in the wind a snowdrift piles up, so when there is a lull in truth an organization springs up.”
What orgonomy needed, he felt, was not a political party but people with skills—
physicians, nurses, scientist—who could root orgonomic findings in practical endeavors and
who would win the respect of people through concrete accomplishments. It could not force
its way.
Yet Reich always had problems distinguishing between short-term and long-term
realities. At times he wrote as though there could be protection now for the truth in gener-
al and for his work in particular, even though the masses were armored. Indeed, sometimes
he asked not just for freedom for his work but for the suppression of “irrational” opinion:
“General formulations such as the ‘freedom of the press, of expression, of assembly,’ etc.,
are a matter of course, but far from sufficient. For under these laws, the irrational individ-
ual has the same rights as the rational one. As weeds always grow more easily and rampant-
ly than other plants, the Hitlerite will inevitably win out.”^18
There were other signs of Reich’s desire for immediate control over “irrationality.”
For example, he pointed out that one needed a license for such mundane activities as bar-
bering, “but there is still no law for the protection of newborn infants against the parents’
inability to bring up children or against the parents’ neurotic influences.”^19 Reich also
believed that “every physician, teacher or social worker who will have to deal with children
must show proof that he or she ... is sex-economically healthy and that he has acquired an
exact knowledge of infantile and adolescent sexuality. That is, training in sexeconomy must
be obligatory for physicians and teachers.”^20
It is so characteristic of Reich that he called for the requirement of sex-economic
education at a time when such education was quite taboo. There is the typical defiant asser-
tion that the rightful place ofhis work in a decent society should be granted right now.But
Reich never solved the question ofwho decideswhich potential parents are neurotic; which
teachers are sexually healthy; whose speech is irrational. Reich never intended there to be
some kind ofvote on these matters. He believed that healthy people should decide—peo-
ple like himself. They would fail, not least because the masses would never select people who
told them what was wrong with them.
In the meantime,in spite of his awareness of the extreme difficulty of real social
change, Reich’s bitterness and impatience with the masses grew. By the time he wrote Listen,
Little Man!in 1945 (published in 1948),it was the “average man” who received his thunder
and condemnation^21 .Listen, Little Man!is about the “average person,” but it is also written
for him or her as the “ideal reader.” The prose is clear and simple. Whereas in his psychi-
atric writings Reich speaks of “chronic muscular spasms” and the like, now he says the same
thing in basic English,Addressing the “Little Man”: “You can only ladle in and only take,
and cannot create and cannot give, because your basic bodily attitude is that ofholding back
and ofspite.”
Reich used the term “little man” in various senses. One meaning was the “common
man”the “man in the street.” At other times, Reich had in mind the “average man” who has
gained power—Stalin or Truman (whose use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and
300 Myron SharafFury On Earth