4 Wilhelm Reich Quotes on Culture

Wilhelm Reich quotes on culture

12. Nature and culture, instinct and morality, sexuality and achievement become incompatible as a result of the split in the human structure. The unity and congruity of culture and nature, work and love, morality and sexuality, longed for from time immemorial, will remain a dream as long as man continues to condemn the biological demand for natural (orgastic) sexual gratification.

30. In the course of thousands of years of mechanical development, the mechanistic concept, from generation to generation, has anchored itself deeply in man's biological system. In so doing, it actually has altered human functioning in the sense of the machine-like. In the process of killing his genital function, man has become biologically rigid. He has armored himself against that which is natural and spontaneous within him, he has lost contact with the biological function of self-regulation and is filled with a strong fear of that which is alive and free.

34. MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine? When I say 'animal,' I do not mean anything bad, cruel or 'base'; I am stating a biological fact. Man has developed the peculiar concept that he is not an animal at all, but, well - man; a creature which long since has shed that which is 'bad,' which is 'animal.' He demarcates himself in all possible ways from the bad animal and points, in proof of his 'being better,' to culture and civilization which distinguish him from the animal. He shows, in his whole behavior, his 'theories of values,' his moral philosophies, his 'monkey trials' and such, that he does not want to be reminded of the fact that basically he is an animal, an animal, furthermore, which has much more in common with the 'animal' than with that being which he asserts to be and dreams of being. The theory of the German Ubermensch has this origin. Man shows by his maliciousness, his inability to live in peace with his kind, his wars, that what distinguishes him from the other animals is only his unbounded sadism and the mechanical trinity of the authoritarian concept of life, mechanistic science and the machine. If one looks at the results of civilization as they present themselves over long periods of time, one finds that these contentions of man are not only erroneous; more than that, they seem to be made expressly for the purpose of making man forget that he is an animal.

59. My discovery of the Life Energy is today widely known nearly all over the globe, in hundreds of institutions, whether acclaimed or cursed. It can no longer be stopped by anyone, no matter what happens to me.