We are confronted with the incontrovertible fact: At no time in the history of human society did masses of people succeed in preserving, organising and developing the freedom and peace that they had achieved in bloody battles. We mean the genuine freedom of personal and social development, the freedom to face life without fear, freedom from all forms of economic suppression, freedom from reactionary inhibitions of development; in short, the free self-administration of life. We have to rid ourselves of all illusions. In the masses of people themselves there is a retarding power which is both reactionary and murderous and which thwarts the efforts of the freedom-fighters again and again.
This reactionary power in masses of people appears as a general fear of responsibility and fear of freedom. These are not moralistic evaluations. This fear is deeply rooted in the biologic constitution of present-day man. However, this constitution is not, as the typical fascist believes, native to man; it has become that way in the course of history and is therefore changeable, fundamentally speaking. It is not easy to give a brief and lucid exposition of the social role of the fear of freedom. Perhaps it would be best to begin with a -report by James Aldridge, which appeared in the New York Times of 24 June 1942, under the title, ‘British in Africa Lack |Killer Urge’. I quote:
The German Afrika Corps defeated the Eighth Army because it |had speed, anger, virility and toughness. As soldiers in the traditional sense, the Germans are punk, absolutely punk. But Marshal? Erwin Rommel and his gang are angry men, they are tough to the point of stupidity. They are virile and fast, they are thugs with little or no imagination. They are practical men, taken from a most practical and hard life to fight practically: Nazis trained to kill. The German commanders are scientists, who are continually experimenting with and improving the hard, mathematical formula of killing. They are trained as mathematicians, engineers and chemists facing complicated problems. There is no art in it, there is no imagination. War is pure physics to them. The German soldier is trained with a psychology of the daredevil track rider. He is a professional killer, with no distractions. He believes he is the toughest man on earth.
Actually, he cracks very easily and is not so tough, and can be beaten soundly and quickly by a foe using the same ruthless speedy methods he uses . . . The British soldier is the most heroic on earth, but do not confuse that with military toughness. He has the toughness of determination but he has not the toughness which makes him scientifically kill his enemy.
This is the best description of mechanical militarism that I have ever read. It discloses at one blow the complete identity of mechanistic natural science, mechanical human structure and sadistic murder. This identity found its highest and most consummate expression in the totalitarian dictatorship-ideology of German imperialism. This mechanical trinity is set in relief against that view of life that regards man not as a machine, the machine not as the master of man and militarism not as his greatest asset. This living functional view has found its last refuge in the Western democracies. It remains to be seen whether it will survive the chaos.
As strange as it may sound to the ears of a general, I maintain that the defeats of the democracies, as tragic and dangerous as they were, were imbued with a deep humanity, which is diametrically opposed to mechanical automatism: the appreciation of human life. Aldridge is wrong in reproaching the democratic commanders-in-chief for attempting to spare human life, instead of imitating the human robots. He is wrong in demanding that the anti-fascist fighters learn to kill even more mechanically, more automatically, more scientifically, than the Prussian automatons. Those who attempt to beat the mechanical automatons with their own methods will only jump out of the frying pan and into the fire, i.e., in their efforts to become more efficient scientific killers, they will transform themselves into mechanical automatons and perpetuate the process their opponents have set in motion. In such a case the last vestiges of all living hope for a different kind of human society, a permanently peaceful one will vanish altogether.
Our conception of the anti-fascist fight is different. It is a clear, relentless recognition of the historical and biological causes that lead to such murders. The deracination of the fascist plague will come about solely from such recognition, and not by imitating it. One cannot vanquish fascism by imitating - and subduing it with its own methods, without becoming a fascist oneself. The way of fascism is the way of the automaton, death, rigidity, hopelessness. The way of the living is fundamentally different; it is more difficult, more dangerous, more honest, more hopeful.
Let us strip the matter of all current political interest and concentrate on the one question: How does such a complete functional identity of machine, man and scientific murder come about? This question may not bear any relevance to such questions as whether ship-building is keeping pace with ship-sinking or whether the mechanical monstrosity will reach the oil wells of Baku or not. We do not fail to appreciate the importance of these current questions. If my house should suddenly catch fire, naturally I would first try to extinguish the fire and to save what could still be saved of important manuscripts, books and apparatus. But sooner or later I shall have to build a new house, and I shall give considerable thought to what it was that caused the fire in the old house, so that I can prevent a repetition of the misfortune.
MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. In contrast to man, animals are not mechanical or sadistic, and their societies (within the same species) are incomparably
more peaceful than man’s societies. The basic question runs: What caused the human animal to deteriorate and become robot like?
When I use the word ‘animal’, I do not mean something vicious, terrible or ‘inferior’, but a biologic fact. However, man developed the peculiar idea that he was not an animal; he was a ‘man’, and he had long since divested himself of the ‘vicious’ and the ‘brutal’. Man takes great pains to disassociate himself from the vicious animal and to prove that he ‘is better’ by pointing to his culture and his civilisation, which distinguish him from the animal.
His entire attitude, his ‘theories of value’, moral philosophies, his ‘monkey trials’,, all bear witness to the fact that he does not want to be reminded that he is fundamentally an animal, that he has incomparably more in common with ‘the animal’ than he has with that which he thinks and dreams himself to be.
The theory of the German superman has its origin in man’s effort to disassociate himself from the animal. His viciousness, his inability to live peacefully with his own kind, his wars, bear witness to the fact that man is distinguished from the other animals only by a boundless sadism and the mechanical trinity of an authoritarian view of life, mechanistic science and the machine. If one looks back over long stretches of the results of human civilization, one finds that man’s claims are not only false, but are peculiarly contrived to make him forget that he is an animal. Where and how did man get these illusions about himself?
Man’s life is dichotomized: One part of his life is determined by biologic laws (sexual gratification, consumption of food, relatedness to nature); the other part of his life is determined by the machine civilization (mechanical ideas about his own organization, his superior position in the animal kingdom, his racial or class attitude towards other human groups, valuations about ownership and non-ownership, science, religion, etc.).
His being an animal and his not being animal, biologic roots on the one hand and technical development on the other hand, cleave man’s life and thought. All the notions man has developed about himself are consistently derived from the machine that he has created. The construction of machines and the use of machines have imbued man with the belief that he is progressing and developing himself to something ‘higher’, in and through the machine.
But he also invested the machine with an animal-like appearance and mechanics. The train engine has eyes to see with and legs to run with, a mouth to consume coal with and discharge openings for slag, levers and other devices for making sounds. In this way the product of mechanistic technology became the extension of man himself. In fact, machines do constitute a tremendous extension of man’s biologic organization. They make him capable of mastering nature to a far greater degree than his hands alone had enabled him. They give him mastery over time and space.
Thus, the machine became a part of man himself, a loved and highly esteemed part. He dreams about how these machines make his life easier and will give him a great capacity for enjoyment. The enjoyment of life with the help of the machine has always been his dream. And in reality? The machine became, is, and will continue to be his most dangerous destroyer, if he does not differentiate himself from it,
The advance of civilization which was determined by the development of the machine went hand in hand with a catastrophic misinterpretation of the human biologic organisation. In the construction of the machine, man followed the laws of mechanics and lifeless energy. This technology was already highly developed long before man began to ask how he himself was constructed and organized. When, finally, he dared very gradually, cautiously and very often under the mortal threat of his fellow man to discover his own organs, he interpreted their functions in the way he had learned to construct machines many centuries before. He interpreted them in a mechanistic, lifeless and rigid way. The mechanistic view of life is a copy of mechanistic civilisation. But living functioning is fundamentally different; it is not mechanistic. The specific biologic energy, orgone, obeys laws which are neither mechanical nor electrical.
Trapped in a mechanistic picture of the world, man was incapable of grasping the specifically living, non-mechanistic functioning. Man dreams about one day producing a homun-culus a la Frankenstein or at least an artificial heart or artificial protein. The notions of homunculus, which man has developed in his fantasy, project a picture of a brutal monster, manlike, but mechanically stupid, angular, and possessing powerful forces, which, if they are set loose, will be beyond control and will automatically cause havoc.
In his film fantasia Walt Disney brilliantly captured this fact. In such fantasies of himself and his organization, we miss every expression of that which is vitally alive, kind, social and related to nature. On the other hand, it is striking that man invests the animals he portrays precisely with those traits he misses in himself and does not give to his homunculus figures. This, too, is excellently brought out in Disney’s animal films.
In his fantasies, man appears as a mechanical, vicious, overbearing, heartless, inanimate monster, while the animal appears as a social, kind and fully alive creature, invested with all the human strengths and weaknesses. We have to ask: Does man reflect a reality in these fantasies? The answer is: Yes. He very vividly portrays his inner biologic contradiction:
Thus, the machine has had a mechanical, mechanistic, ‘dulling’, and ‘rigidifying’ effect on man’s conception of his own organisation. This is how man conceives of himself: The brain is the ‘most consummate product of development’. His brain is a ‘control centre’, which gives the individual organs commands and impulses just as the’ ruler’ of a state orders his’ subjects’ about. The organs of the body are connected with the master, the ‘brain’, by telegraph wires, the nerves. (A complete misconception naturally, for the organs of the organism had an expedient biologic function long before there was a brain in billions of organisms. And as physiology has experimentally proven, the essential functions of life continue for some time in a dog or chicken from which the brain has been removed.)
Infants have to drink a precise quantity of milk at fixed intervals and have to sleep a precise number of hours. Their diet has to have exactly x ounces of fat, j ounces of protein and % ounces of carbohydrates. Until the day of marriage, a man does not have a sex drive; it begins to operate precisely on this day. God created the world in exactly six days and rested on the seventh, as man rests from his machines. Children have to study x hours of mathematics, y hours of chemistry, z hours of zoology, all exactly the same, and all of them have to acquire the same amount of wisdom. Superior intelligence is equal to one hundred points, average intelligence to eighty points, stupidity to forty points. With ninety points one gets a Ph.D., with eighty-nine, one does not.
Even in our own time, psychic life itself is only something nebulous and mysterious to man, or at best a secretion of the brain, which, as it were, is neatly stored away in individual compartments. It has no greater significance than the excreta that are discharged from the bowels. For centuries man has not only denied the existence of a soul; what is worse is that he repudiated every attempt to comprehend sensations and psychic experiences.
At the same time, however, he devised mystical conceptions which embodied his emotional life. Those who questioned his mystical conceptions of life were persecuted and punished with death, whether it was the ‘saints’, ‘racial purity’, or the ‘state’ that was questioned. In this way man developed mechanistic, mechanical and mystical conceptions of his organizations at one and the same time. Thus, his understanding of biology remained far behind his dexterity in constructing machines, and he abandoned the possibility of comprehending himself. The machine he had created sufficed to explain the performances of his organism.
Is this gap between outstanding industrial dexterity and biologic understanding only the result of a lack of knowledge? Or can we assume that there is an unconscious intention, an, as it were, unconscious arbitrary banishment of the insight into one’s own organization? (In the experimental studies of the orgone, I never cease to marvel that atmospheric orgone was so completely overlooked by tens of thousands of outstanding researchers.)
The irrefutable answer is: The lagging behind of our understanding of the living, its mechanistic misinterpretation and the overestimation of the machine were and are unconscious intentions. There is no reason whatever why man could not have constructed machines mechanistically and at the same time comprehended the living, non-mechanical in a living way. A thorough consideration of human behaviour in important life situations betrays the nature of this intention.
For man the machine civilization constituted not only an improvement of his animal existence; over and above this it had the subjectively far more important, but irrational, function of constantly stressing that he was not an animal, that he was fundamentally different from the animal. The next question is this: What interest does man have in constantly crying out, whether in his science, his religion, his art or his other expressions of life, that he is indeed a man and not an animal; that the highest task of human existence is the ‘slaying of his animal side’ and the cultivation of ‘values’; that the child has to be transformed from a ‘little wild animal’ into a ‘higher man’?
How is it possible, we have to ask, that man should want to cut himself off from the biologic branch on which he grew and of which he is inveterately a part? How is it possible, we must ask further, that he does not see the damages (psychic illnesses, biopathies, sadism and wars) to his health, culture and mind that are caused by this biologic renunciation? Is it possible for human intelligence to admit that human misery can be done away with only if man fully acknowledges his animal nature? Doesn’t man have to learn that that which distinguishes him from the other animals is merely an improvement of the security factor of life, and that he has to give up the irrational renunciation of his true nature?
‘Away from the animal; away from sexuality!’ are the guiding principles of the formation of all human ideology. This is the case whether it is disguised in the fascist form of racially pure ‘supermen’, the communist form of proletarian class honour, the Christian form of man’s ‘spiritual and ethical nature’, or the liberal form of ‘higher human values’. All these ideas harp on the same monotonous tune: ‘We are not animals; it was we who discovered the machine - not the animal! And we don’t have genitals like the animals!’
All of this adds up to an overemphasis of the intellect, of the ‘purely’ mechanistic; logic and reason as opposed to instinct; culture as opposed to nature; the mind as opposed to the body; work as opposed to sexuality; the state as opposed to the individual; the superior man as opposed to the inferior man.
How is it to be explained that of the millions of car drivers, radio listeners, etc., only very few know the name of the inventor of the car and the radio, whereas every child knows the name of the generals of the political plague?
Natural science is constantly drilling into man’s consciousness that fundamentally he is a worm in the universe. The political plague-monger is constantly harping upon the fact that man is not an animal, but a ‘zoon politikon’, i.e., a non-animal, an upholder of values, a ‘moral being’. How much mischief has been perpetuated by the Platonic philosophy of the state! It is quite clear why man knows the politicos better than the natural scientists: He does not want to be reminded of the fact that he is fundamentally a sexual animal. He does not want to be an animal.
Viewed in this way, the animal has no intelligence, but only ‘wicked instincts’; no culture, but only ‘base drives’; no sense of values, but only ‘material needs’. It is precisely the human type who sees the whole of life in the making of money who likes to stress these ‘differences’. If a war as murderous as the present one has any trace of a rational function, then it is the function of exposing the abysmal irrationality and mendacity of such ideas.
Man would have good reason to be happy if he were as free from sadism, perversions and meanness, and as filled with a natural spontaneity, as any one of the animals, whether an ant or an elephant. As vain as man’s assumption was that the earth is the centre of the universe or the sole inhabited planet, even so unreal and pernicious was his philosophy that represented the animal as a ‘soulless’ creature devoid of any morals, indeed, as morally repulsive.
If, while professing myself to be a benevolent saint, I should take an axe and crack my neighbour’s skull, there would be good reason for putting me in a mental institution or in the electric chair. But this juxtaposition exactly reflects the contradiction in man between his ideal ‘values’ on the one hand and his actual behaviour on the other hand. His expressing of this contradiction in high-sounding sociological formulas such as ‘the century of wars and revolutions’, or’ elevating experiences at the front’, or ‘the highest development of military strategy and political tactics’, does not in the least alter the fact that it is precisely with respect to his biological and social organization that man gropes in the dark and is so hopelessly confused.
It is clear that this frame of mind did not evolve naturally; it is the result of the development of the machine civilization. It is easy to prove that, when the patriarchal organization of society began to replace the matriarchal organization, suppression and repression of genital sexuality in children and adolescents were the principal mechanisms used to adapt the human structure of the authoritarian order. The suppression of nature, of ‘the animal’ in the child, was and has remained the principal tool in the production of mechanical subjects.55 Society’s socio-economic development has continued its mechanical course until today in an independent way. The basis of all ideologic and cultural formations developed and branched out hand in hand with the socio-economic development: ‘Away from genitality’ and ‘away from the animal’.
Man’s effort to disassociate himself from his biological origin became more and more pronounced and comprehensive in the course of these two processes, the social and the
psychological. Sadistic brutality in business and war, mechanicalness in his nature, ambiguity in his facial expression, armouring against feelings, perverse and criminal tendencies, all of these became more and more pronounced and comprehensive.
It hasn’t been too long since we began to take cognizance of the devastating effects of this devious biological development. One is easily tempted to look upon the state of affairs too optimistically. One could argue as follows: There can be no doubt that man went astray when he interpreted his own nature in terms of the machine civilization. Now that we recognize this error, it will be easy to correct it. Civilization has to be mechanical, but man’s mechanistic attitude towards life can easily be converted into an attitude based on functional living processes. An astute minister of education could issue appropriate edicts for the purpose of reshaping education. The error would be corrected in one or two generations. That’s the way some clever men spoke at the time of the Russian Revolution, 1917-23.
This argument would indeed be correct if the mechanical view of life were merely an ‘idea’ or ‘attitude’. However, the character analysis of the average man in all social situations brought a fact to light which we cannot afford to underestimate. It turned out that the mechanical view of life was not merely a ‘reflection’ of the social processes in man’s psychic life, as Marx had assumed, but much more than that: Over the course of thousands of years of mechanical development, the mechanistic view of life has become more and more ingrained in man’s biological system, continuously from generation to generation. In the process of this development, man’s functioning was actually changed in a mechanical way. Man became plasmatically rigid in the process of killing his genital function. He armoured himself against the natural and spontaneous in himself and lost contact with the function of biological self-regulation. Now he is filled with mortal fear of the living and the free.
This biologic rigidity is essentially manifested in a general stiffening of the organism and in a demonstrable reduction of plasmatic mobility: Intelligence is impaired; the natural social sense is blocked; psychosis is rampant. I gave a thorough exposition of the facts that support this assertion in The Function of the Orgasm. So-called civilized man actually did become angular and mechanical, and he lost his spontaneity, i.e., he developed into an automaton and ‘brain machine’. Thus, he not only believes that he functions as a machine, but he actually does function automatically, mechanistically and mechanically.
He lives, loves, hates and thinks more and more mechanically. With his biological stiffening and the loss of his native function of self-regulation, he acquired all the characterological attitudes, which culminated in the outbreak of the dictatorship plague: a hierarchical view of the state, a mechanical administration of society, fear of responsibility, an intense longing for a fuhrer and craving for authority, insistence upon commands, mechanistic thinking in natural science, mechanical killing in war. It is no coincidence that the Platonic idea of the state was born in the Greek slave society. Nor is it a coincidence that it has continued to exist into the present day: serfdom was replaced by inner slavery.
The question of the fascist plague has led us deeply into man’s biologic organization. It relates to a development that goes back thousands of years, and not, as those who view society in purely economic terms believed, to the imperialistic interests of the past two hundred years or even past twenty years. On no account, therefore, can the present war be
confined to the imperialistic interests in the oil wells of Baku or the rubber plantations in the Pacific. The Treaty of Versailles plays the same role in the Second World War as the wheel of a machine in the transmission of the energy of coal to the steam piston. The purely economic view of life, as much as it may have been of service, is totally unsuited to cope with the convulsive processes of our Me.
The biblical legend of the creation of man as an image of God, of his dominion over the animals, clearly reflects the repressive action man carried out against his animal nature. But he is reminded of his true nature every day by his body functions, procreation, birth and death, sexual urge and dependency upon nature. His efforts to fulfil his ‘divine’ or ‘national’ ‘calling’ become more, and more strenuous; the deeply rooted hatred of all genuine natural sciences, i.e., sciences that are not concerned with the construction of machines, stems from this source. It took several thousand years before a Darwin succeeded in unmistakably proving man’s animal descendancy. It took just as long until a Freud discovered the fact, banal as it is that the child is altogether, and above all, sexual. And what a fuss the animal, man, made when he heard such things!
There is a direct connection between the ‘dominion’ over animals and racial ‘dominion’ over the ‘black man, the Jew, the Frenchman, etc.’ It is clear that one prefers to be a gentleman than an animal.
To disassociate himself from the animal kingdom, the human animal denied and finally ceased to perceive the sensations of his organs; in the process he became biologically rigid. It is still a dogma of mechanistic natural science that the autonomous functions are not experienced and that the autonomous nerves of life are rigid. This is the case, notwithstanding the fact that every three-year-old child knows very well that pleasure, fear, anger, yearning, etc., take place in the belly.
This is the case, notwithstanding the fact that the experience of oneself is nothing but the total experience of one’s organs. By losing the sensation of his organs, man lost not only the intelligence of the animal and the ability to react naturally, but he ruined his own chances of overcoming his life problems. He replaced the natural self-regulatory intelligence of the body plasma by a goblin in the brain, which he invested with both metaphysical and mechanical characteristics in a way that was metaphysical in every respect. Man’s body sensations did indeed become rigid and mechanical.
In his education, science and philosophy of life, man is constantly reproducing the mechanical organism. Under the slogan: ‘Away from the animal’ this biologic deformity celebrates the most amazing triumphs in the fight of the ‘superman against the lower-man’ (is equal to abdominal man) and in scientific, mathematical and mechanical killing. But more than mechanistic philosophies and machines are needed to kill. This is where sadism comes in, this secondary drive which is the offspring of suppressed nature and is the only important trait differentiating man’s structure from that of the animal.
However, this tragic mechanical-mechanistic development, distorted as it is, did not eradicate its opposite. At the bottom of his nature, man still remains an animal creature. No matter how immobile his pelvis and back may be; no matter how rigid his neck and shoulders may be; or how tense his abdominal muscles may be; or how high he may hold his chest in pride and fear - at the innermost core of his sensations he feels that he is only a piece of living organized nature. But as he denies and suppresses every aspect of this nature, he cannot embrace it in a rational and living way. Hence, he has to experience it
in a mystical, other-worldly and supernatural way, whether in the form of religious ecstasy, cosmic unification with the world soul, sadistic thirst for blood or’ cosmic seething of the blood’. It is known that such an impotent monster senses his strongest urges to kill in the spring. The Prussian military parades betray all the characteristics of a mystical and mechanical man.
Human mysticism, which thus represents the last traces of vitality, also became the fountainhead of mechanical sadism in Hitlerism. From the deepest sources of biologic functioning still remaining, the cry for ‘freedom’ wins through again and again, notwithstanding all the rigidity and enslavement. There is not a single social movement that could advocate the ‘suppression of life’ as part of its programme and hope to win over masses of people. Every single one of the many different social movements that suppress the self-regulation of life energy, advocates ‘freedom’ in one form or another: freedom from sin; redemption from the ‘earthly’; the freedom of lebensraum; the freedom of the nation; the freedom of the proletariat; the freedom of culture; etc., etc. The various cries for freedom are as old as the ossification of the human plasma.
The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression. It will never cease as long as man feels himself to be trapped. No matter how different the cries for freedom may be, at bottom they always express one and the same thing: the intolerableness of the organism’s rigidity and the mechanical institutions of life, which are sharply at variance with the natural sensations of life. If there should ever be a society in which all the cries for freedom fade away, then man will have finally overcome his biological and social deformity and have achieved genuine freedom. Not until man acknowledges that he is fundamentally an animal, will he be able to create a genuine culture.
Man’s ‘upward strivings’ are nothing but the biologic development of vital powers. Such strivings are conceivable only within the framework of the laws of biologic development and not in opposition to them. The will to freedom and the capacity for freedom are nothing but the will and the capacity to recognize and promote the unfolding of man’s biologic energy (with the aid of the machine). It is out of the question to talk about freedom if man’s biologic development is choked and feared.
Under the influence of politicians, masses of people tend to ascribe the responsibility for wars to those who wield power at any given time. In the First World War it was the munitions industrialists; in the Second World War it was the psychopathic generals who were said to be guilty. This is passing the buck. The responsibility for wars falls solely upon the shoulders of these same masses of people, for they have all the necessary means to avert war in their own hands.
In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity and in part actively, these same masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer more than anyone else. To stress this guilt on the part of masses of people, to hold them solely responsible, means to take them seriously. On the other hand, to commiserate masses of people as victims means to treat them as small, helpless children. The former is the attitude held by the genuine freedom-fighters; the latter the attitude held by the power-thirsty politicians.
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