Wilhelm Reich was a crazy dude with too much spunk on the brain. My old lady, Revoltina, thinks he was a dirty old man. All the same, he was not totally wrong in believing that love and intimacy are important to mental health.
Here are three pithy quotes:
‘In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism. According to Marx, the social condition “capitalism” does not consist in the existence of individual capitalists, but in the existence of the specific “capitalist mode of production”, that is, in the production of exchange values instead of use values, in wage work of the masses and in the production of surplus value, which is appropriated by the state or the private owners, and not by the society of working people. In this strictly Marxist sense, the capitalistic system continues to exist in Russia. And it will continue to exist as long as the masses of people continue to lack responsibility and to crave authority.’
‘Under the influence of politicians, masses of people tend to ascribe the responsibility for wars to those who wield power at any given time……The responsibility for war falls solely upon the shoulders of these same masses of people, for they have the necessary means to avert war in their own hands. In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity, and in part actively, these masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer more than anybody else. To stress this guilt on the part of masses of people, to hold them solely responsible, means to take them seriously.’
‘Only the liberation for the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.’
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