Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Can There Be Orgonomy Without Politics?


Reich was never able to separate his own personal political opinions and preferences from his "scientific" theorizing. Throughout his career, both as a communist and later, as an anti-communist, he conflated his personal preferences with what he considered "scientific fact". He inherited from Marx the idea that Communism was "scientific", came to regard Fascism as "pathology", and kept that idea all his life, despite his later disillusionment with Marxism. He never did grasp that political affiliation is not a subject that can be reduced to psychological determinism, but simply what agenda one happens to prefer. 

His followers have continued the error, consistantly claiming that the political position of their choice, whatever it may be, is the only "rational" or "scientific" one and that their ideological opponants are "pathological". It is long past time to give it up and admit that Reich should never have tried to psychoanalyse politics and it would have been better for his legacy if he had stuck to working in fields where objective knowledge is possible and not strayed into social issues where the concepts of medicine and natural science do not belong. 

A field of the natural sciences cannot set itself up as judge of political positions. To whatever extent it does so, it is being corrupted by the personal aspirations and hidden motivations of it's proponants and is therefore failing in it's task. To the extent that orgonomy has attempted to stigmatize one or another political outlook as a form of mental illness, it has departed from being a science and degenerated into partisan polemics. 

There is a great potential in some future society for a science of the biological energy Reich discovered, but if such a science ever does come into existence it will not be orgonomy, at least not as orgonomy has been known so far. It will have to be a science, a true science, as all other sciences are, without any political or ideological affiliations or agendas. And that is not what most of Reich's followers want to see. 

No comments:

Post a Comment