When Auguste Comte first delineated sociology as a natural field of study in 1838, there was no understanding of the biological forces at play in the social interactions between and among people. First there had to be knowledge of the biological forces acting within people before the dynamics of social interactions could be understood. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was a necessary first step in this endeavor. Wilhelm Reich’s elucidation of the three layers of the bio-psychic structure of armored humans, the superficial layer, the destructive middle layer (the Freudian unconscious) and the core (the repository of primary biological impulses) in The Mass Psychology of Fascism represented the true beginning of a scientific sociology.
Reich saw in the ethical ideals of liberalism the social representation of the superficial layer of the individual’s character. The ethics of the liberal serves to keep down the destructive impulses contained in the middle layer. The liberal can recognize the destructiveness of fascist characters on the political Right (Black Fascists). However, because of similarities in his character structure, the liberal is unable to recognize the social destructiveness of fascist characters on the Left (Red Fascists/pseudo-liberals). In fact, he aids and abets them.
From his clinical experience, Reich found that the ideology of the Black Fascist is the expression of the destructive middle layer. By contrast, the ideology of the Red Fascist is the pretense at defense against expression of the destructive middle layer. This ability to dissemble also makes it more difficult for people to recognize the Red fascist than the black Fascist. Moreover, fascist ideologies did not only exist in those who belonged to fascist political parties. They could appear in any person living in an authoritarian society. Reich discovered the emotional plague of armored humans in the expression of the secondary destructive layer of ordinary individuals toward each other. Communists (today’s pseudo-liberals) and Fascists were simply examples of emotional plague characters operating from the extremes of the political Left and the Right.
Elsworth Baker’s discovery of socio-political characterology (Man in the Trap) finally placed sociology on a functional, biologically based, scientific foundation. In addition to the emotional plague character, Baker identified two other socio-political character types. Belonging on the left and right of the socio-political spectrum, they are, respectively, the liberal and the conservative characters. Living in the social surface, the liberal is in favor of social “improvement” but has no idea of the depth and enormity of people’s emotional sickness that prevent them from improving. In effect, bad social situations are made worse. The conservative, having no solutions to offer for social improvement, can only politically oppose the liberal’s harebrained policies. Baker demonstrated clinically that the differences in the ideologies of people on the left and right originated from differences in the pattern of their armor. Since ideologies are bio-social forces in the form of fixed belief systems, the ideologies of the left and right function as socio-political forces that are in constant opposition.
Understanding socio-political characterology permitted one to make sense of current social events with unfailing accuracy. For example, it allowed one to recognize that beginning around 1960, a social transformation of catastrophic proportions took place from authoritarian to anti-authoritarian, a transformation that is now threatening to destroy Western society as we have known it. Prior to that time, the social order was authoritarian. There were approximately equal numbers of liberals and conservatives in the general population. This balance in social forces permitted a degree of social and political stability. The anti-authoritarian transformation resulted in a shift to the extreme left of political center with the prevalence of leftist ideologues who were placed in high social levels through democratic processes. This resulted in the destabilization of society and the headlong descent of America into a socialist state. In today’s anti-authoritarian Western society, socialist thinking is increasingly becoming accepted by the public as the politically correct norm.
Charles Konia, M.D. 