Because the existence of the emotional plague is not recognized, every new attempt to deal with its ravages turns into another, even more destructive expression of the plague than the one before. Beginning around the 17th century, the liberal movement in Europe was an attempt to break away from the chains of Christian repression and mysticism that held people in bondage for over a thousand years. In the 21st century, this liberal movement has shifted far to the political left and has developed into pseudo-liberal/communism which is an anti-authoritarian form of secular repression. Pseudo-liberal/communism is the application of mechanistic mystical thinking to daily life in America. It is a far more invasive and deadly manifestation of the emotional plague than the authoritarian system that it has replaced.
Liberals function primarily from the superficial layer of their bio-psychic structure. Their mode of operation is through the use of their intellect in a defensive manner. to protect them from experiencing the destructiveness that is contained in their middle layer. From their defensive intellectualism originates the two other characteristics of the liberal syndrome, a mechanistic explanation of natural phenomena and a collectivistic attitude toward social living.
There are several important socio-political consequences to the liberal’s living, perceiving and thinking primarily from their superficial layer.
1) Since the liberal has no contact with his secondary layer, he also has little contact with his biological core. He therefore has no deep emotional sense of the existence of good and evil or of the emotional plague of mankind. This is the reason for his moral relativism and his believing that all human beings are essentially good and that even hardened criminals can be rehabilitated.
2) Living from the superficial layer, the liberal perceives everything from the surface. For example, the liberal physician looks at medical illnesses exclusively from the perspective of the superficial symptom or the immediate biochemical manifestations of the disease. Not capable of understanding the deeper biological causes of disease, his therapy is focused on eliminating the disturbing symptom. The liberal economist and politician does the same in the economic and political realms. The liberal sociologist has no sense that a social transformation of catastrophic proportions from authoritarian to anti-authoritarian that began around 1960 is rapidly undermining the stability of Western civilization.
3) Because the liberal’s defense against feeling is from his intellect and not his musculature, the liberal political leader relies heavily on his rational powers derived from his well developed intellect to deal with domestic issues and threats to national security. His fear of open aggression prevents him from being able to take a forceful aggressive stand and, by misleading our enemies to think of America as weak, is capable of putting this country and the world in mortal danger.
Political correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economics into cultural terms. When the morality of political correctness becomes firmly anchored in the superficial layer of the liberal individual’s bio-psychic structure, the liberal’s socio-political character rigidifies and changes into one of pseudo-liberal/communist. The individual functions as an emotional plague character. With the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2008, the pseudo-liberal/communist character entered the mainstream of American politics on the left and became legitimized.
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Neither Left Nor Right
The Emotional Plague
Charles Konia, M.D. 
The election of Obama also provided a window of opportunity for some people to get a closer look at the real goals of the pseudo-liberal movement (i.e. the disassembling and destruction of free market capitalism in the U.S.).
It will be interesting to see if enough people have had their eyes opened to Obama’s true agenda in order to vote him out of office.
If not, the wreckage of another 4 years will be very difficult to witness.
So political correctness can function as a literal “plague” which turns one character (liberal) into another character (red fascist)?
Two further questions come up naturally:
Is the opposite possible, i.e., is there a force (a „counter-plague,“ if you will) which could influence character structures in a way that they change in the direction of health, approaching the healthy center of the socio-political spectrum?
Is red fascist → liberal possible, or is, as Reich and Baker suggested, liberal → red fascist irreversible. Or is the fascist incurable only from the point of view of individual orgone therapy?
This is what I never quite understood when I studied Baker and you as well as Dr. Harman and others: How, by what mechanisms, to what extent, and “in what direction” socio-political character structures can change into one another?
As far as I know the direction of change is always to the extreme left, from liberal to pseudo-liberal/communist. This is because the intellectual armor of the liberal is not stable. Leftists are always seeking change to sooth their conscience. This is why they can degenerate further to the left. In contrast to the conservative whose armor is in the musculature and who has religion to deal with the problem of guilt.
Occasionally, communists are able to see the folly of their leftist ideology and give it up. These people make the best anti-communists. I wish I could understand how this happens.
Here a fitting example how the core contact of a wonderful person and his contact with work democracy (“the real world”) beats red fascist politics:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/30/former-black-caucus-members-switches-to-gop
Peter, a good question. My guess is that in an armored world, decay is easier to take place than growth and development, since collapse occurs with the absence of freely moving orgone. Thus the movement to the extreme Left. In a mechanistic way, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) can apply to pathological character structure in that it is disintegrative and anti-Life. In a natural world, common sense (the melding of subjectivity with objectivity) would soon correct an irrational ideology by the fact that it would be an “untruth”, and free-thought would not want to remain bound to a false ideology. This brings us to the all-important topic of Political Correctness. In my opinion-and as Reich mentioned many decades ago-most people have a decent structure and wish to live and love. Because the world is divided into the Liberal and Conservative camps, there are a large number of people who innocently, but naively, want to “help the world”; they are the true Liberals who have fallen in the clutches of the pseudo-Liberals. How is this accomplished in the modern world? By the destabilizing power of the emotional plague, which is primarily fueled by guilt. If it were not for the guilt that liberals feel (due to fear of overtly competing with the father), they would not be brainwashed by Political Correctness, and thus would heed to the partial contact of their core impulses; they would not be straightjacketed into the communist. At least on an intellectual level (which is still meaningful), if Liberals could be convinced that perversions of behavior exist, and one can disapprove of them without being labeled a “monster”, a foothold into rational thinking might take hold. I believe this would be a direct shot into the heart of Political Correctness, and the damage to it would be massive.
Regarding Dr Konia’s statement about the few who became ex-communists, I saw David Horowitz (from FrontPageMag.com) at a very short lecture, and he basically saw the criminality and immorality of the Left and then gave it up. Perhaps someone that has read his autobiographical books would be in a better position to provide the details of his turn-around.
Ed, you are correct that the guilt of the liberal is a powerful social force by feeding energy to the EP. When people in the past gave up their muscular armor in favor of their intellect in a desperate attempt to become “civilized”, part of the energy that was bound in their armor became their intellectual defense and part of it turned into free-floating guilt ready to attach itself to any social cause. By acted out in the social arena, the liberal obtained partial relief from feeling it.
Acting out guilt serves as a powerful defense against being in contact with oneself and to see what is happening in the world. If the liberal could be in sufficient contact when he is acting out of guilt in supporting social causes and behaving in a politically correct manner, then he will feel the underlying guilt and stop acting it out. How can this be accomplished outside of the therapeutic situation?
Aside from therapy for the liberal who happens to be more to the “left” of the continuum (and of course it is up to him to give up his views), there is, I think another possibility. The environmental liberal is not as tightly armored and bound to ideology, and thus might be influenced in the social realm. This influence would have to be from someone that is well known and admired, and since people in America enjoy entertainment so much (due to its pleasure), this person would have to be from the entertainment field, especially Hollywood. If a “star” would be willing to state the obvious, and in a matter-of-fact-way—that PC is just a reaction formation against guilt, and has no real basis in facts, I think it would have a positive effect on breaking down PC. Bill Cosby and the Foo-Fighters (anti-AIDS hysteria), managed to survive with their statements, and certainly had some influence on the pubic. This is a long shot, and fraught with uncertainties, but it is worth noting the power of suggestion.
Unfortunately, most conservatives in the entertainment field tend not to be politically oriented. I believe this is because of their unconscious fear of encountering the wrath of the emotional plague.
Dr. Baker included in his socio-political character types “the environmental liberal”.
“The Environmental Liberal
I wish to clarify one type of liberal that seems paradoxical in this context. This is what I call the environmental liberal. Actually he is structurally not a liberal at all but is a conservative with liberal ideas. He is anti-communist, moderate in his views, and sincere and one can sense his conservative structure almost immediately…. He grew up in a liberal environment but liberalism never became a part of his structure. It is therefore easily given up. This type of liberal remains open to education and facts, but albeit is rather naïve to political persuasion. He probably constitutes the greatest number of liberals.”
Dr. Baker states in the paragraph above something which agrees with my experience of people (especially from the baby boomer generation): “He (i.e. the environmental liberal) probably constitutes the greatest number of liberals”
At its core, the pseudo-liberal movement is against rational authority, the western democracies, free markets, etc and not for anything life sustaining.
So occasionally, some environmental liberals who are “innocently” drawn to pseudo-liberalism/communism can occasionally extract themselves from the indoctrination and destruction of the pseudo-liberal ideology, thus returning to the life sustaining aspects of their conservative character structure.
This might somewhat explain the conversion of several high profile liberals or communists to a more conservative outlook (e.g. David Horowitz, Norman Podhoretz, David Mamet, Bernard Goldberg, author of “Bias”, etc).
I’m nobody special or anything, but I observed and experience things that caused me to rethink the standard late-boomer/GenX liberalism that I grew up with. I sought out information from non-liberal, non-mainstream sources. It’s been an interesting journey of a dozen plus years because I live in a particularly liberal slice of America. I’ve never stopped studying and even within the rubric of conservatism my views have shifted.
David Horowitz was an early influence and a hero of mine. Interestingly, all four men Steven mentioned are Jewish; so am I. I grew up with a conservative father and liberal mother, both of whom were pretty moderate. Maybe that has something to do with my shift.
Maybe Jews had a very good “non-characterological” reason to join the „progressive“ movement: its internationalism and rationalism promised protection from anti-Semitism. And just as well a very good “non-characterological” reason to join the „progressive“ movement: the Nazi-like anti-Semitism of the USSR and of the „progressive“ movement in general (“anti-Zionism”).
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The ideas contained on my website are derived from functional thinking about social processes. These ideas are more extensively developed in my recent book, Neither Left Nor Right.