The mass psychology of fascism
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (German: Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus) is a 1933 psychology book written by the Austrian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, in which the author attempts to explain how fascists and authoritarians come into power through their political and ideologically-oriented sexual repression on the popular masses. )
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- Being into "weird new-age shit" taints you to the point that you should not be listened to. It hints that their whole epistemological world-view is biased by charlatanism. I don't care if a chiropractor is right about some stuff, they're too tainted to listen to... at all...
Look at what happened to people who were almost coherent. I actually love "Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich. Great explanation of the right-wing fear of sexual pleasure. Too bad he went loony as hell right after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone
Or Althussuar killing his wife suddenly and without warning? (his wife was a hardcore communist woman who apparently summarily executed "collaborators" shortly after WW2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Rytmann
Or Jung's literally mystical ideas of collective unconscious?
This ideology literally makes you nuts. Hence why they want you to be "Schizoanalytical" and "Rhizomatic".
- One of my favorite radical psychoanalysts.
He has a stellar analysis of fascism in "The Mass-Psychology of Fascism." It's almost frightening how prescient he was not only for it's 1933 publication but for our current day as well. I wish more folks would check him out.
His fascination with orgone adds a lot of color to his work. I hope people don't write off his radical analyses for that. Despite the pseudoscience, he does get to the root of things. Great life-affirming stuff.
- I can't help but feel too old for this piece post-Trump. Eco succeeds in helping us identify fascism, but this is not the problem.
The story of Eco's friendship with African American soldiers is odd to me. Eco sees them as cultured human beings who brought freedom to Italy. And yet he neglects to bring up the racial unfreedom they faced at home, including their future exclusion from the GI Bill. Is this irrelevant because the US is not strictly fascist?
I mean to say we should not ignore the real psychological and economic forces that fascism is composed of. Eco touches on these forces. But it's not enough to stop at classifying whether a state is fascist or not. The forces that compose fascism are always present in liberal democracy, even if they don't crystallize into a mass movement.
What's most disturbing is that the German and Italian masses were not tricked: they desired fascism (even if it was against their material interests). Infantilizing the masses gets us nowhere in our understanding. [1]
I may be critical, but this is still a great piece from Eco. It's full of insights about fascism, and it succeeds at what it says on the tin.
For further reading I highly recommend Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism
[1] Ripped this paragraph almost word-for-word from Anti-Oedipus
- Since we are talking books - You could give The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Psychology_of_Fascism
It was banned and burnt by the Nazi's in the 1930's but significantly it was one of several books of the authors which was burnt by the US Govt. in 1956!
- Just to make one clarification:
Obviously the household exists in a context regarding dealings with other households in a traditional culture so intrahousehold dynamics are important. Again, I said I saw modern feminism and women's suffrage arising as a response to changes in the interhousehold space brought on by industrialization.
This being said matriarchy and patriarchy are almost always a question of intra-household dynamics. The question is, whether women effectively hold the keys to power or whether women are isolated from eachother, unable to effectively organize and make their agendas compelling. A strong matriarchy/patriarchy in the household is a good indication of women being able to do this (again one sees this in Greek material despite the fact that the society was formally patriarchal with formal privileges associated with men only, see the drama of Lysistrata for a dramatic account, but also look at Faraone's works cited above).
The family is also generally a state in miniature. What goes on with the family is a mirror of state power structures (see Elaine Combs-Schilling, "Etching Patriarchal Rule" for some brief discussion of this, but also see "Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich for a psychologist's view). So intra-household dynamics are the among the best indications of political power structures in the whole of society.
In short, whoever has power at home, has power everywhere.
- Burning is not an euphemism here, thanks for mentioning it.
From Wikipedia:
>On 23 August, six tons of Reich's books, journals and papers were burned in New York, at the Gansevoort incinerator, a public incinerator on 25th Street. The material included copies of several of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Although these had been published in German before Reich ever discussed orgone, he had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were caught by the injunction.
Publishing the Mass Psychology of Fascism had him kicked from the German Communist Party before.
Another pretty random bit of information, i recently stumbled about his Sex-Pol movement in another context as the Mitrokhin Archive alleges that Arnold Deutsch (Recruiter of Kim Philby of the Cambridge five) was a follower of said movement. Pretty sure thats a great example or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_effect
>Frequency illusion, also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or frequency bias, is a cognitive bias referring to the tendency to notice something more often after noticing it for the first time, leading to the belief that it has an increased frequency of occurrence.
