In My Opinion the Greatest Scientist in the Western Tradition is Wilhelm Reich, of Austria-Hungary
I like REICH (the scientist WILHELM)
I believe in the orgone. It is life-energy in physical form. ((<it emits blue light<)).
He looked at people as a doctor would a patient. Yes, he was a doctor: Dr. Wilhelm Reich was a doctor and a humanist. Let’s get this Substack post outta the way.
I discovered Reich’s books at a record store near where I lived and so that way I was able to collect his books, and I collected several. Since they were being sold for almost next to nothing.
What he wanted to find was the essence of life — or the energy. What is the source of life or the life-energy? If you are wondering about that you should get into Wilhelm Reich. He was basically a Western scientist — first he followed Freud, then he followed Marxist thought. But, in the end, he dropped most of his afilliations with any outside organizations.
Inspired by the search for basic life force, Reich went from psychology to a form of physical therapy where he put people in boxes and was locked away in prison for that. The Internet says he died after being imprisoned. I had thought he got out and died the day after getting out, but I am probably wrong. Reich had been convicted of contempt of court related to alleged medical fraud for the “orgone accumulators.”
If he created phony baloney vaccines, he would be a millionaire, instead. His work had many stages, which involved dealing with sexuality, character armor in the “repressed,” how to do therapy using the orgone energy, and finally something about aiming a device with tubes connected to water at the sky, in Arizona (New Mexico). That project I think was for some reason connected to affecting the weather. I remember thinking, “well now he has gone a too far,” but then when I read about what he actually did it made sense and I ceased criticizing. A lot of what Reich did was almost too much.
I studied those books for a time, in youth, from about 1975 to 1980, and I remember that I developed the opinion that he was the best scientist, or, in the West he was. His conduct was good, and I never saw slander about him — until Wikipedia, that is to say. It is terrible entry!! Other than that, I have not read anything bad about him. But a lot of persons later tried to make him look bad.
There are many books a person could read — that are about him or by him, and there are also volumes (I recommend hist last letters: “Where is the Truth?” -which i thought to be well-edited) of his letters. These are inspiring and the volume I mentioned includes documentation of his court case and what he was fighting in terms of the U. S. government going after him They finally sentenced him to two years of some bullshit charge. Something like the moving of some boxes by an associalt, which violated the court order. Were these gov. guys scared of the boxes? I dunno! (I am not: “Matt Taibi — boy genius of the Internet”)
Here is a link and pictures:
(Oh, and the one other Substack piece in which I mentioned Reich was parody, humor. Something like that. Lies. Forget that one, it’s a joke…. really. Now I am being serious. I am not saying Reich was my hot date as an intellectual, is that clear?)
https://wilhelmreichmuseum.org/about/biography-of-wilhelm-reich/
“No President, Academy, Court of Law, Congress or Senate on this earth has the knowledge or power to decide what will be the knowledge of tomorrow.”
Wilhelm Reich, M.D.
The guy was cosmic without trying to
I just read up on him from information I found through the Organon Foundation. It seems that he was honestly trying to understand how the life force in biology works and, in the process, did experiments which apparently proved the second law of thermodynamics - that heat always flows from warmer to cooler regions - to be wrong.
He used what he’d discovered to try and help terminally ill cancer patients but promised no guarantees as long as they’d sign on based on that premise. Although his theory wasn’t successful with them he nevertheless did see marked physical improvements in them before the cancer was able to overcome such progress.
In 1954 an article in the New Republic, a conservative publication, falsely accused him of using patients for sexual purposes. (This was during the height of Communist witch hunting in the US Senate, led by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy.
Once the Food and Drug Administration got wind of this it successfully pushed the courts to demand he stop all research and appear before the them.
He refused, saying the government was not the correct scenario for proving what he had found. As a result an injunction was issued against him with orders for Federal agents to destroy all equipment and papers.
One of his assistants moved some of his papers from his headquarters in Maine to New York City. Once the courts found out they sentenced both men to prison.
Reich died of heart failure shortly thereafter.
Interesting that this is your first substack that I read.
I recently was researching about Reich. A fellow researcher who has been in the trenches a long time...has brought him to my attention. Are you familiar with Alison Hawver McDowell? If not, you should check out her work. She has a YouTube Channel. And a blog, “Wrench in the Gears.”
While I met her in the education space, she has long since moved on to other sectors. She has landed as of late in looking at the research and what the globalist are up to relative to computational biology, energy work, the “ant computer”, collective consciousness, inter-dimensional possibilities, etc.
I hope to visit Reich’s museum as I live in Maine. But I learned that it will not be open for visitors again until next spring/summer.