getting their due, who feel small Flaubert’s anger, on the contrary, is that of a pow-
erfully caged beast ... of a man who, feeling his strength to the uttermost, is con-
tinually outraged by the meanness, the self-seeking, the lowness, the vulgarity
around him. It is because he feels his strength unlike most of us today who feel only
our weakness that he is so magnificently angry...^23.Still, Reich was saddened that the little man could not stay with his moments of
depth and intensity. As Saul Bellow has Augie March say: “Intensity is what the feeble
humanity of us can’t take for very long.” Nothing hurt Reich more than the failure of peo-
ple to take for long his intensity and the intensity of orgonomy.
While Reich’s anger was directed at the little man, his even greater fury was direct-
ed toward a particular kind of little man whom he termed the “emotional plague charac-
ter.”^24 By “the emotional plague,” Reich meant the destructive acting out of neurotic
impulses. Whereas the ordinary “little man” limited himself or herself to taking and not
giving, to being spiteful, to avoiding conflict, the little man with the emotional plague was
actively destructive toward expressions of life. To give Reich’s favorite example distin-
guishing the two types: People who sit quietly on their porch, minding their own business
but giving little to others, are character neurotics. People who maliciously gossip about
their neighbors, who organize with others to persecute one or another “immoral” person,
suffer from the emotional plague.
By the late 1940s, Reich was becoming increasingly concerned with the way cer-
tain individuals who suffered severely from the plague interacted with the average individ-
ual or the character neurotic. In his own experiences as well as in the case of other inno-
vators, he found very often one or two people (people with the emotional plague) who
actively stirred up the average person’s hatred. In his own case, he found the average per-
son indifferent,ifnot initially friendly, toward his work. (As we know, Reich could at times
exaggerate the degree of people’s receptivity to orgonomy.) Then one or two would begin
gossiping viciously about Reichian “orgies” and the like. The average person would not
stand up to the rumormongers for a variety of reasons, not least because he feared
defamation himself for whatever “indiscretions” he had committed.
No example more beautifully illustrates this process than the late J. Edgar
Hoover, who tried to destroy Martin Luther King, Jr., with the threat of publicizing infor-
mation about King’s sex life obtained by concealed tape recorders. Hoover could get away
with these tactics because others refrained from opposing him, partly out of fear of what
his files may have had on them.
Reich was not only condemnatory of the emotional plague. He believed that peo-
ple thus afflicted were richly endowed with energy and had the potential for considerable
emotional and intellectual achievement. However, because their armor was also strong,
they were incapable of developing their positive impulses. The resulting severe tension
made them especially envious and destructive toward others who could flow more freely.
302 Myron SharafFury On Earth