4 Wilhelm Reich Quotes on Human nature

Wilhelm Reich quotes on human nature

16. Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.

19. In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere 'prejudice.' The violence and the ubiquity of these 'race prejudices' show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression. Correspondingly, there is a German, Italian, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish and Arabian fascism.

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.