Though they are rebels, they are impotent rebels unable to keep up their own rebellion.”^24
They will gratefully submit to the authoritarian Church, which understands their need for
domination. So the living Christ must die again to protect the people from those aspects of
his teachings they cannot live.
Reich mainly differs from the Inquisitor in that he sees man’s “vileness” as mutable,
even if the change requires centuries.
I have one major objection to The Murder of Christ. Reich does justice to himself as
an example of how life is murdered, but he gives insufficient due to the ways he himself
could murder life. In some of his earlier publications, usually written during periods of rel-
ative peace and success, he frankly acknowledged his own emotional plague, making it clear
that he, too, was a child of this authoritarian civilization, that he could be as destructive as
the next person. Now, under attack, he defensively omits such references, though in private
conversation he occasionally revealed this aspect of his self-awareness.
My other criticism concerns not the book per se but Reich’s failure to apply in his
life the very lesson that saturates the book, namely, the deep rationale for the world’s avoid-
ance of orgonomy. Right around the time Reich was writing The Murder of Christ, he was also
very intent on arousing the government’s interest in the Oranur experiment. Reich sent
copies ofhis Oranur Report,which appeared in October 1951, to many governmental agen-
cies. Naively he interpreted their polite thank-you notes as genuine interest. After his detailed
description of the fear of the living, how could he conceivably imagine that government
officials would look objectively at Oranur, a comprehension of which was exactly what offi-
cials and the average citizen feared with a terror no one described better than Reich? Therein
lies the enduring paradox: Reich keeps describing why everyone must fear his work, all the
while believing that somecircle—the Communists in the 1930s or parts of the American gov-
ernment in the 1950s—will appreciate his discoveries.
Reich blamed Christ’s followers for seducing him into the ride into Jerusalem on an
ass. No one but he himself seduced Reich into seeking Washington’s support. Indeed, he
hoped,figuratively, to march on Washington with Oranur in his fist, confounding his ene-
mies at last in one dramatic showdown. Reich rationalized the urgency with which he
approached the government on the basis of the threat of a nuclear war as well as the pos-
sible wide-ranging effects of Oranur itself. However, he was untrue to his basic principle of
letting the world come to him. With the exception of his approach to Einstein, Reich had
waited patiently during the 1940s. In 1951, time was running out. Driven into a corner by
mounting opposition, he wanted to strike back with everything at hand. He deluded himself
that one of his assets was possible support in high places if he could just get the “truth” to
the right people.
The year 1951 also saw the publication ofCosmic Superimposition.People in Trouble,The
Oranur Report, and The Murder of Christwere all loaded with emotion, and often angry emo-
tion. Cosmic Superimposition, on the other hand, was a very quiet book, reflecting a loving
attentiveness to natural phenomena. Here Reich was primarily concerned with the complex
relationship between energy and mass. Starting with the Superimposition of two organisms
370 Myron SharafFury On Earth