The Empire of the Most Easily Triggered

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In How to Be Free I argue that neurosis is the norm for humans. By this I mean that we have an insecurity about our own worth which makes us especially prone to negative emotions. As a result our ego - our conscious thinking self - is preoccupied with self-defence - we are ego-embattled. Our rigidly defensive personality can be conceived of as our character armour (to take a concept from the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich). It is a protection against threats from without - the criticism of others - and within - any potentially disorienting emotion, such as fear, anger or grief, or impulse, such as sexual lust, which we keep repressed.

The more embattled the individual, the more important it is to maintain strict control over their own psychology, and this may be paralleled with an impulse to control the social world around them. So I expressed the view in my book that this need might explain oppressive rule, with those who are most insecure about their own worth feeling the need to rise to the top of the hierarchy and impose discipline on the masses. That may be a bit over-simplistic, as competent leadership can also bring people to the top of a hierarchy. Not all leaders are tyrants. It may, however, go some way to explaining the motivation behind tyranny. After all, the life of a tyrant can be a harsh and unpleasant one, and so a fear-based need may explain the surrendering of opportunities for care-free enjoyment.

At the moment we are faced with a different kind of authoritarianism - the decentralised authoritarianism which arises from Critical Social Justice Theory and its mob-enforced political correctness. It is no coincidence that the tertiary institutions where this new dogma was born also popularised the “safe space” and the “trigger warning”. Insecurity is the driving force behind this form of authoritarianism as well.

In some ways this could be seen as a reverse of the phenomena which Critical Social Justice Theory is ostensibly aimed at addressing.

While racism may have originated in tribal conflicts and sexism in friction resulting from the division of labour between nurturers and group protectors, it becomes ever more severe through a process of negative feedback as individuals become more and more insecure. These responses rigidified into armouring. The insecure individual dehumanises, silences and attacks those he has already exploited or mistreated in some way, because they are to him the outer mirror of that quiet voice inside which tells him he is doing wrong. Of course there can be other aspects of the phenomena arising from something like repressed sexuality which causes him to see members of another race as sexually dangerous or to see women’s sexuality as a threat.

The insecurity which arises from Critical Social Justice Theory is different, but it can lead to a similar kind of fear-based oppression.

What we need to be aware of is the inability to tolerate difference, in this case difference of opinion. The secure individual may view another individual’s difference of opinion on some key question as a challenge, but they will not interpret it as a personal attack.

I think what has happened with Critical Social Justice Theory is that it provides a false explanatory structure for the world. A sound explanatory structure will have a healing effect on the traumatic wounds an individual may be carrying. It will make the individual more courageous and less resentful. It will give them a way of understanding any bad treatment they have experience in life as something which doesn’t reflect badly on them as an individual and direct them toward a positive strategy to addressing the injustices they find in the world around them now. It will make them more tolerant of differing opinions and better able to engage in productive discourse with those who hold them.

But Critical Social Justice Theory is a poor explanatory structure which feeds on the wounds of the traumatised individual, encouraging feelings of resentment and directing them against anything, such as reason and evidence, which might undermine that explanatory structure. It encourages confirmation bias.

Just as racists and sexists are easily triggered, and thus have tried to maintain control over society in order to keep their fears or guilts at bay, so those who have a very poor explanatory structure as their only strategy to live with whatever wounds they are carrying - and the anxiety which arises from them - will end up trying to exercise control over any social manifestation of the realities this explanatory structure is in denial of.

I keep coming back to Biblical concepts, even though I’m not a believer in the supernatural.

To me the Kingdom of Heaven is the society which would arise if our insecurity about our own worth were healed. It is the absence of the control impulse. Love is open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. It is a process which brings us together naturally when we give up trying to control each other. Reason and evidence provide the grounding for this as they are the way in which we discover our collective reality.

Critical Social Justice Theory is an attack on love and reason. Thus I identify it with the Anti-Christ, that which falsely claims to be solving the world’s problems but actually is anti-The Kingdom of God.

We are told, in the Bible, that there will be a final conflict before the arrival of the Kingdom of God, that there will be a Judgement Day and many will be thrown into The Lake of Fire.

If you are caught up in a false explanatory structure which is your strategy for holding all your psychological pain at bay and you are telling yourself that you are the good guy fighting for a better world, it is going to be very painful to be confronted with the truth that you are on the side of destruction and have been deceived. All the pain rushes back in and with no defence. Perhaps that is what is meant by being thrown into The Lake of Fire.

But if that is true, the good news is that it isn’t eternal. The Kingdom of Heaven still lies on the other side of that agony, because love is the sea that refuses no river. All that is needed is to stop fighting against it.

Ask And Ye Shall Receive?

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"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” Matthew 7:7

I often find passages from the gospels a great stimulus to exploratory thinking. I’m not a believer. It seems to me that, to be a believer, is to think that we know what something means. The fact that I may look for meaning in a passage of text, first of all requires a degree of mystery. It is also an experiment. I don’t intend to try, as one might by researching context and language, to make a case for some kind of objective interpretation. I’m treating the passage as if it were a seed that I’m planting in my imagination to see what will grow there. I can’t make any claim for the healthiness of any plant that this experiment produces. I may be gardening in contaminated soil.

The above passage is a mysterious one. No doubt many who thought their faith was strong have asked for things they didn’t receive.

The passage guarantees that the asker will receive and the seeker will find. This sounds a bit like the theme of a Disney cartoon feature - “Don’t let go of your dreams and eventually they will come true.” It may be true that those who give up their dream are unlikely to achieve it, but there are plenty of people who hung onto a dream and came to a sticky end or found themselves mired in debt.

For the time being anyway lets ignore the guarantee. Maybe the guarantee comes back in if we understand the meaning of the passage. Maybe if we do it right, it’s bound to work, but I feel more comfortable being skeptical about that at this stage.

There are three things that it is suggested that we do : ask, seek and knock.

Ask

When we ask for something we describe what it is that we want or at least give it a name.

Unless we are asking for something trivial, we are most likely also admitting an insufficiency in our own ability to supply it.

What do we want? We might make like a beauty pageant contestant and say “World Peace.” But what exactly do we mean by “world peace”? What would it look like? How would a peaceful world need to function in order to maintain that state. What are the barriers which stand between us and it which we need to ask to be removed? The more specifically we can describe what we want, the better chance we have of that description acting as a blueprint that could draw us and others toward it as a reality.

So whether we get what we want can depend on the quality of our asking. If we ask for something which others want as well and in a way which inspires them to action then  our wish may be granted.

The creative principle which we see in operation around us - both in nature and in culture - works through the formation of new wholes. Ecosystems are wholes in which the individual organisms interrelate in a way which not only keeps each species alive, but has allowed for increasing complexity both in the system and its most advanced members. In society, individuals come together in families to produce and raise offspring and individuals come together also to form organisations which engage in creative endeavours, such as producing increasingly powerful forms of technology. Individuals create by bringing parts together to form new wholes, for example I’m creating this blog post by bringing together a new arrangement of words.

One need not have a supernatural concept of God to see that bringing some new thing or new arrangement of things into being means opening up to this creative principle - looking outside ourselves, as well as beneath the surface of our inner self, perhaps - seeking the connections which are the very essence of creation.

Our pride may stand as a barrier to receiving the blessing we seek from the creative principle. Maybe we think we already know. Maybe we think we can already do. But if we get down on our knees and admit that we don’t know and we can’t do, then maybe we will be prepared to see a realisable potential we had been missing.

Seek

Seeking is all about looking. It is about paying attention.

Seeking means first admitting that something might exist. We can’t afford to be too cynical.

Only if we pay attention to the people around us and to the systems - natural, social and  technological - of which we are a part, will we see the opportunities - the potential new connections - through which what we seek can come to pass.

If we get too caught up in our own personal schemes we lose sight of the power that we can have through our appreciation of the talents of others. Many a talent lies dormant because nobody has called upon it.

Knock

A knock is a determined action intended to call forth a response.

If we want something we need to take some kind of action. We need to initiate it, while at the same time remembering that there is much that we don’t know and much that we can’t do.

We might take action to share our vision. We might ask people what they need. It might involve literally knocking on doors.

***

If I can ask for anything, why not ask for the “Kingdom of Heaven”.

What does this phrase mean to me?

This is a potential which exists within us and within the world to manifest a community characterised by loving fellowship.

Thus, “…your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”, to me, means the realisation in the material world (“on earth”) of the matrix (“kingdom”) of love (“God”) which otherwise only exists in the world of positive potential (“heaven”).

Don’t we want to experience the ultimate pleasure and save ourselves from suffering?

The ultimate pleasure is that of loving connection with others or with the world around us in which we lose ourselves in the experience of being part of something larger. Maximising our ability to savour this pleasure requires a harmonious social environment and a harmonious relationship to the natural environment. Within the context of such a loving community, it would be much easier for us to work together to solve the practical problems which face us.

What stands between us and this potential loving community?

Egotism, greed, prejudice, aggression, despair, resentment… There are so many psychological barriers. There is so much in us which can make us enemies and thus lock us all out of “Heaven”.

Let’s imagine a tyrant who inflicts terrible suffering on his people. He is a fortress made of beliefs and behaviours which hold fear and guilt at bay. Can he acknowledge the common humanity of those he oppresses? No. Because to do so would be to confront his own guilt at having treated other humans so appallingly. Can he take his sword away from their throat? No. Because he fears they will rise up and exact their revenge. He really has no freedom of mind or freedom of behaviour. He is a reflexive pattern of oppression within which the loving being he was when he was born is imprisoned.

This is the extreme, but there is something of that tyrant in all of us. We have our rigid defensive beliefs and our fears which push people away.

The Kingdom is the state of freedom. Imprisonment is what keeps us from that kingdom. We are troubled by other’s selfishness, egotism, prejudice, violence. But these are their prisons. Each of us has our prison which is the source of our suffering and may contribute to the suffering of others. Our enemy is the jailer and not his victim.

So what do I ask for?

I ask not for justice, for justice is something which must be imposed. Instead I ask for the key which unlocks the prisons of the mind of which the injustices of the world are the outward expression.

BOOK REVIEW : The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich

This book by controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich is unlikely to appeal to traditional Christian believers. Reich theorises that Jesus must have had sex with one or more of the women who surrounded him during his ministry. If Jesus was a naturally loving individual, Reich concludes, he must have exhibited the free genital expression intrinsic to a healthy character structure. 

Reich was not a traditional believer. He views Jesus as a man whose presence had a profound impact on the world because he was so healthy and the rest of us are so sick. The very tendency to interpret his specialness as something otherworldly, something supernatural, and to create myths of magical events such as virgin birth and resurrection from the dead around his memory, is evidence of how alienated we are from the functioning of our own bodies. 

We are born with primary instincts which direct us toward loving behaviour through the pleasurable streaming of the life energy in our bodies. But we are born into a society which is antagonistic to such feelings. The frustration of the primary instincts causes them to be re-channelled into secondary drives. These can take many forms, including various kinds of egotism, aggression, anxieties, etc.

What Reich admits he cannot explain is how this occurred in the beginning. The story of Adam and Eve gives this change from healthy functioning to antagonism towards the free operation of the life force, i.e. God, a mythological expression. We are caught in a terrible trap and that trap is our own neurotic character structure, which alienates us from each other and from nature. In the first chapter Reich gives a description of The Trap and the various ways we try to reconcile ourselves to imprisonment within it. Religion is one source of solace, a promise of a life outside the trap after death.

But Reich presents Jesus as a man who never entered The Trap. A man with a healthy character structure, a man who unselfconsciously gave expression to our original loving instincts. His wisdom was the honest clear thinking anyone would exhibit who was not impeded by the fears and frustrations that come with being divided against one’s own life energy.

Central to this condition is fear of our sexual feelings. This is the hook on which our loving instincts get snagged.

In Western culture things have changed a lot since Reich’s death in 1957. We are more honest about sexuality. He played a role in opening things up. It was he who coined the term “Sexual Revolution”. But that doesn’t mean that the problem he highlighted is any the less with us. What he felt was repressed in us was not so much sex itself but the loving expression of “the genital embrace”. It’s possible to have sex several times a day and still be a denizen of The Trap. Reich uses the term “four-lettering” to describe compulsive neurotic sex - the “wham bam thank you ma’am” kind of copulation that is all the world away from the gentle process which builds slowly and naturally to an orgasm which frees the soul to meld with that of one’s partner.

Maybe attitudes to adolescent sexuality are more enlightened than they were in Reich’s day. He talks of the sexual agony of the adolescent. This is something I could identify with. Even though I had sexually liberal parents, I was greatly disturbed by the onrush of powerful sexual desires at puberty. I remember wishing at one point that my sexual desires could be medically removed, because they were such a source of terrible anxiety. Why? I don’t know. Reich felt that young people were psychologically damaged by the sex negative attitudes of parents, teachers and the church, which caused them to fight against and repress their sexual desires instead of expressing them in a healthy way. Thus one generation of sexual cripples cripples the next.

Once again, the fact that young people today are more sexually active would not necessarily be a positive sign for Reich. Compulsive unloving sex is just another neurotic symptom.

In this book, which was written only a few years before he was imprisoned and died, Reich doesn’t try to make a carefully reasoned or evidenced argument about human nature or about the life and death of Jesus. This is written more in the mode of the prophet crying in the wilderness. His early work was supported with references to case studies and anthropological research. Here he simply states what he strongly believes to be true and it is up to us to either feel that it makes sense of our own experience and what we have read in the gospels about Jesus or that it doesn’t. Given that, in the middle of his career, Reich claimed to have discovered scientific evidence of the life energy, which he called “orgone” - evidence which was taken seriously by very few other scientists - perhaps this less scientific approach is preferable. One need not agree with everything Reich says to gain from the stimulation of his iconoclastic thought. We all need to be shaken up from time to time.

The story of the life and murder of Christ is, arguably, the most important story in Western history. Even those of us who are not Christians know its major events. It permeates our culture. It doesn’t matter that Reich is no Biblical scholar. Even if this were a fictional story, it is one which embodies the central human dilemma. Reich is using the basics of the story as a way of contemplating and illustrating the human condition. And he doesn’t hide the fact that he identifies aspects of his own situation with that of Christ. He too, at least in his own mind, is a speaker of truths unwelcome to the authority figures of his time. He too had reluctantly taken on a leadership role.

Reich presents Christ as a man who only gradually discovers that he is special. He has to learn that others are not free in the way that he is. His psychological freedom and loving nature make him very attractive to those around him. He wants to help them. But he doesn’t understand that their character structure is such that they will suck up whatever love he shows them and then resent him because they can’t be like him. They will seduce him into becoming a leader - into marching on Jerusalem - but it will all be for nothing. He will be killed because those with a sick character structure always have a murderous resentment for those who are still truly alive inside themselves.

It is this tendency which is the central subject of the book. For Reich, the murder of Christ is something that happens all over the world ever day. Christ was an embodiment of our original loving instincts as they are expressed in the body. And the Murder of Christ continues through the stifling of the expression of those instincts in every child. Who is the murderer of Christ? Reich points the finger at all of us.

Like Listen Little Man!, another book Reich wrote in the latter part of his life when he was at the centre of much hostility, The Murder of Christ is often a harshly accusatory book, but we may gain much through our encounter with its thorniness. Today we know more about the chemistry of love. We know that there are forms of intimacy, sexual or otherwise, which cause our bodies to produce the chemical Oxytocin. The experience of this chemical in our blood stream, which produces warm feelings of affection and bonding and thus, no doubt, works to melt the rigidity of our angry, frightened or resentful ego structure, is perhaps what Reich and his patients experienced as the flow of “orgone energy”. Perhaps it is true that a significant element in the dark side of our life as humans - aggression, sexual predation, greed, depression, loneliness - arises through a fear of bodily sensations which, were we less troubled by them, could lead us to a more loving society.

Eva Reich, Jerome Siskind, Peter Reich, Wilhelm Reich and Ilse Ollendorff in Maine

The Economy of Love

Gentoo penguin colony on the rocks and glacier in the background at Neco Bay, Antarctica
- Photograph by Vadim Nefedov

Love is a mode of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. It is also the bonds and emotions which accompany such a mode of being with others. The underlying message which it conveys is one of unconditional acceptance.

Love is the default relationship mode for humans. This may be hard to believe when we look around us at all the evidence of selfishness, prejudice and malevolence. We might believe that love is a precariously artificial thing which we only achieve by transcending our more basic nature, but that is not the case.

Love is what occurs when there are no barriers to it. If it is the exception it is simply because there are many barriers which can impede it. Think about the Antarctic. All you see is ice. Now that ice rests on rock. For us to see that rock, the ice would need to melt, but the fact that the ice is what we see doesn't mean that the rock is not the more basic and pre-existing phenomena.

Love is what happens between us when we feel truly safe. Not just safe physically, but secure in ourselves psychologically. It happens because if feels pleasurable.

It is a very basic principle that organisms, when all else is equal, open up to what is pleasurable to them and withdraw from what threatens them with pain or injury. If our existence is threatened then our attention may shrink back to ourselves and focus on meeting the challenge or we may reach out specifically to someone who can help us to meet the challenge. This is a conditional exchange. Our connection with them is dependent on their ability to help us to meet that current challenge.

For me the pleasure principle argues against the idea that we are essentially competitive. Where competition arises it is a temporary barrier to love. If we lived in a village during a time of food shortage, then our hunger might drive us to fight over what food is available. But as long as there was enough food, our tendency would be to return to a loving mode of relationship, because it feels most pleasurable.

What I'm deliberately ignoring here is the barrier to love provided by chronic emotional disturbance. This is the Antarctic ice which keeps the rock of love in us buried. If we are lucky, in our intimate relationships, we are able to thaw out enough to uncover it for a while.

The essence of this chronic emotional disturbance is compromised self-acceptance. What undermines our self-acceptance can be varied - suffering abuse at the hands of others, being heavily exposed to unreachable ideals of one kind or another which make us feel that we are unacceptable by comparison, being harshly judged by others, feelings of guilt about some of our actions, etc.

The message of love is unconditional acceptance and its expression requires that, for the moment, we feel unconditionally accepting of ourselves. To be focused on some aspect of ourselves which we feel to be a flaw is to not be fully focused on the other person. In love we forget about ourselves even as we give full expression to our essence.

This chronic emotional disturbance is really love deprivation. But it is important to remember that such deprivation does not necessarily lie in not being shown love by others. We need to be able to received love, and this is where the barrier tends to lie. Love, as I've said, is a mode of communication, and communication is a two way process.

To receive love we have to feel safe. We have to be able to open up to it. Our compromised self-acceptance leaves us feeling insecure and defensive, and for this reason we develop character armour - a rigid structure of self-perception and mode of interacting with the world. The aim of the character armour is to provide protection from external threats - to feel safe we need a practiced form of response - and from internal threats - a way to bottle up any feelings of hostility or despair.

The character armour is a barrier to giving or receiving love, because it stops us from being open and spontaneous. How would we do trying to make love with a suit of armour on? Our flesh would not touch and our movement would not be sinuous. Our bodies could not meld into one. The same is true psychologically. Love is a spontaneous dance. It can't be rehearsed.

Compromised self-acceptance takes either a passive or an active form.

Depression and other forms of mental illness are examples of mostly passive compromised self-acceptance. The message has been communicated to us - either directly by one or more others or more pervasively by some aspect of the culture - that we are not good enough. We passively take that message to heart. We may battle with it, but the battle is mostly internal.

What happens with the active form of compromised self-acceptance is that we set out to defend ourselves against the message that we are not good enough, or, in the extreme, to get revenge for having been subjected to it.

We may become obsessed with "proving" something about ourselves, by seeking status or material extravagance or something like that. We are thinking about what we do and what we have says about us. We are self-centred.

When severe insecurity about self worth combines with exposure to idealistic moral "shoulds", we may be so desperately cornered that we feel compelled toward some kind of revenge for our state. The "shoulds" require us to behave lovingly, but our severely compromised self-acceptance makes this impossible. If we were to take onboard the "shoulds" then they would destroy what is left of our self acceptance, leaving us suicidal. Hence the savagery with which we may attack those "shoulds" or anyone or anything our mind associates with them.

Photograph by Vadim Guzhva

This is the origin of malevolence in all its forms. Malevolence is clearly one of the major barriers to love.

Let's look at an example. Our self-acceptance has been undermined to such a degree that we feel the need to be comforted by sameness in those around us. People of a different race or culture leave us feeling insecure, because they give us a sense of uncertainty about whether they accept us. But then someone criticises us as being racist. The ideal is that we should feel about and behave towards others the same way irrespective of race or culture. This may set up a negative feedback loop. Our sense of insecurity in the presence of "the other" is grounded in our fear that we are not good enough. It leads to behaviour which causes us to be judged not good enough. Thus the insecurity is increased. The presence of "the other" becomes, in itself, a condemnation, which, if we are to keep from total loss of self-acceptance, must be resisted. This can lead to violently hostile feelings toward "the other", ironically generated by the insistence that we feel and act benevolently toward them.

The ways in which hostility between groups and individuals in our society, and all the other barriers to love, are generated are multifarious, but the underlying principles of the process are simple. Self-acceptance is undermined by mistreatment by others and exposure to unreachable ideals. Undermined self-acceptance makes us more likely to mistreat others. The only thing which can solve the problem is the cultivation of self-acceptance. The message of acceptance from others can help in this, but only if we are able to receive that message, something that our character armour impedes. Simply showing love to those who have hostile feelings towards us may actually increase those hostile feelings if they see our loving behaviour as a criticism of their unloving behaviour.

My aim here is not to directly suggest strategies for removing the barriers to love, but to provide a simple articulation of the phenomena which may be helpful in arriving at those strategies.

We need to understand that love is the default and that the barriers to it are outgrowths of compromised self-acceptance. The message which needs to be communicated is one of unconditional acceptance, not of behaviour but of the individual who betrays that behaviour, because hostile behaviour is, ultimately, a defiant response to what the individual experiences as an unjust withholding of that acceptance. It is acceptance that we are not unworthy because we are scared or angry that heals. When we act on our fear or anger in a way which harms others, the likelihood of our receiving that acceptance from others or ourself recedes. Thus the means for redemption and reconciliation where the damage has already been done are the Holy Grail we must seek.

Photograph by rawpixel

BOOK REVIEW : Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century though his ideas have yet to receive the broad recognition they deserve. Why? A combination of two complimentary factors :  his accurate diagnosis of a species-wide form of psychological disorder he called “the emotional plague” was extremely confronting, and his claim to have discovered a cosmic energy called “orgone”, which could heal people if they sat in “orgone boxes” and could make it rain if you pointed a “cloud buster” at a cloud, made it easy to dismiss him as a crackpot.

The challenge of reviewing one of his books is how to deal with the whole “orgone energy” issue. Reich was not a biologist or physicist. He came from the Freudian school of psychoanalysis, which was never based on the strict discipline characteristic of the hard sciences. He arrived at the concept of this cosmic energy from the basis of the physical experiences of himself and his patients. Some may be tempted to interpret what he says in the light of other, more recent, discoveries. A friend of mine suggested that what Reich describes as the flow of orgone through the body corresponds with the pathways by which we now know that the chemical oxytocin travels through the bloodstream. Reich believed that the orgone flowed most strongly at orgasm and orgasm produces oxytocin. Did sitting in orgone boxes help to heal people of their psychological or physical ailments? It seems likely that there would have been a placebo effect. Beyond that I’m happy with my ignorance. There are Reich supporters who claim the accumulators and cloudbusters work, but orgone energy never gained any currency amongst biologists or physicists.

Those who dismiss Reich on the basis of the grander claims make a big mistake. He arrived there by studying human behaviour, and it is in that field that his importance lies. Character Analysis was originally published in 1933 and then greatly expanded in 1948. It’s a book with a split personality which illustrates how much it’s author’s therapeutic ideas had changed over that time. In the main body of the work he introduces two of his most important ideas - character armour and body armour. The basic frame of reference here is still Freudian psychoanalysis, though Reich is already a heretic. He makes the case that Freud’s “death instinct” represents a denial of the responsibility of the psychiatrist to address those aspects of our culture which make us sick. Why does a mentally ill person hurt themselves? Because they have a self-destructive instinct? Today we might blame it on something else internal to the individual - a chemical imbalance. Reich argues that we need to be aware that religious institutions, schools and parents who teach children to fear the natural erotic processes of their own bodies can be the source of the neurotic impulse for them to hurt themselves. We shouldn’t make personal what may be political. The sections that were added later bring in discussion of orgone energy, but also widen the discussion of what constitutes psychological health and introduce the concept of “the emotional plague.”

The validity of Reich’s discussion of character armour is something which each of us can test through our observations of our own behaviour and that of others. Our personality consists of a more or less rigid character structure - a way of looking at ourselves and a mode of operating in the social world. The purpose of this structure is to protect us from threats internal and external. If we are criticised, it is to our character armour that we cling. This explains why even the most well-argued criticism of someone’s political views, for instance, far from leading them to change them, is liable to lead to them asserting them all the more strongly. Existential anxiety, sexual desires or repositories of repressed anger are examples of internal threats which may make us feel the need for our armour. This concept is a very important one because it focuses our awareness on the role of perceived threat on unhelpful intransigence. If we want to help someone to improve their behaviour we may have more luck if we first do what we can to make them feel safe, e.g. from judgement or criticism, and only then appeal to them through reason.

Body armour is the physical manifestation of character armour. The archetypal example is “the stiff upper-lip”. Our anxiety about certain physical sensations can cause us to chronically stiffen parts of our musculature. This may be a response to fear of erotic feelings, “orgasm anxiety”, but it may also be a way of repressing feelings of grief or the anxiety of trauma. Reich developed his own massage methods to deal with this. His discussion of blocks in the flow of “orgone energy” through different parts of the body is very similar to the Eastern concept of chakras.

It is with the concept of the “emotional plague” that Reich links the neurotic frustrations of the individual to the politics of society as a whole. In 1933, when the first part of this book was published, Reich was forced to flee Nazi Germany. What leads to such collective madness? According to Reich, there are three modes of psychological being. We may be healthy, in which case our body’s natural desires to love and be loved and engage in productive activity are being met. Or we may be neurotic, in which case the failure to satisfy our primary biological drives gives rise to secondary drives of a destructive nature which make repression necessary. In this case we may be a resigned, self-destructive, neurotic. But the other possibility is what he calls “the emotional plague” - a form of destructive social behaviour in which the sadistic secondary drives express themselves in behaviour which may range from gossiping about people to supporting an authoritarian political order to murder. Essentially all manifestations of the dark side of human behaviour can be understood as expressions of this form of disorder in which a natural drive is distorted through having to make its way through the character armour and is expressed as some form of hostility. Reich has given us a holistic framework for the process by which the human animal, whose primary biological orientation is toward love - not excluding its bodily erotic expression - comes to be capable of war, torture, rape, etc. From such a viewpoint we can see that we will make little progress in solving our problems by political means unless we also learn how to free up our character armour and reconnect with our original loving nature.

This is not a book to accept or reject as a whole. Some ideas may be well-founded, others may not. Reich, like Freud and Jung, had conservative attitudes to homosexuality, for instance. But if you are looking for answers to the big questions of human behaviour, you’ll find at least some of them here.

"Toxic Masculinity" or Toxic Idealism?

How often does domestic violence take place because the perpetrator doesn’t know that it is wrong? Assuming that we are talking about violence inflicted upon the physically weaker individual, it is one of the most obvious of injustices. It is true that some highly regarded religious texts attempt to justify it in some cases, taking the same kind of reasoning which has been used to justify the corporal punishment of children - i.e. a theorised larger benefit for the individual through violence-induced self-discipline, so the possibility is there, especially in those cultures still dominated by such religious belief structures. But I think that it is safe to say that educational programs based around telling us that domestic violence is a bad thing will not have a major effect in minimising the problem as they are telling us what we already know.

As with any other form of destructive behaviour, domestic violence is counterproductive to the larger best interest of the perpetrator. Any relief from pent-up frustration experienced in the act of violence is liable to be offset by the longer-term disadvantages - feelings of guilt, possibility of punishment, progressive decline in benefits available from the victim through decrease in physical and emotional health. This may seem very cynical, but I present it this way for a reason. We have to understand that, even from the most clinical viewpoint, the abuser experiences a net loss. Once this is established the emphasis falls on the question of how the individual can gain the ability to behave differently - or, to look at it from a different perspective, what is driving the behaviour which is unhelpful both to themselves and to the victim.

Domestic violence may involve violence by men against women, men against men, women against men or women against women. There is also violence by adults against children, children against children and children against adults. But since a large slice of the problem is violence by men against women, this tends to be the main focus of educational programs aimed at addressing the problem.

One radical feminist approach which is gaining popularity describes aspects of archetypal masculinity as “toxic” and attempts to re-educated males out of them. I think this provides a good example of how an idealistic approach to a social problem can exacerbate rather than help it.

Before we take a look at the problems inherent in an idealistic approach to the problem, lets look at what we might achieve through a more pragmatic approach. 

Domestic violence is usually a form of expression for feelings of anger. So, given that anger is occurring, what can we do to channel it into something other than violence. As Bernard Lafayette said : “Violence is the language of the inarticulate.” Anything we can do to encourage people to give verbal expression to their feelings of anger is liable to reduce the incidence of violence. And this applies also to those who might end up on the receiving end of violence. A person who feels able to express their anger outwardly rather than adopt a submissive approach to life is less likely to end up being victimised by others. If walking away or seeking help are options they will be more likely to take them more quickly.

But where does the anger come from in the first place? Each of us has our character armour - our personality structure - the purpose of which is to protect us from threats internal and external. An internal threat might be feelings of worthlessness. We may have particular kinds of behaviour on which we pride ourselves because they carry the meaning for us that we are not worthless. Essentially the character armour is built from the conditions of our self-acceptance. If we use the example of an archetypal masculine persona, a young boy may have been taught that he’s not a real man if he cries. Thus not crying becomes a condition for his self-acceptance. All of us have some form of character armour. Playing on other’s pity by crying excessively and playing the victim, for instance, would just be another form of armour.

Insecurity in the armour can lead to outbursts of anger. When we don’t feel under threat, everything is peaceful, but when we feel our self-acceptance is under threat we will defend it aggressively by expressing angry feelings toward the source of the threat.

The more self-accepting we are, the less prone we are to anger or violence. Of course this doesn’t mean that people who don’t feel angry are necessarily self-accepting. The negative feelings can be directed inwardly rather than outwardly, thus many non-self-accepting people become depressed rather than angry.

Through cultivating unconditional self-acceptance we can increase the integrity and thus the health of our personality structure. If we have many conditions for our self-acceptance then we are like a hollow tree which many things can break. If we are self-sufficient in the maintenance of our self-acceptance then we are like a healthy tree which can resist or bend as required.

We achieve unconditional self-acceptance by learning to accept all of our thoughts and feelings. Let’s take a man who has been violent towards women. Telling him that his masculinity is “toxic” isn’t going to help him be more self-accepting. He feels angry. He wants to beat a woman. So this is the place for him to begin. He needs to accept that it is O.K. to feel angry and that is O.K. to want to beat a woman. He will feel these things whether he thinks they are O.K. or not, but recognising that the thoughts and the feelings do no harm in themselves and can be accepted in themselves will help to take the pressure off. The fact that he has, in the past, been violent, is an indication that his particular character structure and situation have resulted in a level of pressure pushing him towards violence which he was unable to resist. A demand - from the individual’s conscience or from others - that they be different from the way they are when they have no way of accommodating this demand can be a source of unbearable pressure. Drawing a distinction between the deed and the thoughts and feelings which lie behind the deed can be enough to free the individual from a good deal of this pressure. If they are made to feel that they are unacceptable for feeling like beating a woman then there is far less motive for resisting that urge. And if insecurities about self-worth are what lie at the heart of the character armour then we are hardly helping someone to free themselves of a destructive form of such armour by insisting that they are a bad person.

Copyright: alphaspirit / 123RF Stock Photo

Let’s look at a little myth or parable about the masculine and the feminine to see if we can put that aspect of the issue into some kind of historical context. The virtue of this format is that it allows for simplification.

A tribe live in the jungle. Both men and women spend time looking after the infants. Leopards from time to time eat one of the infants. The men make spears and head out into the jungle to kill the leopards and protect the women and children. (As child bearers the women are too valuable to be hunters.) Hunting requires the cultivation of competitive and aggressive abilities. The hunting culture comes to clash with the nurturing culture. The women tell the men not to be so macho when back amongst the tribe. Suppressing the voice of the nurturer within was a necessary part of becoming a successful hunter, so giving in to the critical voice of the nurturers would endanger the group, but resisting that critical voice means an increase in the behaviour which is being criticised. It is a negative feedback loop. This cultural divide between men and women determines the structure of our character armour with some of those made most insecure by the negative feedback loop feeling the need to exercise more and more control over society.

We can’t know if things actually happened like that, but I think that the pattern of criticism leading to an increase in the thing criticised is something we can see in society today. Constructive criticism is helpful to the secure individual, but if the negative behaviour arises from a state of insecurity then reestablishing a state of security is a prerequisite to being able to change for the better, and in this case criticism can be counterproductive.

While idealistic criticism leads to insecurity and retaliatory hostility, idealism itself is driven by insecurity. The more someone doubts their own worth the more addicted they may become to “proving” their worth by championing “the good”. If we have a lot of psychological room then we can think about all the shades of grey regarding any moral issue and we can recognise the underlying psychological issues which need to be addressed if we want an improvement in people’s behaviour. But if we are so insecure - so backed into a corner by our own dark side - that only a simplistic division between good and evil is possible and no strategy more complex than an insistence on the good can find a hold in our mind - then idealism is the result.

Which brings us back to the idea of trying to educate young men out of their “toxic masculinity”. This reminds me of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the discipline and “consciousness raising” approach of religious cults. Education should be about giving people facts and tools, not trying to shape intentions and personalities. The shaping of intentions and personalities should be an autonomous process. We may be able to “educate” people to be submissive to our demands, but a society of such people is a dictatorship waiting to happen. If we want a truly healthy society it needs to be made up of individuals with the kind of integrity which can only grow naturally.

The concept of unconditional self-acceptance is very simple. At its heart is the idea that thoughts and feelings, in and of themselves, do no harm, but, no matter how apparently sick, may be steps on the way to a healthier mode of being. It isn’t an attempt to “educate” anyone out of anything as it is offered as a tool to be used only if the individual finds it useful.

Carl Jung said : "The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers." If we apply this to those in our society who are given to violence, we are left with the question : “What is the nature of the violence which has been done to them?” Is it not possible to conceive that that violence is/was a lack of acceptance of some kind - a message conveyed by those around them (from parents to peers to religious teachers) that they were, in some essential way, unacceptable? Is it not the same kind of invisible violence that drives so many to suicide?

Of course here we find another negative feedback loop. The more violent acts a person commits the further recedes the possibility of the acceptance - both from themselves and others - they might require to lose the violent impulse.

It may be easy to lose hope for our society - torn as it is between those whose insecurity makes them cling to various forms of idealism and those who are driven to hostility by the wounds that that idealism’s lack of acceptance inflicts upon them (neither of those positions being mutually exclusive). But each of us who learns - through unconditional self-acceptance - to achieve reconciliation between the warring factions of our own psyche is an island of strength in a sea of weak and frightened individuals. The advantage lies with us.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 18

“Born Again” “Pseudo-Idealism”

Let’s first look at the limited situation in which there is some truth to Griffith’s concept of “born again" “pseudo-idealism”.

What he is saying is that we have a genetic orientation to selflessness, but our developing mind has to defy its oppression and seek self-understanding which leads to anger, egocentricity and alienation. But if we become too corrupted by these qualities we transcend them (except alienation since to transcend alienation is to become more alienated) and adopt some form of “good” behaviour and convince ourselves that we are now an uncorrupted individual.

We have to look at this in terms of armouring. Many people whose initial form of character armour involves trying to compensate for their compromised self-acceptance by “proving” themselves in an aggressive, materialistic or combative way will eventually find that they can’t maintain it in the face of idealistic criticism, both from others and from the conscience they learned in childhood. So they will either shift their “proving myself” strategy to one of demonstrating their worth with good deeds or verbal support for a good cause. This may be a very dramatic change in which the whole basis of someone’s life reverses, or it may be only a superficial coating which coexists with much of the same aggressive, materialistic or combative characteristics which were there before. To really be healed and returned to our capacity for unconditional love we would have to abandon the battle to prove ourselves altogether in favour of unconditional-self acceptance. This is what Jesus meant when he talked about the need to be “born again”, but this is not what is happening in the situations Griffith is referring to.

In Griffith’s view of the world pretty much all of us are a bottomless pit of rage and corruption and therefore any attempts we make to do something positive about the problems we see around us are just signs of how “false/dishonest/‘phoney’/‘fake’/deluded” we are. Now there is some truth that doing what we feel to be right sometimes involves transcending selfish impulses or feelings of anger for a while. This is after all what Griffith himself has to do when he transcends his angry feelings about our non-ideal behaviour and expresses sympathy for our position.

But since I see no reason to believe we have a genetic orientation to selflessness, I see no reason to believe we have 2 million years of accumulated rage to transcend. We do accumulate rage to the extent that we have to repress it within our character armour, but anyone who does not undermine their self-acceptance by exposing themselves to too much corrupting idealism and provides themselves with plenty of outlets for their frustration, will find they don’t have all that much to transcend. Certainly not as much as Griffith himself who has been both exposing himself to extreme levels of corrupting idealism but also avoiding many of the normal healthy outlets for the frustration that must engender.

The most dramatic evidence of projection in Griffith’s writings is his views on the “pseudo-idealistic” movements.

First of all it is important to consider what we mean by “idealism”. Griffith emphasises the ideal of “selflessness”, but an ideal is any human concept of perfection. For the Nazis racial purity was an ideal. The Nazis were extremely idealistic especially in their worshipping of the beautiful body. Machismo is an ideal - the ideal of the perfect patriarchal male. And the conflict between the left wing and the right wing is not one between idealism and the need for freedom from the oppression of idealism. It is a conflict between two kinds of idealism which can be equally oppressive - the communal ideals of the left and the individualistic ideals of the right.

To really understand the social phenomena Griffith identifies as “pseudo-idealism” we need to recognise that the opposite of idealism is pragmatism. Pragmatism is an approach which puts aside all idealistic expectations in favour of a “whatever works” attitude.

Within each of these social phenomena - religion, socialism, feminism, the New Age movement, environmentalism, etc. - there are differing degrees and varieties of idealism and dogmatism, often conflicting with each other, existing alongside pragmatic approaches.

That Griffith can look at this complex chaotic diversity and see in it simply a dogmatic insistence on ideal behaviour and oppression of expression of contrary feelings or ideas, shows how he is seeing himself reflected in the mirror of the world. He is the dogmatist. He is the one insisting on us deferring to his personal conception of ideal behaviour (now that he has provided a bullshit “defence” for our having departed from it in the first place). His is the boot that would crush the human face forever if we were, en masse, to adopt his “Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” rather than liberating ourselves by learning to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance.

It is true that all of these social movements have been missing a key ingredient for their success, but that key ingredient is not Griffith’s extreme idealism and bullshit “defence”, it is the cultivation of unconditional self-acceptance so that we can melt away our particular armours and thus be reconciled with those against whom our particular armours dictated that we be in conflict.

Keeping in mind that Griffith’s “defence for humanity” is bullshit that allows him, in his mind, to justify expressing his extremely idealistic criticism or all aspects of human behaviour, doesn’t it sound like he is really talking about himself when he says : “And since the lie they were maintaining was so great, they had to work very hard at convincing both themselves and others of it, which meant they were typically a strident, extremely intolerant, belligerent even fanatical advocate of their position.” You never know, they might even be intolerant of women wearing tights!

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. Griffith is probably the most selfish person in the world. While there are problems and insufficiencies in the way in which we are trying to address social and environmental problems, Griffth has come to see all of this as despicable because we are addressing ourselves to the world as a whole and not to his personal psychotic problem, which he feels should come first. (Of course that is not how he sees it because he is trapped within that psychosis.) But once we see the way that he is projecting his own situation onto the world, we can see that he is like Oscar Wilde’s selfish giant, not wanting the children to play in his personal garden. Essentially he is saying : “You can’t come into Paradise unless you are selfless.” He wants it all for himself. And that is a sign of how much he must be suffering. No wonder he has been through ten years of chronic fatigue syndrome! By clinging onto the poison of idealism he must have turned himself from William Blake’s Albion Rose to Crouched in Fear. To really understand his world view you have to recognise that he thinks we are all even more fucked up than he is, whereas, in truth, than can be no more fucked up person on the face of the planet than him.

Griffith's second book illustrated with William Blake's paintings - Crouched in Fear and Albion Rose

Burning in Hell

Griffith says : “Moses himself described how ‘The Lord spoke to you [the Israelite nation] face to face out of the fire […fire is a metaphor for the searing truth of Integrative Meaning] on the mountain. [This was only possible because] At that time I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire.’”

And in Genesis 3:24 : “After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”

Doesn’t this fit with my interpretation of Satan as being a personification of idealism? God (the personification of love and forgiveness) would not be represented by something which burns and destroys, like fire. The fires of Hell belong to the devil.

It would take someone fairly secure in self - fairly self-accepting - to confront the condemning ideals and thus be Satan’s mouthpiece as Moses was. But idealism is both the source of corruption and the flame in which we burn for the “sin” of having been corrupted by it. It is the ultimate negative feedback loop.

Jesus on the other hand was not a worshipper of the Devil like Moses. He was not an idealist. When the idealists tried to stone the woman caught in adultery, Jesus stopped them. He said, “Judge not that thou be no judged.” To judge others is to be an idealist - to hold them up to an ideal standard and find them wanting. Jesus message was a Godly one of love and forgiveness. Love is the opposite of idealism. It is all-accepting. It is the water that puts out Satan’s fire and rescues us from the Hell of idealistic condemnation. Unfortunately, after his death Jesus’ followers turned his healing philosophy into the largely Satanic church known as “Christianity”.

There is controversy now about the Bible’s attitude to homosexuality. Jesus said nothing about homosexuality positive or negative. Condemnation of homosexuality comes from the Satanic (i.e. idealistic) parts of the Bible - Leviticus and the letters of the Apostles. These parts of the Bible preach repression rather than love. Since God is love, those parts of the Bible are anti-God.

Abandoning the Battle to Find Understanding

Griffith says : “Yes, the born-again, pseudo idealistic strategy was both treacherous and extremely dishonest — traits that totally undermined humanity’s search for knowledge — because in campaigning against the battle to find knowledge you were leading humanity towards an extreme state of denial/alienation/separation from the truth/knowledge, when, in fact, humanity had to continue the battle to try to get closer to and ultimately reach the ultimate truth/knowledge/understanding of the human condition.”

Keeping in mind the principle of projection, we can see here that, on some deeper level, Griffith is aware that his theory is not the full truth needed to liberate him from his condition, but that, by dogmatically clinging to it anyway, and shutting down his search for a more accountable understanding, he is taking himself into an ever deeper state of alienation, both from truthfulness and from the world the rest of us inhabit.

Jesus

Griffith says : That Jesus “realise[d] that he had to create a religion around his soundness; he had to suggest to people that through supporting and living through his soundness they could be ‘resurrected[ed]’ ‘from death to life.’”

This is the lie created and  perpetuated by the so-called Christian church. Jesus did not want to create a religion. He wanted to liberate the world from the obscene lie that was religion, i.e. deference to idealism, i.e. deference to Satan. His God was not the Satanic “God” of the old testament. Idealism is hatred. The God he preached was love. But the idealists of his day crucified him. He didn’t love the “ideals”. He loved those whom the idealists oppressed and called “sinners”. “Sin” is just another word for “selfishness” and selfishness is just the self-directedness of the suffering individual. It was the condemnation of idealism which made us sinners. So he recognised that the way to help us was to show that God is love, which forgives all, and thus expose the religion of his day as nothing but Satanism. The Satanists couldn’t stand to have their hypocrisy exposed, so they killed Jesus and, eventually, began preaching a new brand of Satanism in his name.

Of course, Jesus words were passed down, so a few rare individuals, such as William Blake, were able to see his true meaning.

Mental Illness

Griffith talks about the increase in mental illnesses in the world, e.g. depression, ADHD, autism… These are a product of a shortage of love, love from parents and self-love, etc. Love is acceptance. What we need is the unconditional acceptance of others, such as our parents if we are children, and unconditional acceptance of ourselves. What has always undermined our capacity for this kind of love, however, has been the conditions imposed by the kind of idealism that Griffith is dishonestly promoting. While we can’t blame our situation entirely on him, he has, for over 25 years, been pumping out his toxic sludge, and now he is looking around and crying about the fact that children are increasingly suffering from a sickness that comes from exposure to just that sludge. Children are not getting the love they deserve from their parents because their parents are not unconditionally self-accepting. And why are they not unconditionally self-accepting? Because they are weighed down with all this guilt about not being perfect parents. Griffith, with his obscene lie that children are born expecting an ideal world and a mother who is as close to the Virgin Mary as possible, is robbing children of love.

On some level does Griffith resent the innocence of children? It is as if he worshipped “innocence”. But when we worship something we split ourselves in two. The conscious part of us clings to that which is worshipped, but to maintain this state we have to push all contrary feelings about what we worship into our subconscious. The subconscious then grows more and more resentful of that which is consciously worshipped. The Catholic Church worships innocence in the form of the “virgin” Mary and the infant Jesus. So is it any wonder that it has generated so much sexual abuse of children?

The Return of the Repressed

So much that Griffth sees as signs that we are headed toward “terminal alienation” are things I see as positives - tattoos, violent video games, pornography, etc.

We have been repressing so much within our armouring. All of these cultural phenomena are healthy ways of letting it out, of opening up to honest free expression. Sure they can have their negatives, like anything. But those who are most frightened by them are those who are most armoured/repressed. They don’t want to admit that they have even more sickness inside them than is on display in these forms of expression.

But what is buried beneath all of this sickness, the seed of which was sowed in us by idealism’s attack on love, is our capacity for unconditional self-acceptance, i.e. love of ourselves, and thus love for all others.

Theatrical improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone says : “Grotesque and frightening things are released as soon as people begin to work with spontaneity. Even if a class works on improvisation every day for only a week or so, then they start producing very ‘sick' scenes : they become cannibals pretending to eat each other, and so on. But when you give the student permission to explore this material he very soon uncovers layers of unsuspected gentleness and tenderness. It is no longer sexual feelings and violence that are deeply repressed in this culture now, whatever it may have been like in fin-de-siecle Vienna. We repress our benevolence and tenderness.”

I talk about this subject in more detail in my post Sucked Into Paradise.

It is the censorious spirit of the idealist which would ask us to be dishonest about expressing the non-ideal side of our nature and thus remain forever alienated from our capacity for love.

Read Part 19 (The Final Part)