These were Wilhelm Reich’s words regarding past attempts to improve social conditions through politics. He continues:
“People will get very enthusiastic about it. They will glow. They will burn for you. But their structures won’t follow. Their character structures can’t follow. Then you are in trouble… This discrepancy between what a human being wants, what he dreams of, what he intellectually understands as true and good and what he actually can do, i.e., what his structure, the character structure, really permits him to do, is quite a problem…It is also the gap where religion comes in with the idea of paradise.”
Today, in our anti-authoritarian society, people are being deprived of their illusory hopes in religion as it is being replaced by the a secularized, intellectualized version of it in the form of socio-politics. They are losing whatever contact that they had with themselves at the time when their emotions were tied in to their personal and religious beliefs. Today, people are more out of touch with themselves and their world than they were in the past authoritarian era.
Now more than ever, a functional understanding of what is happening to our society is vital to prevent further degradation. This knowledge is being made available through a lecture series on Social Orgonomy open to the public given by the American College of Orgonomy.
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Charles Konia, M.D. 
So clear! So many thanks.
you’re welcome.
Dr Konia, regarding “people are more out of touch with themselves …” I wonder to what extent this is so, as a result of the loss of immediacy resulting from the excessive use of communication technology, the non living, interposing itself between communicants and substituting itself for living air. Nevertheless, certainly the armor has a lot to do with it and I would add pervasive neuro-toxins.
Mr Brun,
You are right. Technological developments can increase armored people’s level of cluelessnes with themselves and with others.
This article by a former Reichian psychologist expresses exactly that same point:
http://www.primitivism.com/technology-trauma.htm
The of the tools that technology provides depends on the individual’s character structure. Technology can be used constructively or destructively. Technology is not the problem. It is how people use it.
Europe is much farther along in this direction since in most countries in Europe, with the exception of Poland, religion has been largely abandoned and is now more a matter of tradition and ethic identity than actual belief. In America, religion still has believers and is still politically important, but in European countries , just as you say, it has largely been replaced by politics as the route to happiness. We can see what social developments to expect in America in the future, both good and bad, by looking across the Atlantic.
This only applies to Western Europe. Religion has grown in the former communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe.
In Western Europe Islam is growing enormously and will be the strongest group in France, UK and Germany in a few years.
Sadly, you are right. The Communist effort to stamp out religion by brute force backfired. It gained an aura of forbidden fruit and since the demise of communism has grown to be a powerful political force, especially in Poland, where a neo-fascist government has gotten into power due to religious support.
And, yes, in Western Europe Islam is now the most influential religion, but that is only temporary, until the next generation, better educated and more at home in European culture than their immigrant parents, shakes it off as the children of Jewish immigrants did in America in the 20th century. A century ago there were predictions in America that Jews would never assiimilate because of their religion. Today, more than half of people from Jewish families marry someone from non Jewish backgrounds and hardly any of them takes the Jewish religion seriously.
Give the current wave of immigrants from the Middle East another generation and Islam will likewise cease to be a factor in their lives.
The exact opposite is true. Every further generation of Muslims becomes more Islamic. 90% of the German Turks vote for the Islamist Erdogan.