Showing posts sorted by relevance for query EMOTIONAL PLAGUE. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query EMOTIONAL PLAGUE. Sort by date Show all posts

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Life Is A Video Game


"Meet The Dawson College Shooter"

"Life is a video game, you've got to die sometime."

That sums it up...we are all becoming victims of Doom and other first person shooter games.

And this emotional plague is only going to spread wider as these games move to cellphones and IPods....Nokia, EA team up to offer games

And those of you who think the emotional plague inherent in violent video games has no impact well remember Columbine, they practiced with first person shooters.

'Columbine' Game Was Gunman's Favorite



The mesmerizing impact of living in a video game is an expression
of alienation in modern atomistic society.

I am arguing that children and teenagers are spending much of their time in simulations, rather than in the natural or “real” world. It is an argument, which if true, has serious implications for not only our children, but also for the future of our society. Essentially, I believe that the unreal, the simulation, the simulacra has been substituted for the real in the lives of our children. This occurs at many different levels: in the video games that are so much a part of the experience of contemporary childhood; in the shopping malls and “commercial civic spaces” where our children spend so much of their time; in television programs, advertisements and movies; in the theme parks where we vacation; in the online chat rooms and discussion programs through which we communicate and exchange information; and finally, in the images of beauty and sexuality that run as a powerful undercurrent through much of our culture and the lives of our children.
Let me begin by reflecting a bit on the information included on the recently released videotapes made by Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold shortly before the Columbine High School shootings last year.
It is very clear that Harris and Klebold wanted to tell the world a story whose script they seem to have learned through the entertainment media—particularly from ultra-violent films and video games. Harris tells his story in front of a video camera with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a sawed-off shotgun cradledin his lap.
Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. Professor School of Education University of Miami


The result is not a mass cultural phenomena (each case like Dawson or Columbine appears isolated in itself ) which allows proponents of gaming to dismiss criticism. Rather it is an individual who lives in their game and acts out in mass culture. Something the defenders of gaming cannot account for. Even though they know full well these games originated in the military and are used for training the armed forces.

Those who would say that this is not so use statstical data on crime rates in relation to violent video games to dismiss the critics.

 The North American research seems somewhat oblivious to the (mostly European) social science research on media effects that suggests the importance of particular context in explaining violent behaviour;

The reality is that those susceptible to the emotional plague will succumb to living these games out in reality. This video computer simulacrum, as Baudrillard calls it, becomes their real life.

Canada Gunman Blogged on Violence, Murder

On a Web site filled with obscenities and hatred for authority, Gill posted a log and about 50 pictures of himself, many of them posing with a semi-automatic rifle and wearing a long black trenchcoat and boots.

In rambling and angry blog entries, using the identification fatality666, Gill raved about video games involving shooting, and said "I love guns. . . . I really do. The great equalizer. . . . wouldn't you say?"

His log entries often evoked scenes of random shootings. In one, predictive of the drizzly weather Wednesday when the shootings occurred, he wrote, "The disgusting human creatures scream in panic and run in all directions, taking with them the lies and deceptions. The Death Night gazes at the humans with an empty stare, as they knock each other down in a mad dash to safety. He wishes to slaughter them as they flee. . . ."

Kimveer Gill
A picture from Kimveer Gill's Blog


In the psychological system of Wilhelm Reich, the "emotional plague" exists as a sort of mental disease which spreads throughout societies whose members are genitally blocked, i.e., incapable of genuine, healthy sexual love or expression. Hating life, creativity and freedom, and terrified that their own frustrated drives could explode uncontrollably at the slightest provocation, victims of the "emotional plague" cope by seeking to control, punish, and censor others who are healthy.Emotional Plague


We see that the compass of the emotional plague coincides approximately with the broad compass of social abuse, which has always been and still is combatted by every social freedom movement. With some qualifications, it can be said that the sphere of the emotional plague coincides with that of “political reaction” and perhaps even with the principle of politics in general. This would hold true, however, only if the basic principle of all politics, namely thirst for power and special prerogatives, were carried over into those spheres of life which we do not think of as political in the usual sense of the word.

The Emotional Plague by Wilhelm Reich Originally appeared as Chapter 16 of Reich’s book ‘Character Analysis’

the emotional plague
A term initially proposed by Wilhelm Reich for the psychological syndrome
marked by irrational insistence on beliefs and ideas that depend on dissociation
of mind from body. Reich also refered to it as "the neurotic character in destructive
action on the social scene". Though this dissociation has plagued humanity for many
centuries, it wasn’t until the “The Age of Reason” that the abstract intellect was
exalted to god-like status with Newton’s theories and Descartes’ “Meditations”.
The current era of emotional plague has accelerated via the massive collective
projection of physical, emotional and sexual energy into mental, or virtual,
mediums such as the internet, VR technology, video games, mass media
advertising, and television. If emotional plague is caused by disassociating
mind from body, its confusion can be easily maintained by mistaking
the virtual for the real, by taking an image or an idea of a reality
for the reality itself; eating the menu instead of the meal, etc.

paratheatre manifesto, pt. 1


"The emotional plague is a chronic biopathy of the organism. It made an inroad into human society with the first mass suppression of genital sexuality; it became an endemic disease, which has been tormenting people the world over for thousands of years. [...] Epidemic outbreaks of emotional plague became manifest in widespread and violent breakthroughs of sadism and criminality, on a small and large scale. One such outbreak was the Catholic Inquisition of the Middle Ages; the international fascism of the 20th century is another.
If we do not look upon the emotional plague as an illness in the strict sense of the word, we would run the risk of mobilizing the police against it, instead of medicine and education. The nature of the emotional plague necessitates police force, and this is how it is spread. It does indeed represent a grave threat to life, but one that will never be eliminated by the police force.
[...]The ascetic, plague-ridden individual uses ethical odes to justify his sexual debility. The justification has nothing to do with the manner in which he lives, which is there before the justification. The healthy person will not want to impose his way of life on anyone but he will cure and he will help others when he is asked and when he is capable. [...] Thus, it is not surprising that truthfulness and straightforwardness, though highly extolled modes of behavior, are rarely encountered in human intercourse. [...] The fact that they are not, that they are looked upon with astonishment, that truthful and straightforward men and women are considered freaks, a bit 'touched in the head', all this cannot be explained on the basis of the ruling cultural ideology...we must turn to our knowledge of the organized emotional plague.
It cannot be assumed that any freedom movement will have any chance of achieving its goals if it does not sharply and clearly confront the organized emotional plague with truthfulness."
Character Analysis
Wilhelm Reich
Noonday Press 1972



Also See

Chris McKinstry

When AI commits suicide

Make Friends and Kill Yourself



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Thursday, April 19, 2007

You Talkin' To Me

The emotional plague continues to reveal itself in America where Gore Kulture meets everyday life.

"You talkin' to me?" Alone in his apartment, Travis postures and practices his moves in front of the mirror.

"You talkin' to me?" Alone in his apartment, Travis postures and practices his moves in front of the mirror.

Kimveer Gill
A picture from Kimveer Gill's Blog The Dawson College killer.


Could "Ismail Ax" Be A Part Of This Picture (NBC)

For two days the world has been searching for the meaning of the phrase "Ismail Ax."
Those two words, written in red ink on one arm of Cho, the 23-year-old Virginia Tech student behind the campus shooting spree which killed 32 students, set off a massive Internet hunt by the public Tuesday for clues to what might have motivated the nation's worst mass killings.

And today a theory has emerged proposing an answer which shows the killer's sick sense of humour - that it is a web language term used to signify a query.

Cho was a keen internet user who dubbed himself "?" in email and web conversations.

A web-savvy source told The Daily Telegraph Online today Ismail is a term used in text tagging - a way to tag words for searchability online.

"He was already known for signing his name as a question mark," the suorce said. "And the meaning of this tag represents question. The name Ismail itself represent question."




One of the photographs in the Virginia Tech killer's "multimedia manifesto" may have been inspired by a bloody South Korean movie.

"Oldboy," from the respected director Chan-woo Park, is about a man unjustly imprisoned for 15 years. After escaping, he goes on a rampage against his captor. In one scene, he dispatches more than a dozen henchmen with the aid of a hammer.

In the package of materials that Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC News, one photo shows the killer brandishing a hammer in a pose similar to one from the film.

"Oldboy," the second film in Park's "Vengeance Trilogy," won the Gran Prix prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

The connection was spotted by Professor Paul Harris of Virginia Tech, who alerted authorities, according to London's Evening Standard. The similarities have prompted speculation, especially in online forums, that Cho's entire massacre may have been inspired by "Oldboy.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”


"We see that the compass of the emotional plague coincides approximately with the broad compass of social abuse, which has always been and still is combatted by every social freedom movement. With some qualifications, it can be said that the sphere of the emotional plague coincides with that of "political reaction" and perhaps even with the principle of politics in
general. This would hold true, however, only if the basic principle of all politics, namely thirst for power and special prerogatives, were carried over into those spheres of life which we do not think of as political in the
usual sense of the word."

"Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly, and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as to primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power."

The Emotional Plague /Listen Little Man by Wilhelm Reich
"

See:

Nazi Gay Killer Wanted to be a Cop

The Real Crime In Canada



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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

The Real Crime In Canada


Is violence against women. Today is Dec. 6 and we remember the massacre of women Engineering students in Montreal by Mark Lapine. And yet in Canada violence against women has not declined, while other forms of violent crime has, including crime linked to drugs. Nurses remember victims of abuse, call for end of violence against women Which makes Harpers get tough on crime announcement on the weekend as misplaced as they get.

"I want to talk about the values of a peaceful, orderly and safe society, and a problem none of the other parties seem to care about -- the problem of crime and the threat it poses to our families and our communities," Harper said at a recreation centre in Burnaby, B.C.

Yep well instead of focusing on the symptoms like drugs or guns, we must look at the culture we live in that continues to allow for domestic violence, sexual assault, violence against women.

"We've got to get to the root causes of crime -- despair, poverty, addiction -- in our communities," Layton said during a campaign stop in Vancouver."That means we've got to put an equal emphasis on the prevention of crime in the first place, as we put on dealing with the results of crime at the end of the day."

Harper would bring in draconian measures that will only lead to a growth in the prison industrial complex, as has occured in the U.S. The Liberals responded after Dec. 6 with tougher gun laws and the billion dollar boondoogle of the Firearms registry, which has not reduced gun crimes but has criminalized gun owners. Nope neither of these approaches will work, until we begin to actually teach about human relationships in our schools.

We can no longer leave this up to the dysfunctional patriarchical families and churches to teach moral and character education on an adhoc basis, or on the basis of patriarchical beliefs that women are the property of their husbands to with as they will. It's time to address the real issues around the crimes against women and children which is the fact that in our society they are still seen as the property of their husbands/fathers, and what happens in the home is not the concern of society.

Such is also the ideology of the Conservatives daycare announcements, that society should not provide early childhood education, rather parents should do this or choose who does it. We don't allow this for children aged 5 and up who HAVE to go to school, nor should we continue to allow it for younger children. We are socially disadvantaging them.

The conservatives disadvantage working mothers, that's a crime, by denying them access to publicly funded and regulated day care. Instead they complain of the Nanny State will funding tax breaks for nannies. Nannies who are from the Phillipines and are exploited in the homes of the rich, because as indentured servants they have no rights, and no one to monitor their working conditions. Again the exploitation of women for the sacred family of patriarchy.

Women are still fired for getting pregnant in some workplaces, including Catholic Schools if they are unwed. And as more women enter the workforce, and remain the primary care givers for children and the elderly, the workplace has yet to meet their needs with onsite daycare. The rare exception, such as the CIBC, gets an innovative workplace award from the Conference Board of Canada, when this should be the norm not the exceptional.

Yes we have crime in society much of it based upon the failure of the nuclear patriarchial family to meet its social obligations, because it is dysfunctional as Wilhem Reich correctly opined. When the right reacts to youth crime, they call for getting tough on hoodlums, tough love. But many of those committing these crimes come from broken homes with little love in the first place. Nor did our social institutions create a home like atmosphere for them, instead shoveling them through agencies and schools until they got expelled from the 'system' with no future.

Such as Mark Lapine who 16 years ago took his frustrations out on women whom he blamed for his low self esteem as a patriarch in training. His upbringing in a single mother family, isolated ,from the community in modern urban Montreal, in his own little world, all this contributed to his madness. Being a patriarch in the making he had no male role model in his own world or in ours. So for his own personal psychological reasons he was going to go out and prove to the world he was a man. And to do so as society around him told him he did it by taking a woman, or in this case women, literally.

His crime was not the gun he used, or his hatred of women, his crime was that of being a patriarch in the making rather than a human being in the making.
His crime was seeking power over others, a crime that politicians, priests and bosses practice everyday.

"We see that the compass of the emotional plague coincides approximately
with the broad compass of social abuse, which has always been and still is
combatted by every social freedom movement. With some qualifications, it can
be said that the sphere of the emotional plague coincides with that of
"political reaction" and perhaps even with the principle of politics in
general. This would hold true, however, only if the basic principle of all
politics, namely thirst for power and special prerogatives, were carried
over into those spheres of life which we do not think of as political in the
usual sense of the word."

"Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly, and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as to primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power."

The Emotional Plague /Listen Little Man by Wilhelm Reich

Lapines crime which so shocked us, is our crime, for society made him the criminal he was as it does all criminals. Locking them away and throwing away the key does not address the real nature or source of crime; the social structure of the authoritarian patriarchical society. It merely reinforces it.

Which is why Harper and the right wing can pass all the laws they want, it will never reduce crime. It is the very reactionary politics that continues to promote the emotional plague that is the social conditioning of patriarchical capitalism.

In Quebec today violent crime including violence against women has decreased, in this largely social democratic country, one that has a fully functioning public day care system. In Alberta on the other hand, home of Harper and the most right wing free market government in Canada, violent crime and violence against women is the highest in Canada. That is the real crime.

For Reich, a key question was: Why did people support the Nazis? Reich stated that he found that several things went together in Nazi Germany:

  • Strong paternal authority
  • Sexual repressiveness
  • authoritarian personalities
  • reactional political ideologies

Economically the Nazi program was not in the interest of lower middle class people of Germany, but they gave their support to it. Reich asked, What psychological reason could be found that would make the fascist ideology compelling to this group of people?

His answer was: The combination of authority and rebellion. Reich said the sons would especially admire an authoritarian person above them who was also rebellious. (Like Hitler and Stalin) That way they could fulfill the desire to rebel but with subservience. This was a submission that came with some real resentment.

FAMILY AND WORK. Reich noticed that the family structure and work structure in the German lower middle class overlapped. In their small farms and businesses, both the family authority and the work authority were the same person.In other cases, if you go off to work you're going to work somewhere else. But if you're in a situation where you're working together within the family, the father's capacity to ensure his authority, to have a kind of totalitarian state within the home, goes way up.

  • Especially in such situations, fathers are better able to sexually repress their sons. So the sons develop a subservient attitude toward authority and a stronger identification with the father, which transfers to other authorities. They develop an authoritarian personality structure. A very strong identification with the authority who is above you and a subservience to it. Reich was apparently the first to look at this. Later Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson & Sanford studied this dynamic in much more detail in their social psychological classic, The Authoritarian Personality. Still later, Milton Rokeach continued this line of inquiry in Dogmatism.
  • The authoritarian agenda is largely unconscious. People are almost totally unconscious of what they are doing, The parents carry out the intentions of authoritarian society. The authoritarian parent finds meaning through identification with a strong leader and nation. This explains why people get so caught up in their nation "being Number 1."
  • Reich held that most of our inner experience has been cut off along with our sexuality, so that "being number 1" is where people of whom this is so find meaning in life.

THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX. Reich's explanation: You also get the Oedipus complex from this kind of situation. Sexual desires naturally urge a person to enter into all kinds of relations with the world, and to enter into close contact with others in a variety of forms. If these urges arep reressed, they can only express themselves in the narrow confines of the family. Karen Horney referred to "the emotional hothouse of the family."

'FAMILY VALUES" The "safeguarding of the family," held Reich, customariily refrers to the male-dominated authoritarian and large family. This, he declared, "is the first cultural precept of every reactionary ideology."

  • Rather than support a variety of family forms, reactionary ideologies bolster the particular form that has an authoritarian male at the head. This sets people up to go for politically conservative ideologies.
  • Jennifer Stone, a contemporary thinker, declares, "Always remember, 'family values' is a code-word for male supremacy."
  • One cross-cultural study found that male dominance in the sultural structure was highly correlated with aggression.
  • A feminist psychoanalyst, Nancy Chodow, maintains that no matter what you say about sex roles, if mother does all the childcare, it will perpetuate sex roles of traditional patriarchal society.
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Sunday, December 06, 2020

A REPRINT

The Real Crime In Canada: Is violence against women. Today is Dec. 6 and we remember the massacre of women Engineering students in Montreal by Mark Lapine. 



The Real Crime In Canada  

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Is violence against women. Today is Dec. 6 and we remember the massacre of women Engineering students in Montreal by Mark Lapine. And yet in Canada violence against women has not declined, while other forms of violent crime has, including crime linked to drugs. Nurses remember victims of abuse, call for end of violence against women Which makes Harpers get tough on crime announcement on the weekend as misplaced as they get.

"I want to talk about the values of a peaceful, orderly and safe society, and a problem none of the other parties seem to care about -- the problem of crime and the threat it poses to our families and our communities," Harper said at a recreation centre in Burnaby, B.C.

Yep well instead of focusing on the symptoms like drugs or guns, we must look at the culture we live in that continues to allow for domestic violence, sexual assault, violence against women.

"We've got to get to the root causes of crime -- despair, poverty, addiction -- in our communities," Layton said during a campaign stop in Vancouver."That means we've got to put an equal emphasis on the prevention of crime in the first place, as we put on dealing with the results of crime at the end of the day."

Harper would bring in draconian measures that will only lead to a growth in the prison industrial complex, as has occured in the U.S. The Liberals responded after Dec. 6 with tougher gun laws and the billion dollar boondoogle of the Firearms registry, which has not reduced gun crimes but has criminalized gun owners. Nope neither of these approaches will work, until we begin to actually teach about human relationships in our schools.

We can no longer leave this up to the dysfunctional patriarchical families and churches to teach moral and character education on an adhoc basis, or on the basis of patriarchical beliefs that women are the property of their husbands to with as they will. It's time to address the real issues around the crimes against women and children which is the fact that in our society they are still seen as the property of their husbands/fathers, and what happens in the home is not the concern of society.

Such is also the ideology of the Conservatives daycare announcements, that society should not provide early childhood education, rather parents should do this or choose who does it. We don't allow this for children aged 5 and up who HAVE to go to school, nor should we continue to allow it for younger children. We are socially disadvantaging them.

The conservatives disadvantage working mothers, that's a crime, by denying them access to publicly funded and regulated day care. Instead they complain of the Nanny State will funding tax breaks for nannies. Nannies who are from the Phillipines and are exploited in the homes of the rich, because as indentured servants they have no rights, and no one to monitor their working conditions. Again the exploitation of women for the sacred family of patriarchy.

Women are still fired for getting pregnant in some workplaces, including Catholic Schools if they are unwed. And as more women enter the workforce, and remain the primary care givers for children and the elderly, the workplace has yet to meet their needs with onsite daycare. The rare exception, such as the CIBC, gets an innovative workplace award from the Conference Board of Canada, when this should be the norm not the exceptional.

Yes we have crime in society much of it based upon the failure of the nuclear patriarchial family to meet its social obligations, because it is dysfunctional as Wilhem Reich correctly opined. When the right reacts to youth crime, they call for getting tough on hoodlums, tough love. But many of those committing these crimes come from broken homes with little love in the first place. Nor did our social institutions create a home like atmosphere for them, instead shoveling them through agencies and schools until they got expelled from the 'system' with no future.

Such as Mark Lapine who 16 years ago took his frustrations out on women whom he blamed for his low self esteem as a patriarch in training. His upbringing in a single mother family, isolated ,from the community in modern urban Montreal, in his own little world, all this contributed to his madness. Being a patriarch in the making he had no male role model in his own world or in ours. So for his own personal psychological reasons he was going to go out and prove to the world he was a man. And to do so as society around him told him he did it by taking a woman, or in this case women, literally.

His crime was not the gun he used, or his hatred of women, his crime was that of being a patriarch in the making rather than a human being in the making.
His crime was seeking power over others, a crime that politicians, priests and bosses practice everyday.

"We see that the compass of the emotional plague coincides approximately
with the broad compass of social abuse, which has always been and still is
combatted by every social freedom movement. With some qualifications, it can
be said that the sphere of the emotional plague coincides with that of
"political reaction" and perhaps even with the principle of politics in
general. This would hold true, however, only if the basic principle of all
politics, namely thirst for power and special prerogatives, were carried
over into those spheres of life which we do not think of as political in the
usual sense of the word."

"Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly, and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as to primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power."

The Emotional Plague /Listen Little Man by Wilhelm Reich

Lapines crime which so shocked us, is our crime, for society made him the criminal he was as it does all criminals. Locking them away and throwing away the key does not address the real nature or source of crime; the social structure of the authoritarian patriarchical society. It merely reinforces it.

Which is why Harper and the right wing can pass all the laws they want, it will never reduce crime. It is the very reactionary politics that continues to promote the emotional plague that is the social conditioning of patriarchical capitalism.

In Quebec today violent crime including violence against women has decreased, in this largely social democratic country, one that has a fully functioning public day care system. In Alberta on the other hand, home of Harper and the most right wing free market government in Canada, violent crime and violence against women is the highest in Canada. That is the real crime.

For Reich, a key question was: Why did people support the Nazis? Reich stated that he found that several things went together in Nazi Germany:

  • Strong paternal authority
  • Sexual repressiveness
  • authoritarian personalities
  • reactional political ideologies

Economically the Nazi program was not in the interest of lower middle class people of Germany, but they gave their support to it. Reich asked, What psychological reason could be found that would make the fascist ideology compelling to this group of people?

His answer was: The combination of authority and rebellion. Reich said the sons would especially admire an authoritarian person above them who was also rebellious. (Like Hitler and Stalin) That way they could fulfill the desire to rebel but with subservience. This was a submission that came with some real resentment.

FAMILY AND WORK. Reich noticed that the family structure and work structure in the German lower middle class overlapped. In their small farms and businesses, both the family authority and the work authority were the same person.In other cases, if you go off to work you're going to work somewhere else. But if you're in a situation where you're working together within the family, the father's capacity to ensure his authority, to have a kind of totalitarian state within the home, goes way up.

  • Especially in such situations, fathers are better able to sexually repress their sons. to it. Reich was apparently the first to look at this. Later Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson & Sanford studied this dynamic in much more detail in their social psychological classic, Still later, Milton Rokeach continued this line of inquiry in
    • So the sons develop a subservient attitude toward authority and a stronger identification with the father, which transfers to other authorities. They develop an authoritarian personality structure. A very strong identification with the authority who is above you and a subservience The Authoritarian Personality. Dogmatism.
  • The authoritarian agenda is largely unconscious. People are almost totally unconscious of what they are doing, The parents carry out the intentions of authoritarian society. The authoritarian parent finds meaning through identification with a strong leader and nation. This explains why people get so caught up in their nation "being Number 1."
  • Reich held that most of our inner experience has been cut off along with our sexuality, so that "being number 1" is where people of whom this is so find meaning in life.

Reich's explanation: You also get the Oedipus complex from this kind of situation. Sexual desires naturally urge a person to enter into all kinds of relations with the world, and to enter into close contact with others in a variety of forms. If these urges arep reressed, they can only express themselves in the narrow confines of the family. referred to "the emotional hothouse of the family."THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX.Karen Horney 

" The "safeguarding of the family," held Reich, customariily refrers to the male-dominated authoritarian and large family. This, he declared, "is the first cultural precept of every reactionary ideology." 'FAMILY VALUES
  • Rather than support a variety of family forms, reactionary ideologies bolster the particular form that has an authoritarian male at the head. This sets people up to go for politically conservative ideologies.
  • Jennifer Stone, a contemporary thinker, declares, "Always remember, 'family values' is a code-word for male supremacy."
  • One cross-cultural study found that male dominance in the sultural structure was highly correlated with aggression.
  • A feminist psychoanalyst, Nancy Chodow, maintains that no matter what you say about sex roles, if mother does all the childcare, it will perpetuate sex roles of traditional patriarchal society.
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