“You are a fart, and you believe to smell of violets.”
— Wilhelm Reich

Why not accompany Sunday’s workout by listening to the provocative, long-censored words of a controversial author like Wilhelm Reich? Especially if he uses sentences such as the one above?

Listen, Little Man! is one of those intimate books that weren’t written to be published, it was written because the author would otherwise explode. Those are the best books!

Although there is no lack of smugness in Wilhelm’s words, not to say guruism, his words from 70 years ago are more real, topical and urgent than ever before. I don’t know if you know the feeling of being annoyed by guruism, however after listening to his words you have to admit to yourself, “Don’t be presumptuous, he’s right!”

Listening to Reich, I notice how technological advances made us week and lazy, how timid we are, gullible, powerless … Even when we are brave, there are no sufficiently great ideas to justify us willing to die for them. We are alienated from death and thus from life too.

We voluntarily dive into e-junk in e-shops, our souls sulky, our dreams stolen. We use the most powerful tool in human history to tighten our shackles instead of freeing ourselves.

There have never been such mighty chains to tie us down like today.

 

 

The acute ignorance of modern humans

The information-technological absolutism — that’s the dream of every autocrat. Now religion no longer needs God. It has become superfluous to frighten people with an omniscient Being that sees everything, knows everything and punishes all sins without exception! Now influential people directly manage the Being that sees everything and knows everything. Suggestive guidance is so subtle, it seems as if the Being can read our minds.

It goes without saying that in the past God hasn’t actually been reading our minds and punishing us for our sins. Some people did, God was just the excuse. People who have amassed power over others have been deciding: how, what for and whom to punish. It’s no different today.

We have an infinite library of humanity at our fingertips. But all this knowledge is an illusion if it is not accompanied by free-thinking. The crucial facts that concern us viscerally remain hidden by a veil of ambiguity because certain people prefer it that way. Yes, we can read freely all the factful (and boring) descriptions in encyclopedias, while the powerful, controversial, exciting and arousing knowledge enters into public discourse — with the consent of the library administrators — in a form that’s not much different from pornography.

I don’t expect those who know what’s going on, to discern for us and present to us what is true and what is not on a silver platter. Guardians of knowledge should be teaching us from an early age to discern for ourselves and be able to recognize stupidity and madness from afar. We need to know how to find knowledge, but we should also be able to assess it critically and not swallow it blindly. As George Carlin said:

Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.

Our society cannot afford this, as every other brick in its foundation is a lie. As a civilization, we are too big to afford to remove any bricks at all, what to speak of removing every other brick.

Imagine putting everything around you through the filter of common sense: religious dogmas, cultural norms, political programs … on which all societies of this world are founded.

If I try to convince you that the Earth is as flat as a coin, you will not give in so easily! You will stand up against me and bombard me with questions. If I tell you about the ancients who lived for 1000 years, one of them even in a fish for a while, one of them walking on water, one having sea parted by God so his people could cross to the other side, etc., you might admit that these are biblical allegories, not historical facts, but you will quite likely defend the biblical God anyway. If you won’t defend God, then you’ll at least defend the religious morals or at least the cultural heritage we’d be without if it weren’t for religion. To me, this is like defending a nuclear bomb because without it Hiroshima would not boast with modern architecture.

As long as we give special allowances to certain areas of our society and do not expect from them the same level of reason and common sense as we expect in other areas, people will keep ignoring the calls to reason and doing as they please, because that’s just the way it is. In the name of religion, for example, people will go on saying and doing particularly crazy nonsense, and what’s worst of all, they will maintain their right to be offended if others challenge them, let alone make fun of them.

Let us nail all this nonsense to the cross of uncompromising reason, instead of crucifying the presumptuous who point the finger at our centuries-old idiocy. Which reminds me of words of Thomas Jefferson …

Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.

Tega, seveda, ne moremo. Nismo se naučili dvomiti, naučili smo se le brati — in bati. In zdaj smo tu, kjer smo — mali ljudje.

We can’t do that, of course. We have not learned to questions, we have only learned to read – and to fear. Now we are where we are — little men.


Nonexistent prison is the best prison

We are holding ourselves in the prison of schizophrenia, building on this Tower of Babel, which awaits no other final destiny than collapse. If someone points a finger at the madness of doing this, the cameras turn at him, he gets a million views on Youtube, but nothing changes. We are already so deep in the artificial reality, no slap can wake us up.

We end up knowing a billion of empty phrases, but not knowing how to hear the songs of our souls, read the wisdom of our bodies, find our home in nature, rejoice in life, heal the diseases of the Earth we are responsible for.

It’s not just those in “responsible” positions who are to blame. The responsibility is on each of us. As long as we participate in the criminal act of a geocide (killing of the Earth), we are complicit in it and thus co-responsible. Speaking of geocide — to accompany what you’re just reading I give some appropriate music. Here, The Geocide, performed by Cattle Decapitation:

Have I shocked you? 🙂

This is the real sound of our civilization if you take off your headphones with entertaining music of the latest inflated hits stealing your attention. Listen to The Geocide, let the screaming reset your guts.

Push yourself out of your comfort zone, shock yourself by listening to the vicious sound, remember how numb we are for the real geocide out there, morally deaf and blind. Remind yourself where you choose to make exceptions and where you don’t.

The architects of the Tower of Babel are only interested in the tower, they cannot allow a systemic view of life at any cost. They will give special remissions to the construction of the tower, that’s where they will make exceptions, they won’t do it to support the prosperity of the Earth. We can only be builders of the tower, we can’t be the guardians of the Earth.

 

“Big” people are actually little people

Reich reminded me that the little man happens in two dimensions. Most little men are tiny, submissive, and docile, but from among these men emerge some “big” little men, inflated balloons with no content. There would be no little men without these extremes. When you watch TV, you see “big” little men. When you turn off the TV, you may also notice the face of the little little man — yourself — in the dim reflection on the screen.

It’s frightful how often narcissistic sociopaths and heartless crooks fondly take leadership positions among little men Those are “big” little men. Little little men project all virtues onto these “big” men, while projecting flaws back upon themselves; they forgive the “big” men their faults and do not even allow themselves to see them; to see flaws in a Führer, in a Marshal is an unforgivable sin!

Genuine big men can only build influence among other big men. Big men accept all people, both themselves and others, with their virtues and flaws and do not behave secretively. They are not interested in dominating others. The power of a big man is relative — when he is stronger, he leads, when he is weaker, he follows. Leading and following are constantly in flow, never rigid. The big man leads with responsibility when his time comes, and withdraws when that time is over.

But big men are not only leaders! Thousands of “little” big men will forever remain anonymous because they are not interested in fame. They do what’s right, cameras, or no cameras. When they stand up against malice and madness, they are uncompromising and they embrace death with dignity.

The easiest way to recognize a big man is by three characteristics:

  1. he will respond to hatred with love,
  2. he will include the excluded,
  3. when he is wrong, he will admit that he is wrong.

On the other hand, the power of the “big” little man is absolute and unquestionable (but only in the artificial bubble of the authority he takes on) — such a man must conceal his flaws and never show weakness with his body language. Then and only then will little men respect him and consequently build up their own (false) self-esteem too. Our little civilization is thus based on (self)respect without a real basis. Pale faces urgently need carefully ironed ties and polished suits — without such outfits their doctrines and dogmas are powerless, they are nobody in naked nature.

Little men need little leaders in recognizable uniforms; they are not able to respect genuine big men with high moral integrity. So they choose leaders from their ranks and raise them into marshals, presidents, fuhrers, and kings. The bigger the crowd of little men, the bigger the fool they select as their king. It’s like with numbers: if you have 300 million numbers, the common denominators will be two: some irrational number and, of course, 1. Since we can’t have oneness, all we have left is irrationality.

Photo by Arno Senoner on Unsplash

At the end comes indoctorination

Don’t rush reading on. Read the title again. No, it’s not a typo!

I’m just reading the book The Systems View of Life, where the authors point out how physics was the first to embrace the systems view of life, while biology and especially medicine (which most directly study life) are still avoiding it.

One extreme is the view where, in order to understand life, everything needs to be broken down to elementary particles. Understanding the components, we will understand life. Medicine is still trapped in this paradigm. The other extreme is the view, where to understand life it is necessary to understand connections, relations, relationships, (inter) dependencies, etc.

The medical science, when adhering to a mechanistic view, sees a human as a “machine” composed of elements that can be repaired, changed, enhanced, and so on. When a “failure” occurs, doctors look for the “foreign bodies” that caused the “failure” and try to remove them. Foreign bodies are threats and it is justified to eradicate them entirely without trying to understand their role in a wider (eco)system.

Medical science, when it adopts a systems view, understands a human as an intersection of millions of threads. This intersection takes its identity from the current intertwining of associations and relationships. The human does not end where the bag of atoms ends, the human is an intrinsic part of an (eco)system; the health of this “intersection of threads” can’t exist in singularity, it has to take place in plurality. Therefore all species and their ecosystems must be protected. Caring only for humans is self-destructive in the long run, because without all other beings — including bacteria and viruses — we could not exist.

I wonder how many thousands of mutations and variations of viral colds, flus, and xyz diseases have passed through us during times when we were our own biggest executioners. In the 20th century alone (just in wars), people killed 108 million members of their own species; in the entire history, this number could be as high as a billion. In the last 3400 years, people have lived in peace for only 268 years. And then we– following the injunctions of various führers — get all militant against a kind virus that came to tells us that we are little men.

It’s wise to keep in mind the motto “Don’t kill the messenger!” Just by obliterating the virus, we will be no healthier than we’re right no, or no less sick.

Medicine feels obligated to suppress the virus because it is bound to abide by the dogma of constant growth just like the economy. A key indicator in the economy is GDP growth and in medicine the longevity of the population — regardless of the healthfulness of that population and in what kind of society.

Let me make one thing clear: I’m not against treating diseases! I oppose only the rigid mechanistic view, the dogmatic advocacy of one and only permissible method, and the political violence that comes with the package.

I am against the partiality of treatments. Medicine cures the little man of one disease and releases him back to the sick world: to smog and noise, anxiety and distress, hardly making a living on a minimum wage. If you point out that these are not the domains of medicine, you are simply acknowledging that you are exactly the little man who defends your own prison.

I am against the dictatorship of the little man and the spiritual poverty in which humanity stands right now. There are so many diseases in this civilization to which zero tolerance should apply, not just to selected infectious diseases. Let’s say we treated like that all the macroeconomic non-transparency, which allows for the limitless accumulation of capital, all the global pollution, all the oppression of the workforce so they’d produce sedatives for wars in our hearts.

A true treatment of a human is the treatment that leads him towards wholeness. Treating the little man should continue as long as it takes for him to become a big man, getting rid of artificial “parasites”, “viruses” and “bacteria” in his body, head and heart. To such a man, COVID-19 can’t do much harm easily, and even if it does, the big man will smile and thank the life for all that it has given him.

The little man, on the other hand, will scream, “NOOOOOOO! Even if the Earth has to collapse, so could live another year, month, or even a day, I would accept it. I don’t care about the Earth, the Universe, if only I can have one more ride with my yacht around this idyllic island.”

And thus we come to the core of the problem! Those of us who would gladly withdraw from our selfish life on Earth for a higher good of all life, can’t withdraw now! In the name of Earth and Life, we must stand upright, our noses pinched as farts flock around us, believing to smell of violets.

Well, at the very end actually comes life

The mechanistic view of the world is imperfect and in itself misleading. It must have the systems view at its side to ensure integrity. As you can see, the systemic view includes the mechanistic, it doesn’t deny it.

Medicine needs a holistic basis in order to be able to stop treating little men of little illnesses and prolonging unwholesomeness. It must begin to heal the Earth as a whole and the People as integral parts of the (eco)system. Medicine must not isolate us from the lush and raw passions of life as such — with the viruses, bacteria and everything that comes along with them — otherwise medicine is (at least in part) indoctorination.

We’re eradicating viruses, but we’re keeping atomic bombs, rockets, aircraft carriers, submarines — do I need to add anything else to the list to illustrate the madness of the human race? Why don’t we bring all this to the judgment of common sense?

Do doctors really have to be primarily concerned with protecting the prescribed doctrine, while they can care about Life only as much as to prolong the lives of the little men, but they don’t have the time to challenge these little men to wholeness and demand such wholeness from our entire civilization?

Doctors are keeping alive billions of consumers of junk. What benefit do these pathetic little men offer to the Earth? They just click and click, with soundproof headphones on their ears and their eyes chained to the screen. What benefit do these wretched souls bring to the Universe? Shiny colors in the latest commercial are diverting all their attention from seeing the majesty of the star-laden sky.

Listen, big man, if you’re reading this, I believe you will smile. I believe you will clench your fist and do everything you can to change things for the better wherever you can.

Listen, little man, if you’re reading this, please smile too. Clench your fist! Break free from slavery to empty doctrines. If you’re upset by me calling you a “fart,” please understand that I’m a fart, too. It’s not so much about whether or not you are that, it’s about whether you believe to smell of violets.