One of the safeguards against the emotional plague in the past authoritarian era was the idea of the presumption of innocence. In those days, a person was presumed to be innocent until he was legally proven to be guilty in a court of law.
With the anti-authoritarian transformation of society, the emotional plague has broken through the social surface and this requirement is no longer necessary. Today, a public figure is more often than not assumed to be guilty as soon as he is charged with a crime. This change in the belief of being automatically responsibile for criminal behavior once charged is the result of the invasion of the emotional plague into the social mainstream in today’s anti-authoritarian society. It is now becoming an everyday matter to charge and identify someone as a criminal simply by accusing him of a crime.
A recent example of the use of this tactic was the political Left’s attempt to destroy the Trump Presidency. This is a favorite trick used by today’s leftist ideologues and their media that goes back to the days of the French Revolution. All that was needed in those days to send someone to the guillotine was to accuse a person of the “crime” of being Loyal to the King. See The French Revolution and the Emotional Plague in the upcoming (volume 52\2) issue of The Journal of Orgonomy. The emotional plague is alive and well in today’s world just as it was in 18th Century France when the French King and Queen were murdered by fanatic, leftist mobs.
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Charles Konia, M.D. 
Excellent post, Dr. Konia. Thank you.
WOW! LOVE IT!!
I’ve tried to bite my tongue and not engage in online chat forums. But this is too much.
The “TrumpPresidency “as you refer to it ; is really a euphemism for something far worse-more in line with an Authoritarian, would be Dictator.
He has removed or tried to remove any guardrails to the democratic institutions we hold dear; and instead has installed loyalty to the chief as the guiding principle.
From the various Inspector Generals whose role it is to provide oversight; to most recently the head of the Southern District of New York; he has fired them if they did their jobs.
He has decimated the State Department, denigrated and demoralized all of our Intelligence Agencies ,including the FBI and the CIA . Emboldened Russsia, North Korea and China-while fawning over the leaders of these dictatorships .This is a “bad” man who in his hey day as a builder in NY; stiffed contractors and bullied them into not getting paid by bringing a fleet of high priced lawyers to intimidate them into submission.And he operates in the same way; only now he. has the full authority and power of the US government behind him. Very,very dangerous.
This is a ‘Presidency” that has denigrated every institution and rule of law to serve the whims of a Boy/King. A “Sociopath” , who lies every time he opens his mouth and has destroyed the whole notion of Truth in the public discourse. Worse he has normalized lying and made fake news a Reality; so that the average man in the street can’t tell the difference. Who in any other situation would be out of a job for gross incompetence and corruption. and would go to jail if it weren’t for the fact that he is the President of the United States.
Instead of his fulfilling his duties to protect and serve the Constitution and fulfill the trust of the people of the United States; he has repeatedly lied and conned and abdicated his responsibility and instead sought fawning approval. Even arch conservative hawks like John Bolton agree that Trump’s sole purpose in everything he does is focused on his re-election. And in this White House; obstruction of justice is a way of life. It employs or attracts “grifters” who are there to defend the Grifter in chief.
His lackey Bill Barr has inverted, subverted and perverted the whole Department of Justice ( numerous heads of various departments have quit in the past three weeks) and in fact his only role is to serve as Trump’s personal attorney.
This is the Reality TV star turned President by a fluke and is utterly out of his league to face any serious national emergency , such as Covid-19, and racial unrest. Who frankly is uninterested in governing or learning what it takes to govern; and if re-elected; I fear the United States that I grew up in would no longer exist.
Thank you for this enlightening comment! It highlights again who and what Trump really is: He tries to undo something which was started in the 1960s or even back in the 1930s: The subversion of all American institutions by Communist influence agents. This subversion started by “Moscow” functions by now completely autonomous. To get an inkling of what really happened and HAPPENS look to India, for the sake of seeing things clearer from the distance and “alienated,” outsmarting the ocular block:
They fooled, manipulated, indoctrinated, and even hypnotized you since the day you entered school for the first time and you watched TV for the first time. One of their main operations was to kill Reich, to minimize orgonomy, and to replace it with “Reichianism” (Communism).
Trump calls it draining the swamp.
Thanks Peter, it could not have been said better by an American.
Edward,
Everyone has a right to an opinion, but we must be living in “parallel universes” as everything you accuse Trump of, has been recently accomplished by the Democrats (projection). Without arguing the key points since it won’t make a difference, this shows that either the Progressives or the Conservatives have a severe ocular block as both sides cannot be simultaneously right. Somebody is very removed from reality, and the question is posed: is it possible to self-reflect and re-evaluate? If one is then wrong about some person who was falsely accused, can the personal sadistic hatred against him be undone? There is an important adage of “Be careful of what you wish for.”
It is doubtful the Progressives can admit wrongness in their thinking as their once benevolent motto of “Live and Let Live” has changed to “Live for Me and Die for You”–everything that was normal is a target for destruction. The overriding effort by the Left has been to demolish sanity by falsely equating secondary drives as equal to primary ones and ordering everyone to think and feel that way. From here on, the ground was set to manipulate minds and behavior at will. The results are that Americans do not trust their senses to know right from wrong anymore, and blindly using appeasement as a bargaining chip.
Confusion and immobilization that you are describing is the manifestation of the emotional plague.
Thank you Ed for your reasoned response to Edward…as opposed to my emotional one. Im afraid my anger at what the Far Left has been doing to our country got the better of me. You are completely right that everything elucidated by Edward has actually been done by the democrats, clearly a projection, which I notice they do all the time: accusing the other side of things they–the far left–are actually doing. I suspect a lot of people are, like myself, quite angry at the actions of this national outbreak of the EP. Our constitutional freedoms definitely appear in jeopardy. Still & all, I apologize for my loss of cool & want to restate how much I appreciate Dr Konia’s penetrating insights into the current social situation, as well as all the other excellent comments on here.
It is hard not to get caught up in the insanity of the moment as described well by Ed in his response to Edward. As much as I agree with everything he wrote about the “Left”, it does not matter whether we have arrived at this point in time due to the “Left’s” destructive ideology.
Rational thinking alone will not be able to overcome the bio-social infection that has blossomed over the last 100 years and discussing the political differences between the left and right won’t work either. That ship has sailed.
While I do think there is some merit to thinking about how we can get out of the social mess that we are currently experiencing, I truly wish that there was more discussion about how functional thinking could provide some much needed life positive and practical alternatives to the increasing glorification of secondary destructive drives in today’s world. Obviously this kind of discussion would be more focused on the future but could also possibly provide some useful ideas in the short or mid term. There are no simple short term solutions for problems that have been brewing for decades/centuries.
There are very few, if any, other places that such a discussion (or sharing of comments) could occur except on this site.
In “The Emotional Plague” Dr Konia wrote about the confluence of a few circumstances that helped fuel the transformation to anti-authoritarian society in the 1960’s. One was the public’s misunderstanding of Freud’s work and discoveries. If you realize that Freud’s work could be so easily misconstrued, it is not hard to imagine how Reich’s would not only be misconstrued but completely turned on its head by the public because of its direct and functional connection to the depths of the human experience in the literal sense. A connection that for the most part was “hidden” in the evolution of armored human civilization.
What I am trying to point out is that due to the “necessity” of armoring that developed in humans it was inevitable that the emotional plague would be a major part of human life. Reich’s work along with the creation of the ACO provided a light at the end of the EP tunnel. The ability to apply what Reich, Baker, Dr. Konia and the ACO have explained in their writings about the EP is still in the early stages of actual implementation. More functional thinkers are needed and this will take time.
The American Constitution and the life positive bio-social nature of its contents have been under attack since its inception. It was just a matter of time until some generation would be faced with its possible repudiation and the destruction to healthy life that would flow if that occurred. WW2 was a prime example and the good guys won that one. The red fascist attack is much more insidious and developed over a very long period of time. It won’t be dealt with sufficiently and decisively in a short period of time.
Even though we need to deal with the present and near future in order to survive, it is helpful to keep the historical perspective of how we arrived at this point in time in order to apply the knowledge that flows from functional thinking effectively.
The last 6 months have shown that the effects of the transformation to anti-authoritarianism in the U.S. on its population and societal leaders had taken a greater toll that what might have been previously understood. The proof is in the pudding.
In regards to Mr. Feldman‘s comment: generally speaking I take someone’s degree of agitation, no matter how cleverly expressed, as a sign of their degree of irrationality.
In regards to our concerns for the future of civilization in general and American civilization in particular: who knows what will happen, but I do think that generally OR eventually triumphs over DOR. Life finds a way, a way that we can’t predict; but it does find a way, because that is what life does.
Because of the spontaneous nature of functions, often we can’t predict or see what the eventual outcome of things will be, regardless of what our fantasies and fears might be.
Did my comment get deleted? Dr. Konia, I was simply asking for a clarification on what changed from your initial assessment of Trump, when he was first elected until now. You were not a fan in those days, though his character hasn’t changed much, if at all.
Nothing has changed in my view of Trump as a political figure.
No one is perfect personally or politically, but we can see now with the economic disintegration under Biden, the security threats under Biden, the border under Biden, and on and on, what a tremendous president Trump was , and how he had a genuine love and warmth for America and desire to not harm America. Trump 24! Biden is a giant blow-hard and the Trump haters who follow him are just too armored and stupid to see the multi layered character structure aspects of why their “social surface” Democrat idealism does nothing while things just get worse and worse!