“And this is the irony, and the tragedy, of the postwar years: that while, from his own point of view, Reich’s development seemed totally rational and logical, the detached, and necessarily superficial, observer could only see increasing evidence of extravagance and disintegration… His ’scientific’ discoveries became ever more preposterous — the orgone accumulator, the cloudbuster, even a motor that was supposed to work off orgone energy. (Many Reichians claim to have seen the motor operating: the driving force was an orgone accumulator, excited by a half-volt battery; it drove a twenty-five-volt motor.)
“And then, in what seemed like an irrevocable step into sherer insanity, Reich suddenly decided that the human race, and himself in particular, were being observed by beings from outer space in flying saucers…
“Reich had paid no attention to all the publicity about flying saucers, even when, in 1952, some visitors to Orgonon reported seeing shining objects in the sky… But after reading Major Donald Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers Are Real, Reich remembered the visitors who had reported shining objects the previous year… What intrigued him was that Keyhoe said that UFOs were often surrounded by a bluish light, and moved noiselessly. To Reich, this immediately suggested orgone energy.” (pp. 214-5-6)
“Temperamentally, my sympathies are with Gardner and Cattier — Reich seems to be a thoroughly dislikable human being. Moreover, I agree with the critics that it was not Reich’s ideas, but his paranoiac behavor, that landed him in jail. Colleagues in the Vienna group had already noted his paranoid tendencies when he was in his twenties. It was Reich’s combination of aggression, ambition, and craving for success that led to most of the rebuffs he received. It seems to me that it was this eagerness for recognition that thwarted the natural expression of his genius. By the mid-1930s, the sense of rejection had turned him into a man with a huge chip on his shoulder, and it was this, rather than his revolutionary ideas, that caused his endless personal problems.
“I must also admit to a thoroughgoing dislike of the Communist aspect of Reich’s personality. I am not now speaking of his ‘Communist phase,’… but of that tendency in him that made him seem, for a time, such an admirable recruit to Communism: a kind of intellectual thuggery, an ability to treat complex issues with a crude and unrepetent reductionism…
“Then why write a book about someone I find it so hard to like? First, because there is a kind of horrifying fascination in watching a man of Reich’s immense vitality make a series of wrong choices that bring him to disaster. But second, and more important, because I find it impossible to agree with critics who feel that he went off the rails after the discovery of the orgone. Anyone who takes the trouble to follow Reich’s development in detail quickly realizes that these critics were not in full possession of the facts. There was no sudden insane conversion to the idea of orgone energy; Reich made the discovery slowly and logically, step-by-step, in the most approved scientific manner.” — Colin Wilson, The Quest for Wilhelm Reich: A Critical Biography (pp. 233-4)
LANGUAGE IS THEFT/ Conscription: Based on the belief that slavery in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.
