something to do with sex?”“I think so ... something about free love. It must be helping him. Did you
see that lovely girl with him?”“Yeah ... Well, what he should have done is fight it in the beginning. He
could have called on all these people to say they believed in it and that it helped
them. Oh, he could have done a lot. After all, they called the Wright brothers crazy
and Ben Franklin.” ... I hope he doesn’t become another martyr for people to enjoy
in the mirror. I hope Reich will live out his days. He has done and suffered enough
and it is time others took up the brunt of that burden. The work stands, they can
burn the books, but the books are out, the accumulators are out in the world, they
can’t touch them. Reich found the truths he was looking for when he went into this
problem the emotional desert, the connections involving hiding and spying and
manipulating and conniving. The problem may be scientifically exhausted just as the
problem of human misery is basically exhausted from a scientific viewpoint, though
many details remain to be filled in. To get this across in a big way is, one would guess,
just as hopeless as was the attempt to get sex-economy across through mass meet-
ings, and when one tries to get it across with a bang, one gets into things unworthy
of its essential grandeur.Schiller wrote: “The strong man is at his most powerful alone.” Reich was
basically alone during this whole injunction nightmare because he was willing to risk
“contempt” of the law not only in the name of scientific freedom (on that level
alone he could have gotten more support), but because he wanted to put the emo-
tional plague’s “contempt” for life in the prisoner’s dock. He tried many ways and
ways not always to his credit to give that bottomless contempt a communicable form
and shape, to make it into a “case.”Now whatever happens he will be basically alone. If he dies, he will die
alone....And ifhe goes on,somehow, somewhere, elaborating the laws of orgone
energy and deadly orgone, with that infinite sweetness, depth and harmony, he will
again be alone, waiting for structures to grow that are capable of joining him in that
soaring but realistic, sweeping but disciplined search. Out of a quite great ignorance
I can only say I hope he does the last, rather than dying or pouring out his strength
in an attempt to reach a jury or a judge who will not, who cannot perhaps, reach out
ofthemselves.The judge set sentencing for May 25, 1956. Reich and Silvert were released on bail.
Reich left the courtroom in a very active, somber mood. He said that a “legal scandal” had
been committed, that this was just the beginning, and that he was glad at least certain issues
420 Myron SharafFury On Earth