Some notes about The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich. Just read 15+ pages of the preface and a few pages of the first chapter last night, I was wondering when the preface would end, but when I had checked it was a quick read and I was already finished with it, with only a couple pages to go. If anyone's ever seen Mysteries of the Organism, the movie about Wilhelm Reich, Reich was a psychoanalyst who Deleuze said the community "never forgave" for his turn to vitalism. He built "the orgone accumulator" to capture this vital energy from the atmosphere in a small outhouse looking box you stand inside, but it was quackery. But if you read his account against fascism, and watch his movie, you get the sense he was a wildly sexually liberated leftcom of some sort? Who is critical of right wing Marxism, and uses his vitalism of the orgone against the repression of "small man syndrome" of fascism. Very influential on Deleuze and Guattari, as well as one I have not read as much, Bergson who was influential on Deleuze's vitalism, along with Nietzsche.
Read like 26 more pages of Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism. A very relevant book. The thing about Reich which is interesting is he was really against metaphysics, and mysticism - thinks mysticism is reactionary - but yet has his own vitalist ideas that led him to thinking a box collects vital energy when you sit in it. He actually was remarkably sharp, his theories reflect so much of what Deleuze and Guattari say about the family. Namely that the family is a small state apparatus, which is important for instilling the fascist tendency in people through authoritarianism. Reich pinpoints the primal scene of sorts of fascism to be the repression of masturbation. In other words, Reich has a somewhat different view of Freud, where Freud often talks about a sort of sexuality which is not sexual, often from early memories in childhood, Reich believes that there's a psychosexual repression which is about literal sex which fascism suppresses.
Reich looks at how fascists co-opted socialism, and then betrayed socialists, the fascists saying they wanted to bolster the peasants, and galvanize the middle class through scapegoating, the purposeful suppression of facts, and a rabid geo-political insecurity which the fascists capitalize on. The mega-machine that Deleuze and Guattari talk about in Anti Oedipus, this is deeply connected with the social machinery that Wilhelm Reich talks about. There are capitalist machines in the psyche, but they are not overdetermined by economics; Reich attacks Karl Marx for over-emphasizing the economic in the psyche. Reich emphasizes not only the economic, but also the sexual, and the systems of control that go down to the very foundation of one's psychology through development. Looking at not only individual psychology, but "mass psychology" is how Reich examines fascism.
The lady and I are getting back into reading. Her friend started a book club, their first read is Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Supposedly a candidly poignant take on Israel/Palestine relations.
