Pill Pod 212 - The Mass Desire for Fascism

This week we looked into OG critic of fascism Wilhelm Reich, who wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism right after the Nazis were elected in 1933. Reich was among the first "neomarxists", and believed that Marxists need to understand psychoanalysis to understand Fascism.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
A victor. Did you hear our episode on why communism
and fascism are the same thing?

Speaker 2 (00:18):
No? I didn't.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Oh I recommend it to you. Did I hear that
one you were on that one must have been.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Asleep this well, I guess I have no such thesis.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
We were talking about the Monk School and how that's
like their only political position.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
That's funny.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Class at the Monk School not a surprise.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
We said, we were glad that you weren't there so
we could just you know, speak for you without any
without any conciliatory.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
Tone implicating you, since that is some somewhere you might
not want.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
To limit your options. Did you teach a class called
horseshoe theory one on one there?

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Oh? That what? That that that communism and fascism are
the same thing?

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Well, of course they're all totalitarian. So we did look
at the research and it's that the Nazis are totalitarian,
the Russians are totalitarian, Chinese are totalitarian. Uh, communism is totalitarian,
but we are not. We are we are good and
Israel is good.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
I mean they, I mean they are definitely like global
elitists over there.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Well, you know, the the three academics who said we're
fleeing Canada.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, to Canada, to Canada.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Yeah. Two of them already live here, and they just
all got jobs at the Monk School. And we are
kind of in shock that these people can publish anything
with a with a thesis like that.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
But you know, if you follow the trends, you can
get jobs.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
But if you.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
Try to follow your passions and study things you like
that aren't necessarily in high demand in the in the
ideological factories, you're probably not gonna go very far. Well.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
I wish someone had told me that before I took
this fascism study. It's all you have to do is
say things I don't like. Are fascism, Well.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
I think usually fascism refers to specifically the far right.
But then you have these other terms that sort of
pull back, like authoritarianism, Oh, is.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
That just the right?

Speaker 3 (02:25):
What about totalitarianism? Oh my god, marx was kind of totalizing.
Is Marxism totalitarian? Like you pull back and then suddenly
you get this stupid, that fucking horseshoe theory thing where
it's like, if you go far enough to the left
or far enough to the right, you get to things
that are just similar Like they just connect on very
certain points. Like there's more similarities between the far left

(02:47):
and the far right than there are between either of
those and the center, which is what the Monk School
wants to be, is the center.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
So who's this Monk School? Like, like, like, could you
explain where you're deriving that thesis? Like I don't doubt
that there are people at the Monks School, but I'm
just curious, Like where you're you're getting the generalization from.
Is it like on their website?

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Oh, we looked, we looked at some of their their
published work, but it was mostly because those three people
were getting whatever his refugee status fleeing from the drump regime.
Did you know they're already They're already there too. It's
not like they're they're even leaving the States to go there.
They've been there since Spiden.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Was president, including Jason Stanley.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
No, he's the one exception and the other. The headline
is we're experts on fascism when two of them just
study Ukraine and poutin is fascism? I guess we got
some not a lot, by the way, just like one
or two comments from from libs saying that we were

(03:51):
doing apologia for Stalin by saying he's not a fascist.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
I can see it, I can. I can already tell Wow,
you guys really really get out of control when I'm
not there, right, Fuck.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
We really just go to the ends of the horseshoe.
Look what we've gotten ourselves into this time, Victor, you're
the politics guy. Is there is there any reason to
think that there might be a difference between Stalin and
Hitler or are they just they're the same thing?

Speaker 2 (04:15):
No, I think there's I mean, I love making distinctions,
you know me. I'm all about distinctions. So obviously there's distinctions.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Okay, what's the main distinction?

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Probably like their motivations, although their actions, I mean, the
similarity is like maybe they were both driven by a
certain logic of like revenge and suspicion against enemies, so
like actions of like destroying anything that is that can
be framed or perceived as a threat to their power,
like kind of a paranoia. But then like the motivations obviously,

(04:49):
like Stalin was, you know, believed in socialism like at
one point. But I don't know, like the problem is
like I'm just not an expert, Like I'm not I'm
not enough of an expert in like the historical nuances
to be a it's like, give you a confident answer.

Speaker 3 (05:01):
Mussolini was a socialist before he became a fascist too.
He was like a head writer in a big socialist
journal and then he I.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Think where they're similar, I think they're both authoritarian, right, So, like,
setting aside that category of fascists, I would say that
Stalin and Hitler were both authoritarians.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
So like, like, if you're just gonna give a main distinction,
Stalin got a backwater farming economy to the second largest
economy in the world. Well, that's the outcome of his actions,
whereas Hitler like destroyed his country almost entirely in about
in about seven years. So yeah, the violence happened. Violence

(05:42):
has been a primary political tool for thousands of years.
So I mean, it's very funny when Americans decry violence
because they've had no decade without war in their entire existence.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Like, I guess if if in the October Revolution or whatever,
it would have been like the Libs that won, Like
I guess, like, who's to say that they wouldn't have
just become like an industrialized liberal democracy that's even better
off than they are now, Like, I don't know, I'm
just asking that question, like I don't know for sure.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
Right, Well, can you correct me if I'm wrong? But
I don't think there's ever been any equivalent to the
five year plans state five year plans in a capitalist
democratic country. I don't think. I think those two things
are fundamentally opposed because capitalists would never agree to that.

Speaker 3 (06:32):
Let's trust the let's trust the if you're strictly applying
like Marxist stage theory, which is obviously like quite a
contested area of Marxist scholarship. And those letters he sent
later in his life seemed to suggest that, oh, maybe
Europe's pathway was was different than other places in the world.

(06:53):
But the idea is, yeah, like Russia kind of went
fast forward on fast forward bourgeois revolution or into bourgeois
society out of their backward feudalist society. Which is so,
I mean, it was the most wasn't it. I Mean,
I don't know, I'm uncomfortable with the word backwards, but
that's how they referred to it. Wasn't it more like

(07:14):
the most backward place on the continent?

Speaker 1 (07:17):
Well, what is what is the polite term developing non industrialized.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, or like agrarian not industrial.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
And here's another here's another hypothetical, like potentially uncomfortable question
is like what about if Hitler hadn't have come to
power and Germany just stayed like this, like under the
boot of like the you know, the World War One
Treaty of where like they had to pay reparations. I mean,
maybe they would have ended up continuing to develop, like

(07:47):
being under the thumb of the rest of Europe and
been like a shit country. That's an uncomfortable question obviously.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
The way well, now that's that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
All the historians in the audience are going to be
putting their head in their hands. But you know, one
like you still have to remember, I think, other than
the UK, Germany had the second largest economy in Europe still.
But Hitler comes in, focks everything up, and then the
country gets split into as a result of his actions.

(08:15):
He's just a bad He's a bad leader on the
economic outcomes alone.

Speaker 3 (08:19):
Yeah, the Treaty of Versailles was supposed to be After
World War One, the Treaty of Versailles was supposed to be. Yeah,
this like extremely harsh imposition on German society that like
created the conditions for fascism to arise. But then when
you read like historians on this period or even like
people like Wilhelm Reich on this period, you get this

(08:41):
more fine grained analysis where there was you know, this
huge German workers Socialist Party with schools and and like
centers and tennis clubs whatever. It was huge. It was
like millions of people, and there really was like a
war between them and this fascism that just seemed to
like spring up out of nowhere, and we just kind

(09:05):
of cut all that out of our histories and ignore
the fact that in nineteen eighteen what ended World War One?
And we say, oh, it was this or that treaty,
but like, you know, no, Germany's navy went on strike,
people were marching in the streets and demanding and Wilhelm
abdicated the throne because of popular pressure, and there were
five further years of revolution after nineteen eighteen, right, like

(09:29):
huge unrest, and that's all usually cut out of the
quick you know, history books versions of like what brought
World War One to an end? Oh, it was this
treaty and this action on the behalf of the British
whatever they attacked, like all this stuff, but they forget
that socialist element of the history.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah, definitely, history hadn't ended yet. There was a fork
in the road, and we all know how that turned out. Now, guys,
I think I'm like, I'm at the limit of my
historical analysis, not my area of and I don't want
to say some dumb ship. Maybe we should change tracks
over to some ship that.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
We will hit the limit. We hit the limit pretty quick.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
I have more proof that communism and fascism are the
same thing. Both the USSR and the Nazis banned this book.

Speaker 3 (10:20):
Oh so did oh you mean Reich's book?

Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, that's the mass psychology of fascism today on the pillpod.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
Let's Reich and all his work and his equipment was
destroyed in the United States in the sixties too, like
the United States burned all his ship.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yes, this this is true. I saw that. I saw that. So,
like what Tim Snyder is correct, everything is fascism.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
So fascism, communism, and democracy are actually all the same
thing than by that piece of evidence.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
I bet it was like something to do with immorality
laws that the United States banned it.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
Yeah, he was, he was sexually permissive. They didn't like it.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
Let's turn from history to something that we know a
lot about, which is sex.

Speaker 3 (11:09):
That we've been reading about. I've read about that.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
We have read about sex having. But this is we
already know that in cells are Nazis. Right, this is
proof from nineteen thirty three that Nazis are in cells.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
Yeah, I love he does lose me a bit on
those sorts of ideas, but I do love his analysis nonetheless.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
Man, yeah, we have to just say this first because
this is very uh, very Freudian, you know, And I
don't hate it all because in my mind I just
flip it into like the Lacinian symbols instead of actual sexuality,
which is wait, I have a stat here.

Speaker 3 (11:49):
You have to sanitize it.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
This is this books one hundred and eighty pages, right.
It says sex, sexuality or sexual an average of five
point three times per page.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
So if you did a word cloud, it would just
say like sex and all caps in the middle, the
biggest one sex. That's a good book.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
Fascism.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
It's yeah, it's very sexism.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
This is Freudian in like the caricature, bad Freudian way.
Not to say the analysis is bad, but you know,
after this after early psychoanalysis was just obsessed with sexuality.
Then it becomes a little bit more abstracted. Desire becomes
a little bit more abstracted. Libido doesn't just mean your

(12:38):
horny anymore, you know. So this is it's a it's
a product of its time, and you can see the
different definitions. So it's important this right, this was written
in nineteen thirty three, so when the Nazis are are
first elected and before all the stuff that we know,
including the war, were associated with fascism, that's what he's talking.

(13:00):
So it's it's a very different moment compared to when
we're looking back at it. But yeah, let's uh, let's
dig in here.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
It's an interesting it's got a good the context too.
Uh is is critical theory, turning to the failures of Marxism,
why the promised revolution never materialized, but also looking at
the rise of fascism, right, because it's pretty much a
twentieth century phenomenon. It has a kind of history, like claims,

(13:32):
and you can trace it back, but like formally it emerges,
you know, the founder is Mussolini, and Hitler quickly followed
suit with a different but related version, and you have
texts from like Batai, famous texts from Adorno and all
at al and like the authoritarian personality. You know, big

(13:53):
becomes a big I mean it's Fascism is one of
the most studied topics in social science, so it's no surprise.
But this is like early og stuff on fascism.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
Yeah, it's too bad that Diego is not here because
I would have liked to get his reaction to this,
because it's kind of questioning the well, at least it's
questioning I guess, a vulgar version of the of the
like material conditions thesis. Right, Yeah, I think we should
get to what it's saying. Right, it's saying that, like
the reason you can't explain why revolution hasn't happened just
on like material conditions, because he's claiming, well, the material

(14:26):
conditions were there for people to be upset and want
to revolutionize, like they just clearly were there in a
bunch of circumstances, but it didn't happen. Why didn't it?
And he wants to give a kind of psychological thesis
for why that didn't happen, which eventually gets to like
the sexual repression thesis, But it kind of starts off
as just like a psychological as describing a kind of
psychological structure, a kind of group think that leads people

(14:49):
to like kind of want and crave hierarchy, and that
like actually they and like sort of be like and
that ideology has this kind of material effects. And I
was also thinking about this when I was reading, like,
how does this interact with Pills's favorite dictum that ideas
don't matter?

Speaker 3 (15:10):
Right?

Speaker 2 (15:10):
I mean, he still tries to frame them as a
material ideas in a way or like material like that.
It's like the psychological effect, so it's still happening, but
it does sort of maybe cast some sort of a
challenge to that thesis. I don't know. I don't know
if you agree or not.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
Pills, Uh No, I don't because psychoanalysis is also an
ideas don't matter discipline. You can't just say ideas are
the things in your head, because the idea of the
unconscious is that you don't know in the last case,
why you're thinking what you're thinking, because it's repressed. So

(15:48):
insofar as psychoanalysis is involved, it remains an ideas don't
matter thesis, and in the sense that it's not your
conscious thoughts or in this case, it's the crowd. It's
not the crowd conscious thoughts that matter, and ultimately they
are coming from a not the economic situation, but the

(16:08):
unconscious processing, symbolic processing of the situation, which you know,
is something I'd agree with, but I don't agree with everything.
He says, No, there's some there's some stuff in here,
and you just go, you know, I'm I'm feeling the
age of this this analysis. So he takes like very

(16:29):
different from from the way we would talk about science.
He believes that psychoanalysis is like a legit science, as
with Marxist analysis. This is legit science. Everything that's not
that is mysticism, irrational moralism, not materialist.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
Or ideological production propaganda.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yeah, exactly. We don't put Freudian psychoanalysis into the category
of science anymore. So that's like, if you open this
up and he's like, actually, the swastika represents two people
having sex. That's why it's that's why it's so powerful
as a symbol, then you go, dude, dude, you got
to you gotta relax a bit here on that stuff.

Speaker 3 (17:14):
Well, it's really fascinating and comparing it to the analyzes
of fascism that we looked at last time. I mean,
this is very different. It doesn't sort of just give you,
like a Vickensteinian loose collection of qualities that just need
to sort of be there. As long as there's like
five out of eight of these things present, you can

(17:36):
call it fascism. That's kind of how like fascism is
defined now. But he's like, first of all, this is
like a very early, maybe first stab at explaining the
psychology of fascism in a meaningful way, and not just
like they had Hitler psychosis or you know, they had
one pulled over on them. It's just like saying, you know, oh,
Trump just fooled everybody, right, like, like he just made

(17:59):
these promises and everyone was completely fooled and he pulled
one over and they're all mystified and they have Trump psychosis,
you know, that kind of vulgar psychologic, psychological explanation. But
he's also saying the vulgar Marxists can't explain it either.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, he hates the vulgar Marxists too. Do you think
that by right standards here Trump's a fascist?

Speaker 3 (18:20):
I was thinking about that, but you know, and and
you know, the organization of the politics that he's talking
about here interesting, right, because you have a split left
and a split right here. So you have the communist
parties and the and the Social Democrats on the left,
and you have the nationalist parties and the Fascist Party
on the right. In America, you have just two parties.

(18:41):
You don't have the four parties. The Socialist Party the
first of all, there is no official Communist party. Second
of all, the Social Democrat Party is like this tiny
little appendage on the on the outskirts of the Democratic Party.
And then on the right, I don't know, it's just
a hodgepodge kind of mess, but it's sort of unified
around certain things. And yeah, I would say that those

(19:05):
like fascist tendencies on the right are definitely like ascendant
with Trump.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
Yeah, kind of saying that, like there's not enough attention
on like the psychological structure of human beings and the
things that kind of like tempt them towards things.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
We should start at the beginning, because that's where he
talks about what mass psychology and the mass individual, which
is like a modern invention. There was no mass individual
prior to the twentieth century.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
He's basically saying, right, At the beginning, he's saying, you know,
faith in Marxism is kind of in danger right now
because Marxism, we've seen this rise of fascism, and Marxism
as it stood in his time is failing to explain this,
and we need to What he wants to do is
use freudgen principles to kind of like supplement Marxism, right,

(19:55):
So the idea of ideology as a material force is yeah,
he's asking how ideology becomes a material force that shapes history,
just like the development of the forces of production. How
does it get a hold of people and change their behavior?
And his answer to that is ultimately going to be, well,
like it starts in the family, and then kind of

(20:15):
the alpha'sarian thing, it goes through education, and then religion
also reinforces it, and one of its main features to
him is sexual repression. But in the beginning, this doubting part,
you know, so the cleavage. What is the cleavage, right,
It's the difference between the economic structure and the ideological structure.
So Marxists will start with the economic structure and just

(20:39):
say that explains everything, and in fact ideology follows from it.
So it's like an identical reflection of it. Right, So
how do we explain these people acting against their own interests? However,
and like going towards the fascist parties and the nationalist
right wing parties, how do we explain that vulgar Marxism
can't do it? Like I said, they resort to those

(21:00):
silly kinds of they've had the woolpulled over their eyes explanations.
And what he's saying is we have to separate. That
there's a cleavage here. We have to separate because it's
an actual fact that your economic structure of a society
and the ideological structure of your society can actually diverge.
That's the cleavage. They can be divergent, so people can,

(21:23):
for instance, the working class tends to you know, it's
ideology and its economic situation actually tends to be aligned.
But that's not the case for the lower middle classes, right,
you'd think and the vulgar Marxists just kind of sit
back and expect. This, according to Reich, is that as
capitalism advances and the proletarianization of the middle class carries

(21:45):
on apace, you just expect more and more support to
naturally accrue to the communist side of things. But that's
not happening.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
You know.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
You have like the Great Depression, you have the post
war devastation, you have all this shit that should be
made making people into Marxists, and it's not right. They're
going the middle class and the lower middle classes are
going to the right. And you see this huge ascendancy
from nineteen twenty eight to nineteen thirty two of the
National Socialists, the Nazi Party massively ascended, just comes out

(22:18):
of nowhere, and their base was the lower middle classes
and the middle class in general, not so much the
upper middle class, but the middle class at that time
represented about twenty million people, whereas the working class represented
about twelve million people, so they actually didn't have the
numbers to outvote the middle classes. But according to the

(22:42):
vulgar Marxists, this shouldn't be happening. To them, this feels irrational,
and we need to bring in psychological principles mass psychology
to explain this irrational behavior.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
We call this basically neo Marxism now, and none of
the neo Marxists, by that definition, actually say I'm a
neo Marxist. They would just say I'm Marxist. But this
is what all the Frankfurt school was was trying to
not be vulgar Marxist but try to add something in
and I think Reich here says it like exactly like

(23:15):
Marx was not wrong. It's people who interpret Marx is
wrong because that's split that you're saying, there's a split
between economic conditions and ideology. Vulgar Marxists think we go
from A to B. But we know, because we're clever
and we do psychoanalysis, we know that there's something in
the middle there that's being crossed over. And that thing

(23:37):
in the middle is basically psychology, what a what a
human does, but he does something a little bit different
from what we would call psychology today, which is usually
individually based, right and philosophy or psychology and philosophy. It's
usually an individual what do they think? Phenomenology, an individual

(23:59):
how do they experience the world.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
Except for social psychology, but that's kind of an anomaly exactly.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
So he is probably not introducing this term because I
know Americans are studying it already. But group psychology or
crowd psychology.

Speaker 3 (24:16):
Yeah, like like Freud's article.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, oh yeah, exactly, there we go. But we've seen
we've seen like the Nuremberg rally pictures, and he's pointing
out here at least that humans behave differently in groups.
And I kind of this raised an interesting question for
me because we think of ourselves like our real self
philosophically or phenomenologically is, as an individual. But this group,

(24:42):
the way we act in a crowd, the way we
act in a group, it's a flip side of that.
So why do people behave so different in riots than
they do when they're at a family dinner, or why
do people behave differently in concerts? Why are there different
social rules in concerts? So we don't have to necessarily
answer that question if it's not that interesting. But for Reich,

(25:05):
you can't have a fascism without this crowd psychology, and
he often expresses it in the terms of the crowd
carries away the individuality. That's a thing he particularly likes.
And again this is important because this is when, like

(25:25):
the Nuremberg rallies have just started.

Speaker 3 (25:28):
Yeah, I even went back and looked. I just looked
at the Freud's paper from nineteen twenty one on group
psychology and the analysis of the ego and the opening sentences,
the contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology,
which at first glance may seem to be full of
significance loses a great deal of its sharpness when examined

(25:50):
more closely. That's his opening sentence, So he's gonna say. Yeah,
he's saying, you know, it does seem like very different
to deal with individual which is generally what you're doing
as a therapist, dealing with individuals, and then like trying
to psychologize groups. They may that might seem like night
and day. But he's saying, no, actually, you know, individual

(26:13):
psychology and group psychology similar things can be said about them, Like, yeah,
group the libidinal sex economy. That's his term here, Reich,
the sex economy, right, like the economy of sexual energy.
I never thought i'd say those words, just saying, like
the sexual economy of an individual and the sexual economy

(26:36):
of a group. There's like analogies between them. Yeah, he's
going to get there, like later on. At first, he's
really just focusing on the failure of vulgar Marxism to
even consider the character structure what he calls it, the
character structure of a society.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
When he also talks about this kind of like psychic
contradiction in people that like, on the one hand, you
could think of it that like the material condition also
create the potential for like kind of some kind of
revolutionary consciousness. But then at the same time people's personalities
are shaped by I think he talks about like authoritarian society,
right that like that like the society like kind of

(27:15):
primed people to be like obedient, nationalistic and like and
kind of like repress their emotions, right, And then that's
eventually going to lead to the discussion of like sexuality,
because he makes this connection between like an authoritarian society
I think, and this kind of sexual stuff that he
talks about later. So like he's kind of saying that
like the person structured, and like I think that I

(27:37):
think that's where like he talks about like ideology kind
of being a material effect that like I guess the
patterns of like this authority enterian society are based on
some kind of ideology, And I guess I was interested
in how like to what extent is that an idea
And to one extent is that just like a pattern
of behavior based on like group pressure or like maybe

(27:57):
those two things are the same thing. Maybe like idea.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
Is just that materialized that latter definition that you just gave,
that ideology is just what happens over and over again.
I find that's what I think ideology is, right. I
don't think ideology is ideas. And his example of this,
which I think is really awesome, he's like, you don't
need psychology to come in and explain why workers are

(28:24):
striking or why they're stealing bread because they don't have
enough money to buy it. You can say there's no
need for psychology to interfere there because there's cause material
effect material. But what you need psychology for, contra the
vulgar Marxist, what you need psychology for is to explain

(28:46):
why even when they are starving they don't steal, or
they don't strike, even when they're starving, they are okay
to die having not stolen. That's the thing that you
need that, that's the thing that you need psychology to
explain that. From his perspective, again, he is a Marxist,
but he says Ivolga Marxist can't explain why the majority

(29:09):
will still follow the rules even when it harms them physically.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
I love that lot. That is one of the greatest
lines here is like, yeah, why are people hungry not
stealing food? Why are workers who are being exploited not
immediately going on strike? Right because he says, the usual
line of discussion on this is just like opprobrium. It's
what we see today. People go on strike and the
news is like or whatever. The mouthpieces of the ruling

(29:36):
classes are all like, you know, all bad workers. They're
so unappreciative, they're so ungrateful for all they have. They're
going on strike, They're disrupting the economy. Who do these
people fucking think they are? Why are they striking? And
Reich is saying, that's not the question, are you insane?
The question like, all these people under exploitative, impoverished and

(29:57):
starving situations, how are they not striking and stealing and
causing shit? What is it that leads people? This is
like the question at the beginning of Deluze and Guattari's
book too, is like why do people prefer their chains?
You know, it's silly to say, you know, people were
fooled by Trump. No, they saw him as someone who
might come along and be a big breaker of chains,

(30:19):
somebody who will relieve them of this situation. They voted
him in not because they're bored, but because they're suffering,
you know, it would be the same sort of thing,
not because you know, the vulgar Marxist explanation is just
that they're irrationally acting against their own economically determined interests,
and we have to throw up our hands and just

(30:39):
say these people are insane. Now you can't do that.

Speaker 2 (30:42):
Now, let me let me just let me just quickly
intervene though about like the definition of ideologies these like
patterned repetitive behaviors, because I wonder, like, you know, if
there is a place for ideas there in the sense
that what's the like one of the things that helps
people continue you to repeat those behaviors are these rationalizations, right,

(31:03):
that get mutually reinforced. Right, people say like why are
we like why are we doing this? Right? And then
people will be like, well, they'll have like some story
about it, right, And then they'll like have some like
and they'll they'll self discipline each other. Right, They'll be like, well,
don't you want to be a member? I mean I
was actually thinking about it, Like I one time, actually
not that long ago, went for drinks with this master's

(31:25):
student I met at like a philosophy party and he's
very bizarre dude, and actually he listens to our podcasts,
so so like you know, so hey buddy, hey Luca.
Uh but uh like real like actually like a fascinating
amount of knowledge the guy has. But like we went

(31:45):
to get like like well we had we had a
drink and then I think we went to go get
like some food at this diner and he didn't tip.
And I was like horrified by this, right, and like
I could feel the like the ideology inside, I mean,
and he was kind of like, well, it's all bullshit.
And I remember having to just be like, well, dude,
like I get it, Like I agree with you. I mean,
I hate tipping when I'm in Europe. I'm just like, God,

(32:07):
this is so much better no tipping. But like we
do just live in a society like it. And I
kind of had the analogy to rudeness. It's like, you know,
I think that whatever stupid convention that we have at
the table are like arbitrary, but I also just like
understand the reality that like it's just rude to not
do these things. And I was like, whatever you think
about like the underlying logic of tipping, like it's just

(32:29):
a fact that the society we live in, like that's
just a rude thing to do.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Yeah, you wouldn't like, so wouldn't tip if you knew
if you're in another country, you would be polite and
try to follow the local customs. So if you were
aware that tipping is insulting, you wouldn't tip, just just
like here, not tipping is insulting.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
So I guess, like my point is, like this repetitive
behavior like is grounded in some kind of a rationalization. Uh,
that seems connected to ideas, I guess.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
I mean we can say ideological repetitive behavior though, like
ideology might be like a general pattern of thought that
impresses itself on individuals and you know, so it doesn't
really have much to do with ideas in the sense
that ideas are events in the heads of individual peoples
or events in the heads of individual brains. If that's

(33:22):
what you think ideas are, then yeah, okay, ideology has
nothing to do with that. It's a general pattern of that.
I don't know, it doesn't just come from the top down. However,
in this sort of you know, ruling class ideology perspective,
it actually that's why he's saying it first comes in
through the family, right through the authoritarian structure of the family.

(33:44):
That's where this kind of authoritarian fascist ideology. And that
was a question I had, as he does kind of
use the word authoritarian and fascism interchangeably sometimes, but this
is early days, so fine.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
But again, but the authoritarian structure of the fan is
like again, it's grounded in rationalizations. Right. There are post
maybe post talk rationalizations like well, you have to obey
your father because whatever. It's like, that's what the Bible
says or whatever the fuck you're saying, right, and it's
like why it's like and when you're a kid, you're like,
why do I have to do that? And it's like, well,
because I remember my dad being like because I told
you so or whatever. And then it's like, well, you're

(34:20):
supposed to listen to and it's like sometimes it'll be nonsense,
but then other times it'll be like, you know, rationalizations
that can make varying degrees of no sense to some sense,
you know, So I don't know, I mean, I whatever.
I'm not trying to like make this about ideas. I
just thought thought it's it just made me think about that,
you know, when I was reading this, like, to what

(34:40):
extent is this Like obviously it just probably comes down
to what we mean by ideas, right or in ideology,
and if those two things are well, yeah, all the same.
I guess it just I guess it does just sometimes
seem a bit too like strong to be like it's
just like material conditions all the way down, Like there's
a trivial sense in which that's true, like like and

(35:03):
I don't know, maybe it's just like that that the
division between I mean, as a kind of Mary Lepontian,
I mean, I do kind of think that everything is
just like in a sense material embodied gestures, right, including thought,
So in that sense, that sort of trivial sense, there
is no idea per se that is, like, you know,
not part of the material. But then but I feel

(35:24):
like there's a different kind of distinction that's trying to
be made. I don't know if this is like just
unhelpful to this discussion, but first of.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
All, like to understand what you're saying, we'd have to
understand what idea means. And I don't think we're using
idea in the same way. Yeah, exactly, But we've already
talked about this for like twenty episodes on religion. Ideology
is original religion the same thing as is ieology. True.
But I think the thing that's important for here is
that ideology changes slower than material conditions. So you have

(35:53):
like specific gender roles that function, or sexual roles, as
this guy would say, but you have sexuality that is
necessary for the functioning of society in one time, in
one period he calls it an epoch of capitalism. But
then the material conditions change, and if stuff changes too fast,
then reactionary has always turned to ideology, even if the

(36:15):
ideology is contradictory.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
One thing I wanted to bring up, and we are
going to have to circle around and then come back
to where we are right here, is the nineteen twenties.
I didn't know this. I learned that from this article.
There was a huge outbreak of syphilis after World War One.
And if you have the outbreak of syphilis, this puts

(36:41):
it was like a It was a public panic. I
mean for good reasons, because syphlis can kill you, but
there was a public panic around it. And this is
where you get a reactionary sense of sexual purity being
kind of enforced or ideologically enforced, which didn't exist prior

(37:01):
because obviously these guys are going and get their get
their nuts off while they're were they're fighting in World
War One, so they're getting.

Speaker 3 (37:07):
Syphilis, tons of soldiers, all using the same prostitutes.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
But Reich connects this, yeah, I know, Reich connects this
idea of the purity of the blood with the Nazi
idea of the purity of the family, which means Daddy
can't go screw prostitutes anymore. And also to the purity
of you know, the Aryan blood and these these toxic influences.

(37:34):
So where was it going with this?

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (37:36):
Yeah, the sexual the sexual ideology that the middle class,
especially the lower middle class, and I'd like to get
into his division of the classes, but they they re
adopt a much more i don't know what you'd call it,
puritan traditional sense of family sexuality then had existed prior
to that, and it's all these things are connected, the

(37:59):
purity of the blood, the syphilis outbreak, the falling back
onto the family structure as an economic unit. Anyway, I
just wanted to make sure that we got to that
because I found that really interesting and I had never
heard of that before, but it kind of makes sense
with the blood purity sort of talk.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yeah, I know for sure.

Speaker 3 (38:18):
I want to emphasize that point you made about the
ideology chant the superstructure, whatever you want to call it,
change is slower than the material conditions, because that's really
important here, right, because when we talk about the material conditions, well,
we're largely including like the forces of production, which means

(38:41):
like the means of production and the labor power and
the relations of production too, right, like the relations that
people enter into and interact with the production forces of
production through like you know, you have relationships with your coworkers,
you have the owner and the people who don't own things,
the property relations, you have your bosses, whatever, all that stuff, right, So,

(39:06):
and then the ideology is supposed to match that, right, Like,
you have this superstructure that emerges on top of it,
including which actually includes politics, law and other and religion
and other things too, And so that superstructure changes slowly,
then more slowly than the base. Right. And then part

(39:26):
of the problem he's trying to open up is like, well,
how does that happen? Does how do we get this
thing we call tradition which is always kind of backward looking,
and we also have this immensely productive base. Right Like, again,
the capitalist class is the most revolutionary class we've seen
in history. Right, They're always revolutionizing the means of production.

(39:48):
I mean, look just look at the difference between today
and Reich's time, right, completely different economic basis, and the
superstructure and the ideological superstructure tends to sort of drag
behind that. So what causes that, right, Like, they're supposed
to be according to the vulgar Marxist, this sort of
spontaneous coincidence, not a cleavage, but a spontaneous coincidence between

(40:12):
the base and the superstructure. And yet that's not happening.
And that happens, Actually, that cleavage happens to such a
degree where the people whose best interests would be to
support social democracy or even better, communism are actually going
to the other side and supporting the people who want
to kick them while they're down. Right, they want to
get they want to get kicked in the face while

(40:35):
they're down and not improve their situation, which is obviously
kind of unfair. But it's happening anyway, that the lower
middle classes are flocking. And he says here it's the
it's was precisely the wretched masses who helped put fascism
extreme political reaction into power. And I think that that

(40:57):
also brings up the point of he considers fascism to
be extreme political reaction. That's like one of the ways
he kind of what do you call that? That's a
positive he uses with fascism, right, extreme political reaction, reaction
to what the rise of communism? Which is that part
of history I was talking about at the beginning that

(41:18):
always gets left out of this interwar period is the right,
is the rise of fascism as a reaction against socialism
and communism. But anyway, I just wanted to emphasize that
point because now we get to the familiar argument where
actually the the ideological superstructure does turn around and react
upon the economic base and change things. Right, It's not

(41:41):
just a one directional thing. It's a two directional thing.
But the problem is, and the main question he's trying
to answer here is like why and how does that happen?
How does it looking back at the title, how does
ideology become a material force that shapes history?

Speaker 2 (42:00):
That's the whole thing, And just quickly I want out
of the reason I got so fixated on that Idea's
question is just because it was interesting to me that,
you know, subtitles are ideology as a material.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
Force, ideology? Yeah, how does this reactive ideology take hold
of people? And what you said earlier, I just want
to sorry, one more emphasis is the difference between individual
and group psychology, right, just just as much as within
the group, we see divisions, right, we see conservative and
progressive forces at play within individuals. I'm surprised you are

(42:33):
Lakhanian split subjects. Lights didn't light up here, pills, But yeah,
even the subject is split, right, he says, even within workers,
there's the battle between the conservative forces and the progressive forces,
and your economic situation does not determine which one of
those forces wins out in your personality. It's actually part

(42:56):
of the it's you know, we have to get into
this cleavage idea to explain how sometimes your economic situation
does not actually determine your political consciousness. It actually is
determined in a way that is completely out of line
with your economic situation. That's again, that's another way to
phrase the question he's trying to answer here, and.

Speaker 1 (43:19):
His answer to the question is sex psycho sexuality.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
Sexual repression.

Speaker 3 (43:26):
Yeah, just a fine crack at the question.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
It's a it's a good crack. But if you at the.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
Time, at the time, it kind of made sense. It
reminds me of Freud Freud's civilization it's discontent too, because
his answer there too like sexual repression.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
Or sexual repression. So you have you really have to
read this text contextually and then metaphorize it for you
to get anything out of it, because otherwise you're just like, oh, yeah,
I'm repressed because my dad doesn't let me fuck my bom.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
Maybe Lacan was onto something kind of divesting all of
that of its over sexuality.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
Which is of course still a split subject. It's just
one reality is. There's no symbolic here. It's just it's
just a sexual desire, which is later in the twentieth
century changed to desire in general, which makes a lot
more sense, maybe because it's more abstract, so it's less
irritating to think about sexuality for philosopher types. But anyway,

(44:22):
I wanted to get to we have to get to
who caused Hitler, because Hitler did not cause Nazism. According
to Reich, Hitler is what we might call an expression
and He's an expression of the most ps psycho sexually
repressed class, which is the lower middle class. So this

(44:46):
is where I found a lot of parallels to our
current historical moment and America and trump Ism and who
supports Trump versus who nominally opposes Trump. Because the lower
middle class they are always sex actually anxious because they
can't compete with the upper middle class or the upper class.
And you tend this is according to Reich, not according

(45:09):
to me, but for him, the lower class is more
sexually libertine, I guess, and the upper class is more
sexually libertine because they can afford cortisans. And the working class,
I guess they're just so they're so rough that they
go to work instead of going to church. So get
you get all the moralism is like condensed in the

(45:31):
lower middle class because they're competing with the upper middle class.
Now the upper sorry just finished this distinction. The upper
middle class, these are there are people with cosmopolitan interests,
not like nationalist interests, because they own basically big businesses.

(45:52):
So Reich does not give an exact definition here of
what the lower class, the lower middle class versus the
upper middle class is, but you can infer a little
bit here that like family businesses, where the lower middle
class they might have like the family grocery store, then
the upper middle class would be those with a grocery
store chain. Now I don't know where professionals like lawyers

(46:13):
and accountants and doctors fit into this, but presumably they
are not in They're not in conflict. They are not
in class conflict with the upper middle class the way
that the lower middle class is in conflict with the
you know, the bigger stores, the guys with more money
that are out competing you in the marketplace. Now, the
upper middle class is more concerned with cosmopolitan stuff, like

(46:37):
not nationalist borders. They're they're they're less concerned with immigrants
because immigrants can work for them, they might have business
in other countries. And the lower middle class then these
are the guys. These are like the plumbers, the small professionals.
Maybe you own your own little accounting office. Basically they
have the same living standards as the working class, the

(47:01):
industrial working class, and they always feel this anxiety because
they can't there's something preventing them from moving up the chain.
But they're also really moralistic, like religious, So this is
the basis for Reich about how the family becomes this
economic unit, and I think he says the majority of Germany,

(47:26):
or a huge amount of German society is in this section,
like small business owners, and this is where the Nazi
support really comes from, because they're sexually frustrated, they're stuck
in this moral system, probably religious, and then they always
have to compete with the lack of upward mobility, especially

(47:49):
in an economically trying time.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Yeah, well, it's interesting. It kind of reminded me of
what you were saying. They're also of you know that
scene in Titanic that Jijik talks about that kind of
shows like the upper class than in contrast to the
lower class, and like the laws they're like libertine in
a way, but like that they're so like they're dancing
and they're just kind of like and then the upper
class are like although I guess what's hidden, Like the
upper class libertinism is more like it's kind of in

(48:14):
the shadows. It's hidden. It's just I don't know if
you guys have been watching Handmaid's Tale, right, but like
in Handmaid's Tale, they're all like, you know, they're they're
all it's obviously like this intense sexual morality. But then
of course all the like commanders, the like leaders have
like a brothel that they go to like on their
off time, right even, But I guess the other thing
that that was interesting to me, right like, and I

(48:35):
was also thinking about what you were thinking about pills
in terms of how is this story about sexual repression
like applicable today with trump ism? Because I feel like
on its face, I was kind of like thinking also
in terms of Gijack and Lacan, but specifically what Gijack
was saying, how you know, back in Freud's time, sexual
people would feel ashamed for feeling too much sexual desire, right,

(48:58):
but like now it's like reverse store, like they feel
for not enjoying enough sexual desire. So like, initially on
its face, like reading this, I was like, this is
kind of like a dated story of like the old
Freudian time, but like but I still think like in
a way it holds, And I guess because it's in
this he's sort of talking about that like sexual repression

(49:19):
causes people, I guess to be like afraid of authority
and like suspicious of freedom and like you know, so
whereas like it seems like now like the repression is
almost having an opposite effect but leading to the same outcome.
So like people are like angry at authority, right, Like
that's the way it comes out, rather than being afraid

(49:40):
of it. So it's like, so like these kinds of
you know, what's what's it called the like the paradigmatic manosphere? Dude, yeah,
entertain right, So like instead of like the repression being
like I'm afraid of authority, therefore I'm going to submit
to the fascist, it's like a hatred of author already
being and therefore I'm going to follow this fascist and

(50:03):
like fuck you libs, right like, So I don't know,
there's so it's like so because initially I was like
this doesn't fit, but then I was like, well, maybe
it fits in this kind of reversed upside down way,
you know, kind of like the same way Jijak says.
You know, oh, people think Freudianism doesn't fit because everyone's
everything is like all advertising, its sexualized. It's sexual liberation.
But it kind of fits, but in the opposite way

(50:24):
where people are feeling shame for like not having enough sex,
right or something like that. And I wonder if somehow
this also holds with like the story of I mean, anyway,
that's my best attempt to kind of like be charitable
and say, like this is still super applicable today. I
don't know if that makes sense to you guys, but
that's how I was trying to think about it.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
Well. You can see it in the structure of QAnon, right,
because the QAnon is the lower middle class. Precisely, they
hate the rich because the rich are too libertine sexually.
You know, they're performing sex rituals, they're pedophiles. All of
this has to do with their this this free sexuality
that they don't have access to. They are also like

(51:05):
Evangelical Christians, which are which are They're They're pretty high
up there on the Puritan scale, and yet they follow Trump,
who's like a three time married pornstar and fucking sexual deviant.
And Elon Musk, I mean, I guess they're split up now,
but Elon Musk, who's who sends vials of a seamen
to women in the male These are sexually strange people,

(51:30):
but the base of Trump is them are Evangelical Christians
basically on a one to one ratio, But.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
There are also those other quarters, right, because they talk
about Trump supporters as being split up between like, well,
there's the evangelicals, but then there's like the barstool conservatives,
right who I think fit with like kind of the manosphere,
where like they're not really religious, but like they're I mean,
but there is the all the in cells who follow
them to who are into it, and like there is.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
We wait, who's who's preventing this set the in cells
from having sex? I mean, it's just it's the women
who are inspired by feminism right now, they are allowed
to deny them sex, so they're.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
They're rubbing it in their face in the media and
like being like everyone should be having a.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
There is kind of a right wing version of this argument.

Speaker 1 (52:12):
Now. Yeah, Reich says this about the middle class. They
rebel against the system in crisis, which is immediately understandable.
What is not understandable socioeconomically is the fact that the
middle class, already popularized nevertheless, are afraid of progress and
become extremely reactionary.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
Yeah, that's what the sexual repression and this authoritarian family
structure creates obedience, It creates fearfulness of authority. It tends
to make people want to seek irrational mystical views and
like that self helpy kind of stuff he brings up
here to the self help psychology of cure or whatever

(52:54):
his name was. Parties. Now my understanding and the reason
I explained why there is no Communists or even Social
Democrat party. And there is a split left though kind
of I don't know in Canada a bit in this.
In the States there's split support between the squad and
the Centrists. But yeah, I my impression is that many

(53:16):
workers also support like what he would classify here in
his ideological structure as workers. I think a lot of
them did support Trump, although I'm not sure, but this
would you'd have to see, did all the workers vote
for the for the Democrats and all but all the
lower middle class people voted for Trump? If that were
the case as he's defined as Reich defines them here.

(53:39):
If that were the case, then this analysis would fit
absolutely perfectly. And I really regret I should have gone
and tried to find some economic data. I did, but
they divide things up so differently.

Speaker 2 (53:50):
I don't think Trump won. I don't think he won
working class votes quite but but it's getting very close.
So like, yeah, he used to be.

Speaker 3 (54:00):
In that case, even in that case, I think I
find it unconvincing, maybe for the reason that perhaps the
data doesn't align. But even in that case, right could
help us explain why the workers would be voting for Trump,
though according to him, the workers are voting for Trump
because of these authoritarian structures that are endemic to American society.

Speaker 2 (54:24):
I do want to add its interesting. I do know
for a fact though, that this last time that Trump won,
his share of the vote got better in every single
demographic except two. So like every single demographic, Trump is
winning way more votes. Like he's not like winning overall more,
but he improved in every single demographic except for highly

(54:48):
educated people and wealthy people. So the highly educated and
the highly wealthy start went a bit more for the Democrats,
but every single other demographic improved quite a lot for Trump,
including race, like lower class.

Speaker 3 (55:05):
Yeah, and to be absolutely blunt, the workers don't actually
have a party to vote for that's been on there,
that's on their side. So even if the workers wanted
to vote for social Democrats or for communist parties, they
don't exist anymore. They're gone. Like what would a worker
in the States, who out there is going to support

(55:26):
my interests? Who do I vote for, there's nobody. The
Democrats they don't give a shit about you. The Republicans,
they don't give a shit about you. This Reich society
assumes that switched on, woken up workers who are aware
of their situation have somebody to vote for. They'll go
vote for the Communist Party, They'll go vote for the
Social Democratic Party. Today you don't have that. You just

(55:48):
have both parties lying and trying to grab most of
the votes. So there's also that a lot of comparison problems.
I'll say. The last thing that makes this unconvincing is,
you know, the sexual revolution was not a huge success
in you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll did
not liberate everybody's minds and bodies. And you know, works

(56:09):
like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are kind of
critical of this whole you know, freedom through drugs and
sex and libertine behavior kind of thing. You know, that
whole like last Gasp of the sixties kind of stuff
going on in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas like that. Also,
you know, we've experimented with these kinds of sexual politics.

(56:31):
I think in the past, the sixties and seventies, did
it and it turned out to be a big failure
because what happened after the sixties, reactionary politics set right
back in again and we get and we get thirty
forty years of neoliberal demolition squads.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
But the pill, for example, means that you can do
sex and you're not going to have a bunch of
fatherless children running around, because that's the reason to control
sexuality is because you don't want fatherless children and running around.
They're they're a drain on the system, so to speak.

Speaker 3 (57:04):
But after wonomic explanation, and then.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
You have, yeah, it's liber a little bit of libertinism
in subsets of the economy they are free. And then
what do you have, like seventies, you get like the
oil shock, you have an economic crisis, then you blame
sexual libertinism for the problem, for the economic problem. So
I think this kind of fits perfectly with that. And

(57:27):
then similarly you have a backlash over STDs and the
AIDS epidemic and don't don't have sex or you're gonna die.
The moral panics, right, the moral panics that surround that
as well. It's like whenever whenever you see an economic downturn,
then in at least Reich's terms, it's not something I

(57:48):
totally agree with. But then the the economic downturn is
expressed by like sexual intensity, not necessarily sexuality, but either
it can be a On the other side, it could
be reactionary anti sexuality, like Project twenty twenty five try
to ban ban pornography, like that's gonna go right well.

Speaker 3 (58:11):
Or even just look at their rhetoric against whatever they
think wokism, Marxist communism, stuff they think everyone they want
to destroy the family, right, and like those sorts of
that sort of overblown fear of like sexual liberation politics
that is just part of the anti woke rhetoric. Is yeah,

(58:32):
perfectly indicative of what you just said. Yeah, like start
going on witch hunts, blame sex, gay marriage, start controlling
women more, start banning stuff, start start banning abortions, start
banning you know, sexual reproductive control, start you know whatever,

(58:53):
getting religious, getting enforcing religious values because we've got to
get back to those we're losing our traditions, right, Like,
you know, all that stuff is reactive politics. It fits
pretty nicely in with what Reich is saying here, is
like reaction the fascist is a reactive politics, and.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
You have to see how it's processed too right, because
it's not. It is accompanied or the inciting event is
like economic uncertainty. But as soon as you have economic uncertainty,
then what he calls the psychosexuality of the lower middle
class and the middle class, they need to revert. They

(59:35):
need to go back to the ideology that worked. What
is it. It's a fantasy of pre sixties. It's a
fantasy of the nineteen fifties when no one cheated on
their wives, when there was no pornography. And then they
get this someone who speaks that language, even though he
doesn't represent that at all. This doesn't matter, Like Reich says,
contradictions do not matter. There's no argument here. Hyler even

(59:58):
says like you just need to present the end goal
at all times, don't get bogged down in arguments, implying
that you know, if we get bogged down in arguments,
we're gonna lose. So let's have that's a bunch of
evangelical Christians. Let's have a three time divorced, porn star,
fucking sexual deviant. Let's have him lead us into the

(01:00:19):
new Christian future where we get rid of gay's, trans
abortion and whatever else.

Speaker 3 (01:00:27):
Yeah, that is kind of fun That is a kind
of a funny disconnect, is that? Yeah, for for the
for the masses, it's sexual repression and for the select
few on top, it's just complete, no holds barred sexual gratification.
Right like now that now that, now that musk is
out and reminding us also kindly that Trump was very

(01:00:51):
good friends with Epstein, a sex trafficker. You know, it's
always the it's always these moral these beacons of morale
that are also the source of the worst sexual transgressions ever,
Like who's been who is the moral arbiter of what
you could see on fucking movies for most of the
twentieth century was like the Christian right and their control

(01:01:14):
over Hollywood. Where do you find all this pedophile and
sex trafficking rings fucking Hollywood?

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
Man?

Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
Like they come from the same place. I'm not even
gonna mention the Catholic Church. But like, then look at
the republic just Republican politics in general. They're all so
on the surface like just sex is, you know, a
moral conundrum and then privately they're fucking freaks.

Speaker 1 (01:01:37):
Well that's exactly what you would expect from if Reich
is correct, because he says that this authoritarianism is about
eradicating sexual pleasure. He says the only purpose of the
church and the state is to eradicate sexual pleasure. Now,
I think that's a little bit it's a little bit overstated.
But if you change sexual pleasure to something like manage

(01:02:00):
desire or make sure that desire doesn't get out of control,
or give you things to pay attention to to seduce
your desire so that you don't focus on politics, then
I don't know, that seems like a pretty reasonable explanation
of ideology.

Speaker 3 (01:02:13):
Well, the first argument whenever you start to argue for
like maybe opening up on our sexual moras a little bit,
the first argument is always that you're going to start
blurring the line between like acceptable and unacceptable sex, Like
you know, Fuco's out there, you know, saying, you know, okay,
we need to fix our sexual politics. Suddenly books are
coming out about how he's a pedophile, which are probably untrue,

(01:02:35):
But that's just how the ideology industry works.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
I can back this up with a quotation. At times
of political upheaval of the total social organization, the conflict
between sexuality and compulsive morality becomes most acute. And then
he says there's a sexual or one team interprets a
sexual revolution, as the other team interprets as a collapse

(01:03:02):
in morality and a decline of culture. And I thought
this was apt because it is basically verbatim what the
what the conservative factions say, like when civilizations start race
mixing that was a Hitler quote, but that when civilizations
start to race mix then you're witnessing a decline of culture,

(01:03:25):
whereas the other team interprets the decline of culture as
you know, less less repressive sexual laws.

Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
Like I don't know about Trump's sex life, but there's
been enough scandals and definitely musk, you know, just like
jizzinging cups and mailing them all over the place. Like
they're definitely not that they definitely are connected with their
their orgone or their organ energies at whatever right calls
the sexual energy, there is definitely there. They're not like

(01:03:55):
these stereotypical portrayals of like sexually frustrated young men like
Hitler in cells who are taking it out on the world.
They've more followed that pattern of yeah, like sex for me,
but morality for you, Like complete sexual freedom for me,
but you know, you have to control yourself. You the
proletariat needs to reproduce the base of society, so you

(01:04:19):
can't just go around banging whoever you want. I can
as a capitalist, but you cannot. So it just seems
there's a stereotypical idea out there that sexual repression leads
to violence and insanity.

Speaker 1 (01:04:35):
And there is a contradiction, right because they hate the elites. Now,
from our Marxist position, we'd say, yes, the elites are
the problem. But what is the problem for the conspiracy
theorists with the elites. It's their sexually to liberate it
because they're they're pedophiles, so they're they're breaking these sexual rules,

(01:04:57):
and it's it's it's not without true. It's obvious. There's
there's Epstein and Epstein's Epstein's friends, and Trump, who's an
Epstein friend. But the contradiction here is they don't apply
it to their guys. They just apply it to whoever,
Oh he's a white hat pedophile or head or something
like that. They apply it only to their enemies, and

(01:05:18):
they get to pick who their enemies are.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
So I don't know, I'm still I'm still kind of
struggling to think about what it's like now. And like
like these Trump supporters who are kind of like unable
to whereas like the story Reichs telling is really like
the kind of classic story, like I said, of like
sexual repression. I don't know, like if you guys disagree
with that, but that's just how I'm I've been sort
of thinking about it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
I think this would make a lot more sense, like
I've been saying since the beginning, if we turned away
from the sexuality part of energy and the littlebitial part
of energy and just called it called it energy, right,
Like you can see this energy on display, And of
course maybe the sexual a something, maybe it doesn't. But

(01:06:02):
the energy of like Trump and a Trump rally, as
opposed to the pseudo pretend to be energy of some
of the Democratic candidates, like the Cringey attempt to drum
up support, you can see why someone would not be
attracted to that. And I'm not saying like sexually but

(01:06:23):
kind of sexually libit in eally, the right wing seems
a lot more fun. It seems like it has a
lot more energy, despite the fact that there are a
bunch of like Catholic converts and evangelical whatever they are.
But it's just it's a contradiction. It's a contradiction, like
he says, but if you look at it on TV,

(01:06:43):
one side's having way more fun and the other side
is being prude and finger wagging. So of course the
libital energy is on one side, whereas maybe fifteen years
ago it was reverse.

Speaker 2 (01:06:55):
I'm not sure, but it's still I mean, I mean,
I think that's a better analysis, but I'm still just
trying to stick with what Reich is saying, and it just,
you know, it just does seem to me that like
the crucial point for him is that, like, because we
have this sexual repression, that's what makes us obedient, right like,
and therefore subject to fascism, right Like that's the kind

(01:07:15):
of the logical connection that I see in him. He's saying,
because at the home we're like repressed, we're told to
like suppress those things. Then we become like obedient and
basically open to being like told what to do, and
therefore that makes it possible for fascism to take root,
which is really different than what you're saying, but which
I agree with that Like, actually it's about like where

(01:07:37):
is this libidinal energy happening that like tempts us toward it, right,
So it's not about obedience, but it's about actually being
drawn to like what's more energizing, what's more fun.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
Well, here I'll just explain it. Like if this is
his version is Freud, what I just said is lacan. Yeah,
like where's the where's the pleasure of upsetting the elite?
Because that's that's one thing Reich says exactly, He's like,
what the what the lower middle class wants because they
resent the upper class because they can never get that,

(01:08:08):
they can never move that high. They want to piss
them off, if nothing else, so they elect they elect Trump,
they elect Hitler. Hitler says, I'm gonna stick it to
big business, and then he of course reverses positions, but
he presents himself basically as an anti capitalist at the start.

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
And here Reike mentions that Hitler was anti upper middle class.

Speaker 1 (01:08:30):
They want to piss off the people that they cannot
be and that instead of like that's what he calls rebellion,
what Right calls rebellion is just having sex when you're
not allowed to. But the juissance aspect of the same thing.
When La Khan interprets Freud is rebellion, that pisses off
the other the father that's supposed to be watching you.

(01:08:52):
So I think if you lakhanianized this, it would make
a lot more sense for our current situation.

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
Yeah, I agree. Do you guys think that maybe there's
there's like a historical like there's a historical explanation, because
like I I was always somewhat persuaded by like that
Gijak story that like, oh, like there actually was a
time or at least who he was talking to, right,
kind of like upper class Austrians or whatever, where like

(01:09:20):
their motivation did seem to be more like repression, right,
and then and then it like changed later I don't.

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):
Know, you mean sexual repression.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
Yes, that like back then, like the thing that was
like that, like that you that analysts observed in analysis
was like a lot of like fear of of like
of the of their own desire like kind of overflowing
out of them and like shame. It's like, oh God,
I want to I want this, Oh my god, like
I want to have sex with like whatever, my this
donkey at my farm, and it's like, you know, whatever,

(01:09:51):
whatever the fucking crazy example you can think of. And
then like now it's like the opposite. It's it's it's like, uh,
it's like shit, like should I be experimenting more? Should
I be enjoying more? And I don't know, I just
feel like that also maps on a little bit, at
least I'm trying to make the half hearted case at
least that that like when you think about the structure

(01:10:12):
of fascism, it's like, now, it's like, well, like those
people are like I should be having more fun, and
it's like, well, who are the ones who are having
more fun?

Speaker 3 (01:10:20):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:10:20):
It's like, yeah, anyway, I don't know, I don't want
to like the labor that point that I'm kind of
trying to develop, But.

Speaker 3 (01:10:26):
It does seem like he's connecting authoritarianism, sexual repression, the
prohibition of a rebellion, and the authority of the state
and its representatives. So there, yeah, there is a kind
of pro authority kind of thing he's saying, and you know,

(01:10:48):
the desire to follow a leader, the desire to have
a strong man.

Speaker 2 (01:10:52):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:10:52):
I always think it's it's very contradictory, you know, like
when you present this face of sexuality, but then your
politics are anti sexuality. You know, it just seems like
there's always something some something on the face of it
like that, and then but the substance is actually the opposite,
you know, Well, that's.

Speaker 2 (01:11:12):
That's why it's that's why it's interesting to me that
now that now like people who are into Trump and
like into that authoritarianism, like whereas authoritarianism, like the way
that Reich is framing it, is something that is like
somehow maintaining moral rules that were primed by the family.
It's like, if anything, now, like Trump is the more
subversive one, right, It's like that's the one that is

(01:11:35):
pushing against the norms, and it's the Democrats who are like,
you know, the fucking more moralist, boring people who are
like maintaining our shame and maintaining our like you know,
as I remember seeing a tweet after the day after
Trump won his second term, someone was like, oh, the
institution that people associate most with the Democratic Party is
like their human resources department right at work. That's like

(01:11:56):
always policing, right, policing boundaries. And it's just weird that
like the fascist is the one that everyone is at
least perceiving, who are supporters as like the subversive one,
the one who's pushing against norms.

Speaker 3 (01:12:09):
Right, But that's what I meant to, Like, you know,
Trump presents himself as subversive and anti establishment, but I
don't think that's the case.

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
I think it's just I agree with you on many
grounds when it comes to cultural war issues though, Like
he is subversive, right, which is the thing that people
stupidly get fixated on, right, Like of course, economically and
like when it comes to like capital, of course he's
not subversive, of course not, but like people are so
fucking fixated by cultural war issues that he's the one

(01:12:42):
who's like, oh nice, we can laugh at comedy again, right,
that's Trump. It's like, okay, we can laugh at like
subversive comedy and all the cultural war stuff that doesn't
really actually matter to the like material conditions. Right, But
it's still but there is still some kind of psychical
allure of like, ooh, the subversive one, the cool ones
who are like, you know, pushing up against the man.

Speaker 3 (01:13:03):
It does seem like they do use this rhetoric of yeah,
they feel so stifled, they can't tell jokes and the
joy comedy, they can't have sex with who they want
because sex has been ruined by the feminists and whatever,
And yeah, it does seem like they do adopt that
kind of Yeah, and it is very culturally, it's very

(01:13:27):
subversive and I don't know, but it's.

Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
A trojan but it's a trojan horse maybe for like
for a return. That's the thing, Like it's maybe a
trojan horse. Where well, I mean we're seeing it, right,
I mean, look at what the fuck the government's actually doing. Right,
Trump is just like deporting people, like like.

Speaker 3 (01:13:42):
The fascism that the fascism, you know, it's it's common
for a politician to present themselves is something different, that's
not a surprise. But the fascism that Reich is analyzing too,
don't forget, is a reaction against again, like very far
left politics that were institutionalized, right Like the politics that

(01:14:04):
fascism is in reaction to. Like what Reich is analyzing,
the stuff it's reacting to is like way to the
left of the Overton window today, right, Like the stuff
that Trump and the MAGA movement is reacting to is
basically centrist democratic politics. Like that's what it is. They're
not reacting. I mean they use the rhetoric of I mean,

(01:14:27):
calling Kamala Harris and Trudeau communists is just betrays the
most basic misunderstandings of politics in history. But that's how
they're doing it, because that's actually that is an echo
of old fascism, is to present their opponents as the communists,
as the far left, when really their opponents are just

(01:14:50):
the establishment center Democratic Party, who are just you know,
lukewarm moralists. You know, they represent, you know, as if
Trump clears all that away and the Democratic Party's values
are completely turned on their head, there would just be
a new regime of sexual repression taking its place, whereas

(01:15:12):
just a different version of authoritarianism, whereas you know, communism
and what Reich is promoting is fundamentally opposed to all
forms of authoritarianism. Worker democracy means no concentration of capital
in the hands of a few, and all the Democratic
and Republican parties and their supporters want to do is

(01:15:32):
just shift around the few hands that capitalism is concentrated in.
They don't actually want to democratize anything, not to speak
of control of the means of production and the whole
property system that props up capitalism. Right. So, yeah, there's
a very big contextual problem with comparing the Like Reich's

(01:15:53):
analysis of fascism in the thirties, to like, what the
fuck's happening today? But and then, but as we've pointed
out and I think observed, there is a lot that
is quite prophetic and far sighted written in here too.
Even if we sort of think, oh, you know, the
sexual Revolution didn't quite you know, we tried that maybe

(01:16:15):
and it didn't work. Not in the same sense that
we tried Marxism and it didn't work. We just didn't
try it right. It was vulgarized, it was turned in,
it was sloganized and vulgarized and turned and completely turned
into economic determinism. Like for him here he's saying, and
this is hard to believe, but you know, the vulgar

(01:16:36):
Marxists disregarded any explanation that started with ideology had a
role to play in what happened here. They just disregard that.
They think that that is woo woo. He says. They
consider it to be metaphysics, you know, the old fucking
Marxist chestnut of like, it's either materialism or idealism, and

(01:16:59):
if it's idealism, then it's bourgeois. And if it's bourgeois,
it's rooted in metaphysics, and and so any so all
psychology is really just bourgeois metaphysics, and that's just then
vulgar Marxisms, Like that's our position, let's move on now.
And Reich is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what the fuck?

Speaker 1 (01:17:17):
And Reich is sure to say, if Marx were reading this,
he would agree with me, because Marx was not a
vulgar Marxist, he says.

Speaker 3 (01:17:23):
He's saying, my ideas are rooted in Marx.

Speaker 1 (01:17:26):
He pulls a quote from Marx to say Marx would
have agreed with him several All right, well, I think
that's a good place to end. I don't know if
we are in fascism psycho sexual fascism or not, but
there's there's an overlap. There's something to see here.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
Interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:17:44):
How's our Yeah, we got to check on how the
sex economy? How's the sex economy doing? And does it?
Does it bear out what Reich is talking about here for.

Speaker 2 (01:17:54):
Today a solid reading none the less?

Speaker 3 (01:17:57):
That's so sure.

Speaker 1 (01:17:57):
We got women in the workforce, we got kids in daycare.
This the family has been destroyed. Yeay, we got the
gaze getting married.

Speaker 3 (01:18:06):
Yeah, but yeah, then you have the opposite. Abortion and
birth control is all being banned. Have you got these contradictions.
You know that those are the contradictions that we find
inside ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:18:20):
That's also I think that all fits though. You cannot
choose your own preferences over the family, because the family
has to return to this position of sacredness.

Speaker 3 (01:18:29):
It's it's the factory of the worker, the factory what
does he called the family. It's like the factory of
authoritarian ichology.

Speaker 1 (01:18:37):
Yeah, he's like, he says, it's the colonel, the fascist state.
That's what do you want instead? All right, that's it
from us, Thank you everyone.

Speaker 3 (01:18:47):
All right, till next time, keep it in your pants.