this fraud: The race theory is a mystical view of life. Man’s natural happiness in love and security in life will be the doom of this view.
Our institute is faced with a momentous task. We have to prepare ourselves for two basically different possibilities:
In the event that this Second World War will force the answer to social chaos to the surface and into social consciousness, we will be called upon to deal with great tasks. We will have to assume an enormous responsibility. We have to prepare ourselves for this
possibility in advance. We must have a clear conception of our tasks. Our knowledge of human reactions and the effects of the fascist pestilence will have to be clearly organized if we do not want to fail. Our tasks can be fulfilled only within the framework of the general struggle for the establishment of genuine freedom. If we cherish the illusion that man’s structure is immediately capable of freedom and self-administration, that, in other words, we need merely eliminate the plague of party fascism to make it possible for social freedom to function, to put justice before injustice, truth before falsehood, decency before meanness, then we too will be doomed together with everything else that is based on such illusions. This much is clear. The development of freedom requires that one be ruthlessly free of illusions, for only then will one succeed in rooting out irrationalism from masses of people to open the way to responsibility and freedom. To idealize masses of people and to commiserate with them will only produce fresh misfortunes.
The various freedom organizations in Europe treated this sickness on the part of masses of people as a quack might treat a paralysed patient, namely by persuading him that he was not really paralysed and would surely be able to dance a polka if it were not for the bad wolf (in 1914, the war industrialists; in 1942, the psychopathic generals). A paralysed patient may like to hear such a consolation and rejoice in it, but he still won’t be able to walk. The decent physician would proceed ‘ruthlessly’; he would be very careful not to arouse any false hopes in the patient. He would use every means at his disposal to determine the nature of the paralysis and to decide whether it is curable or not. If, fundamentally, it is curable, then he will find the means of curing it.
The fascist dictator declares that the masses of people are biologically inferior and crave authority, that, basically, they are slaves by nature. Hence, a totalitarian authoritarian regime is the only possible form of government for such people. It is significant that all dictators who today plunge the world into misery stem from the suppressed masses of people. They are intimately familiar with this sickness on the part of masses of people. What they lack is an insight into natural processes and development, the will to truth and research, so that they are never moved by a desire to want to change these facts.
On the other hand, the formal democratic leaders made the mistake of assuming that the masses of people were automatically capable of freedom and thereby precluded every possibility of establishing freedom and self-responsibility in masses of people as long as they were in power. They were engulfed in the catastrophe and will never reappear.
Our answer is scientific and rational. It is based on the fact that masses of people are indeed incapable of freedom, but it does not - as racial mysticism does - look upon this incapacity as absolute, innate and eternal. It regards this incapacity as the result of former social conditions of life and, therefore, as changeable.
Two important tasks follow from this:
The investigation and elucidation of the forms in which man’s incapacity for freedom expresses itself;
The investigation of the medical, pedagogic and social tools necessary to establish the capacity for freedom in a more and more thorough and more and more extensive way.
At this point the ‘mistakes’ made by democratic governments will be recalled: pacts with plague-ridden dictators, the many acts of treachery committed against democratic
allies (England-Spain; Russia-Czechoslovakia, etc.), the priority given to business interests over principles (Russian oil for Italy during the Ethiopian war; Mexican oil for Germany during the Spanish anti-fascist fight; Swedish steel for Nazi Germany; American steel, American coal, etc., for Japan; English behaviour in Burma and India; the religious-mystical faith of the socialists and Communists, etc.). But the gravity of these ‘mistakes’ diminishes when compared with the mistakes of masses of people, their social apathy, passivity, craving for authority, etc. The ineluctable fact remains: The working masses of men and women, they and they alone, are responsible for everything that takes place, the good things and the bad things. True enough, they suffer most from a war, but it is their apathy, craving for authority, etc., that is most responsible for making wars possible. It follows of necessity from this responsibility that the working masses of men and women, they and they alone, are capable of establishing lasting peace. The quintessence of this accomplishment can be nothing but the elimination of the incapacity for freedom. Only the masses of people themselves can accomplish this. To become capable of freedom and of securing peace, masses of people who are incapable of freedom will have to have social power. This is the contradiction and its solution.
In the event that the outcome of this war will not bring the basic facts to the surface of social consciousness and that the old illusions continue to exist, it is to be assumed that our present position will not change much. If such is the case, we will not be able to escape the conclusion that the illusionary ‘pills’, the formal freedoms, the formal joys and forma/ democracies, will soon give birth to new dictators and a new war. In such a case we will continue to be ‘isolated’ and in opposition to this social misery; our task will be no less difficult. Within this general framework of illusions we will have to maintain a subjective and objective honesty. We will have to make every effort to keep our insights into the nature of man unadulterated, and at the same time to deepen them. It will not be easy for the workers in the field of orgone biophysics, structure psychology and sex-economy to elude the influences of illusions and to preserve their knowledge in a pure and crystal clear form for future generations. Their knowledge must be practically applicable if the insight into the psychic mass plague should still have to be asserted after the sixth, twelfth or twentieth world war. In this case we will not pass on to our descendants deeds of heroism, war decorations, ‘heroic remembrances’ and front-line experiences, but a modest, unobtrusive, unostentatious knowledge, pregnant with the seed of the future. This task can be accomplished even under the worst social conditions. When the time is ripe to overcome the emotional plague, we do not want that generation to make any unnecessary mistakes, and we do not want it to have to cast about for answers to the arguments of the plague. We want it to be able to fall back on old, though neglected, truths and to be able to shape its life more honestly and more decently than the generation 0/1940.
At this point, some friend or other may well feel prompted to ask: ‘For Christ’s sake, why don’t you fight for social power to push through the important truths you have perceived? Isn’t it cowardly of you to sit there, politically passive, though you claim to be in possession of vital facts. Damn it, fight for positions as ministers of health, ministers of education, statesmen, etc.!’
We understand this argument. Many of us have set it forth again and again. There were many sleepless nights because of it. The dilemma is this:
Without the power to put them into practice, truths are of no use. They remain academic.
Power, no matter what kind of power it is, without a foundation in truth, is a dictatorship, more or less and in one way or another, for it is always based on man’s fear of the social responsibility and personal burden that ‘freedom’ entails.
Dictatorial power and truth do not go together. They are mutually exclusive.
It is a historical fact that truth has always died when its protagonists have gained social power. ‘Power’ always means the subjugation of others. However, truthful facts can never be put into practice by subjugation, but only by persuasion. We learned this from the French and Russian revolutions. Not a single one of their truths survived more than a few decades at the most. Jesus proclaimed a truth which was stupendous at his time. It died in the Christian world when he was replaced by the popes. Deep insights into human misery of two thousand years ago gave way to formulas; the simple cowl gave way to the gold-draped ornament; the rebellion against suppression of the poor gave way to consolidations of happiness beyond the grave. The truths of the great French Revolution died in the French Republic and ended in political power-mongering, in the ignorance of a Petain and the business dealings of a Laval. The truths of Marxian economy died in the Russian Revolution when the word’ society’ was replaced by the word ‘state’ and the idea of an ‘international mankind’ was replaced by nationalistic patriotism and the pact with Hitler. They died in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia, notwithstanding the fact that the heirs of the great European freedom-fighters had all the social power in their hands. Almost one hundred years after the birth of the truths of 1848, the muck, which goes back thousands of years, still prevails. Power and truth do not go together. This too is a bitter, unfortunate truth.
It is true that those of us who have political experience could wrestle for power just as any other politician. But we have no time; we have more important things to do. And there is no doubt that the knowledge we hold to be sacred would be lost in the process. To acquire power, millions of people have to be fed illusions. This too is true: Lenin won over millions of Russian peasants, without whom the Russian Revolution would have been impossible, with a slogan which was at variance with the basic collective tendencies of the Russian party. The slogan was: ‘Take the land of the large landowners. It is to be your individual property.’ And the peasants followed. They would not have offered their allegiance if they had been told in 1917 that this land would one day be collectivized. The truth of this is attested to by the bitter fight for the collectivization of Russian agriculture around 1930. In social life there are degrees of power and degrees of falsity. The more the masses of people adhere to truth, the less power-mongering there will be; the more imbued with irrational illusions the masses of people are, the more widespread and brutal individual power-mongering will be.
It would be stupid to try to win over masses of people with the assertion that they themselves and not individual psychopaths are responsible for social misery, that they themselves and not one of their elected or acclaimed leaders bear the responsibility for their fate, that they alone are responsible for everything that happens in the world. This is’ completely at variance with what they have always been told and what they have imbibed. It would be stupid to try to acquire power with such truths.
On the other hand, it is definitely conceivable that the world catastrophe will reach a stage at which the masses of people will be forced to get an insight into their social attitudes, be forced to change themselves and to assume the heavy burden of social responsibility. But in such a case, they themselves will acquire power and will rightfully reject groups who ‘conquer’ power ‘in the interest of the people’. Hence, there is no reason for us to fight for power.
We can be assured that the masses of people will need us, will call upon us and will entrust us with important functions, if they should ever get in a position to transform themselves in a rational direction. We will be a part of these masses, not their leaders, not their elected representatives, not their ‘custodians’. Then, as was the case in Austria and Germany many years ago, masses of people will throng to our clinics, schools, lectures and demonstrations of scientific facts to get answers to basic questions of life. (They will not demand or expect us to tell them how to solve their life tasks.) But they will throng to us only if we shall have remained honest. Then, when masses of people will have to bear the responsibility for social existence themselves, they will inevitably run against their own weaknesses, against the heritage of a vicious past. In short, they will run against those facts in their structures, thoughts and feelings that we include under the term ‘in-capacity for freedom’. And as a social institution, together with thousands of friends, we will expose the mechanism of the incapacity for freedom and all the obstructions to the development of freedom to help masses of people to achieve genuine freedom.
For this we need no power. The confidence of men and women - of all ages, occupations, every colour of skin and every view of life — in our absolute integrity as physicians, researchers, teachers, social workers, biologists, physicists, writers, technicians, etc., will be far more enduring than any power ever acquired by a politician. This confidence will be that much greater, the more our scientific and practical activity reflects reality. This confidence cannot be conquered; it comes about of itself when one adheres to one’s work honestly. In no case should we want to adapt our insights to the masses’ present way of thinking for the purpose’ of winning influence’. Widespread confidence in our activities can proceed only from the deepening of our general knowledge about the nature of the plague.
When we are called upon, it will be a sign that self-administration in social life is indeed taking hold, that the will to ‘profound truth’, to fruitful self-criticism, is awakening in the working masses of men and women. Since our organisation is the only organization that sees through the irrationality of politics and the old ideologies, it cannot be any other way. Conversely, if we continue to remain in the ‘opposition’, it will be a sure sign that society is not ready to see through and eliminate the irrationality in its mechanism. In such a case, however, no power would be of any help to us, and we ourselves would only degenerate into irrationality.
Don’t let this conscious renunciation of power causes anyone to underestimate our work. We do not play the role of ‘humble’, ‘unassuming’ scientists. Our work is accomplished at the source of life, in line with fundamental natural science. False modesty here would be tantamount to self-destruction. It is true that, beside ‘Dneprostroi Dam’, ‘orgastic potency’ sounds small; ‘character armouring’, insignificant, compared with ‘blackout’; ‘orgone’, academic beside ‘Bataan and Tobruk’. It seems this way from a contemporary point of view. But compared with Kepler’s laws, what remains of
Alexander the Great? What remains of Caesar compared with the laws of mechanics? What of Napoleon’s campaigns compared with the discovery of micro-organisms or unconscious psychic life? And what will remain of the psychopathic generals compared with cosmic orgone? Renunciation of power does not mean renunciation of rational regulation of human existence. It is the effect that is different: long-sighted, deep and revolutionary, true and life-securing. It does not matter whether we feel the effects tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. It will be up to working masses of men and women to pick the fruits of new knowledge today and not the day after tomorrow. The responsibility they bear for their life and activity is no less than the responsibility the individual shoemaker bears for the shoe, the physician for the patient, the researcher for his statements, the architect for his constructions. We do not strive to be people’s benefactors or commiserators. We take people seriously! When they need us, they will call us. Then we shall be there. For my part, I reject the struggle for power with the intent of obtruding my knowledge.
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