Reich on Trial
Robert Anton Wilson
(The scene: Wilhelm Reich is on trial in Hell. The trial looks in all respects like a 3-ring circus, complete with jugglers, acrobats, fire-eaters, etc. The prosecuting attorneys are the Marquis de Sade and Count von Sacher-Masoch, both of whom are dressed as clowns. The Ringmaster (Satan) presides as judge.
Early on in the trial, Dr. Reich introduced as evidence a Computer which continually monitors the growth of the worldwide nuclear weapons stockpile. The Computer emits an ear-splitting whistle every time there is an increment in firepower equivalent to the original Hiroshima bomb.....)
SADE: Why did you rebel against Freud?
REICH: (slowly) I rebelled against Freud because he was a coward.
SADE: A coward? The man who challenged all the taboos of his age?
REICH: He back-tracked, he evaded, he weaseled. He would not say flatly what his theories all implied.
SADE: You mean he did not share your Utopian fantasies.
REICH: Look at the photos of him; look at that jaw.
The Computer whistles again.
REICH:Look at his expression, those clenched teeth. He was holding back -- and I tell you, all of you, that is why he got cancer of the jaw finally. He wouldn't speak what he knew. He held it in, behind those clenched teeth, until it killed him.
SADE: And what is the truth Freud dared not speak?
REICH: Everybody knows it by now. Look at the crime news on TV --
REICH: or go into the emergency clinics and talk to the rape victims. Talk to the battered wives and the abused children. Our whole species is mad, emotionally plagued. We have been mad so long that every attempt to break out of the Trap just unleashes unconscious rage and increases the violence.
REICH: We all know we're in the Trap, but nobody knows how to get out of it. We attack each other thinking that's the way out.
SADE: What? That is the truth Freud dared not speak? I thought he said all that in Civilization and its Discontents.
REICH:He would not say there was a way out of the Trap -- one way only --
SADE: Your way, of course.
REICH:The way I discovered, gradually, after many mistakes.
SADE: Which is?
REICH:Work on the breathing and the muscle tensions. And tell people frankly that there is no metaphysical Good and Evil in the human world any more than there is in the animal world or the chemical world or the physical world of gravity and mass.
SADE: Hedonistic materialism, in short. The permissive society.
REICH: Not permissiveness. Sanity. If a child is a nuisance, tell him so. Tell him his behavior is annoying. But never, never make a metaphysical moral issue out of it. Never, never say anything is sinful or wrong in a cosmic sense. Never pass on the lunacey, the Emotional Plague, that has come down to us from ages of superstition and barbarism.
SADE: A world without morals. Anarchy. That is what you mean?
REICH: It is not anarchy. It is what every person with an ounce of sanity knows. Nobody is to blame for anything. We are all in the mess together because our ancestors were mad and a mad society has passed on their repression from generation to generation.
SADE: And the things I did before I was brought here and cured? They were not Evil?
REICH: You enjoyed feeling Evil because it made you seem heroic. The humiliating truth, Marquis, is that you were merely ill.
SADE: And Hitler was merely ill?
REICH: That is the horror of the situation. We all know it by now, but we cannot remember. We repress it and go on blaming one another -- we forget what we know, because remembering it means remembering that we are robots, too -- that we have all been crippled in different ways by trying to live in the imaginary world of morals instead of the real world of nature.
SADE: So we just teach people how to breathe properly and relax their muscles and we will have Utopia?
REICH: No. I never said it was that easy. I said it was almost impossible, but we had to try, if there was to be any chance of survival at all. Removing the Emotional Plague is just like removing bubonic plague. It will take decades of work all over the world by thousands of specialists. But if we don't try --
REICH: We must understand that every moral idea is strictly a hallucination. It creates guilt which creates muscular tension, which creates rage. That leads to further armoring, to hold the rage in. That leads to all the psychosomatic illnesses that orthodox medicine can't cure and to all the social pathologies around us. Rape. Child-beating. War.
REICH: (excited, beginning to harangue) You compared me to Rousseau. Yes, in the Age of Reason, he had to recreate the myth of Eden again; he called it the Noble Savage. A hundred years later, Marx had to recreate it: he called it the primitive matriarchy, before private property. Eden is always recreated, because we know there is a natural grace and a natural way of life we have lost. We lost it through the invention of Good and Evil. As soon as we believed we were sinners, the Trap closed on us. We accepted the sin and punished ourselves. Or we projected the sin outward and punished scapegoats.
REICH: (rage bursting through) Masochism or sadism -- those were the only choices once we believed in Good and Evil, once we believed in Sin. We are animals. We are no more guilty than a dog, a cat, a horse, a chipmunk. Everybody has known it since Darwin. But we are still in the Trap.
SADE: You really hate the Morality that caused you to kill your parents.
REICH: It is causing the whole human race to kill its children! We cannot see what we are doing. We have been robbed blind by our damned Morality.
SADE: Your Almightiness, the prosecution rests. We believe it is obvious, out of his own mouth, that the defendant is a menace to civilization as we know it.
REICH: Wait! Do you know why that moment in nature is so precious, that moment of peace and oneness?
RINGMASTER: The defendant will not speak at this time.
REICH: It is a moment beyond Good and Evil!
RINGMASTER: You can argue that later. Fifteen minute recess. Then we will hear the case for the defense. (He rises)
MASOCH: All rise!
REICH: Listen to me a moment! That moment of peace, that moment in Nature, beyond Good and Evil -- that is the essence of us. Our core. Our true selves. We normally never feel it because --
RINGMASTER: Clear the Court!
REICH: because our muscles hold it down. Our muscles are chronically tense, it is so chronic that we never notice it. We only notice the peace when on a rare moment the tension relaxes. What do you think the Drug Culture is all about? Relaxing the muscular armor, getting rid of that tension for a few hours, or a few moments.
ACROBATS go down into the audience and persuade people to leave. They are very polite, like well-trained policemen, and become very threatening (in a polite way) with those unwilling to leave while REICH is still talking.
REICH: We are diseased -- dis-eased. We have lost touch with natural feeling. When the Life Force tries to break through the muscular armor, it gets deflected, I say, and comes out dis-eased and violent. That's why all political revolutions fail. That's why there are no political solutions. That's why
RINGMASTER: Silence the defendant.
MASOCH and SADE "beat" REICH with bladders again and drag him offstage right.
REICH: (as he goes) You can't feel naturally. You can't see what you are doing, or what is being done around you. You are robots. Robots. All of you. All of you.
(The scene: Wilhelm Reich is on trial in Hell. The trial looks in all respects like a 3-ring circus, complete with jugglers, acrobats, fire-eaters, etc. The prosecuting attorneys are the Marquis de Sade and Count von Sacher-Masoch, both of whom are dressed as clowns. The Ringmaster (Satan) presides as judge.
Early on in the trial, Dr. Reich introduced as evidence a Computer which continually monitors the growth of the worldwide nuclear weapons stockpile. The Computer emits an ear-splitting whistle every time there is an increment in firepower equivalent to the original Hiroshima bomb.....)
SADE: Why did you rebel against Freud?
REICH: (slowly) I rebelled against Freud because he was a coward.
SADE: A coward? The man who challenged all the taboos of his age?
REICH: He back-tracked, he evaded, he weaseled. He would not say flatly what his theories all implied.
SADE: You mean he did not share your Utopian fantasies.
REICH: Look at the photos of him; look at that jaw.
The Computer whistles again.
REICH:Look at his expression, those clenched teeth. He was holding back -- and I tell you, all of you, that is why he got cancer of the jaw finally. He wouldn't speak what he knew. He held it in, behind those clenched teeth, until it killed him.
SADE: And what is the truth Freud dared not speak?
REICH: Everybody knows it by now. Look at the crime news on TV --
REICH: or go into the emergency clinics and talk to the rape victims. Talk to the battered wives and the abused children. Our whole species is mad, emotionally plagued. We have been mad so long that every attempt to break out of the Trap just unleashes unconscious rage and increases the violence.
REICH: We all know we're in the Trap, but nobody knows how to get out of it. We attack each other thinking that's the way out.
SADE: What? That is the truth Freud dared not speak? I thought he said all that in Civilization and its Discontents.
REICH:He would not say there was a way out of the Trap -- one way only --
SADE: Your way, of course.
REICH:The way I discovered, gradually, after many mistakes.
SADE: Which is?
REICH:Work on the breathing and the muscle tensions. And tell people frankly that there is no metaphysical Good and Evil in the human world any more than there is in the animal world or the chemical world or the physical world of gravity and mass.
SADE: Hedonistic materialism, in short. The permissive society.
REICH: Not permissiveness. Sanity. If a child is a nuisance, tell him so. Tell him his behavior is annoying. But never, never make a metaphysical moral issue out of it. Never, never say anything is sinful or wrong in a cosmic sense. Never pass on the lunacey, the Emotional Plague, that has come down to us from ages of superstition and barbarism.
SADE: A world without morals. Anarchy. That is what you mean?
REICH: It is not anarchy. It is what every person with an ounce of sanity knows. Nobody is to blame for anything. We are all in the mess together because our ancestors were mad and a mad society has passed on their repression from generation to generation.
SADE: And the things I did before I was brought here and cured? They were not Evil?
REICH: You enjoyed feeling Evil because it made you seem heroic. The humiliating truth, Marquis, is that you were merely ill.
SADE: And Hitler was merely ill?
REICH: That is the horror of the situation. We all know it by now, but we cannot remember. We repress it and go on blaming one another -- we forget what we know, because remembering it means remembering that we are robots, too -- that we have all been crippled in different ways by trying to live in the imaginary world of morals instead of the real world of nature.
SADE: So we just teach people how to breathe properly and relax their muscles and we will have Utopia?
REICH: No. I never said it was that easy. I said it was almost impossible, but we had to try, if there was to be any chance of survival at all. Removing the Emotional Plague is just like removing bubonic plague. It will take decades of work all over the world by thousands of specialists. But if we don't try --
REICH: We must understand that every moral idea is strictly a hallucination. It creates guilt which creates muscular tension, which creates rage. That leads to further armoring, to hold the rage in. That leads to all the psychosomatic illnesses that orthodox medicine can't cure and to all the social pathologies around us. Rape. Child-beating. War.
REICH: (excited, beginning to harangue) You compared me to Rousseau. Yes, in the Age of Reason, he had to recreate the myth of Eden again; he called it the Noble Savage. A hundred years later, Marx had to recreate it: he called it the primitive matriarchy, before private property. Eden is always recreated, because we know there is a natural grace and a natural way of life we have lost. We lost it through the invention of Good and Evil. As soon as we believed we were sinners, the Trap closed on us. We accepted the sin and punished ourselves. Or we projected the sin outward and punished scapegoats.
REICH: (rage bursting through) Masochism or sadism -- those were the only choices once we believed in Good and Evil, once we believed in Sin. We are animals. We are no more guilty than a dog, a cat, a horse, a chipmunk. Everybody has known it since Darwin. But we are still in the Trap.
SADE: You really hate the Morality that caused you to kill your parents.
REICH: It is causing the whole human race to kill its children! We cannot see what we are doing. We have been robbed blind by our damned Morality.
SADE: Your Almightiness, the prosecution rests. We believe it is obvious, out of his own mouth, that the defendant is a menace to civilization as we know it.
REICH: Wait! Do you know why that moment in nature is so precious, that moment of peace and oneness?
RINGMASTER: The defendant will not speak at this time.
REICH: It is a moment beyond Good and Evil!
RINGMASTER: You can argue that later. Fifteen minute recess. Then we will hear the case for the defense. (He rises)
MASOCH: All rise!
REICH: Listen to me a moment! That moment of peace, that moment in Nature, beyond Good and Evil -- that is the essence of us. Our core. Our true selves. We normally never feel it because --
RINGMASTER: Clear the Court!
REICH: because our muscles hold it down. Our muscles are chronically tense, it is so chronic that we never notice it. We only notice the peace when on a rare moment the tension relaxes. What do you think the Drug Culture is all about? Relaxing the muscular armor, getting rid of that tension for a few hours, or a few moments.
ACROBATS go down into the audience and persuade people to leave. They are very polite, like well-trained policemen, and become very threatening (in a polite way) with those unwilling to leave while REICH is still talking.
REICH: We are diseased -- dis-eased. We have lost touch with natural feeling. When the Life Force tries to break through the muscular armor, it gets deflected, I say, and comes out dis-eased and violent. That's why all political revolutions fail. That's why there are no political solutions. That's why
RINGMASTER: Silence the defendant.
MASOCH and SADE "beat" REICH with bladders again and drag him offstage right.
REICH: (as he goes) You can't feel naturally. You can't see what you are doing, or what is being done around you. You are robots. Robots. All of you. All of you.
posted by Dr. Joe at 4:54 AM
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