Maurice Brinton in The Irrational in Politics:
Wilhelm Reich set out to elaborate a social psychology based on both Marxism and psychoanalysis. His aim was to explain how ideas arose in men’s minds, in reaction to the real conditions of their lives, and how in turn such ideas influenced human behavior. There was clearly a discrepancy between the material conditions of the masses and their conservative outlook. No appeal to psychology was needed to understand why a hungry man stole bread or why workers, fed up with being pushed around, decided to down their tools. What social psychology had to explain however is not why the starving individual steals or why the exploited individual strikes, but why the majority of starving individuals do not steal or why the exploited individuals do not strike.
Again, we live on a planet where 15% of the richest folks gobble up over 80% of the world’s resources…a planet where 3,500,000,000 men, women and children barely subsist on less than $2 a day…a planet where every 24 hours tens of thousands of human beings literally starve to death.
But the wretched of the earth are not exactly rising up to change all this. Why not? Reich’s speculation revolved around the use of sexual repression as a tool to engender authoritarian personalities. From a very early age children are taught to repress [or fear or be ashamed of] their natural sexual instincts. And Reich suggests that this is a potent tool for repressing other potentially rebellious behavior as well. After all, if a culture can suppress something as powerful as the sexual libido how hard can it be to mass produce personalities that are [on average] politically docile and conservative in turn?
Whether or not this has any relevance respecting the validity of any particular political agenda is not nearly as intriguing to me as the manner in which Reich was in or around the bullseye regarding the indoctrination that goes on in children…brainwashing that does, for all intents and purposes, create social automatons.
But there is, of course, an important difference between Reich’s time and our own. Today the caretakers of our political economy not only seek to repress sexuality in kids but also try to transfigure it into a commodity…or into a potent device to sell other commodities. That creates particularly schizophrenic psychological riptides and all manner of neurotic reprecussions. Sex is everywhere. But seldom has there been a generation that understands it less.
It all unfolds largely below the surface of consciousness. Nothing is actually exposed so as to generate any real discussion about how it all works. And slowly but surely the whole planet is being infected.
More Brinton:
What was it…Reich asked, which in the real life of the oppressed limited their will to revolution? His answer was that the working class was readily influenced by reactionary and irrational ideas because such ideas fell on fertile soil. For the average Marxist, workers were adults who hired their labor power to capitalists and were exploited by them. This was correct as far as it went. But one had to take into account all aspects of working class life if one wanted to understand the political attitude of the working class. This meant that one had to recognize some obvious facts, namely that the worker had a childhood, that he was brought up by parents themselves conditioned by the society in which they lived, that he had a wife and children, sexual needs, frustrations and family conflicts…Reich sought to develop a total analysis which would incorporate such facts and attach the appropriate importance to them.
In other words, Brinton’s and Reich’s points revolved precisely around the manner in which we view ourselves and the world around us is profoundly situated in dasein. And dasein has a childhood. And this childhood consists of years and years of deep-seated indoctrination. It is not only what you learn about how to live in any particular political economy…but how you acquire a psychological framework, a engrained conditioning hard-wired into your brain such that it becomes extremely difficult to unlearn all the layers of psychological compulsions, intentions, motivations etc. that propel you into the future.
And again it is not really all that important whether they are entirely correct in their analysis; only that they are certainly not entirely incorrect. Many try to “analyze” reality into existence by simply noting how the pieces seem to fit into the larger puzzle. And then by interpreting what that puzzle “means”.
Reich however goes a bit further according to Brinton:
[b]In learning to obey their parents children learn obedience in general. The deference learned in the family setting will manifest itself whenever the child faces a ‘superior’ in later life. Sexual repression----by the already sexually repressed parents—is an integral part of the conditioning process.
According to Reich, the ‘suppresion of natural sexuality in the child…makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, ‘good’, and ‘adjusted’ in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief the goal of sexual repression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all the misery and degradation…the result is fear of freedom, and a conservative, reactionary mentality. Sexual repression aids political reaction, not only through this process which makes the mass individual passive and unpolitical, but also by creating in his structure an interest in actively supporting the authoritarian order’.
Psychologists and psychiatrists have written pages about the medical effects of sexual repression. Reich however constantly reiterated its social function, exercised through the family. The purpose of sexual repression was to anchor submission to authority and the fear of freedom into people’s ‘character armour’. The net result was the reproduction, generation after generastion, of the basic [psychological] conditions essential for manipulation and enslavement of the masses.[/b]
Here again, in my view, it really doesn’t come down to whether or not they have hit the bullseye; only that the dart landed somewhere on the board. And my contention is that the analysis of others, in not taking into account factors such as these, aim their dart at the bullseye and don’t even manage to hit the wall the dartboard is anchored to historically and ethnologically.
Also, this childhood acculturation is particularly insidious because it is not unfolding in many respects on a conscious level. The ruling class doesn’t sit in a conference room somewhere and, from day to day to day, plot this all out. And parents don’t huddle in the living room and decide how best to brainwash their kids. Instead, all of this evolves more or less organically as a historical manifestation of political economy. Production revolves around the means of production and in the capitalist political economy that revolves around rationalizing it down to its most basic [and alienating] components.
You need a certain kind of mind to work under these robotic conditions and the “system” sets out to produce them. But all of this is internalized in the minds of most folks as part of the “natural order of things”. Few are actually conscious of how this works “in reality”…and thus few self-consciously seek to sustain “the system” on that level. Most simply believe that what they think about the world they live in is the only rational way for the world to be.
What makes things more complex in todays world, however, is, again, that sex has also become an enormously profitable comodity. In fact, Frontline had a rebroadcast of their program on the poronography industry in America. Here you see the classic contradiction coming to a head. During the Reagan era the conservatives wanted to shut the industry down. And almost did. Then the more liberal Clinton administration assumes power and Reno all but shuts down the investigations and prosecutions. Then Bush and Ashcroft assume power and they are all set to revise the draconian clampdown. Only 9/11 intervenes and suddenly the justice Department is forced to shift gears to the Patriot Acts. Another kind of repression. But the crucial fact remains that even though you have the Father Knows Best crowd co-existing [for now] with Hollywood, Eminem and rapworld, the “libertines” barely scratch the surface in their understanding of “sexual freedom”. And it is often manifested in misogynist and homophobic ways. In any event, it’s all just co-opted into the “entertainment industry” and everything stays right on the surface. And it is right on the surface of pop culture, mass consumption and celebrity that the new gods rule.
Sadly, however, perusing much that comes out of philosophy departments [and venues like this] these days you wouldn’t even suspect the above analysis bore any relevance whatsoever to the human condition.