Emotional Plague
Keep these mutts away from me.
"The emotional plague" was a term coined by Wilhelm Reich who was a psychoanalyst in Germany in the 1930s to describe what he was seeing. His insights into Germany at that time are the best I've seen.
https://wilhelmreich.gr/en/orgonomy/orgonomy-and-sociology/social-psychopathology/emotional-plague/
He thought of it as a genuine pathology - it's not some sort of moral failure on the part of an individual. He put it this way:
An organism which, from birth, is constantly impeded in its natural way of locomotion develops artificial forms of locomotion. It limps or moves on crutches. Similarly, an individual moves through life by the means of the emotional plague if, from birth, his natural, self-regulatory life manifestations have been suppressed. The individual afflicted with the emotional plague limps, characterologically speaking. The emotional plague is a chronic biopathy of the organism
He observed that Germany at the time was very sexually repressed; he was a psychoanalyst after all. By sexually repressed he meant that all people need to get sexual gratification as a natural thing and that society was repressing that in many ways.
One symptom of the plague is that millions of people could be brought to orgasmic type experiences at mass rallies where they can scream their hatred for outsiders and their love for the leader. It's the orgasmic experience that cements the love for the leader.
Sound familiar?
(Full disclosure: Reich did die in an insane asylum in the 1950s after trying to market therapies based on what he called "orgone energy" that the authorities called quack medicine)
It seems that trumpists are suffering from the emotional plague.
My impression of them is that they are very sexually repressed - sex had to only be between a man and a woman to produce a baby. Sex for other reasons must be forbidden and suppressed.
They go to mass rallies where Trump brings them to pseudo-orgasm while scream hatred for outsiders and love for the leader.
This is frightening stuff. It can blow up into world war.
What can we do?
An emotional plague seems to be a mass affliction rather than an individual one. I recall Reich's comment that the afflicted individuals aren't necessarily malevolent personally - it's their mass action that's the problem.
A hopeful thing is that those afflicted are primed to attack anyone who disagrees with them in any way - self righteously of course. This causes schisms which don't work well in electoral politics.
The collapse of McCarthyism in the 1950s lead to the implementation of many progressive policies in the 1960s and '70's (vietnam war notwithstanding).
Diseases and plagues are common in nature. But also they also cause defences against them to evolve. One of the strongest social defenses against this plague is just plain vote the bums out.
It's said "give a man enough rope and he'll hang himself". Now the victims of the plague have gone from serial lies to barking mad. Even MAGA people must be wondering about barking mad.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.