Showing posts with label conspiracy theories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conspiracy theories. Show all posts

17 Mar 2022

I Still Dream of Orgonon: Notes on the Strange Life and Times of Wilhelm Reich (Part 2: The American Years)

Wilhelm Reich (1890-1957)
 
Folge der Stimme deines Herzens, auch wenn 
sie dich vom Pfad schüchterner Seelen abführt [1]
 
 
III. The American Years 
 
Reich arrived in New York in September 1939, having accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the New School of Social Research, teaching a course on the 'Biological Aspects of Character Formation'. Despite certain misgivings, which he expressed in his diary, one likes to think Reich secretly had high hopes for his new life in the New World; for, as the song says, life can be bright in America ... [2] 

Alone in a strange country and without much else to do in the evenings, Reich began experimenting on mice (as you do); injecting them with bions. Soon afterwards, however, he met the woman who was to become his second wife (and lab assistant) Ilse Ollendorff, so presumably had something else to occupy him at night. 

It was shortly after he arrived in the US that Reich announced his discovery of a bio-cosmic force that he called orgone energy (or, sometimes, orgone radiation). This, arguably, is the thing most people remember him for today (if they remember him at all). Reich claimed to have observed it emanating from the mice after injecting them, as well as in the night sky through a special telescope he called an organoscope.   

Indeed, according to Reich, orgone energy was present everywhere and in everything; from the blue of the sky to the blue of sexually excited frogs; from red blood cells to the chlorophyll of plants. In 1940, he began to construct orgone accumulators; a modified Faraday cage made of wood and lined with stone wool and sheet iron. 
 
Initially they were designed for lab animals, but he soon knocked up some human-sized sex boxes, as they became known, and volunteers from amongst his patients were encouraged to sit inside - naked, of course. Soon, he was claiming that his orgone accumulators could not only treat schizophrenia, but cure cancer and that he was on the verge of producing a unified theory of physical and mental health. 
 
Hoping to have his ideas scientifically endorsed, Reich contacted and met with Albert Einstein in January 1941. Although initially encouraged by their discussion - and the fact that the latter agreed to home-test a small orgone accumulator - Reich was ultimately disappointed when Einstein wrote to him to say thanks, but no thanks. 
 
And despite Reich pestering the physicist with lengthy letters reporting his latest experimental results, Einstein refused to reconsider the matter and eventually wrote asking that his name not be used in connection with the accumulator. Reich suspected this was all part of the same conspiracy which had cost him his position at the New School in May 1941 and seen him evicted from his apartment after neighbours complained about his strange experiments.    
  
Now things quickly went from bad to worse: after the German declaration of war in December 1941, Reich was arrested by the FBI and taken to Ellis Island, where he was held for three weeks on suspicion of being an enemy alien. Even after his release, he was placed under surveillance (admittedly, this was unfair since Reich was both Jewish and an ardent anti-fascist, forced to flee his homeland because of the Nazis). 
 
Undeterred, Reich purchased an old farm in Maine, in November 1942, and slowly built this up as his home and research centre, calling it Orgonon. In 1950, accompanied by his wife and two children, as well as several colleagues and an artist friend, he moved there on a full-time basis. [3]
 
Up until this time, Reich's activities had attracted little interest from the American press and the coverage he did receive was largely uncritical, if bemused. But suddenly his reputation came under attack and his work was branded pseudo-scientific nonsense which made many false or misleading claims. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigated and concluded that Reich was, indeed, a fraud of the first magnitude [4].
 
And he didn't help matters when, in 1950, he established the Orgonomic Infant Research Centre (OIRC): it's one thing asking adults to strip off and sit in a box, but to involve naked young children in your reserach is never a good idea; several who were treated by OIRC therapists later claimed they had been physically and sexually abused - although not by Reich - and he agreed to close the Centre in 1952 in order to avoid a court case involving one of his team.         
 
By this date, Reich had also divorced his wife on the suspicion that she'd had an affair; what was good for the gander wasn't so good for the goose, it seems. Ilse nevertheless continued working alongside him for another three years, but only after signing confessions about her infidelity and secret feelings of fear and hatred for him.
 
When not denouncing his ex-wife, Reich was telling everyone he knew about his latest discovery - deadly orgone radiation, which, he said, caused desertification; a problem that, conveniently, could be solved with his new cloudbusting technology (basically a number of 15-foot metal pipes mounted on a mobile platform and connected to cables that were inserted into water). 
 
Reich insisted that his cloudbuster could unblock orgone energy in the atmosphere and cause rain. He described his new research as cosmic orgone engineering. Unusually, this did not seem to require that anyone remove their clothes or agree to a massage.  
 
Meanwhile, the FDA were continuing their investigations and in the spring of 1954 obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and promotional literature for said devices. Reich refused to appear in court, arguing that no judge was in a position to evaluate his work on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy - which is true, but then, who is?          
 
Perhaps annoyed by Reich's non-appearance and insulted by his attitude (as expressed in a letter), the judge not only granted the injunction, but instructed that accumulators, parts and instructions be destroyed, and that several of Reich's books that mentioned orgone be withdrawn from circulation. 
 
Of course, Reich being Reich, he thought this further evidence of the conspiracy against him; a conspiracy he now believed had extraterrestrial origins. And so he started chasing UFOs (or energy alphas) which he saw zipping across the skies over Orgonon, leaving black streams of deadly orgone radiation in their wake. When he thought one was in range, Reich would fire a cloudbuster at it, in the hope that this would drain away the negative energy (and thus save planet Earth) [5]
 
And Reich being Reich, he of course violated the injunction against him and so was charged with contempt of court in 1956. Initially refusing to attend court to fight the charge, Reich eventually decided to defend himself, pleading not guilty, whilst at the same time admitting that one of his associates had sent an accumulator part through the post. 
 
The jury were not sympathetic to his tale of an alien controlled conspiracy and the judge discreetly suggested to Ilse Ollendorff that she might consider finding psychiatric help for her ex-husband. Thus, Reich was found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation was also fined $10,000 (equivalent to around $104,000 today) and any remaining orgone accumulators had to be destroyed by court order; which they were, along with over six tonnes of Reich's books, journals and papers.       
 
Reich appealed the decision, but lost. He also wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, but to no avail. And so, on March 12, 1957, Reich entered Danbury Federal Prison (Connecticut), where he was examined by a psychiatrist who recorded paranoia, manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution. A week later, Reich was transferred to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary and examined again. This time it was decided that whilst he was mentally competent, he could become psychotic if unduly stressed.
 
Fellow inmates referred to Reich as either the flying saucer nut, or the sex box guy. He told his son that he passed the time studying mathematics and crying. When, having served one-third of his sentence, he became eligible for parole, Reich expressed his hopes for the future and looked forward to regaining his liberty. Unfortunately, he died of heart failure, aged sixty, just days before his parole hearing and likely release.
 
 
IV. Closing Remarks
 
Reich was buried in a vault at Orgonon, without ceremony. No academic journals saw fit to publish obituaries. Former friends within the psychoanalytic community who had at one time thought him brilliant, also stayed schtum, perhaps not wanting to speak ill of the dead (their general view being that he had become an embarrassment to himself and the profession).  
 
Nevertheless, in the years since his death - and for all his crackpottery - his work has significantly shaped developments within psychotherapy and influenced a number of intellectuals and artists, including William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and - as mentioned in part one of this post - Deleuze and Guattari. 
 
To tell the truth, I'm amazed that anyone bothers to take his work seriously today - but then some people also continue to read Jung! Perhaps, being a tad more generous, we might paraphrase something that Camille Paglia once said of Freud: Critics always miss the point because they think he produced pseudoscience, when in fact he created great art. [6]  
 
And besides, even false facts and fake discoveries can have real effects ...
 

Notes
 
[1] In English, this reads: 'Always follow your heart, even if it leads you from the path of timid souls.' It is just the kind of clichéd romantic nonsense that I would have thought profound when young, but which now makes me roll my eyes.     

[2] I'm quoting from 'America', a song written by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein for the musical West Side Story (1957). 

[3] Readers might be interested to know it is now the Wilhelm Reich Museum and holiday cottages are available to rent, including the cabin Reich himself lived in. 

[4] In return, Reich labelled the FDA hoodlums and fascists. Believing himself to have the support of President Eisenhower, he was as uncooperative with invesitgators from the FDA as he could be, though they continued to go about their work, interviewing his colleagues, students, and patients. Apparently, one university professor who had bought an orgone accumulator, told them that he knew the device was useless, but it secured him domestic tranquility as his wife was happy to quietly sit in it for several hours each day.  
 
[5] Reich even rented a house in Arizona in order to stage a full-scale battle with the aliens and thought there was a very remote possibility that his own father had, in fact, been from outer space. In a sense, Reich by this stage of his life and career has more in common with David Icke than he does with Freud.   
 
[6] See Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 228. Paglia's actual line reads: "Freud has no rivals among his successors because they think he wrote science, when in fact he wrote art." 
 
 
To read part one of this post - on the European years - click here.  
 
 

6 Nov 2020

Build Back Better

Zen fascists will control you ...
  
I. 
 
In an episode of The Inbetweeners, an increasingly frustrated Will ends up describing French exchange student Patrice as a 'fucking baguette eating dickhead frog'. When Simon points out the racist nature of the remark, Will replies: 'He's made me racist' [1], which is not merely an amusing but also a thought-provoking idea. 
 
Similarly, one can't help observing that the seemingly irrational actions of governments here and elsewhere in response to Covid-19 - such as massively curtailing freedom and deliberately wrecking the economy - have significantly contributed to public paranoia; that they have, if you like, made conspiracists of us all.       

Thus it is that previously reasonable individuals who once would have laughed at ideas of the Great Reset and the New World Order, are now beginning to wonder if there isn't some truth in them as they (desperately) try to make sense of what's going on. 
 
They want to know why it is, for example, that politicians the world over - across the political spectrum and including Boris Johnson and Joe Biden - have adopted the mantra Build Back Better and promise us a fairer, greener future with electric cars, social justice, and a universal basic income, whilst insisting we all wear masks and live online.   


II.

This holistic - or, if you prefer, totalitarian - concept of Building Back Better was first discussed at the UN in relation to the issue of disaster management and adopted by the General Assembly as an official programme in 2015. The main principle is to regard crises - including pandemics - as opportunities to create more resilient social structures and economic models than before.     

Prior to this, the phrase had been floating around for several years, used not only by politicians, economists, and members of think tanks, but by the sort of people involved in aid agencies and various NGOs who dream of a safer tomorrow for all the world's children - oh, and a global government run by a technocratic liberal elite who know what's best for everyone at all times.   

Today, key personnel at the IMF, WHO, WEF, and EU, seem to have miraculously arrived at some kind of ideological consensus re the need to Build Back Better. 
 
Of course, it's hardly a conspiracy - more like an open secret - when individuals like Klaus Schwab are unashamedly setting out their visions of a post-Covid utopia and declaring: "The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world." [2] 
 
They call this the new normal. And they laugh at those who naively believe we'll soon return to the old ways once there's a vaccine ...
 

Notes

[1] See: The Inbetweeners, S2/E3, 'Will's Birthday', dir. Ben Palmer, written by Damon Beesley and Ian Morris, (original air date 16 April 2009).  

[2] Klaus Schwab (Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum), 'Now is the time for a "great reset"',  article on the WEF website (3 June 2020): click here.  


11 Apr 2019

Reflections on a Black Hole in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

A black hole as captured by the Event Horizon Telescope
Photograph: EHT Collaboration


As a nihilistic anti-theist, it made me very happy when astronomers released the first image of a supermassive black hole yesterday, thereby demonstrating that at the heart of the universe is not a loving presence, or judgemental God, but rather an enigmatic object defined by its absence and darkness.

Certainly that's true for the Messier 87 galaxy (or M87, as it's known); a giant elliptical galaxy, fifty-five million light years from Earth in the constellation of Virgo, that was discovered by the French star-gazer Charles Messier in 1781.

And it's doubtless true for our galaxy also (in fact, the EHT team are presently working on producing an image of the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way and hope to have such sometime soon). 

Further, one is tempted to suggest that if there's any truth in the old saying that suggests the microcosm corresponds with the macrocosm - as above, so below - then maybe it's the case that what was once called the soul is nothing but a tiny and mysterious core of chaos; a dark source of eternal creation that exists beyond the event horizon of the known self; a place wherein psychological law collapses and all human reality is distorted beyond recognition.

And who knows, maybe we'll one day even have a picture of that ...


Notes

The astonishing image of the black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (which is actually a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile) using a technique known as interferometry

Of course, crackpot conspiracy theorists are, with depressing predictability, already claiming online that - just like the NASA moon landings - the picture is fake and the 200 scientists involved in the collaborative research project are therefore wilfully attempting to deceive the public as part of some elaborate hoax. 


15 Sept 2017

Of Contrails and Chemtrails (with Reference to the Case of Kylie Jenner)

Kylie Jenner reflecting upon chemtrails 


I have to admit that I make very little effort to keep up with the Kardashians and their extended family network. But it's been brought to my attention that one of their number, Kylie Jenner, recently tweeted her concern about the issue of so-called chemtrails ...

"It's heartening to discover", said my correspondent, "that when not revealing her charms, this talented young model, actress, entrepreneur and media personality, is courageously attempting to expose the truth about those mysterious white lines across the sky that the authorities pretend are perfectly harmless ..."

Quite! Only not quite quite ...

Because those mysterious white lines are in fact nothing more than water vapour in the form of ice crystals and, as such, are of course entirely innocuous. In other words, chemical trails don't really exist; they are simply condensation trails (known as contrails) produced by aircraft engines burning hydrocarbons at cruise altitude, as re-imagined within the paranoid world of conspiracy theory. 

Depending on the ambient temperature and humidity, contrails may be visible for only a brief few moments, or they may persist for hours and spread to be several miles wide, coming to resemble natural cloud formations. Either way, they do not contain unknown bio-chemical agents deliberately sprayed for sinister purposes by secret government agencies.

Such claims - originating in the late 1990s - are often based on mad fantasy and shocking scientific ignorance. However, despite repeatedly being shown to be absurd, they still persist and attract followers; including, it seems, glamorous celebrities such as Miss Jenner. It's an unfortunate fact that when experts and officials deny the existence of chemtrails, believers interpret this as further evidence of a cover-up.

Lunatics, it seems, have always been prone to lifting up their eyes and looking to the heavens for signs; if not of God's greatness, then of man's inherent wickedness ...


Notes

Anyone interested in the latest research into this by a large number of atmospheric scientists might like to see an article by Christine Shearer, Mick West, Ken Caldeira and Steven J. Davis entitled 'Quantifying expert consensus against the existence of a secret, large-scale atmospheric spraying program', in Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 11, Number 8 (10 Aug 2016), IOP Publishing Ltd. Click here to read online, or here to view as a PDF.

And if anyone is interested in Kylie Jenner's tweet from 25 May 2015 on chemtrails, here it is:




6 Mar 2017

On the Practical Idealism and Pan-Europeanism of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi

Count Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi 
(1894-1972)


One of the reasons that I dislike crackpot conspiracy theories in which nothing is as it seems, nothing happens by accident, everything is connected and invariably involves either the Jews or extraterrestrials, is that they serve to distract from and disguise what is really going on in the world.

What's more - and worse - they discredit the very notion of orchestrated acts, planned and carried out in secret, by elite groups, with sinister or subversive aims. One is almost tempted to say that all the popular conspiracy theories are themselves part of a wider conspiracy and that people like David Icke are essentially useful idiots, rewarded with fame and fortune for the work they do.     

So it is that people know all about Icke himself, for example, and his shape-shifting reptilians, but very few have ever heard of Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi and his vision of a future Europe composed of a racially-mixed population ruled over by a politico-spiritual elite.

Coudenhove-Kalergi was one of the key early advocates of European integration and served as the founding president of the Pan-European Union for almost fifty years; a body that served as a prototype and ideological foundation for the EU as we know it today.     

Aristocratic by birth and temperament, Coudenhove-Kalergi nevertheless favoured social democracy over feudalism. His ambition, however, shaped by readings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spengler and detailed in his own extensive writings from the 1920s onwards, was to oversee the creation an ultra-conservative, post-democratic Europe, in which the nation state was dissolved, but the continent united by a common cultural ideal.

Not surprisingly, his Pan-Europa project was despised by Hitler, who characterized Coudenhove-Kalergi as a rootless, cosmopolitan half-breed, supported by Jewish finance and under the influence of Freemasonry. And, indeed, Coudenhove-Kalergi continues to serve as a hate figure today for those on the far-right opposed to globalism and who understand the European migrant crisis as an attempt to destroy the racial foundations of Europe and eventually replace the native peoples with a new population made up of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Who understand the migrant crisis, in other words, as a crucial stage of the Kalergi Plan, as set out in Praktischer Idealismus (1925) and which predicts:

"Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals."

Obviously, depending on one's politics, this can be viewed as either a utopian dream or a dystopian nightmare. But it's maybe something worth discussing seriously - and not quickly dismissed as just another mad conspiracy theory put forward by racist neo-Nazis et al ...