Re: Who ya gonna call? CLOUDBUSTERS!

[roofus@.cs.clemson.edu (James A. Drenter)]

In article rj4@Mercury.mcs.com, jorn@MCS.COM (Jorn Barger) writes:
> ...
> Aaron offers, re Cloudbusting:
> > I think that she is talking about fear in general. If you
> > have a talent for something, that other people will try to take away
> > from you-- don't be afraid to use it. If you don't use it, then you have
> > nothing. What good is a glow in the dark yo yo if it's buried in
> > the garden?  None.
>  
> This is tricky, because Wilhelm's role re the yoyo was analogous to the
> government's role re Reich.  Is Kate saying Reich was as wong to fear the
> yoyo, as the USA was to fear WR?  I imagine she'd still be comfortable with
> her image even if it was proved that the yoyo *was* dangerous.  (I think at
> that time they really used radioactivity in those things.  Our friend, the
> atom!)
>
> ... later ...
> I'm not sure if it was supposed to emit DOR, or change good orgone into bad.
> One of the most vivid Orgonon stories is how DOR was discovered when someone
> did the experiment of putting something radioactive into an orgone box, and
> the result, supposedly, was that the vibes got so unbearable they had to
> evacuate the lab for days, weeks, months.
>  

The glow-in-the-dark yoyo was taken from an event in the young Peter's life.
He had such a yoyo, and following an experiment with an orgone collector and
radium, Wilhelm concluded even small amount of radioactive substances were
dangerous and made Peter bury the yoyo.

There are numerous biographies of Wilhelm Reich available, other than Peter's.
You may be surprised that while the good Dr. was and is a fringe scientist, he
wasn't completely wacked.  His research methods were impecible, he was an
extremely experienced observer of both people and nature.  Most people who
look at what he did won't argue that he had discovered *something* -- exactly
what no one seems to know.
But his experiments were repeatable, and often had rather unexpected results
(e.g. the experiment Jorn mentions, where trying to amplify the effect of an
orgone collector with radioactivity increased the radioactivity of a sliver of
radium enough to give everyone in a lab radiation poisoning).  This is the kind
of thing which is really hard to explain away with our current understanding of 
radiactive emmisions.

The fact is, Reich was treated as a fringe scientist even then, and he became
very paranoid, especially of the government.  Furthermore, he attributed more and
more to Orgone energy (sort of a "Reichian Unification Theory" :), and never
questioned his original hypothesis.  His paranoia and extensive belief in Orgone
energy--which he felt was being ignored by the scientific community (which it was)
--led him to write "Listen, Little Man" in 1948.  It was, rather blatantly, a
scathing attack on his critics using both the accepted technique of showing the
fallacies of some of their statements, and the unaccepted technique of attacking
them personally by questioning their ethics and abilities.  An excellent example
of this was that once, during the FDA trial, he became furious and proclaimed
loudly that he would "flood the whole town" to show them the validity of what he
was doing.  The judge was less than amused.


> He made claims that orgone therapy cured cancer.  That was their sole case
> against him.  There's NO evidence those claims were *tested* before he was
> imprisoned, and his books confiscated and *burned* (in the good ol' free-er-
> than-thou USA, just a generation ago).  They were clearly pre-judged
> according to the conventions of the time.  ('Scientists' aren't supposed to
> do this, but they do.)  It makes perfect sense to me that if you
> *psychologically deny* some of your body-organs, especially the erogenous
> ones, as our culture demands we do, every sort of ill-health might follow.
> So any psychotherapy that even asks someone to *visualize* their organs
> streaming healthy energy, ought to do more good than harm!

Ironically, most people agree that Reich would have won his case against the FDA
easily if he had gotten a lawyer instead of trying to defend himself.

Personally, having read a couple of Reich's books (notably, The Discovery of the
Orgone--English translation, and The Oranur Experiment:  A First Report), Peter's
book, and a couple decent biographies by Colin Wilson and Charles Rycroft, I think
that 1) There is no such thing as "Orgone" energy, and 2) there is something that
Reich learned to collect, manipulate, and direct that exhibits some qualities of
a form of energy and reacts badly with radiation, and 3) Reich had no idea what
he was working with. 


James
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