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

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