Mass Psychology of Fascism/X. Work Democracy

1. GIVE RESPONSIBILITY TO VITALLY NECESSARY WORK!*

• First published in International Journal of Sex-economy and Orgone-Research 2, 1943, 93-96.

All over the world, social conditions are again in a state of flux. The fall of the Italian leader of political irrationalism has introduced this process. Sooner or later, it will be followed by the fall of German political irrationalism. The process of social reconstruction in Europe will begin with a vacuum in social life which will manifest itself primarily in political chaos. If there is to be a way out of this chaos, two things must be established in time: the duty of the working individuals in all vital occupations to take an active part in the social process; and rational organizations for the mastery of the social chaos. We cannot assume that any of the old political parties or any new ones which may be formed will be capable of bringing about a factual and rational new social order. It is necessary, therefore, that, as soon as circumstances permit, the outstanding and politically independent representatives of all vital branches of work gather in national and international conferences. It is the task of these representatives of work to discuss and solve, in a work-democratic manner, the practical problems of individual and social life for which they are responsible. Once such strictly practical and unpolitical work conferences have started to function, events will shape themselves according to the logic and consistency which are inherent in factual and rational work. A thing which has become clear long ago, independently in various places in Europe and America, is this: the responsibility for all future development can rest only and alone on vitally necessary work and, consequently, on the [265] shoulders of its representatives, and not on any merely ideologically oriented bodies.

What is „Work Democracy?“ Work democracy is the natural process of love, work and knowledge which has always governed economy and the social and cultural life of man and always will, as long as there is a human society.

Work democracy is the sum total of all naturally developed and developing life functions which organically govern rational human relationships.

Work democracy is not an ideological system. Nor is it a „political“ system which could be imposed on society by the propaganda of parties, individual politicians or ideological groups. There is not a single formal or political measure by which work democracy could be „established“. One cannot establish work democracy the way one establishes a republic or a totalitarian dictatorship. The reason for this is simple: Natural work democracy exists and is in constant operation, no matter whether this or that political party or ideological group knows about its existence or not. The process of natural work democracy may be strictly at variance with existing social institutions, or it may be more or less identical with them. This work-democratic process requires that social ideologies and institutions be brought into harmony with the natural needs and human relationships as they express themselves clearly in natural love, in vitally necessary work and in scientific search. These living social functions can be hindered or they can be furthered; the working individual may be conscious of them or not. But they cannot ever be destroyed. For this reason, they form the solid and only rational basis of any rational social process.

Political ideological systems are based on conceptions of the natural life process. They may further or hinder the natural life process. They themselves, however, do not function at the roots of the social process. They may be democratic; in that case they further the natural human life process. They may be authoritarian and dictatorial; in that case they are its deadly enemy.

Work democracy cannot be imposed on people as a political system. It depends on the consciousness on the part of the working [266] people in all professions of their responsibility for the social process. This consciousness may be present or it may grow in an organic manner, like a tree or an animal organism. The growth of this consciousness of social responsibility is the most important prerequisite for the prevention of the cancer-like growth of political systems in the social organism. If they are allowed to grow, they will sooner or later bring about social chaos. Furthermore, such consciousness of responsibility alone will, in the course of time, bring the institutions of human society into harmony with the natural functions of work democracy. Political systems come and go without stopping or fundamentally changing the social process. But the pulse of human society would stop and not return should the natural life functions of love, work and knowledge cease for only one day.

Natural love, vitally necessary work and scientific search are rational life functions. They can inherently be nothing but rational. Consequently, they are diametrically opposed to any kind of irrationalism. Political irrationalism which infests, deforms and destroys our lives, is – in the strictly psychiatric sense – a perversion of social life, caused by the ostracizing of the natural life functions and by their exclusion from the determination of social life.

Any kind of totalitarian and authoritarian regime is based on the irrationalism which the masses of people have inevitably acquired as a result of their upbringing. Any dictatorial political ideology, by whomsoever it may be advocated, hates and fears its deadly enemy, the functions of love, work and knowledge. The two cannot exist side by side. The dictatorial regime can only suppress the natural life functions or exploit them for its own purposes; it can never further them without digging its own grave. From this it follows:

1. To establish new, artificial, political systems would be not only unnecessary; it would be catastrophic. What is necessary is that the determination of the social process be given over to the natural life functions.

Nothing new has to be created; all that has to be done is to eliminate the obstacles which stand in the way of the natural social functions. [267]

2. The ones to represent these natural life functions are the best workers in all of the vitally necessary professions. They function in a work-democratic manner not on the strength of any personal political inclinations, but simply on the strength of their activity as industrial workers, farmers, teachers, physicians, writers, administrators, technicians, scientists, etc. The gathering of the representatives of vitally necessary work into an international body with socially and legally recognized factual authority would be invincible and would mean the end of international political irrationalism.

3. Social production and consumption are interlaced in a natural, organic manner. Organizations which would express this natural interlacing in a practical manner would be a solid guarantee against further catastrophes produced by irrationalism. The responsibility for the gratification of human needs would rest exclusively with the consumers and producers and would not be imposed on them – against their will and in spite of their protests – by an authoritarian government. This responsibility for one's own fate, as it is already at work in the existing organizations of consumption and production, would be a decisive step in the direction of establishing a work-democratic self-administration of society. Since all work processes are dependent on each other and are organically interlaced, and since, furthermore, consumption determines production, there already exists, in the basic social process, a naturally developed and organically functioning organization; this alone will be able to safeguard the further social development of Europe.

4. Natural work democracy is politically neither „left“ nor „right“. It embraces anyone who does vital work; for this reason, its orientation is only and alone forward. It has no inherent intention of being against ideologies, including political ideologies. On the other hand, if it is to function, it will be forced to take a firm stand, on a factual basis, against any ideology or political party which puts irrational obstacles in its path. Yet, basically, work democracy is not „against,“ as is the rule with politics, but „for“; for the formulation and solution of concrete tasks.

What is new in work democracy? Neither the idea that democ-[268]racy is the best possible form of social living nor the idea that work and consumption are the natural basis of social existence. Neither its anti-dictatorial orientation, or its will to fight for the natural rights of all working individuals of all nations. All these demands, ideals and programs have been advocated for centuries in liberal, socialist, early communist and other political organizations.

What is new in work democracy is that its exponents neither founded political parties in order to enforce a work-democratic organization, nor were content with a mere ideological reiteration of these old demands, ideals and programs. What is new is that the work democrats asked themselves, scientifically, why it was that thus far all democratic demands, ideals and programs have failed and, both in Europe and Asia, had to give way to reactionary dictatorships.

What is new in work democracy is: that for the first time in the history of sociology a possible future order of human society is deduced not from ideologies or from conditions yet to be created, but from processes which are naturally given and which have always been in operation. What is new in it is the renunciation and rejection of any kind of politics and demagogy. New is that, instead of the working masses of people being relieved of social responsibility, they are being burdened with it. Further, that the work democrats have no political ambitions nor are allowed to develop any. Further, that it consciously develops formal democracy – which means merely the voting for ideological representatives without any further responsibility on the part of the voter – into genuine, factual and practical democracy on an international scale; a democracy which is borne, in progressive organic development, by the functions of love, work and knowledge. Further, that it fights mysticism and the idea of the totalitarian state not by an ideology, but by practical life functions governed by their own natural laws.

Work democracy introduces into liberal thinking a decisive new insight: the working masses who carry the burden of social existence are not conscious of their social responsibility. Nor are [269] they – as the result of thousands of years of suppression of rational thinking, of the natural love function and of the scientific comprehension of living functioning – capable of the responsibility for their own freedom. Another insight contributed by work democracy is the finding that politics is in itself and of necessity unscientific: it is an expression of human helplessness, impoverishment and suppression.

In brief, work democracy is not a political program, but a newly discovered basic bio-sociological function of society.

2. The Biological Miscalculation In The Human Struggle For Freedom*

• First published in International Journal of Sex-economy and Orgone-Research 2, 1943, 97-121.

1. Our interest in the development of freedom.

This article will demonstrate a miscalculation which, as history shows, all movements for freedom thus far have made; a miscalculation which either nipped such movements in the bud or else brought to nothing what had already been achieved. These considerations are based on the conviction that only a work democracy can create the foundation of genuine freedom. Long experience in sociological disputes leads me to expect that a great many people will take offense at the disclosure of this miscalculation. It makes the highest demands on people's will to veracity; it puts a heavy burden on everyday living; it places all social responsibility on those who work, be it in the factory, in the office, on the farm, in the laboratory, or wherever.

Facts of a fundamental nature, that is, facts which – beyond the political noise of today – concern the history or even the biological constitution of humanity, such facts, experience shows, are always being refuted. They are being refuted with all kinds of arguments, but basically always on irrational grounds. As long as there is peace, as long as everything runs its usual course, the argument goes somewhat like this: „Everything is all right anyhow, the League of Nations sees to it that peace continues, the diplomats straighten out what international difficulties there may be, and [270] the generals are only figureheads. So, why bring up problems which would be of importance only in the event of war? We've just finished a war to end all wars, so why get excited?“ Once such arguments have been shown to be illusions, once the League of Nations and diplomacy have failed, once a new war has broken out, this time more worldembracing and more brutal than anything history has ever seen, then all attention is concentrated on winning this war. Then the argument runs: „First of all we've got to win the war. This is no time for any fundamental truths. To those we'll pay attention when the war is won, when the time comes to consider the peace“.

That is, one makes a neat distinction between waging a war, winning a war and winning the peace. What is overlooked is that it is exactly during a war that those deep social tremblings take place which destroy old institutions and change human beings, in other words, that the germs of the peace ripen in the devastations of the war. The human longing for peace is never so strong as it is during a war. In no other condition of society, therefore, are there such strong impulses to do away with the conditions that make for war. People learned to build dams when they suffered from floods. Peace can be built only during the war, then and there.

But instead of learning in time the lessons of the war for building a new world, important decisions are postponed until the diplomats and statesmen are so busy with peace negotiations and reparations that again there is no time for „fundamental facts“. For the argument during the transition period from war to pseudo-peace is, „First of all the war damages have to be repaired; the factories must be converted from war to peace production; we have no time now. Let us postpone the problem until we have again arranged everything for peace“. In the meantime, the lessons of the war have been forgotten and everything becomes once more arranged in such a manner that within one other generation there will be another, even more terrible war, bringing with it the old „busyness“ and the „lack of time“ for occupying oneself with „fundamental problems“. The war emotions are soon replaced by the old rigidity and emotional inertia.

[271] If one, like myself, has experienced this busyness and these arguments for a second time in the course of a life of 45 years; if in the new catastrophe one recognizes every trait of the old one; if one has to admit reluctantly that nothing has changed basically since the first catastrophe (except the improvement in destructive war technique and a more comprehensive development of human sadisms); then one cannot in the long run escape the conclusion: For some peculiar reason, the masses of the people do not want to get to the bottom of the secret of what makes wars, they are afraid of the truths which might bring the cure.

People are wont to consider a war as a „social thunderstorm“ which „clears the atmosphere“. They say it has great advantages. It „builds character,“ it „makes men out of the boys,“ etc. Furthermore, they say, there always have been wars and there always will be. They are biological facts; Darwin found that there is a „survival of the fittest“. If that is so, why organize peace conferences? Incidentally, I have never heard that the bears or squirrels split into two camps and go about destroying each other. There are, in the animal world, no wars between members of the same species. War among members of the same species is, like sadism, an acquisition of „civilized man“. There can be no doubt: for some reason humans avoid tracking down the causes of wars. There are, no doubt, better ways of making youth healthy and strong than wars: such as a healthy love life, enjoyable and secure work, sports, and freedom from the gossip-mongering of spinsters of all kinds. All such arguments in favor of war are empty irrational talk.

What is the fact people are afraid of? And why are they afraid of it? Could it be that everybody secretly knows this fact and is simply afraid to acknowledge it to himself as well as to others?

The fact is this: As a result of thousands of years of social and educational warping, the masses of the people have become biologically rigid and incapable of freedom. They are no longer capable of organizing a peaceful living-together.

This finding answers the above questions. It sounds hopeless and contemptuous. Nobody wants to hear this or to take cognizance [272] of it. No statesman would know what to do with it. Yet, every honest person knows it.

The dictators, without exception, have built their power on the social irresponsibility of the masses. They have exploited it consciously and have made no bones about it. The German masses have been told for years that the masses only give out what is put into them. They reacted to this by becoming servile followers. They themselves brought about the infamous situation. It would be nonsense to assert that the Psychopath General alone could have conquered 70 million people.

„What,“ the politicos and the saviors will ask, „you call Americans incapable of freedom? And what about the heroic rebels in Czechoslovakia and Jugoslavia, the British Commandos, the Norwegian heroes, the Russian armies? How dare you thus offend the democracies?“

We do not mean military groups, governments, minorities, individual scientists or thinkers. When we speak of genuine social freedom, it is not a matter of this or that group. The history of society is determined exclusively by the overwhelming majority of the working individuals, be it that they passively tolerate tyranny, be it that they actively support it. Are the masses of people capable of administering society, without being told by politicians or parties what they should do, and how? True, the masses are capable of enjoying freedoms which have already been given them, to do the work which is laid out for them, to be for or against war.

But thus far they have not been able to protect work against exploitation, to organize the work process themselves, to further pioneer work, to prevent wars, to master their own irrationalism, etc.

They are incapable of doing all these things because they have never been in a position to acquire and develop this capability. There is no other answer to this war than self-government of the masses in producers' and consumers' organizations. If one takes the masses seriously, one must ask for their full responsibility, because they have only peaceful intentions. Love of peace must be complemented by the capacity for responsible freedom.

This is a painful bit of truth: Fascism, in the form of irresponsibility, [273] is present in the masses of all countries, nations and races. Fascism is the result of thousands of years of warping of the human structure.

It could have developed in any nation. It is not a specific German or Italian character trait. It works in every mortal. It is expressed in the Austrian, „Da kann man halt nix machen,“ just as in the American, „Let George do it“. The circumstance that it is due to a prolonged social development does not change this fact; „historical developments“ cannot be blamed instead of living humans. Shifting the responsibility from the living human to the „historical development“ is what destroyed the Socialist freedom movement. The events of the past 20 years call for the assumption of responsibility by the working masses of the people.

If „freedom“ means, first of all, the responsibility of every individual for the rational determination of his own personal, professional and social existence, then there is no greater fear than that of the establishment of general freedom. Without a thoroughgoing solution of this problem there never will be a peace lasting longer than one or two generations. To solve this problem on a social scale, it will take more thinking, more honesty and decency, more conscientiousness, more economic, social and educational changes in social mass living than all the efforts made in previous and future wars and post-war reconstruction programs taken together. This one problem and its solution contain everything that the most courageous thinkers in history have tried to comprehend in terms of international social revolution. The world is suffering a gigantic social revolution. But when the suffering is inevitable, we should see to it that the „blood, sweat, and tears“ have a rational goal. This goal is: responsibility of the working masses of people for social life.

This follows with inescapable logic from the following facts:

a) The social process is entirely determined by the working masses;

b) The masses are incapable of freedom;

c) Achievement of the capacity for freedom on the part of the masses, by their own effort, means genuine social freedom.

[274]

What, the reader may ask, causes me to relinquish the usual habit of covering up such generally known facts, particularly since I do not have any aspirations to political leadership?

There are several motives for doing so. For years I fought against giving in to them, simply for fear of the results. I have again and again postponed the writing down of these facts. I tried to get out of it by telling myself that, after all, I am not a politician and political events are none of my business; or by telling myself that I was more than fully occupied with my research in orgone biophysics, so why should I burden myself, in addition, with a painful, thankless and, at the present time, hopeless social problem? I tried to convince myself that perhaps I did have political ambitions which tempted me to get mixed up with political, irrational ideologies; and to such ambitions I did not want to yield. I could leave it to the responsible politicians and statesmen to come out with these facts.

After years of painful conflict and attempts to avoid these facts, I finally had to yield to the pressure which is exerted upon me, as well as upon my co-workers, by our research. There is a duty to express truths with which no other of the highly esteemed duties can compare. The performance of this duty is made so difficult by the fact that, as things are, the utterance of such truths, instead of being a matter of fact, becomes extremely dangerous. Fundamentally, it is only a matter of summarizing and combining facts which, individually, have been known for a long time:

a) Humanity is biologically sick;

b) Politics is an irrational social expression of this illness;

c) Whatever happens in social life is determined by the structure of the masses, be it actively or passively, intended or unintended;

d) This character structure owes its existence to socio-economic processes and it anchors and perpetuates these processes. The biopathic human character structure is nothing but the solidification of the authoritarian historical process, nothing but bio-physiologically reproduced mass suppression; [275]

e) Human structure is determined by the conflict between longing for freedom and fear of freedom;

f) The fear of freedom of the masses of people is biophysically anchored in the rigidity of the character and the total organism;

g) Any variety of social leadership is nothing but the social expression of one or the other side of this human mass structure;

h) It is not a matter of such things as the treaty of Versailles, the oil wells of Baku, or of 2-300 years of capitalism. It is a matter of 4-6000 years of authoritarian mechanistic civilization which has ruined human biological functioning;

i) Money and power interests are substitutes for happiness in love, maintained by the biological rigidity of the human masses;

k) The suppression of the natural sex life of children and adolescents serves the function of structuring people who are willing bearers and re-producers of a mechanistic authoritarian civilization;

l) Thousands of years of human suppression have come into a state of flux and upheaval.

Based on our character research, our interest in a free development of the world is threefold: personal, professional and social:

1. The personal interest is determined by the threat to our existence as members of this sick society. Anyone who, like myself, lost in the first world war his home, family and fortune, witnessed over three years of murderous warfare, saw many of his friends perish, etc., knows what millions and millions of people have to go through today. We want to see an end to this outrage. It is an outrage that a handful of Prussian gangsters and perverse neurotics, who play this or that „Führer“ role, are in a position to exploit the social helplessness of hundreds of millions of decent and industrious people. The outrage is all the worse in that these same millions – not alone in Germany – unknowingly and naively put the power into the hands of the political swindlers. All we want is to be able to do our work in peace, to love our women or men without danger, to bring up our children without the influences of the emotional plague, in brief, we do not want to be disturbed and deceived in this short life of ours by a handful of [276] political thieves. We no longer want our lives ruined by politics.

2. The bearers of the fascist pestilence have realized the incapacity of the masses for freedom and contend that it is a biological, and thus unalterable, fact. They have put into circulation irrational, but deceptive, race theories which divide humanity into biologically superior and inferior races; themselves, the sickest of them all, they have designated as biological, racial „Übermenschen“. We have the answer to this fraud: The race theory is a mystical philosophy. Happiness in natural love and security in life for the human masses will do away with it.

3. Our Institute, with its physicians, teachers and research groups, is confronted with a fantastic task. We must be prepared for two basically different eventualities:

a) This second world war may, after all, bring the answer to the existing social chaos into the consciousness of society. In that case, we would be called to great tasks and would have to assume a tremendous responsibility. For such an eventuality, one has to be prepared. One has to have an idea of the tasks that would present themselves. One must have coordinated one's knowledge of human reactions and the effects of the fascist pestilence if one is not to fail. Such tasks can be undertaken only and alone within the framework of the general struggle for the establishment of genuine freedom. If we were under the illusion that people have a structure adapted to freedom, that they are capable at any time of determining their lives themselves, that, in other words, all that is needed is the elimination of the fascist party – then, undoubtedly, we would perish along with everything else that is based on such an illusion. The development of freedom requires that one shed all illusions. Only then will it be possible to eradicate the irrationalism in the masses and to develop their capacity for responsibility and freedom. The idealization as well as the commiseration of the masses will only lead to ever new disasters.

The liberal organizations of all kinds in Europe showed an attitude toward this disease comparable to that of the quack who tells a paralyzed patient that, really, he is not paralyzed, that he could get up and dance a waltz if there only weren't the big bad [277] wolf (in 1914 it was the munitions industry, in 1942 it is the Psychopath General). The paralyzed patient may be glad to hear this, but it will not enable him to walk. The decent physician would proceed „brutally“; he would carefully avoid giving the patient any false hopes. He would, with all the means at his disposal, try to find out the nature of the paralysis and determine whether it were curable or not. If it were curable, he would find the means of effecting the cure.

The fascist dictators declare the masses to be biologically inferior and craving authority, that is, slaves by nature; thus, they say, any other than an authoritarian dictatorial regime is out of the question for them.

It is significant that all dictators of today come from the class of the suppressed masses. They know this disease of the masses very well. What they lack, however, is the insight into natural development, and the will to truth and search; thus, they would never think of changing these conditions.

The leaders of formal democracy, on the other hand, believed, in an illusory way, in the masses' capacity for freedom; thus, they relinquished any possibility of ever bringing about the capacity for freedom and self-responsibility in the masses, as long as they were in power. The catastrophe has swallowed them and they will not return.

Our answer to the problem is scientifically rational. It is based on the recognition of people's incapacity for freedom. This fact, however, is not conceived of as absolute, as biologically, naturally determined as it is in the mysticism of the race theory, but as the result of old social conditions, and therefore as alterable. From this, two important tasks inevitably follow:

1. The study and classification of the various forms in which human incapacity for freedom expresses itself;

2. The study and elaboration of those medical, pedagogic and social tools which would enable us to evolve the capacity for freedom.

In this connection, people will mention all the various „mistakes“ of the democratic governments: the pacts with dictators; the many betrayals of democratic comrades (England – Spain, [278] Russia – Czechoslovakia, etc.); the placing of business interests before principles (Russian oil for Italy during the Ethiopian war, Mexican oil for Germany during the Spanish anti-Fascist war, Swedish iron for Nazi Germany, American iron, oil, etc., for Japan); the English attitude in Burma and India; the religious mystical attitude of Socialists and Communists, etc. But these „mistakes“ dwindle in importance compared with the mistakes of the masses of people, their social apathy, their passivity, their craving for authority, their willingness to delegate responsibility, etc. Again and again: the working masses of people alone are responsible for everything that happens, good or bad.

They are not only the chief sufferers but also the chief creators of the war. For this reason, the working masses are also the only ones who can establish lasting peace. The essential prerequisite for this is the eradication of the incapacity for freedom. This can be achieved only by the masses themselves. In order to become capable of freedom, and capable of building a lasting peace, the masses will have to have social power.

This is the conflict and its only possible solution.

b) On the other hand, the outcome of this war may not bring the fundamental facts to the surface of social consciousness, and the old illusions may continue to flourish. In that case, little will change in our present situation. In that case, the illusory „pills,“ the formal freedoms, the formal enjoyments and the formal democracies will soon give birth to new dictatorships and a new war. In that case, we will have to continue to exist in „isolation“ and in opposition to the existing social order and its misery. This will not make the task any easier. We will have to continue to exist, personally and professionally honest, in a framework of illusory beliefs. The task of preserving unadulterated one's knowledge about human nature, and of deepening it, is in itself a heavy struggle under these circumstances. It will not be easy for the workers in the fields of orgone biophysics, structural psychology and sex-economy to keep themselves uninfluenced by the prevailing illusions and to preserve their knowledge clear and intact for coming generations. But, though they are not rewarded by the [279] world with anything but opposition and defamation, they must, nevertheless, do so. For their knowledge must be available, in a practically usable form, when, maybe after the sixth, maybe after the twentieth world war, the insight into the emotional mass pestilence will make itself felt. In that case, we shall not hand down to our descendants any glorious feats or „heroic memories,“ but a piece of knowledge which, though simple and unspectacular, has a future. This task can be fulfilled even under the worst of social conditions. That generation which will be ready to master the emotional plague shall not fail if it can be helped; it shall not be compelled first to gather laboriously the answers to the arguments of the pestilence. It shall be enabled to fall back on old, though neglected, truths and to arrange the lives of its members more honestly and decently than is possible now.

At this point, many a friend will ask: „Why, on God's earth, don't you fight for social power in order to get recognition for the important truth you have discovered? If you contend that you know vital facts, is it not cowardly to sit there in political inactivity? Why don't you fight for positions as directors of education or public health, as politicians and statesmen?“

We understand this argument. Many of us have struggled with it ourselves, again and again. It has been the cause of many a sleepless night. If one is confronted with this problem in a concrete form, one runs into the following dilemma: Truths without the power of putting them into practice are of no avail. They remain academic.

Power without a basis in truth, whatever kind of power it may be, is dictatorship. It may be so more or less, in this way or that, but it always is dictatorship, because it is based on the human fear of social responsibility and of the personal burden which „freedom“ imposes on one.

Dictatorial power and truth do not go together. They are mutually exclusive.

It is a historical fact that truth died every time its advocates attained social power. „Power“ always means the subjugation of others. Truths, however, can never be established by subjugation [280] but only by conviction. This was proved by the French as well as the Russian revolution. Not one of those truths survived as much as a few decades. Jesus advocated a truth which at his time was tremendous. It died in the Christian world as soon as his place was taken by the popes. Deep insights into the human misery of 2000 years ago were replaced by formulae, the rough cowl by the golden ornaments; the rebellion against the suppression of the poor was replaced by the holding out of hopes for happiness in a hereafter. The great truths of the French revolution died in the French republic and ended in politics, in the ignorance of a Pétain and the business deals of a Laval. The truths of Marxian economics died in the Russian revolution when the word „society“ came to be replaced by the word „state,“ when the attitude of international humanity was replaced by nationalistic patriotism and the pact with Hitler. These same truths died in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia, even though the successors to the great European fighters for freedom had all the social powers in their hands. Less than a hundred years after the birth of the great truths of '48, the worst product of age-old irrationalism is in power. Power and truth do not go together. This is a brutal, unfortunate truth.

True, those of us who have had political experience could attain power as easily as any politico. But we have no time for it; we have more important things to do. And if we did so, the truths which we hold sacred would undoubtedly go to ruin. In order to obtain power one has to fill the millions with illusions. Even Lenin gained the support of the millions of Russian peasants, without whom the Russian revolution would have been impossible, on the basis of a watchword which was at variance with the real, collectivistic aims of the Russian party. The watchword was: „Take the land away from the large landowners. It will be your own individual possession“. The peasants followed. They would have refused to follow if they had been told in 1917 that one day the land would be made collective. This was shown by the hard struggle for the collectivization of the Russian farm industry in 1930. There are, in social life, degrees of power and [281] degrees of lying. The more truthful the masses, the less despotism; conversely, the fuller the masses are of irrational illusions, the more comprehensive and the more brutal is the despotism of groups or individuals.

To try to win the masses with the contention that it is they themselves and not individual psychopaths who are to be blamed for the social misery; that they themselves, and not some self-declared or elected leader or leaders, carry the responsibility for their own lives; that they themselves and nobody else are responsible for all that goes on in the world – that would be a different thing. It is so much at variance with all that the masses have heard and have made part of themselves that it would be inane to try to obtain power by way of such truths.

However, it is entirely conceivable that the world catastrophe will reach a stage in which the masses of people will be forced to realize their social behavior, where they will be forced to change their ways and to take over themselves the heavy burden of social responsibility. When that stage of social development is reached, however, they themselves will obtain power and will refute any individuals or groups who claim to fight for power „in the interests of the masses“. Thus, there is no reason for us to try to fight for power.

But if and when the masses will have reached this stage of rational re-orientation, we can be sure that then they will need us and will entrust us with important functions. Then we shall be a part of these masses. Not their Führer, not their elected representatives, not the ones who, from some elevated position, tell them what to do. No, the masses will – as was the case many years ago in Germany and Austria – come by the thousands to our clinics, talks and scientific demonstrations in order to get answers to central questions of living. This, however, only if we shall have succeeded in remaining honest. They will not come with the expectation or the demand that we should tell them how to solve their own problems. For as soon as the masses themselves have to carry the responsibility for the social process they will inevitably come up against their own weaknesses, against [282] that which was handed down to them by the past, in brief, against those facts in their own structure, their thinking and feeling which we have summarized in the concept of „incapacity for freedom“. And we shall gladly fulfil the social function of disclosing the mechanisms of this incapacity for freedom and of all inhibitions of free development to the best of our ability in order to aid this mass development in the direction of genuine freedom.

For that, we need no power. The confidence of people – regardless of their age, profession, color or ideology – in our absolute integrity as physicians, researchers, educators, social workers, biologists, physicists, technicians, etc., this confidence will provide a much more solid basis than all the power which politicians ever achieved. This confidence will be the greater the better our scientific and practical activity reflects reality. This confidence cannot be forced; it develops by itself if one does no more than adhere honestly to one's work. The worst thing we could do would be to adjust our knowledge to the prevailing mass thinking with the objective of „gaining influence“. The general confidence in our knowledge and activities can arise only out of the maturation of a general knowledge about the nature of the emotional pestilence.

If ever we are called upon, it will be a sign that self-determination in social life is becoming a reality, that the will to fundamental veracity and to fruitful self-criticism is awakening in the masses. Since our organization is the only one which sees through the irrationalism of politics and the old ideologies, this must of necessity be so. Conversely, the fact that we must remain in the „opposition“ will show us with certainty that society has not reached the stage where it can see through the irrationalism in its doings and set about eliminating it. In that case, power would be of no avail to us; if we tried to achieve it we would only ourselves deteriorate irrationally.

This conscious renunciation of power should not lead anybody to underestimate our work. We are not playing any role, such as that of the „modest,“ „unassuming“ scientist. Our work takes place at the very roots of life, along the line of fundamental [283] natural science. False modesty in this case would inevitably do harm to the work itself. True, „orgastic potency“ sounds insignificant beside „Dneprostroy“ or „Boulder Dam,“ „character armor“ sounds unimportant beside „blackout,“ and „orgone“ sounds academic beside „Bataan“ and „Tobruk“. It does, from the point of view of today. But what remained of Alexander the Great, compared with Kepler's laws? What of Caesar, compared with the laws of mechanics? What of Napoleon's campaigns compared with the discovery of the micro-organisms or of unconscious psychic life? And what will remain of the Psychopath General, compared with the cosmic orgone energy?

Renunciation of power does not mean renunciation of rational guidance of human existence. Only the effect is of a different nature: in the long run, deep and revolutionary, true and life-positive; it makes no difference whether the effects will be felt tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. It will be the responsibility of the working masses of people to gather the fruits of new knowledge today instead of the day after tomorrow. They have no less responsibility for their own life and their own activities than the individual shoemaker for the shoe, the physician for the patient, the scientist for his findings, or the contractor for his buildings. We do not want to take part either in the gestures of saving people or in pitying them. We take people seriously. When they need us, they will call us. We shall be there. But we refuse to fight for power to impose our knowledge on people.

2. Biological rigidity, incapacity for freedom and authoritarian mechanistic life concept.

We are confronted by the incontrovertible fact that never in the history of human society have the masses been able to preserve, to organize and to develop the peace and freedom which they gained in bloody struggles.

What is meant here by freedom is the genuine freedom of personal and social development, the freedom from fear of life, from economic suppression of any kind, from reactionary inhibitions of development; in brief, the free self-determination of life. We should not have any illusions about it: There is at work, in the masses, a reactionary, murderous, [284] development-inhibiting force which brings to ruin again and again all the efforts made by the fighters for freedom.

This reactionary force in the masses expresses itself in a general fear of responsibility and fear of freedom. These are no moral judgments. This fear is deeply rooted in the biological constitution of man of today. Not, however, in a constitution which, as the Fascist believes, is the very „nature“ of man, but in a constitution which has a historical development and therefore is alterable. It is not easy to present in a few sentences the social role of the fear of freedom. I shall proceed from a newspaper report by James Aldridge, published in the New York Times of June 24, 1942, under the headline, BRITISH IN AFRICA LACK KILLER URGE: The German Afrika Corps defeated the Eighth Army because it had speed, anger, virility and toughness. As soldiers in the traditional sense, the Germans are punk, absolutely punk. But Marschall Erwin Rommel and his gang are angry men, they are tough to the point of stupidity. They are virile and fast, they are thugs with little or no imagination. They are practical men, taken from a most practical and hard life to fight practically: Nazis are trained to kill. The German commanders are scientists, who are continually experimenting with and improving the hard, mathematical formula of killing. They are trained as mathematicians, engineers and chemists facing complicated problems. There is no art in it, there is no imagination. War is pure physics to them. The German soldier is trained with a psychology of the dare-devil track-rider. He is a professional killer, with no distractions. He believes he is the toughest man on earth. Actually, he cracks very easily and is not so tough, and can be beaten soundly and quickly by a foe using the same ruthless speedy methods he uses ... The British soldier is the most heroic on earth, but do not confuse that with military toughness. He has the toughness of determination but he has not the toughness which makes him scientifically kill his enemy.

This is the best description of mechanical militarism I have yet come across. It reveals clearly the complete identity of mechanistic natural science, mechanical human structure and sadistic murdering. This identity has found its sublime and unsurpassable [285] expression in the German ideology of totalitarian dictatorship. This mechanistic trinity is opposed by that other view of life which does not consider man as a machine, or the machine the master of man or militarism his highest ornament. This living functional view has found its last refuge in the Western democracies. Whether it will survive the chaos remains to be seen.

It may sound peculiar to the ears of a general, but I contend that the defeats suffered by the democracies, as tragic and as dangerous as they were, were the sign of a deep humanity which is the exact opposite of mechanical automatism: the valuation of human life. Aldridge is wrong in reproaching the democratic military leaders with trying to save lives, in contradistinction to the machine men. He is wrong when he demands that the antifascist fighters learn to kill in a still more mechanical, automatic, scientific way than the Prussian automaton. If one tries to beat the automatons with their own weapons one will, in the process of murdering still more scientificially, oneself become an automaton and will oneself perpetuate what the enemy set in motion. In this process, the last vestiges of all living hopes for a different, lastingly peaceful human society will perish.

The way of the anti-fascist struggle is a different one. It is the way of a clear, ruthless recognition of the historical and biological factors which lead to such murdering. Only this recognition, and not the imitation of fascist methods, will lead to the extermination of the fascist pestilence. One cannot vanquish fascism by imitating or surpassing its methods without, intentionally or unintentionally, degenerating fascistically oneself. The way of fascism is the way of the machine, the dead, the rigid, the hopeless. The way of life is fundamentally different, more difficult, more dangerous, more honest and more hopeful.

Let us proceed from the question of the day to the one question: How can such a complete functional identity of machine, man, and scientific murdering come about? This question leads far away from such questions as whether our shipbuilding equals the sinkings by U-boats, or whether the machine monster is going to reach the Baku oil wells. We do not minimize the importance [286] of these questions of the day. Naturally, when my house catches fire, the first thing I do is to try to save as many of my manuscripts, books and instruments as possible. But sooner or later I shall have to build a new house, and in order to prevent a new catastrophe I shall have to think hard to find out what caused the fire in the old house.

MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man.

The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine?

When I say „animal,“ I do not mean anything bad, cruel or „base“; I am stating a biological fact. Man has developed the peculiar concept that he is not an animal at all, but, well – man; a creature which long since has shed that which is „bad,“ which is „animal“. He demarcates himself in all possible ways from the bad animal and points, in proof of his „being better,“ to culture and civilization which distinguish him from the animal. He shows, in his whole behavior, his „theories of values,“ his moral philosophies, his „monkey trials“ and such, that he does not want to be reminded of the fact that basically he is an animal, an animal, furthermore, which has much more in common with the „animal“ than with that being which he asserts to be and dreams of being. The theory of the German Übermensch has this origin. Man shows by his maliciousness, his inability to live in peace with his kind, his wars, that what distinguishes him from the other animals is only his unbounded sadism and the mechanical trinity of the authoritarian concept of life, mechanistic science and the machine. If one looks at the results of civilization as they present themselves over long periods of time, one finds that these contentions of man are not only erroneous; more than that, they seem to be made expressly for the purpose of making man forget that he is an animal. Whence these illusions of man about himself? What makes him form such illusions?

The life of man is split in two: a life according to biological laws (sexual gratification, feeding, contact with nature) and a [287] life according to his mechanized civilization (mechanistic ideas about his own nature, his position of master in the animal kingdom, his class and race distinctions, his ideas of possession and non-possession, science, religion, etc.). Being-an-animal and not-wanting-to-be-an-animal, biological basis and technical development, are the poles between which his being and thinking are split up. All the concepts of himself which man has developed are borrowed from the machines which he has created. Building and handling machines has given man the belief that, through the machines and beyond them, he is developing to a „higher“ plane. On the other hand, his machines show the appearance and the mechanics of man. The locomotive has eyes to see and legs to run, a mouth to eat the coal and excretory apparatus for the slags, and mechanisms for the production of sounds. The product of his mechanistic technic thus is an expansion of man himself. The machines are, in fact, an enormous expansion of his biological organization. They enable him to master nature to a far higher degree than he could with his hands alone. They give him mastery of time and space. Thus, the machine has become a part of man himself, a beloved and highly esteemed part. He has the perennial dream that the machines will make life easier for him and will give him an increased enjoyment of life. And in reality? In reality, the machine has become man's worst enemy. It will remain his worst enemy unless he differentiates himself from the machine. The progress of civilization, as made possible by the development of the machine, was accompanied by a disastrous misinterpretation of human biological organization. In building machines, man followed the laws of mechanics, of non-living energy. This technic was highly developed long before man finally began to ask himself how he himself was built and how he functioned. When finally, very gradually, cautiously and often at the danger of risking death, he began to discover his own organs, he interpreted their functions in the same way in which he had been building machines for hundreds of years: he interpreted them mechanistically in a rigid, un-alive manner. The mechanistic concept of life is the reflection of mechanistic civilization.

But living [288] functioning is something basically different; it is not mechanistic. The specific biological energy, the orgone, follows laws which are neither those of mechanics nor those of electricity. Because man has been biased in favor of a mechanistic concept of the world he has been incapable of grasping the specifically living, non-mechanistic functioning. Man dreams of one day constructing a homunculus, a Frankenstein, or at least an artificial heart or artificial protein. The phantasies which man developed about this homunculus show a brutal monster which, though human-like, is mechanically stupid and awkward, filled with enormous powers which, once released, can no longer be inhibited and will automatically wreak destruction. This, Disney has splendidly shown in his „Fantasia“. In such phantasies of man about himself and his functioning we miss any expression which would be kind, alive, social and natural. Conversely, it is striking to see how man, in portraying animals, gives them just those traits which he misses in himself and which he does not ascribe to his homunculus figures. This, too, is splendidly exemplified in Disney's animal films.

Man himself, then, appears in his phantasies as a mechanical, cruel, all-powerful, unalive monster, while the animal appears as a kind, social being, with all the human qualities and weaknesses. One has to ask: do these phantasies reflect a reality? The answer is, yes. In these phantasies, man depicts in the most impressive way his inner biological conflict:

a) in the ideology: bad animal – exalted man;

b) in reality: brutal mechanical man – kind, free animal.

That is, the machine has in turn influenced mans own conception of himself in the sense of making it machine-like, mechanistic, unalive and rigid. According to such a concept, man is built like this: the brain is the „most highly developed part“. It represents a „central“ which, like a „master“ in a state, sends orders and impulses to the various organs. The organs are connected with the „master“ by the nerves as if by telephone wires.

Needless to say, this is a totally erroneous concept because in primitive organisms the organs act in a biologically correct way though a brain has [289] not yet developed; furthermore, in more highly developed organisms the essential life functions continue even after removal of the brain. The machine-like concepts are found in every aspect of life: Infants have to take so and so many grams of milk at exactly prescribed time intervals and have to sleep exactly so many hours. The diet has to contain exactly x grams of fat, y grams of protein and z grams of carbohydrates. Up to the date of the marriage ceremony, man has no sexual urge; exactly on that day, he has it. God created the earth in 6 days, on the 7th he rested; just as man takes a rest from the machines. The children get x hours of mathematics, y hours of chemistry, z hours of zoology, etc.; all of them the same thing and all of them are supposed to learn exactly the same amount. High intelligence means 100 points, average 80 points, stupidity 40 points. With 90 points you can become a doctor, with 89 you can't.

To man, psychic life to this day is only a nebulous mysterious something, or else a secretion of the brain. For centuries, he not only denied the existence of the mind, he also declared any attempt to comprehend sensations and psychic experiences to be erroneous. At the same time he constructed a mystical world in which to place all emotional experience. Those who questioned the correctness of his mystical concepts of life, be it „the saints,“ „racial purity“ or „the state,“ he persecuted, even unto death. In this way, he developed mechanistic, machine-like concepts and mystical concepts of his functioning at the same time. Thus, his understanding of biology remained far behind his skill in building machines, and he gave up trying to understand himself. The machine which he created seemed sufficient to explain the functioning of his own organism. 1

________

1 The tragic split between biological and technical understanding, between that which is alive and that which is machine-like in man, is unequivocally expressed in the following: No mass individual in this world wanted the war. But all are its victims, as of a mechanical monster. Yet, this monster is the biologically rigid human himself.

Is this chasm between extraordinary industrial skill and biological comprehension merely a result of deficient knowledge? Or does it result from an unconscious intention to ban all real [290] insight into man's own functioning? In pursuing my experimental studies of the orgone, I am constantly amazed by the fact that the atmospheric orgone has been so thoroughly overlooked by thousands of excellent scientists.

The answer is unequivocal: The lag in the comprehension of living functioning, its mechanistic misinterpretation and the overvaluation of the machine have been, and are, unconscious intentions. One would think that it should have been possible mechanistically to build machines on the one hand, and to comprehend living functioning non-mechanistically on the other hand. Careful observation of human behavior in important life situations reveals the nature of this intention.

Machine civilization means to man not only an improvement of his animal existence. In addition, it has a subjectively far more important but irrational function: to stress again and again his not-being-an-animal, his being basically different from the animal. We have to ask ourselves: What interest has man in constantly proclaiming loudly – be it in science, in religion, in art or in other forms of expression – that he is man and not an animal; that the highest task of human existence is the „subjugation of the animal in man“ and the cultivation of „higher values“; that the child has to be educated from a „wild little animal“ to a „real human being“? How is it possible, we must ask, that man, consistently, saws off the biological limb on which he has grown and to which he belongs? How is it possible that he fails to see the devastations which result from this biological denial, the biopathies, the sadisms and wars? How can he fail to see that the existing human misery cannot possibly be done away with until man again fully acknowledges his being-an-animal? He must learn to see that what distinguishes him from other animals is nothing but a higher degree of security in life; he must give up the irrational denial of his true nature.

„Away from the animal! Away from sexuality!“ is the leitmotif of all human ideology. No matter whether the Fascist puts it in terms of the racially pure „Übermensch,“ the Communist in terms of proletarian class consciousness, the Christian in terms of the [291] „spiritual-moral nature“ of man, or the liberal in terms of the „higher human values“. All these ideologies have one and the same basis: „I am not an animal; I have invented the machines, not the animal. I am not a sexual being, like the animal“. Hence the overemphasis of the intellect, of „pure“ logic over against the instinct, of culture against nature, of the mind against the body, of work against sexuality, of the state against the individual, of the Übermensch against the Untermensch.

Why is it that out of millions of car drivers and radio listeners only a few know the name of the inventor of the car or of the radio, while every child knows the names of the bearers of the political pestilence?

Natural science keeps reminding man again and again that he is nothing but a worm in the universe. The bearers of the political pestilence keep persuading him that he is not an animal, but a „zoon politikon,“ that is, specifically a non-animal, a bearer of values, a „moral being“. What disaster has been brought about by the Platonic philosophy of the state! It is quite clear why man knows the politico better than the natural scientist: He does not want to be an animal, he does not want to be reminded of the fact that fundamentally he is a sexual animal.

Seen from this vantage point, the animal has no intelligence but only „base instincts,“ no culture, no „values“ but only „material needs“. This is stressed just by that type of person who sees the content of his life in money-making. If such a murderous war as the present one has any trace of a rational function, it is that of unmasking the abysmal irrationality of such ideas. Man has every reason to envy the animal for its freedom from sadisms, perversions and meanness, and for its natural spontaneity. As vain as was man's belief that the earth is the center of the universe, so unreal and disastrous is his philosophy that the animal is a being „without a soul,“ without a morality, or more than that, an immoral and antisocial being. If I had the idea of being a benevolent saint and at the same time would smash my neighbor's head with an axe, I would, rightly, land in a mental institution or in the electric chair. But this is exactly the nature of man's [292] contradiction between his ideal „values“ and his actual behavior. His putting this contradiction into highsounding sociological formulae like „the century of wars and revolutions“ or „the highest development of military and political strategy“ does not in the least alter the fact that in no other respect is man as blindly groping and as hopelessly lost as he is with regard to his biological and social functioning.

It goes without saying that such attitudes are not natural but that they have been brought about by the development of machine civilization. The history of the patriarchal order shows clearly that the principal mechanism of changing human structure in the direction of the authoritarian is the suppression of infantile and adolescent genitality. The suppression of nature, of „the animal“ in children, was the first tool for the production of machine-like obedient humans; it still is. 2

________

2 The socio-economic process, together with its effects on the formation of human ideology and structure, is described in my book, DER EINBRUCH DER SEXUALMORAL.

The socio-economic development of society has proceeded independently on its machine-like way to the present day. Along with this development, there was a further development and ramification of the basis of all ideological and cultural formations: „Away from the animal; away from genitality“. Within these two processes, the social and the psychological, man made an ever more thorough and all-embracing effort to deny his biological nature. With that, there was an equally thorough and all-embracing increase of his sadistic brutality in business and in war, of the machine-like in his being, of the mask-like quality of his facial expression, of his armoring against sensations, of his perverse and criminal tendencies.

Only a few years have passed since the devastating effects of this biological aberration began to be understood. One might be tempted to take an all too optimistic view of the situation, and to argue as follows: „It is completely correct that man erred when he equated his own nature to that of mechanized civilization. But now that we have recognized this error it will not be difficult to correct it: true, civilization cannot but be machine-like, but man's [293] attitude toward life can easily be changed from the mechanistic to the functionally alive. All that needs to be done is that the educational authorities change education accordingly“. Indeed, this is what many intelligent people said at the time of the Russian revolution, between 1917 and 1923.

The flaw in the argument is that the mechanistic concept of life is not a mere „idea“ or „attitude“. Character-analytic exploration of average people from every walk of life has shown that the mechanistic concept of life is not merely a „reflection“ of the social processes in psychic life, as Marx had assumed, but far more than that: In the course of thousands of years of mechanical development, the mechanistic concept, from generation to generation, has anchored itself deeply in man's biological system. In so doing, it actually has altered human functioning in the sense of the machine-like. In the process of killing his genital function, man has become biologically rigid. He has armored himself against that which is natural and spontaneous within him, he has lost contact with the biological function of self-regulation and is filled with a strong fear of that which is alive and free.

This biological rigidity is expressed primarily in a general rigidity of the organism and a demonstrable reduction of plasmatic mobility: intelligence is damaged, the natural social sense is lost, there is a general psychosis. The facts which substantiate this statement were presented in some detail in my book, THE FUNCTION OF THE ORGASM. What is called civilized man is in fact angular, machine-like, without spontaneity; it has developed into an automaton and a „brain machine“. Man not only believes that he functions like a machine, he does in fact function like a machine. He lives, loves, hates and thinks like a machine. With his biological rigidity and the loss of the natural function of self-regulation, he has acquired all those character attitudes which reached their pinnacle in the pestilence of the dictatorships: hierarchic concept of state, machine administration of society, fear of responsibility, longing for authority and a Führer, expecting to be told what to do, mechanistic thinking in natural science, [294] machine-like killing in war. It is not by accident that the Platonic concept of the state was conceived in a slave society. Neither is it an accident that it goes on living to this very day: serfdom has simply been replaced by inner slavery.

The problem of the fascist pestilence has led us deeply into that of man's biological functioning. It is a matter of a development stretching over thousands of years and not, as the economists believe, a matter of imperialistic interests of the past two hundred or even of the past twenty years. The importance of the present war can by no means be limited to imperialistic interests in the oil wells of Baku or the rubber plantations in the Pacific. The treaty of Versailles is no more than a cog in the whole machine. The economistic conception of life – as great as its services have been – is completely inadequate for an understanding of the revolutionary processes of our life.

The biblical legend of man's creation in the image of God, and the legend of his superiority in the animal kingdom, clearly represent the act of repression of man's animal nature. Nevertheless, every day he is reminded of his animal nature by his natural needs, conception, birth and death, sexual urge and dependency on nature. All the more intense are his efforts to fulfil his „divine“ or „national“ role; the age-old hatred of any genuine natural science which is not limited to machines stems from this source. It took several thousand years before a Darwin succeeded in proving man's animal origin. It took equally long before Freud discovered the elementary fact that the child is first of all a sexual being. And what a noise did the animal man make when it was presented with these simple facts!

From the „superiority“ over the animal there is a straight line to racial „superiority“ over „Negroes, Jews, Frenchmen“ or whatnot. Clearly, man prefers being a „superior being“ to being an animal.

In order to distinguish himself from the other animals, man, in the process of becoming biologically rigid, denied the existence of his organ sensations and finally ceased to perceive them. To this day, it is a dogma of mechanistic natural science that [295] the autonomic functions are not perceived and that the autonomic nerves are rigid. This in spite of the fact that every child of three can tell you exactly that pleasure, anxiety, anger, longing, etc., are perceived in the belly. This in spite of the fact that the perception of the ego is nothing but the totality of the organ perceptions. With the loss of his organ sensations, man not only lost the intelligence of the animal and the capacity for reacting naturally; he also blocked for himself any possibility of mastering his vital problems; he replaced the natural self-regulatory intelligence of the plasm by an imp in the brain which has, at one and the same time, metaphysical and machine-like qualities. Man's perception of his own body has, indeed, become rigid and machine-like.

Man constantly reproduces the machine-like organism by his kind of education, science and philosophy of life. This biological crippling is reaching the pinnacle of its triumphs in the scientific, mathematically exact, machine-like killing of today. As mechanistic philosophies and machines alone cannot kill, sadism also comes into play; sadism, this secondary drive born of suppressed nature, the only important characteristic which distinguishes man's structure from that of the animal.

This tragic machine-like aberration did not develop, however, without its counterpart. Deep down, even the rigid human has remained a living animal. No matter how immobile his pelvis may be, no matter how stiff his neck and his shoulders, no matter how tense his abdominal muscles – deep down he feels that he is a part of living nature. But as he denies and suppresses this nature in every possible way, he cannot recognize it rationally and factually. Hence, he needs must experience it as something mystical, supernatural, out-of-the-world, be it in the form of religious ecstasy, in the form of a cosmic soul, or in the form of the sadistic „surging of the blood“. As is well known, such an impotent monster has its best intuitions for killing in the spring. The Prussian military display shows all the characteristics of the mystical machine-man.

Human mysticism, which thus represents the last traces of a [296] feeling for life, became, at the same time, the source of the machine-like sadism in Hitlerism. From the remaining depths of biological functioning, through all the armoring and enslavement, the cry for „freedom“ keeps rising. No social movement could ever attain a following with a platform of „suppression of life“. Every one of all the social movements which suppress the self-regulation of the vital forces proclaims some sort of freedom: the freedom from „sin“; the freedom of the „Lebensraum“; the freedom of the nation; the freedom of the proletariat; the freedom of culture, etc.

These diverse cries for freedom are as old as the machine-like aberration of the human plasm.

The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression. It will not cease to ring as long as man feels himself captive. As diverse as the cries for freedom may be, basically they all express one and the same thing: The intolerability of the rigidity of the organism and of the machine-like institutions which create a sharp conflict with the natural feelings for life. Not until there is a social order in which all cries for freedom subside will man have overcome his biological and social crippling, will he have attained genuine freedom. Not until man is willing to recognize his animal nature – in the good sense of the word – will he create genuine culture.

The striving for freedom is nothing but the biological development of the vital forces. It is conceivable only in the framework of the biological laws of development, and not in opposition to them. The will to freedom and the capacity for freedom are nothing but the will and the capacity to recognize and further the development of human biological energy. Freedom is inconceivable as long as the biological development of man is suppressed and dreaded.

Under the influence of politicos, the masses blame the powers that be for wars. In the first world war it was the munition magnates, in the second the Psychopath General. This is shifting the responsibility. The blame for the war belongs only and alone to the same masses of people who have all the means of preventing wars. The same masses of people who – partly through indolent passivity, partly through their active behavior – make possible the [297] catastrophes from which they themselves suffer most horribly. To emphasize this fault of the masses, to give them the full responsibility, means taking them seriously. On the other hand, to pity the masses as a poor victim means treating them like a helpless child. The first is the attitude of the genuine fighter for freedom, the latter is the attitude of the politico.

3. The arsenal of human freedom.

Rulers and generals muster their troops. Magnates muster the sums of money which give them power. The fascist dictators muster the irrational human reactions which make it possible for them to attain and maintain their power over the masses. The scientists muster knowledge and means of research. But, thus far, no organization fighting for freedom has ever mustered the biological arsenal where the weapons are to be found for the establishment and the maintenance of human freedom. All precision of our social existence notwithstanding, there is as yet no definition of the word freedom which would be in keeping with natural science. No word is more misused and misunderstood.

To define freedom is the same as to define sexual health. But nobody will openly admit this. The advocacy of personal and social freedom is connected with anxiety and guilt feelings. As if to be free were a sin or at least not quite as it should be. Sex-economy makes this guilt feeling comprehensible: freedom without sexual self-determination is in itself a contradiction. But to be sexual means – according to the prevailing human structure – to be sinful or guilty. There are very few people who experience sexual love without guilt feeling. „Free love“ has acquired a degrading meaning: it lost the meaning given it by the old fighters for freedom. In films and in books, to be genital and to be criminal are presented as the same thing. No wonder, then, that the ascetic and the reactionary enjoy a higher esteem than the loving primitive; that high social position is incompatible with natural sexual attitudes and behavior; that the „authority“ is not allowed to have a „private life“; that a great scientist like De La Métrie could be besmirched and hounded by ascetics; that any perverse moralist can get away with besmirching a happily loving couple; [298] that adolescents risk the reformatory for having sexual intercourse; etc.

This article was intended to show the miscalculation to which thus far all struggles for freedom have fallen prey. It is this: the incapacity for social freedom is physiologically anchored in the human organism. It follows that the mastery of the physiological incapacity for freedom is one of the most important prerequisites of any genuine struggle for freedom. This article was not meant to discuss those elements of freedom which are generally known and advocated, such as the freedom of expression, freedom from economic suppression and exploitation, freedom of assembly, freedom of scientific search, etc. The essential task here was that of showing the most powerful obstacle in the path of all these endeavors.

It is not difficult to understand why the general characterological incapacity for freedom on the part of the masses of people has never been made a matter of public discussion. It is an all too depressing and too unpopular fact. It requires severe self-criticism and far-reaching changes in the whole way of living on the part of the overwhelming majority of people. It requires shifting the responsibility for all social processes from minorities or individuals to the masses of people on whom work in society depends. Thus far, this working majority of people never have themselves governed the fate of society. The best they could do thus far was to put the guidance of their lives in the hands of decent instead of worthless individuals. The „parliamentary“ form of „government“ was not equal to the actual happenings, for at the same time, other groups and majorities invested brutal sadists and imperialists with power over their fates. There is great danger that formal democracy, in fighting authoritarian dictatorship, may itself undergo a change in the direction of dictatorship.

Since the working masses do not themselves determine their lives, factually and practically, the germ of the suppression of freedom is present in the course of events themselves; it does not have to lie in any evil intention of the elected representatives. The war, e.g., requires many measures which, though acutely necessary, [299] are potentially authoritarian. Under such circumstances it depends on the accidental composition of the government whether the suppression of freedom is going to be temporary or permanent. Of this fact there seems to be a general awareness. For one hears it said ever more clearly everywhere that there can be no return to the old order, and that a basically new world order has to be established. While this is entirely correct, one misses any concrete propositions. In particular, nobody proposes to burden the working majorities, who thus far have played a passive social role, with the full responsibility for their future fate. It is as if there were a general and secret fear of shifting the responsibility from a democratic, well-meaning government to those who thus far have only been voters but not responsible bearers of society. This fear is based not on malice or evil intent, but on the knowledge of the biopsychic structure of the masses of people. The Russian revolution, which started out in the direction of establishing mass responsibility, failed for this reason. Nevertheless, the necessity of a social revolution in the sense of progressing from a formal to a full, factual democracy is the most important conclusion to be drawn from this war and all that led to it. To repeat the inescapable conclusions from the foregoing facts:

a) The masses of people are incapable of freedom;

b) the general capacity for freedom can be acquired only in the daily struggle for a free life;

c) it follows that the masses, who are incapable of freedom, must have the social power if they are to become capable of freedom and capable of creating and maintaining freedom.

The task presented by these facts may be illustrated by an example from plant life. For a long time, I have been observing the effect of weeds on the growth of pine seedlings. The little pines which grow in spots where there are few weeds grow vigorously on all sides, developing branches right above the ground; the leaves are green and full; the plant grows, unimpeded, straight toward the sun; it is „healthy,“ its development is „free“.

If, however, the seed has fallen on a spot where there are many weeds, it develops a crooked stem, incomplete branches, with [300] poor leaves or none at all. Many such seedlings are incapable of pushing through the weeds at all. Others grow crooked in their attempt to reach the sunlight. If one frees such a seedling from the weeds, it begins to grow better and develops more fully; nevertheless, the earlier influence of the weeds is still seen in the form of stunted growth, crooked stem, poor development of leaves, etc. Seeds, however, which fall, in the beginning, on a spot free from weeds, develop freely and fully.

The free development of a society is like that of the freely growing pine seedlings; the dictatorship like the seedling smothered by the weeds; and the formal democracies under the pressure of the dictatorships like the seedlings which, though they manage to push through, are, nevertheless, biologically stunted. There is at present no democratic society able to develop according to natural, free, self-regulatory principles, without the deforming influence of dictatorial authoritarian pressures from without or within. The experiencing of fascism has given us the means of recognizing Hitlerism within and without our own borders. Bio-psychically speaking, Hitlerism is nothing but the most highly developed form of machine-like mechanism plus the mystical irrationalism of the human masses. The crippling of individual and social life is nothing but the result of the age-old influence of all the irrational and authoritarian institutions on the human of today. Fascism has not newly created these conditions; it has only utilized old conditions of suppression of freedom and has brought them to a new peak. All that the generation which is characterized by the results of thousands of years of authoritarianism can hope for is to breathe a little more freely. It can no longer count on becoming a tree which will develop fully, according to natural laws, once the weeds are torn up, that is, once the fascist machine is smashed.

In other words: the biological rigidity of the present generation can no longer be eliminated; all that can be done is to give its still active life forces more room for development. But new individuals are born every day, and in the course of 30 years there is a new generation, without a trace of fascist deformity. Every-[301]thing depends on what kind of conditions this new generation is born into; conditions which secure freedom or foster authoritarian conditions. This defines clearly the social and legislative task that lies ahead: The coming generation must, under all circumstances and with all means, be saved from being influenced by the biological rigidity of the old generation.

German fascism was born from the biological rigidity and crippling of the former generation. Prussian militarism, with its machine-like discipline, its goose-step, its „belly in, chest out!“ is the extreme manifestation of this biological rigidity. It was able to depend on the biological rigidity and crippling of the masses in other countries. Hence its international success. It succeeded, finally – within one generation – in eradicating the last traces of a will to freedom in German society and in turning the new generation, in hardly more than a decade, into rigid, unthinking automatic war-machines. It is clear: social freedom and self-regulation are inconceivable in rigid, machine-like people. The main weapons in the arsenal of freedom, therefore, are the gigantic vital forces in each new generation.

Let us assume that the formal democracies win this war but overlook or underestimate the biological miscalculation in the struggle for freedom, the biological rigidity of the mass individual. In that case, every new generation will inevitably reproduce the rigidity, will form new authoritarian and life-inimical concepts of life, and there will be, at best, only crippled, biologically poorly functioning freedoms. And the masses will never become capable of developing their responsibility for social existence. Thus those who have no interest in such a self-regulation of society need do nothing but use their power of money, position or authority to prevent the liberation of the new generations from the pressure exerted by the rigidity of the old generation.

If, on the other hand, we are interested in bringing about a free society, we are confronted with social, medical and educational tasks: Socially, it is a matter of finding all the sources of the biological [302] impoverishment of man and of creating laws for the protection of a free development. General formulations such as the „freedom of the press, of expression, of assembly,“ etc., are a matter of course, but far from sufficient. For under these laws, the irrational individual has exactly the same rights as the rational one. As weeds always grow more easily and rampantly than other plants, the Hitlerist will inevitably win out. It is a matter of not limiting Hitlerism to the bearers of the Swastika sign, but of recognizing it in everyday life, scientifically and humanly, and of fighting it there. Only in the process of thus weeding out fascism in everyday life will the proper laws against it formulate themselves.

Only one example of many: anyone who wants to drive a car or wants to run a barber shop must, for the protection of the other people's safety, prove his ability to do so; he must have a license. But there is still no law for the protection of newborn infants against the parents' inability to bring up children or against the parents' neurotic influences. Children can – and, according to fascist principles, should be – put into the world en masse, without anybody asking whether they will be fed and properly brought up. The sentimental slogan of the family with many children is typically fascist, no matter by whom it is propagated. 3

________

3 It crept, e.g., into the otherwise progressive Beveridge Plan in England, 1942.

From a medical and educational point of view, the ignominious fact will have to be remedied that the fate of each new generation is in the hands of physicians and teachers who have not acquired the slightest knowledge of the biosexual development of the infant. This is still so, 40 years after the discovery of infantile sexuality. Every day and every hour, this ignorance of physicians and teachers creates fascist mentality in millions of children and adolescents. Two requirements are immediately obvious.

First: Every physician, teacher or social worker who will have to do with children must show proof that he or she himself is sex-economically healthy and that he has acquired an exact knowledge of infantile and adolescent sexuality. That is, training [303] in sex-economy must be obligatory for physicians and teachers. The formation of concepts about sexuality should not be left to chance or to neurotic moralists.

Second: Most rigorous laws are needed for the protection of infantile and adolescent sexuality. This may sound revolutionary. But it should be obvious to anybody that fascism, which grew out of the suppression of infantile and adolescent sexuality, has been much more radical and revolutionary, in a negative sense, than society could ever be in the positive sense of protecting natural development. In every democratic society, there are innumerable attempts to bring about a change in this respect. But these islands of understanding and good will are blotted out by the obfuscations which biologically rigid, moralistic physicians and teachers spread over the total society.

There is no sense in going into details here. Every individual measure will formulate itself spontaneously once the principle of the affirmation of sexuality and of the social protection of infantile and adolescent sexuality is established.

From an economic point of view, only the natural work relationships, i.e., the natural economic interdependence of people, can form the basis and the framework for a biological re-structuring of the masses.

The sum total of all natural work relationships we call work democracy. These work relationships are functional and not mechanical. They cannot be arbitrarily established or organized; they can only develop spontaneously from the work process itself. The mutual interdependence of carpenter and blacksmith, of researcher and glass grinder, of painter and paint producer, etc., results in itself from the interlacing of the work functions. One could not invent an arbitrary law which would change these natural work relationships. One cannot make the laboratory worker independent of the glass grinder. The nature of the lenses is dictated only by the laws of optics and by technic, the form of induction spools by the laws of electricity, the activities of man by the nature of his needs. The natural functions of the work process are out of the grasp of human authoritarian arbitrary [304] action. They function freely and are free in the strict sense of the word. They alone are rational. Only they, therefore, can rationally determine social existence. Love, work and knowledge comprise the whole meaning of the concept of work democracy.

True, the natural functions of work, love and knowledge can be misused and smothered. Nevertheless, they regulate themselves intrinsically; they have done so ever since there was human work and they will do so as long as there is a social process. These natural functions constitute the fact (not by any means the „postulate“) of work democracy. Work democracy is not a political program or the anticipation of a „new order“. It is a fact, though it is one of those facts which thus far have escaped human attention. Work democracy cannot be organized any more than freedom can be organized, or the growth of a tree, an animal or a human. The growth of an organism is, on the strength of its biological function, free in the strictest sense of the word. So is the natural growth of society. It regulates itself and needs no legislation or regulation. Again, it can only be hindered or misused.

The essence of all kinds of authoritarian rule is that it inhibits the natural self-regulatory functions. The task of a genuine free order can be nothing but that of preventing any inhibition of natural functions. This makes strict laws necessary. Democracy, if it is serious and genuine, is identical with natural self-regulation of love, work and knowledge. Dictatorship, human irrationalism, on the other hand, is identical with the inhibition of this natural self-regulation.

From this it follows that the fight against dictatorships and the irrational longing for authority on the part of the masses can consist only in two fundamental measures: 1) in the elucidation of all natural vital forces in the individual and in society; and 2) the elucidation of all obstacles which counteract the spontaneous functioning of these vital forces. The vital forces must be furthered, the obstacles must be eliminated.

Human regulation of social existence cannot extend to the natural functions of work. Civilization in the good sense of the word [305] can consist in nothing but the establishment of the optimal conditions for the development of the natural functions of love, work and knowledge. Although freedom cannot be organized – more, any organization contradicts freedom – the conditions can and must be organized which guarantee free development of the vital forces.

In our professional organization we do not tell our workers what and how they should think. We do not organize their thinking. But we demand of every worker in our field that he rid himself of that lack of freedom in thought and action which he has acquired as a result of his upbringing. If he does so, his spontaneous rational reactions are set free. It is nonsensical to interpret freedom in the sense that the lie has the same right before a court of law as the truth. A genuine work democracy will not give mystical irrationalism the same right as the truth, nor will it give to the suppression of children the same power as to their freedom. It is nonsensical to negotiate with a murderer concerning his right to murder. But this nonsense is constantly being perpetrated in our relations with the Fascists. Fascism, instead of being recognized as organized irrationalism and indecency, is considered a form of „State“ like any other. This, people do because of the fascism in themselves. Of course, even fascism „is right, somewhere,“ just like the mental patient; it only does not know where.

Seen from this standpoint, freedom becomes a simple fact, easy to understand and to manage. In fact, freedom need not be first achieved; it is spontaneously existent in all natural life functions. What has to be achieved is the elimination of all the obstacles that stand in the way of freedom.

Seen from this standpoint, the arsenal of human freedom is gigantic and ever so rich in means, biological as well as mechanical. Nothing extraordinary has to be fought for. Life is to be set free; that is all. The age-old dream of freedom can become reality once reality is comprehended. In this arsenal of freedom we find:

The spontaneous, alive knowledge of the natural laws of life, which everybody has somewhere, no matter what his age, social [306] position or color. What is to be eliminated is the distortion and repression of this knowledge by life-inimical, rigid, mechanistic and mystical concepts and institutions.

The natural work relatonships among people and their natural enjoyment in work. They are full of strength and promise. What is to be eliminated is the obstruction of the natural work democracy by arbitrary, life-inimical and authoritarian limitations and regulations.

The natural sociality and morality which is present in everybody. What is to be eliminated is the loathsome moralism which obstructs natural morality and then justifies itself by the very impulses, perverse, antisocial and criminal, which it has created.

The present war, as no other war before, will do away with many obstacles to natural self-regulation, obstacles which to eliminate would seem inconceivable in peacetime. Thus, for example, the authoritarian fascist relegation of the woman to the hearth, certain practises of business, exploitation and usury, artificial national boundaries, etc. We do not belong to those who contend that wars are necessary for the progress of human civilization. 4

________

4 Translator's note: The fact that this should even be mentioned is a problem in itself. One would think that every decent, thinking person would be of the same opinion. That this is far from being the case is exemplified in the following item which appeared in the LETTERS column of TIME, January 25, 1943:

Sirs:

It is regrettable that Mr. Biddle in his otherwise admirable treatise on Mr. Justice Holmes (TIME, Jan. 4) should have seen fit to praise one of Holmes's rare public indiscretions, the rhapsodic defense of war. That was worthy of a Mussolini or the war lords of Germany and Japan ...

War in itself is obscene, not ennobling ...

S. AGOOS

Some other unorthodox views of war:

„Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing sooner than of war“. – Homer: Iliad, XIII.

„I shall always respect war hereafter. The cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of eternal life, eternal law, reconstructing and uplifting society – breaks up the old horizon and we see through the rifts a wider vista“. – R. W. Emerson: Letter to Thomas Carlyle, Sept. 26, 1864. – ED.

These examples show clearly that the glorification of war is not limited to professional soldiers and imperialists. The italics in the quotation from Emerson are mine. – T.P.W.

The situation is the following: the mechanistic, mystical, [307] authoritarian organization of human society and of human structure again and again bring about the machine-like murder of war. That which is alive and striving for freedom in man and his society rebels against this.

Since in war the biological crippling of man and of society shows itself in its extreme, grotesque manifestations, the living function is forced to assert itself, something which under more normal conditions it is less likely to do.

An alive, functional concept of life opens up manifold tasks. They cannot be entered upon here. One could write a fat volume about the antics of politiciandom alone, this supreme expression of human irrationalism. All that this article intended to do was to demonstrate the biological anchoring of the human incapacity for freedom.

The following objection may be raised: Granted that man, under the influence of machine production for thousands of years, has suffered his body to degenerate in a machine-like fashion and his thinking to degenerate irrationally. But we cannot see how it would be possible to reverse this process in the organism and to liberate the self-regulatory forces in man if the masses continue to be under the influence of the machine. No sensible person will expect us to become iconoclasts and to want to abolish industrial civilization. There is no appreciable counteraction to the biologically devastating influences of machine technic. To eliminate the biological rigidity of man would take more palpable things than scientific information. In addition, this war, with its discipline and its regulation of human activities, will increase rather than decrease biological rigidity.

This objection is entirely correct. The present technical means offer indeed no possibility of undoing the biological aberration of man. For a long time after I had recognized the fact of the biological reproduction of mechanized civilization, I hesitated to publish it. I told myself that there is no use in proclaiming truths which cannot have any practical effect.

Finally, the answer to this painful dilemma presented itself when I began to ask myself how I myself had arrived at the functional formulations in psychiatry, sociology and biology which so [308] successfully explained mechanism and mysticism and could replace them in these three fields. Not because I am some sort of superman. Then, how could I arrive at solutions which were inaccessible to others? Gradually it became clear that decades of professional work on the problem of biological energy had forced me to rid myself of mechanistic and mystical concepts and methods; otherwise the work would have been impossible. That is, my work itself forced me to learn functional thinking. If, instead of cultivating functional thinking, I had cultivated the mechanistic, mystical structure which my upbringing had imparted to me, I would not have been able to discover one single fact of orgone biophysics. But I found myself on the hidden path that led to the discovery of the orgone the moment I entered the taboo field of the orgastic plasma contraction. In retrospect I saw that I had passed any number of critical points at which I might have been pulled back from the functional way of looking at things into the mechanistic, mystical way. How I escaped this danger I could not tell. What is certain is that the functional way of looking at things, which contains so many important answers to the present chaos, was supported by the occupation with the biological energy, the orgone. In this way, I found an answer for myself.

The reason for my explaining this is my belief that this answer is generally valid: The ignorance of the laws of biological functioning has created mechanism, and has put mysticism in the place of living reality. The orgone, the specific biological energy in the cosmos, however, is neither mechanistic nor mystical. This energy follows its own laws, which are specifically functional and cannot be comprehended in terms of rigid mechanics, or in terms of positive and negative electricity. It follows functional laws such as attraction and dissociation, expansion and contraction, lumination, pulsation, etc. The technique of machine murder can hardly expect any succour from it, for it will not be adaptable to the technique of killing. This war, or the next one, will create a gigantic demand for life-positive functions. The orgonotic life-rays are not the least contribution to the development of humanity which sex-economy [309] has been able to make. Sooner or later, ever increasing numbers of people will make themselves acquainted with the functions of the orgone. In the process of understanding and mastering the cosmic life energy, people will be forced to learn functional, alive, thinking; otherwise they would be unable to master the theoretical and practical problems of the orgone. Not long ago, they learned to think psychologically, when an avenue of approach was opened to an understanding of infantile sexuality, and economically, when the laws of economics became known. On the one hand, the mechanical laws of inanimate nature made man become rigid and machine-like when he grasped and mastered them. On the other hand, each new generation, in mastering the laws of the orgonotic life function to an ever-increasing degree, will learn to comprehend, love, protect and develop living functioning.

I would like to ask the reader not to look at this conclusion as a proclamation of salvation. The more deeply one penetrates into the functional realms of natural science, the less one can get rid of the feeling of being only a „worm in the universe,“ I consider myself nothing but the tool of a certain scientific logic. The far-reaching conclusion which I drew from the discovery of the orgone for the solution of the social problem of human biological impoverishment is a true conclusion, comparable to the conclusion that one can overcome gravity by filling a balloon with a gas of a specific weight lower than that of air. I have no cure-alls to hand out, as many of our friends seem to believe. Such things as „natural biological self-regulation,“ „natural work-democracy,“ „cosmic orgone,“ „genital character,“ etc., are facts. They are weapons which sex-economy has put at the disposal of humanity for the eradication of enslaving conditions such as „biological rigidity,“ „character and muscular armoring,“ „pleasure anxiety,“ „orgastic impotence,“ „formal authority,“ „social irresponsibility,“ „incapacity for freedom,“ etc. It is an essential part of this work that it is done out of the enjoyment of work, of searching and finding, of the perception of the spontaneous decency and wisdom in nature, and not in the expectation of medals, riches, academic recognition and popularity, and certainly not out of the sadistic [310] pleasure in torture, suppression, cultivation of illusions, warfare and killing of life.

3. Work Democracy Versus Politics. The Natural Social Forces For The Mastery Of The Emotional Plague*

• First published in International Journal of Sex-economy and Orgone-Research 2, 1943, 122-140.

Introduction. What I am going to present here is general and spontaneous human knowledge, although this knowledge is not socially organized and, for this reason, has as yet not attained a practical effect on a large scale.

Social events are again in a volcanic state of flux. Everywhere people are asking, „What is going to happen now? Which party, or which political coalition will take the responsibility for the fate of European society?“

I have no answer to this question. This article is not intended to offer political advice. It is intended only to point out a certain practical and rational fact which is nowhere mentioned in all the political discussions of the shape of the postwar world. It is the fact which in circles of scientists, physicians, teachers, social workers and others has come to be known as „natural work democracy“. I shall now show what natural work democracy is; I repeat, what it is, not what it should be.

In 1937, that is, two years before the outbreak of the second world war, at a time when the war clouds gathered over Europe, a small monograph entitled DIE NATÜRLICHE ORGANISATION DER ARBEIT IN DER ARBEITSDEMOKRATIE published in Scandinavia. Its author was not named but signed as „a laboratory worker“. It was published in mimeographed form only, and later translated in manuscript into English. It had no large circulation, for it had no political propaganda behind it and it was not written out of political ambition. But wherever it was read, it found acclaim. It was read in small circles in France, Holland, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Palestine. A few dozen copies also found their way illegally into Germany. It was reviewed in a German Socialist weekly in Paris, and otherwise did not make any great stir. Far from gaining any decisive influence on political events, it soon [311] fell into oblivion in the turmoil of the day. Small wonder, for it was not a political treatise, but was, on the contrary, against politics, written by a working individual. Yet, two things seemed to stick in the memory of those who had read it and seemed to appear again and again in their conversations and discussions. One was the word „work democracy“. The other was two sentences. They sound out-of-the-world, Utopian and basically hopeless: „Put an end to all politics! Turn to the practical tasks of real life!“

Peculiarly enough, the only political daily which reviewed the book in an extensive article, also made the word „work democracy“ and the two watchword-like sentences the center of the discussion. The article was sympathetic toward work democracy, but strictly refuted the tendency expressed by those two sentences. This contradiction showed that the book had not been really understood. Apparently, it was written by a former socialist. It refuted all socialist party doings but still contained a great many political formulations and discussions.

In spite of its defects and lack of clarity, it was read with great enthusiasm by a German sociologist and smuggled into Germany. In the course of the ensuing six years, hardly anything was ever heard of it. But in 1941 it was followed by a continuation under the title, WEITERE PROBLEME DER ARBEITSDEMOKRATIE. This also went illegally to several European countries and was even „intercepted“ by the American Secret Police, the F.B.I., and made the basis for questioning.

In the circles of sex-economists and vegetotherapists, who have only a very informal organization, the word „work democracy“ became more and more meaningful. It became part of everyday language; one spoke of work-democratic institutions, of the „work family,“ etc., things which gave a good deal of food for thought. In the midst of the war chaos, a sex-economist in one of the occupied countries wrote to the American group that the book had been translated and was being held in readiness for distribution as soon as circumstances would permit.

In the course of the last four years of war I tried more and more to comprehend the content of the concept of work democ-[312]racy. My starting point were discussions I had had in Norway with friends of various professions. The more I dealt with the concept, the clearer became its outline, the fuller and more alive its content, and finally I had a picture of it which was in full harmony with a great many decisive though neglected sociological facts.

I shall now try to present the meaning of this picture. I have no intention of making any propaganda for it or of entering into any time-consuming discussions about it. But I may say that this picture is becoming more and more identical with the spontaneous and organic manner in which the International Orgone Institute is growing. In its basic features, this organization of sex-economists, vegetotherapists, teachers and orgone biophysicists develops in fact according to the picture of natural work democracy.

1. Work in conflict with politics.

A physician, in order to be admitted to practice, must demonstrate his theoretical and practical knowledge of medicine. A politician, on the other hand, who, unlike the physician, purposes to decide the fate not of hundreds of people, but of millions, does not have to show such proof of knowledge. This fact seems to be one of the fundamental reasons for the tragedy which, for thousands of years, has devastated human society with periodic outbreaks.

The practical worker, no matter whether he comes from a rich or a poor home, has to go through a certain schooling. He is not elected „by the people“. Working people who have proved themselves over years in their profession should determine whether or not the future worker should be a socially potent factor. This demand may be ahead of the facts, but it is indicative of a tendency. In America this demand has even found expression in the requirement that a salesperson in a department store has to have a college degree. As exaggerated and unjust as such a demand may be, it clearly shows the social pressure with which even the simplest work is burdened. Every cobbler, carpenter, [313] mechanic, electrician, mason, etc., has to fulfill very strict demands made on his abilities.

A politician, on the other hand, is not subject to the necessity of such legitimation. All he needs to reach the highest positions in human society – particularly when social conditions are chaotic – are a good dose of cleverness, neurotic ambition, and ruthlessness. The past 25 years have shown how a mediocre journalist was able to brutalize 50 million Italian people and lead them to disaster. For 22 years there was a big noise about nothing, until one day the whole thing collapsed overnight, leaving one with the feeling, „And nothing has happened“. What remained of this gigantic noise which kept the world breathless and tore many nations from their accustomed lives? Nothing. Not one lasting thought, not one useful institution. Nothing could more simply and more forcefully demonstrate the social irrationalism which periodically brings our lives to the verge of disaster.

An unsuccessful housepainter has also succeeded in holding the world's attention for 20 years without having accomplished one single useful, factual and objective achievement. This also is a case of a gigantic noise which one day will dissolve into „nothing“. The world of work continues on its quiet and vitally necessary course. Of the big noise, nothing will remain but a chapter in history textbooks with an erroneous orientation, textbooks which only confuse our children.

This simple antithesis of work and politics – of which every working individual is somehow aware – has enormous consequences for practical social living. It is expressed, first of all, in the political party system which has such an enormous influence on human ideology and structure. This is not the place to discuss the question of how the present party system developed from the first patriarchal and hierarchic systems of Europe and Asia.

We are concerned here only with the effect of the political party system on the course of society. The reader will already be aware of the fact that natural work democracy is not a social system yet to be established but an existing system, one that is to the political party system as is water to fire.

[314] The antithesis of work and politics leads to the following considerations: The elucidation and elimination of chaotic conditions, no matter whether in a social or in an animal organism, requires scientific and practical work of long duration. Let us briefly, without any subtleties of definition, call that individual who does any vitally necessary work which requires the scientific comprehension of facts, the „scientific individual“. In this sense, a lathe worker in a factory is a scientific individual, for his work is based on the fruits of his own and others' work and search. Let us compare this scientific individual with the mystic, including the political ideologist.

The scientific individual, be he a physician, a lathe worker, a teacher, a technician or whatnot, must work in accordance with the social work process and must safeguard it. He has a difficult stand socially: he must substantiate every one of his contentions in a practical manner. He must labor painstakingly, must think, look for new ways, must recognize errors and correct them, must recognize erroneous theories and refute them. In addition, if he achieves something fundamentally new, he must expose himself to human maliciousness and must fight his way through it. He cannot use might and force, for with might and force one cannot build engines, produce therapeutic sera, make stratosphere flights or bring up children. The working, scientific individual lives and works without weapons.

The mystic and the political ideologist, on the other hand, have an easy stand socially, compared with the working individual. Nobody asks them to prove their contentions. They may promise the stars from heaven and paradise on earth: they can rest assured that nobody will call them to account for fraud. Their prerogatives are based on the sacred right of free democratic expression of opinion. If we give the matter a little thought, we soon realize that there must be something wrong with the concept of „free expression of opinion“. For it was possible for an incompetent housepainter to establish for himself, within a few years and in a completely legal manner, with the right of free expression of opinion, a position in the world such as none of the great pioneers [315] in science, art, education or technic ever achieved. This shows plainly that in a certain respect our social thinking is catastrophically wrong and in need of radical correction. We know, from careful sex-economic clinical observation, that it is the authoritarian upbringing of children to be apprehensive subjects which guarantees to the political pirates the credulity and the submissiveness of millions of adult individuals.

Let us follow the antithesis of work and politics in another direction.

The cover of the International Journal of Sex-economy and Orgone-Research, the official organ of the Orgone Institute, carries the motto: „Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it“. Without the functions of natural love between man and wife, mother and child, one work companion and the other, etc., without work and knowledge, human society could not exist for a single day. As a physician, I do not have to take into account any political ideology or any diplomatic necessity, as important as they may seem at the moment. My task is exclusively that of presenting facts. It is a painful fact that none of the three basic functions of social life are in any way taken into account by the exercise of universal suffrage; nor have they ever been taken into account in the history of parliamentary democracy. The political ideologies, on the other hand – though they have nothing at all to do with the functions of natural love, of work and of knowledge – have unimpeded and uncontrolled access to every kind of social power, on the basis of universal suffrage and of the party system. I may emphasize here that I am, and always have been, for universal suffrage. This does not change the fact that the social institution of universal suffrage in parliamentary democracy is in no way identical with the three basic functions of social existence. It is left entirely to chance whether these basic social functions are safeguarded or harmed by the parliamentary voting system. There is no provision in parliamentary democratic legislation which would grant love, work and knowledge the leading role in guiding the fate of society. This lack of accord between democratic [316] suffrage and basic social functions has a catastrophic effect on the social process.

I shall no more than briefly mention the many institutions and laws which explicitly impede these functions. This basic conflict between work and politics has never been clearly formulated by any scientific or political group. Nevertheless, it is the core of the biosocial tragedy of the animal, man. The political party systems do not correspond in any way to the conditions, tasks and goals of human society. A cobbler cannot suddenly become a tailor, nor can a physician suddenly become a mining engineer, or a teacher a carpenter. But in America a Republican, without any factual re-orientation, can suddenly become a Democrat; in pre-Hitler Germany, a Communist could without any difficulty turn into a Fascist, a Fascist into a Communist, a Liberal into a Communist or Social Democrat, and a Social Democrat into a German Nationalist or a Christian Socialist party member; in doing so, he could strengthen or weaken the program of the respective party and in this unprincipled manner influence the fate of a whole nation.

This shows plainly the irrational character of politics and its antithesis to work. The question whether political parties ever had an objective and rational place in the social system is irrelevant here. What is relevant is that today the political parties do not fulfil any rational function. The practical and positive achievements in a society have nothing to do with party lines and party ideologies. This is shown, for example, in Roosevelt's New Deal. The so-called party coalitions are makeshifts for want of a factual orientation and a real solution. It is not possible to master tangible realities with opinions which one changes like a shirt.

These first steps in the elucidation of the concept of work democracy have already led to important insights into the social chaos. This makes it imperative to continue our examination of natural work democracy. For nobody knows where the answer will be found to the chaos produced by politics.

This task of finding an orientation in the social chaos must itself be considered a piece of rational practical work. Since natural [317] work democracy is based on work, and not on politics, this „work on the social organism“ may well yield a practically useful result. If so, it would be the first time that work had a decisive influence on the social problem. This work would be work-democratic in that it could cause other working sociologists, economists and psychologists to work on the social organism. Since this work attacks politics as a principle and as a system, it will doubtless be countered with political ideologies. It will be interesting and important to see how work-democratic sociology will stand this practical test. Work-democratic thinking meets political ideologies with the concept of social function and social development, that is, with facts and possibilities, and not with other political ideologies. It is the same as in the field of morals: sex-economy fights the damages wrought by compulsive morality not with another kind of compulsive morality – which would be the political way – but with concrete knowledge of and practical work on the natural love function. In other words, work-democratically oriented sociology will have to prove itself in practical life in the same way as the contention that steam contains energy is proven by the motion of the locomotive. Thus we have no reason for engaging in political or ideological squabbles about the existence or the practicability of work democracy.

The work-democratically thinking and acting worker does not take a stand against the politician. It is neither his intention nor his fault if the results of his practical work show up the illusionary and irrational character of politics. As a practical worker, no matter in what profession, one is intensively occupied with practical tasks for the improvement of life. For this reason, one is not like the politician who, for lack of practical tasks, is always „against“ and never „for“ something. This „being-against“ characterizes politics in general. That which is practically productive is not done by the politician but by the worker, no matter whether the politician's ideologies are for or against it. Long experience shows unequivocally that the practical worker inevitably comes into conflict with the politician. Thus, whoever works for living functioning is against politics whether he wants to be or not. The [318] teacher is for a rational upbringing of children; the farmer is for the machines necessary in his work; the scientist is for finding proof for his findings. It is easy to see that whenever a working individual takes an attitude against this or that achievement, he does not act in his capacity as a worker, but under the influence of political or other irrational motives.

The contention that positive work achievement is never against anything, but always for something, sounds exaggerated. The reason for this is simple: our work life is permeated by irrational expressions of opinion which are not recognized as such, that is, which are not being distinguished from objective judgments. Is not the farmer against the industrial worker, the industrial worker against the engineer, etc.? Is not this a