Kings and emperors always inspect their troops. Money magnates keep a sharp eye on the sums of money that give them power. All fascist dictators measure the degree of irrationality in human reactions, for it is this irrationality that makes it possible for them to win and maintain their power over masses of people. The natural scientist measures the degree of knowledge and the methods of research. But thus far no freedom organi2ation has taken stock of the biologic arsenal in which the weapons necessary to establish and maintain human freedom are to be found. Despite the exactness of our social machinery, there is still no natural scientific definition of the word freedom.
No other word is so abused and so misunderstood as this one is. To define freedom is to define sexual health. But no one wants to state it openly. One often has the impression that the advocacy of personal and social freedom is associated with fear and guilt feelings. As if to be free were a forbidden sin, or at least not quite decent. Sex-economy comprehends this guilt feeling: Freedom without sexual self-regulation is a contradiction in itself. According to the prevailing human structure, however, to be sexual means to be’ sinful’ or guilty. There are only a few people who experience love without feelings of guilt.
‘Free love’ became a defamatory word and lost the meaning given to it by the old freedom-fighters. In films, to be a criminal and to have a strong sexuality are represented as the same thing. It is not surprising, therefore, that the ascetic and the reactionary man are more highly esteemed than the amorous peoples of the South Seas; that a high social position is incompatible with natural behaviour in sex; that, officially, ‘authority’ is not supposed to have a ‘private life’; that a great researcher such as De La Mettrie could be defiled and persecuted; that any perverse moralist can insult a happy couple with impunity; that adolescents can be imprisoned for having sexual intercourse, etc.
In this chapter we set out to show the miscalculation that all freedom-fighters until now have made: The social incapacity for freedom is sexual-physiologically anchored in the human organism. It follows from this that the overcoming of the physiologic incapacity for freedom is one of the most important basic preconditions of every genuine fight for freedom. It cannot be the aim of this chapter to give an exposition of those elements of freedom that are generally known and advocated, i.e., freedom of expression, freedom from economic suppression and exploitation, freedom of assembly and coalition, freedom of scientific research, etc. For us it is essential to focus upon and elucidate the most powerful obstacles to all these efforts.
We understand why the general characterological incapacity for freedom on the part of masses of people has never been a subject of public debate. This fact is too dark, too depressing and too unpopular to be discussed openly. It demands that the overwhelming majority subject themselves to a self-criticism, which is sure to prove embarrassing, and to undertake an enormous reorientation in their total approach to life. It demands that the responsibility for all social events be shifted from minorities and islands of society to the overwhelming majority, on whose work society is dependent.
This working majority has never managed the affairs of society. The best that they were able to attain so far was the entrusting of the leadership of their lives to decent and not mean individuals. The ‘parliamentary’ form of ‘government’ could not stand up to the pressure of facts, for other social groups and majorities invested brutal sadists and imperialists with power over their fates. The danger is too great that a formal democratic social organization will deteriorate into a dictatorial organization when it is forced to defend itself against the authoritarian dictator of its life. Since the working masses of people themselves do not
determine their life in & factual and practical-way, the germ of oppression is already present in the course of the chance makeup of the government. This seems to be a generally known fact. It is heard more and more clearly from all sides that one can no longer count on a return of the old and that a fundamentally new world order has to be put together. This is absolutely correct, but concrete words are missing. What is missing is the hardening of the working majority of the population, which until now has assumed only a passive social role, with the full responsibility for their future fate. It is as if there were a widespread secret fear of shifting the responsibility from the shoulders of a democratic and well-meaning government to the shoulders of those who had until now been only electors, but not responsible supporters of society. This fear does not relate to evil-mindedness or a wicked orientation, but to the knowledge of the given biopsychic structure of masses of people. The Russian Revolution, which began in the direction of mass responsibility, fell to pieces and ended in a dictatorship precisely for this reason.
Nonetheless, social revolution by means of transforming formal democracy to a complete, factual democracy is the most essential conclusion to be drawn from this war and everything that led to it. I want to repeat the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the above facts:
I should like to illustrate the present practical task with an example from plant life. For some time I have been observing the effect of weeds on the growth of fir seedlings. Those seedlings that are not surrounded by many weeds grow fully on all sides; hardly above the ground, has the stem shot forth far-reaching branches. The needles are full and sappy.
The plant strives upwards towards the sun free of any hindrances; it is ‘healthy’; its development is ‘free’. But if the fir seed has chanced to fall on a spot where there are a lot of weeds, then it develops, hemmed in by weeds, a needle less, crooked stem. It does not develop full branches; the needles are shrivelled, others don’t develop at all. Many such seedlings are not capable of pushing their way up through the weeds.
The influence of the weeds is directly manifested in the deformity of the plant. It has to fight a hard battle to get to the sun, and it is distorted in the process. If such a seedling is freed of its weeds, it grows better, develops more fully; but the early influence of the weeds cannot be eradicated. The growth of the fir is stunted, its stem will be crooked and its needles will not be full and sappy. Yet every new seed that falls on a patch of earth free of weeds develops freely and fully from the start.
I think that we can definitely compare the free development of a society to the fir seedling that is free of weeds; the dictatorship society to the stem hedged in by weeds; and that formal democracy which is at the mercy of pressure groups can be compared to the stem that, though it fights its way through, is biologically distorted in the process of its growth. At the present time there is no democratic society that can develop according to natural, free, self-regulatory laws, i.e., free of the deforming influence of dictatorial-authoritarian conditions within or outside of the society. The experience of fascism has put at our disposal numerous means of recognizing inchoative Hitlerism within or outside
of its own borders. Biopsychically viewed, Hitlerism is nothing other than the consummate form of mechanical mechanism plus mystical irrationalism in masses of people. The crippling of individual and social life is nothing other than the accumulated secular influence of all authoritarian and irrational institutions on present-day man.
Fascism did not create these conditions anew; it merely exploited and perfected the old conditions which were used to suppress freedom. The generation that bears the remnants of an age-old authoritarian order in its nature can only hope to be able to breathe more freely. Even after the weeds have been uprooted, i.e., after the fascist machine has been smashed, it will not be able to live and grow according to the natural laws of a fir tree.
In other words: The biologic rigidity of the present generation can no longer be eliminated, but the living forces that are still operative in it can attain space to develop in a better way. However, new human beings are born every day, and in the course of thirty years the human race will have been biologically renewed; it will come into the world without any trace of fascist distortion. It is a question of the conditions under which and in which this new generation will be born; will they be conditions safeguarding freedom or will they be authoritarian? From this, the task of social hygiene and social legislation is clear and emphatic:
Every effort must be made and all means employed to guard future generations against the influence of the biologic rigidity of the old generation.
German fascism was born of the biologic rigidity and deformity of the preceding German generation. With its mechanical discipline, its goose-stepping and its ‘stomach in, chest out’, Prussian militarism was an extreme expression of this rigidity. German fascism was able to rely on the biologic rigidity and deformity of masses of people in other countries. This accounts for its international success. In the course of a single generation it succeeded in uprooting the last vestiges of the biologic will to freedom in the German society and in remoulding the new generation into rigid, robot like, war-machine automatons in a little more than a decade.
Hence, this much is clear: Social freedom and self-regulation are inconceivable with biologically rigid, mechani2ed human beings. The principal weapon in the arsenal of freedom is each new generation’s-tremendous urge to be free. The possibility of social freedom rests essentially upon this weapon and not upon anything else.
Let us assume that the formal democracies will be victorious in this war. Let us further assume that in the struggle for freedom they will overlook or refuse to admit the social importance of the biologic miscalculation, i.e., the general biologic rigidity of masses of people. In such a case, each new generation will reproduce this rigidity of necessity. They will produce new life-fearing, authoritarian views of life in this or that form.
Though bitterly fought for, the freedoms achieved under such conditions will be full of loopholes and gaps and their functioning will be biologically hampered. Masses of people will never be capable of developing full responsibility for social existence. Thus, those who have no interest in the self-regulation of society need only prevent each new generation from liberating itself from the pressure of the old generation’s rigidity, using any one of the power means of money, position or force.
The task consists of social, medical and educational acts: Socially, it is a matter of seeking out all the sources of man’s biologic desolation and of enacting appropriate laws to safeguard free development. General formulations such as ‘freedom of the press,
assembly and expression’, etc., are obvious, but they are not enough by a long shot. Under these laws the irrational man has the same rights as the free man. Since weeds always proliferate and grow more rapidly than a sturdy tree, the Hitlerite would have to win out in the long run. It will be a question of “realizing that ‘Hitlerism’ is not confined to those who bear the overt insignia of fascism, a question of seeking it out and fighting it in everyday life in a scientific and human way. Only in this process of weeding out fascism in everyday life will the appropriate laws against it be formulated as a matter of course.
Let one example suffice: A person who wants to drive a car has to pass a driver’s test; this is a necessary requirement to guarantee the safety of others. A person who owns a bigger house than he can afford is forced to rent or buy a smaller house. A person who wants to open a shoe store must show proof of his ability to do so. But in this twentieth century of ours, there is no law to protect the newly born against the parents’ inability to bring them up and the parents’ neurotic influence.
Scores of children can, indeed should, according to the fascist ideology, be put into the world; but no one asks whether they can be nourished properly and whether they can be educated in keeping with the highly extolled ideals. The sentimental slogan about the large family is typical of fascism, no matter who propagates it.
With respect to medicine and education, the deplorable fact will have to be corrected that hundreds of thousands of physicians and teachers hold the weal and ill of every new generation in their hands, though they know nothing about the laws pertaining to the biosexual development of the small child. And this is still the case forty years after the discovery of childhood sexuality. Fascist mentality is hourly and daily, inculcated in millions upon millions of children and adolescents owing to the ignorance of educators and physicians.
Two demands shoot into the foreground at this point. First: Every physician, educator and social worker etc., who is to deal with children and adolescents will have to prove that he himself or she herself is healthy from a sex-economic point of view and that he or she has acquired exact knowledge on human sexuality between the ages of one and about eighteen. In other words, the education of the educators in sex-economy must be made mandatory. The formation of sexual views must not be subject to the hazard, arbitrariness and influence of neurotic compulsive morality. Second: The child’s and adolescent’s natural love of life must be protected by clearly defined laws.
These demands may sound radical and revolutionary. But every one will admit that the fascism that grew out of the frustration of childhood and adolescent sexuality has had a far more radical and revolutionary effect, in the negative sense of the words, than the social protection of nature ever could have in a positive respect. Every modern democratic society is full of individual attempts to effect a change in this area. But these islands of understanding perish in the swath of the plague spread by the biologically rigid, moralistic educators and physicians who stand above the society as a whole.
There is not much sense in going into detail here. Each individual measure will result spontaneously, if only the basic principle of sexual affirmation and the social protection of childhood and adolescent sexuality is adhered to.
With respect to economy, only natural relationships of work, i.e., men’s natural economic dependencies upon one another are capable of creating the framework and basis for the biologic restructuralization of masses of people.
We call the sum total of all natural work relationships, work-democracy; it is the form of the natural organization of work. In terms of their nature, these work relationships are functional and not mechanical. They cannot be arbitrarily organized; they ensue spontaneously from the work process itself. The reciprocal dependency between a carpenter and a blacksmith, a natural scientist and a glass grinder, a painter and a paint manufacturer, an electrician and a metal worker, is determined by the interrelationships of the work functions.
One cannot conceive of an arbitrary law that could change these natural work relationships. The man who works with a microscope cannot be made independent of the glass grinder. The nature of lenses is solely dictated by the laws of light and technology, just as the form of induction spools is dictated by the laws of electricity and the activities of man are dictated by the nature of his needs. The natural functions of the work process are divorced from every kind of human-mechanistic and authoritarian arbitrariness. They function freely and ate free in the strict sense of the word. They alone are rational; hence they alone can determine social existence. Even the psychopathic generals are dependent upon them. Love, work and knowledge embrace everything that is implied in the concept work-democracy.
Though it is true that the natural functions of work, love and knowledge can be abused and stifled, they regulate themselves by virtue of their nature. This has always been the case from the very beginning of human work, and they will continue to regulate themselves as long as there is a social process. They constitute the factual basis (not the ‘demand’) of work-democracy. The concept work-democracy is not a political programme; it is not an intellectual anticipation of an ‘economic plan’, nor is it a ‘New Order’.
Work-democracy is a fact that has eluded human perception until now. Work-democracy cannot be organized any more than freedom can be organized. The growth of a tree, an animal or a man cannot be organized. By virtue of its biologic function, the growth of an organism is free in the strictest sense of the word. The same applies to the natural growth of a society. It is self-regulating and requires no legislation. To repeat, it can only be hindered or abused.
The problem lies in the fact that it is the function of all forms of authoritarian rulership to binder the natural self-regulatory functions. Hence, the task of a genuinely free order must be to eliminate all hindrances to natural functions. Strict laws are needed to accomplish this. In this way, a democracy that has a serious and genuine intent is a direct manifestation of the natural self-regulation of love, work and knowledge. And dictatorship, in other words man’s irrationality, is a direct manifestation of the obstruction of this natural self-regulation. It clearly follows from this that the fight against dictatorship and the irrational craving for authority on the part of masses of people can consist only in one fundamental deed:
Those forces in the individual and in the society that are natural and vital must be clearly separated from all the obstacles that operate against the spontaneous functioning of this natural vitality.
The former have to be promoted, the latter have to be eliminated.
The human regulation of social existence can never relate to the natural functions of work. Civilization in the positive sense of the word can have no other meaning than to create the best conditions for the unfolding of the natural functions of love, work and knowledge. Though freedom is not capable of being organized, since any organization is
contrary to freedom, the conditions that are to clear the way to the free unfolding of the life forces can, indeed must, be organized.
We do not tell those who work with us how or what they should think. We do not ‘organize’ their thinking. But we demand that every worker in our field free himself or herself from the false ways of thinking and acting that he or she acquired through his or her upbringing. In this way, his or her ability to react spontaneously and in a rational way is set free.
It is ridiculous to conceive of freedom to mean that a lie has the same right as a truth before a court of law. A genuine work-democracy will not accord mystical irrationality the same right as truth; nor will it allow the suppression of children the same scope as it allows their freedom. It is ridiculous to argue with a murderer about his right to murder. But this ridiculous mistake is made again and again in dealing with fascists. Fascism is not comprehended as state-organized irrationality and meanness; it is regarded as a ‘state form’ having equal rights. The reason for this is that everyone bears fascism in himself. Naturally, even fascism is right’ sometimes’. The same is true of the mental patient. The trouble is that he doesn’t know when he is right.
Viewed in this way, freedom becomes a simple, easily comprehensible and easily manageable fact. Freedom does not have to be achieved - it is spontaneously present in every life function. It is the elimination of all obstacles to freedom that has to be achieved.
Viewed in this way, the arsenal of human freedom is enormous and has an abundance of means at its disposal, both biological and mechanical. Nothing extraordinary has to be fought for. The living must merely be set free. When reality is comprehended, the age-old dream can become reality. In this arsenal of freedom, we find:
A living, spontaneous knowledge of the natural laws of life, a knowledge that men and women of all ages, every social situation and every colour of skin have. What has to be eliminated is the thwarting and distortion of this knowledge by hard, rigid mechanical-mystical views and institutions, which are hostile to life.
The natural work relationships of men and women and their natural pleasure in work are full of energy and promise. What has to be eliminated is the thwarting of natural work-democracy by arbitrary, authoritarian restrictions and regulations, which are hostile to life.
Natural sociability and morality are present in men and women. What has to be eliminated is the disgusting moralization which thwarts natural morality and then points to the criminal impulses, which it itself has brought into being.
As no other war, the present war is eliminating many obstacles to natural self-regulation, the elimination of which appeared inconceivable in times of peace, e.g., the authoritarian relegation of the woman to the kitchen, wild business dealings, rank exploitation, artificial national boundaries, etc. We do not belong to those who contend that wars are necessary for the development of human culture. It is like this: The mechanical, mystical and authoritarian organization of human society and of the human structure constantly precipitates the mechanical destruction of human lives in war. That which is living and free in man and in society rebels against this. Since the biological crippling of man and society surpasses all bounds in war that which is truly alive is
forced to make efforts it would not have been capable of making under less vicious circumstances, for it had not previously comprehended itself.
At this point a justified objection will be raised, namely:
We admit that for the past thousands of years man has allowed his body to become more and more like a machine and his thinking to become more and more irrational, especially since he fell under the influence of machine production. But we fail to see how it is possible to undo the mechanical degeneration of the organism and to liberate man’s self-regulatory forces, if masses of people continue to live under the pressure and influence of the machine.
No reasonable person will demand or expect us to abolish the machine civilization. The biologically destructive influences of machine technology are not offset by any significant counterbalance. Facts more tangible than scientific expositions are needed to rid man of his biologic rigidity. It is more likely that this war, by making human activity more rigid and more thoughtless, will increase, not eliminate, biologic rigidity.
This objection is entirely correct. With man’s present technical means, there is indeed no prospect of undoing the devious biologic development of the race of animals called man. In fact it took me a long time to decide to publish the insight I had obtained into the biologic reproduction of the machine civilization. I told myself that it could serve no purpose to proclaim truths that could have no practical effect.
The way out of this painful dilemma offered itself spontaneously when I asked myself how I had arrived at the functional formulations in psychiatry, sociology and biology, formulations that so successfully succeeded in clarifying the mechanization and the mysticism in these three fields and were capable of replacing this mechanization and mysticism. I do not regard myself as some sort of exceptional superman. I am not much different from the average man.
How, then, did I manage to hit upon the solution that had eluded others? Gradually it became clear that my professional involvement with the problem of biologic energy over several decades had forced me to free myself from mechanistic and mystical views and methods. If I had not freed myself from these views and methods, I would not have been able to perform my work on the living organism. In short, my work forced me to learn to think functionally.
If I had cultivated solely the mechanical-mystical structure that my education had inculcated in me, I would not have discovered a single fact of orgone biophysics. However, the hidden path to the discovery of the orgone was discerned the moment I set foot in the prohibited domain of orgastic plasma contraction. In retrospect, I saw that I had got past any number of critical points in this development which could have diverted me from the living, functional way of looking at things to the mechanical-mystical view of the world. I have no idea how I managed to escape the pitfalls. It is certain that the functional view of life, which contains so many essential answers to the present chaos, was nourished by my work with biologic energy, i.e., orgone energy.
The ignorance of the laws of biological functioning was responsible for mechanization and the substitution of mysticism for living reality. However, cosmic orgone, i.e., the specific biologic energy in the universe, does not function mechanistically, and it is not mystical. This orgone energy follows its own specific functional laws, which cannot be comprehended materially, mechanistically or rigidly, nor in concepts of positive and negative electric fluids. It obeys functional laws, such as attraction, disassociation, expansion, contraction, radiation, pulsation, etc. I doubt that orgone energy is suited for any kind of killing, and hence of any use to the mechanistic technique of murder.
This war or the next war will enormously increase the need of life-securing functions. The orgonotic radiation is no mean contribution on the part of sex-economy to the further development of the human race. Sooner or later, larger and larger groups and circles will familiarize themselves with the functions of orgone. In the process of working with the cosmic life energy, men and women will be forced to learn to think in functional, living terms in order to be able to master cosmic orgone.
In the same way, they learned to think in psychological terms when the doors to the knowledge of childhood sexuality were opened and to think in economic terms when the economic laws were discovered. In the process of comprehending and mastering the mechanistic laws of inanimate nature, man himself was forced to become mechanically rigid. In the same way, as each new generation masters the orgonotic functions of life to an ever-increasing degree, it will comprehend the living and learn to love, protect and develop it. This analogous conclusion is definitely justified.
Therefore, I ask you not to confuse this line of reasoning with the proclamation of messianism. As I have stressed again and again in many of my writings, I regard myself as a ‘worm in the universe’ and as the mere tool of a certain scientific logic. That great delusive characteristic that helps the plague-ridden general to accomplish his criminal deeds is definitely missing in my case. I lack the conviction of being a superman, and it’ follows from this that I also lack the conviction that the masses are racially inferior.
The far-reaching conclusion I drew from the discovery of orgone for the social problem of man’s biological desolation is a modest but true conclusion, comparable perhaps to the conclusion that the earth’s force of gravity can be overcome by filling a balloon with a gas specifically lighter than air. I do not, as many of my friends expect, have a remedy which would enable us to effect immediate political changes.
Facts such as ‘biologic and natural self-regulation’, ‘natural work-democracy’, 1 cosmic orgone’, ‘genital character’, etc., are weapons that sex-economy has put at the disposal of the human race for the purpose of eradicating enslaving conditions, such as ‘biologic rigidity’, ‘character and muscular armouring’, ‘pleasure anxiety’, ‘orgastic impotence’, ‘formal authority’, ‘enslavement to authority’, ‘social irresponsibility’, ‘incapacity for freedom’, etc. It is of the very nature of this work that it was done with pleasure, pleasure in research and discovery, pleasure in the perception of nature’s spontaneous decency and wisdom. It was not done in the expectation of medals, riches, academic recognition and popularity, and certainly not from any sadistic pleasure in torture, suppression, the procreation of lies and deception, the conduct of war and the killing of life. That’s all!
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