The Robin Hood Syndrome

The Robin Hood Syndrome consists in ” taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor.” A New York Times editorial entitled, The crisis has ended nearly two decades of wealth ( June 13, 2012), states exactly that: ” What’s needed now is even more support, including federal spending on education and public-works projects to create jobs, targeted tax credits for hiring, programs to promote mortgage relief that supports  house prices by keeping Americans in their homes, as well as a renewed commitment to financial regulation to ensure that the system doesn’t melt down again.”

The question is: Where is the money going to come from? Obviously, from increased taxation of the “rich” and from sapping the productive members of the economy, from the working power of people.  The next question is: how long and how much money will it take to improve the economy?  The answer is that since money does not grow on trees, there  is a finite amount of money that the rich and the productive sector can supply and sooner or later this money supply will run out.  Moreover, from past and  current experience it has been shown that this method of  solving economic problems does not work. It’s like throwing good money after bad.

Why then do liberal politicians and economists steadfastly hold on to this destructive idea? It is because they have no understanding that wealth, economic prosperity and “doing good deeds” to bring them about, can not simply be equated with money.  This ideological bias of liberals and others is deeply embedded in the superficial layer of people’s armored  character and therefore is not  open to being questioned.  It is a defense originating against recognizing that the true value of wealth and money comes from the capacity of  people to work productively, from the rational work function of human beings that originates from the depths of their biological core.  Having little or no contact with their biological core, they cannot know that  money has no value in itself and that its value is derived from the capacity of human beings to do productive work in a free marketplace. See my blog, “Why Stimulus Packages do not Work, May 20, 2012.

Since federal spending does absolutely nothing to improve people’s work function, it can do nothing to improve economic conditions in America which are the result of people’s helplessness and incapacity to work for what they want or feel they deserve to have. These  are the real reasons for all the economic problems that we are currently facing.

June 15, 2012
Categories: emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 1 Comment

The Decline In The Level Of People’s Core Contact

The antiauthoritarian transformation of American society has resulted in profoundly destructive social changes because it released the fury of the secondary layer contained in armored people.  An attempt by the superficial layer or facade to contain the destructiveness gave rise to the hypertrophy of the intellect as a defense against it.  This was manifested in recent years by  people’s pursuit of superficial distractions of every kind including relying on drugs of every kind to take away their pain and suffering, relying on the morality of political correctness to deal with the superficial symptoms of the secondary layer and a shift in the political mainstream to the far left of center, the socio-political red shift.

This shift to the left was politically legitimized in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States.  Compared to the biophysical state of the American people in around 1960, there has been an alarming decline in their level of core contact. This is graphically manifested by the fact that today, in 2012, Obama has a good chance of being elected by the American people to a second term of office.  If he had been running for president in 1960, he would have been easily seen by everyone, including Democrats as well as Republicans, as an undisguised communist and run out of town.

From a biophysical point of view, people who politically support Obama are functioning entirely from their superficial layer and have no contact with their biological core.  They are  liberal characters duped by the political mainstream into believing that he is a loyal American.  How long can a society survive where people are out of touch to such a degree with their biological core?

June 14, 2012
Categories: character structure, emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 5 Comments

From The History Of The Emotional Plague: The Solution Of Conservatism

With the transformation of society from authoritarian to anti-authoritarian that started around 1960, the floodgates that were holding back the great destructive secondary layer drives of humanity for thousands of years gave way and the full force of the emotional plague inundated the Western world like a tsunami.  Spreading its infection into every corner of human life including, in particular, political life in America, it continues it’s devastation unnoticed by almost everyone.

Politician’s knee-jerk response to this cataclysmic event depended entirely on their socio-political character structure.  Those on the extreme left, the communists, immediately saw it as an opportunity to take political advantage of the situation.  Taking well-meaning liberals along with them, they pretended to be one of them and became pseudo-liberals.  They rode on the wave of social destruction that was taking place in the following years, added their leftist “solutions” to the devastation and passed off these changes as ” social progress” to a gullible public.   On the other hand, conservatives in both political parties (Democratic as well as Republican) fought to resist the social destructiveness, but because they had no idea of the nature of the  evil that they were fighting and because their only way of opposing the plague was through political means, their attempts were in vain.

The defeat of the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer Hubert Humphrey to Richard Nixon in 1968 marked the “beginning of the end” for the conservative faction of that party, many of whom went on to become “neoconservatives”.  Meanwhile, the traditional political role of the Democratic Party consisting of true liberals was rapidly fading as it became under the control of  the pseudo-liberal contingent.

In reaction to the communist threat in the 1950s and to the global outbreak of the emotional plague in the 1960’s, the conservative movement slowly began to organize in America from different sources, mainly from those who had belonged to the Republican Party and became the Conservative Party.  Most recently, the Tea Party movement, founded in 2009, has proven a large outlet for conservatism.  Their stated political goals include adherence to the U.S. Constitution, lower taxes, and the opposition to the federal government’s encroachment into areas that are outside of its province such as health care.

Depending on where they are to the right of the socio-political spectrum, conservatives have varying degrees of undistorted core contact.  Because they only deal on a superficial, political level with the emotional plague’s many symptoms, the conservative movement’s effectiveness in opposing its spread has been limited.  Unfortunately, focusing on the symptoms and not the underlying disease itself  inevitably turns the rational effort at containment of the plague into “politics as usual,” an endless ideological battle between the opposing political forces of the left and the right.  The net result is one victory after another for the forces of the emotional plague.

May 31, 2012
Categories: character structure, emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: Leave a comment

From The History Of The Emotional Plague: The Solution Of Liberalism

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.

May 28, 2012
Categories: character structure, emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 14 Comments

Communism/Socialism Is A Cancer Of The Social Body

In articles written in the Journal of Orgonomy ( Vol. 20 Nos. 1,2) entitled Cancer and Communism, I show that from a functional perspective  individuals and  societies are  biological systems and that  cancer in an individual living system is functionally identical to communism/socialism in a social system. This  identical relationship of cancer to communism  (including socialism) is valid from a bio-energetic standpoint since both conditions are examples of diseased biological systems that are in a process of bio-energetic decay and disintegration. Communism is in a more advanced state of decay than socialism.

Cancer is a systemic disease involving the whole organism.  The cancer tumor is a local symptom of the disease.  Similarly, communism/ socialism is a disease of the entire society. The various social manifestations are superficial symptoms of a diseased society.  In the cancer disease, the cancer tumor through its vascular supply continually draws off  energy from what remains alive of the healthy part of the organism eventually killing the host.  The exact same parasitic process occurs in the case of communism and of socialism in America today where people who are in need of the government for their survival including most of the public sector feed off of the productive labor of those in the private sector who are the life blood of the economy.

The strategy of today’s pseudo-liberal\communists is to  undermine people’s independence in every possible way and to foster economic dependency on the government.  For example, every one of President Obama’s socialist policies such as waiving college students loans, unionizing and increasing the number of public sector  employees, encouraging disgruntled youths to riot by supporting their rebellious social “causes” (i.e. the Occupy Wall Street movement), providing extended welfare care for the able bodied unemployed, and so on, function to worsen people’s already disturbed biological work function.

This strategy is in the service of weakening the working power of individuals and of increasing power of the Federal Government and ultimately destroying the heathy American social system that the “social cancer” feeds on.  When this happens, no one will understand how this once great nation was destroyed just as no one today understands the true cause of the cancer disease.

May 25, 2012
Categories: emotional plague, Medical Sciences, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 4 Comments

Why “Stimulus Packages” Do Not Work

In order to have an understanding of any kind of human activity, a sense of the three layers of the human bio-psychicic structure, the superficial layer, the destructive middle layer and the biological core is absolutely necessary.  Economic activity is no exception.  Originating from the biological core, all economic activity is a result of the productive work function operating between people.

Money has no intrinsic value.  The value of money is ultimately derived from and is sustained by people’s ability to work productively.  When the quality and the quantity of people’s work function deteriorates in any way, the value of money also declines and the nation becomes a little poorer.  Stated differently, it takes more money to do the same amount of work than before.  A commonly overlooked but serious manifestation of the general deterioration of the work function in today’s society is people’s willingness to assume a state of indebtedness to a far greater degree than a level of responsibility required to discharge the financial obligation through work.  Thus, the economic recession that is currently upon us is a direct  manifestation of people’s work disturbance in the workplace.  It is an example of an expression of the secondary destructive layer of armored humans.

The stimulus package that President Obama signed into law in 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment act, ABRA, has as alleged primary objective to save and create new jobs.  It’s actual way of bringing about this goal is to provide temporary relief (welfare) programs for those who are most impaired by the recession and to invest in infrastructure, education, health and “green” energy programs.  The rationale of the stimulus package is from Keynesian macroeconomic theory which argues that the government should offset the decrease in private spending by an increase in public spending in order to stop further economic deterioration.  It is an example of how liberals see all problems from  the social surface and deal with social and economic problems exclusively from their superficial layer.

Furthermore, ABRA is a clear expression of the emotional plague.  The alleged objective  of the stimulus package (to save and create more jobs) is one that no rational person can have any argument with.  However, the way that this highly idealistic goal is to be implemented, the true motive  (through increased governmental spending and instilling increased dependency of people on the Federal government through welfare and other socialist programs) is cleverly pushed into law and overlooked by almost everyone.  Nothing is  mentioned about people’s emotional neediness or of their inability to work for what they want. These are primary manifestations of people’s emotional sickness originating from their secondary destructive layer that are expressed in the social realm as the emotional plague.

By ignoring this reality and not dealing with the source of the problem (people’s underlying work disturbance) the stimulus program is likely to worsen the current economic situation.  The economic recommendations of the political right, fiscal responsibility by cutting spending and taxes and letting the market regulate itself comes closer to addressing the current economic problems of armored humanity than all the “solutions” provided by today’s leftist ideologues.

May 20, 2012
Categories: Biological Sciences, emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 2 Comments

From The History Of The Emotional Plague: The Solution Of Christianity

The core functions of all religions are twofold: First, it provides a way of understanding the relation of humans to the cosmos from which they originate and second, it provides a way of coming to grips with people’s armored condition and it’s destructive social consequence, the emotional plague of mankind.  Because human armor is omnipresent, practically the entire human race is caught in the world-wide web of the emotional plague.  This trap includes religions movements themselves.

Christianity has had a powerful influence on Western life in it’s attempt to address  these  functions, particularly in understanding and dealing with the problem of human evil which is how the emotional plague is currently recognized in a distorted form.  Christianity  began to flourish around the fourth century A.D.  when the Roman Empire was disintegrating. People’s secondary destructive drives were responsible for this collapse and   Christianity’s primary  function was to preserve whatever remained intact of  Roman social order.

In order to do this, Christianity combined the two basic functions of religion, the cosmic element and the emotional plague element, into one comprehensive  mystical dogma: Christ, the son of God, came to earth to save humanity from it’s sins by sacrificing his life for man.  The function of this belief was to restore social order by anchoring Christian mysticism into the structure of  the armored populace.

Christianity attempted to get to the universality of human armor and the emotional plague through the irrational idea of original sin: all men and woman are sinners.  It also attempted to bring about social cohesion by converting all non-believers into Christianity since only by believing in Christ as the true savior of souls could one be saved from eternal damnation.

The act of mystical belief in Christ the savior was expected to keep impulses from the destructive secondary layer of armored humans in check.  Since Christ died for people’s sins, the responsibility for sinning (human social destructiveness) and the guilt that is associated with it is taken over in the body of Christ.  People can temporarily be relieved of the feeling of guilt that is contained in the destructive impulses in their armor by believing in Christ.

The Catholic church has incorporated into its religion the function of providing relief in the practice of confession.  The priest as the representative of Christ on earth functions in the role of confessor.  What is essential for obtaining relief from guilt is the sinner’s absolute conviction that  Christ is the true savior.

However, the Christian solution to the problem of the emotional plague was only partially successful and lasted for about a thousand years in Europe.  Consider the rampant debauchery and corruption of the  Church’s leaders during the middle ages that resulted in the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.  The importance of the Reformation movement was to deal with the emotional plague within the Catholic Church itself.  The Reformation under Luther returned to  the earlier Christian belief that faith in Christ alone without any human intervention was sufficient for salvation.

But Protestantism also was not able to contain the build-up of energy in the destructive secondary layer since it soon was apparent that Protestants could be as cruel and as fanatical as Catholics.  Furthermore, people were growing dissatisfied with Catholicism’s rigid mystical interpretation of the natural world.  From a biophysical perspective, people’s mystical form of ocular armor was loosening.

The only other solution that armored humans had to deal with the problem of human destructiveness was to pull energy up from the body into the head and rely on the objective, not subjective,  aspects of human life.  This led to the age of enlightenment and the liberal thinkers in 18h century England.  On the one hand, liberalism was a rational attempt to deal with the  Catholic Church’s mystical view of the world and on the other, it was a hopelessly desperate attempt to deal with and control impulses from people’s secondary destructive layer  (the emotional plague) by pulling energy from muscular armor into the brain.  With liberalism, brain (ocular) armor intensified through the development of defensive intellectualism at the expense of muscular armor.  One form of ocular armor (mysticism) was replaced by another equally destructive form (defensive intellectualism). From a characterological perspective, conservative thinking was replaced by liberal thinking.

However, eliminating mystical religion created another, more serious problem in today’s anti-authoritarian society.  There was no longer a mechanism for people who had given up their faith in religion to obtain relief from their guilt resulting from the socially destructive impulses contained in their middle layer.  Since people had chronic armor they also had a chronic sense of guilt that they had to live with on a daily basis.  As a result, people developed free floating guilt feelings.  To obtain relief, it was readily acted out through advocating leftist social and political causes of every kind.

The development of free floating guilt in people who have given up their mystical faith in religion and in religious leaders is the reason for liberalism’s instability as a political movement and why it can quickly degenerate into socialism and communism.  It is also the reason  for how quickly psuedo-liberal leaders on the political left can appear on the social scene to assume the role of a secular savior of the masses who need to be led into subjugation.

Wilhelm Reich found that human beings are not born evil,  but that evilness is instilled in infants and children through a process of armoring and  that this causes them to behave destructively toward other humans.   Armoring in humans is the source of the emotional plague.  Therefore, if humans are not born evil but are made so, sinfulness can be prevented in the human race through natural child rearing practices and through the process of armor elimination of medical orgone therapy.  The emotional plague is a medical disorder and must be treated like any other infectious medical disease.

May 9, 2012
Categories: emotional plague, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , , , , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 6 Comments

The Common Understanding Of “Character” Is Not Enough

In a recent Wall Street Journal article “America’s Crisis of Character” (April 21-22 2012), conservative columnist Peggy Noonan cites that the week’s Gallup poll showed that only 24% of Americans feel that the nation was on the right track.  She attributes the  dissatisfaction to the widespread cultural degradation that is taking place in every area of American life . She is “worried about the American character-who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.”

Typical of conservatives, the use of the concept of character in this way is unfortunately fraught with strong pejorative and moral overtones (i.e. “good” vs “bad” character) and is, therefore, of not much help in providing an understanding and management of the source of social problems.

There is now a true science of character. First  discovered by Wilhelm Reich and extended into the social and political arena by Elsworth Baker, knowledge of characterology can dramatically help people  to effectively deal with today’s social destructiveness. Reich described character functionally as the individual’s stereotypical manner of acting and reacting in all, (including social and political) situations.  The primary function of  character is to protect (armor) the individual from feeling unpleasant and unacceptable emotions and sensations.  A functional understanding of  character can be essential to know how a person will behave in any given social situation.

Our anti-authoritarian society is the result of the breakdown of the traditional authoritarian family and of the numerous kinds of impulsive an anti-social character types that are currently littering the social landscape.  Today’s anti-social behavior that Ms. Noonan describes in her article is a direct result of this breakdown.  Without an understanding of the function of character armor and of the anti-authoritrian transformation of society that we are living in, all attempts at trying to make sense of what is happening to our society are  bound to be futile.  The only thing the political right can accomplish is to retard the social degradation into socialism.  It can do nothing to arrest or reverse it.

April 26, 2012
Categories: character structure, emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 5 Comments

The Source Of Barack Obama’s Popularity

The source of a politician’s popularity comes from the people.  A question that is not asked is, how can an individual like Barack Obama who has performed so poorly as President of The United States in almost every area enjoy the enormous popularity that he has to the point that he actually has a good chance of being reelected to a second term in office?

In order to answer this question, it must first be known from which layer of their bio-psychic structure does people’s attraction to Obama originate, the superficial layer or facade, the destructive middle layer,or from the biological core.  Most Blacks (98%) voted for Obama in 2008.  Many of them did so because they identified with him as being Black. For them, only Obama’s blackness, not his political thinking, was the primary distinguishing feature that mattered.  This group was attracted to Obama from the superficial layer of their bio-psychic structure.

With the anti-authoritarian transformation of society, there was a breakthrough of the emotional plague  and a shift to the left of the political mainstream as leftist ideology became the dominant force driving socio-political activity in the West.  As a result, many diverse groups of all classes of people including White as well as Black leftist ideologues and particularly those in the media as well as others who somehow believed that the government should take care of them, became swept up in a political movement that ran on a vague platform of  “change” led by savior-candidate Obama.  A recent Washington Post/ABC poll shows by a 2-to-1 ratio that the president is more “friendly and likable” than Mitt Romney. These group’s attraction to Obama originate from the superficial and from the powerful destructive middle layers of their bio-psychic structure.

Thus, Obama and most if not all of his supporters have contact with each other through their superficial and middle layers.  In today’s anti-authoritarian society, the biological core of human beings has been all but obliterated from social life leaving only the superficial and destructive middle layers to determine social processes.  How long can a society last that has absolutely no undistorted contact with the biological core functions of work and love that sustain it?

April 21, 2012
Categories: emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 7 Comments

People’s Difficulty In Recognizing The Emotional Plague

People’s inability to recognize the existence of the emotional plague as a highly destructive and contagious medical disease is related to the fact that there is currently no scientific knowledge of the bio-emotional forces that govern human social life.

What must be known and understood is that differences in human armor produce differences in the way the emotional plague is misperceived and misunderstood. These differences correspond in a general way to the pattern of armor of people belonging on the left and right of the socio-political spectrum. Those on the left (liberals) live mainly in their superficial layer or facade. For them, the idea of the emotional plague is meaningless because the function of the liberal’s facade is to defend them from being aware of their destructive, middle layer (from where the emotional plague originates) and so the plague does not seem to exist for them.  (The liberal’s unawareness of the plague is partly why they are an effective tool that leftist radicals can use at will to carry out their destructive social agendas.)  Those on the right (conservatives) have better contact with their middle layer and their core. For conservatives, the idea of the emotional plague is real but it is perceived in a distorted form.  They view the plague not as a true medical disease but as a moral human failing.  They think of it in terms of “good” and “bad” human behavior and that the illness can be addressed by rational political dialogue.  However, the plague is not good or bad.  It cannot be stopped by political means.  Like any other medical disease, the plague is embedded in the biophysical structure of plague-ridden people.  The farther they are to the right of center, the more righteous and irrational are their thoughts about the plague.  This view of the plague is worthless from a therapeutic standpoint since a moralistic or righteous approach can never be used to combat a contagious medical condition.  (It is reminiscent of the irrationally fearful ways some contagious medical diseases, such as leprosy, syphilis and the bubonic plague, were treated before the modern era in medicine.)

Humanity cannot possibly come to grips with the emotional plague and recognize it as a deadly medical illness because their armor prevents people from seeing and thinking without distortion about problems in their individual and social lives.  This is why the disease will  remain a mystery and continue to ravage society until a sufficient number of  qualified social scientists appear on the scene who can take an honest look at themselves and deal with the emotional plague as a true medical illness.

April 15, 2012
Categories: character structure, emotional plague, Medical Sciences, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 1 Comment

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