My existential journey in socio-political movements and political philosophy started in 1960. Although only 12 years old, I already had a keen interest in politics and followed the election between Nixon and Kennedy closely. Of course, young democrats such as myself were all in for JFK. He instilled the belief in us that politics needed our participation and that we had a contribution to make so that America could become great again! In 1963, the CIA using a mafia hit team out of Chicago ended that dream by assassinating President Kennedy.
Entering college in the mid-sixties, I found that the anti-war movement and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were both a strong presence on college campuses. By the end of my freshman year, having read the documents and history of the Vietnam war, I was convinced the U.S. needed to exit the war as soon as possible. As a result, I organized the first chapter of SDS on my campus. President Kennedy, in an interview in the summer of 1963, indicated that he was seriously considering withdrawing troops if the South Vietnamese government could not carry the main burden of the war effort. He also, in a speech at American University, expressed a desire to build on the truce attained with Cuba in the crisis of 1962 by increasing detente with the Soviet Union. All of this alarmed the weapons manufacturers and the war hawks in the Pentagon. Politicians in districts or states with military bases and weapons corporations also developed anxiety.
Even in a normally quiet suburban liberal arts college such as the one I attended there was an embryonic anti-war movement. I joined it by helping organize support for the 1967 March on Washington to end the Vietnam war. The bus company contracted to transport us to Washington D.C. cancelled under pressure at the last moment, and we all went down to D.C. in whatever cars were available. By chance, our arrival was on a street chosen by Lincoln Rockwell’s Amercian Nazi Party to organize their counter-demonstration. It weirdly looked like a street out of a WW II movie.
The demonstration proved to be one of the largest organized protests up to that time. I marched with tens of thousands of others on the Pentagon where tear gas drifted into our faces. My group had marched behind Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party and they tried to breach the line of troops surrounding the Pentagon. The troops stopped them with the tear gas and a line of fully armed soldiers. Other events of the day included novelist Norman Mailer in a fist-fight with a Nazi and Allan Ginsburg’s attempt to levitate the Pentagon by prayer (not all that successful). In the course of the day, I became infatuated with a young woman from my group, but that is in another narrative entitled: “Memoir of a Septuagenarian Sexologist.”
Of course, we had to contend with the army call-up, and draft resistance grew along with the movement to end the war. I had a deferment as a full-time college student and later pulled a high lottery number. (One of my friends gained an exemption by submitting to his Draft Board a letter from a psychiatrist stating that he had taken 25 LSD trips and was not a good candidate for the military service.) The anti-war struggle merged with the black civil rights movement after Dr. King pointed out the connection between defense spending, war, labor organizing (an Atlanta sanitation strike was taking place in 1968) and domestic poverty. The “deep state” of the time had him assasinated shortly thereafter.
In the early 1970’s, the war slowly ended. I went on to become a lawyer and continued my political efforts in the democrat party and the social change movements of the years until the 1990’s. I also gave seminars on mass psychology, culture, and political ideologies. Specifically, I gave a discussion at the N.Y. Marxist School in New York City on Dr. Wilhelm Reich’s “Mass Psychology of Fascism.” Many years of further education and experience with the relationship between political ideologies and actual socio-economic reality slowly transformed me into the libertarian conversative and MAGA activist that I am today. In the time since then, I continue to give seminars on mass psychology, culture, and social change.
There was no “Paul on the road to Damascus” conversion to right-wing conservatism for me. Mostly, it was an educational process over many decades punctuated by brief “peak experiences” of insight into human psychopathology all along the line of human history. I had traveled a long road with many experiences as a “fellow traveler” of Maoists and Trotskyists. These experiences were very valuable. My experience was not unique. There is a long list of people (for example, Whitaker Chambers) who also evolved from Left to Right. Such a list could probably fill the old thick phone directories of years ago.
The experience that finally took the blinders off me took place during a brief stint as the Chairman of the N.Y.S. Socialist Party around 2013. (Norman Thomas variety). I learned that the anti-Zionism of many on the Left was a thinly veiled ideological mask for anti-Semitism. This linked up with other experiences over the years with affirmative action and other social change movements that veiled a communist agenda and reverse racism against white people. For a number of years I worked as an in-house union organizer and I learned about the stagnation and degeneration of the labor movement.
The following are insights that came to me over the years.
There are three layers to the human character structure. The surface layer attempts to present an acceptable facade or mask to display to the bio-social field. The secondary layer contains anti-social repressed impulses created by the unrelenting pressure of the pathologial ruling classes against the mass population from the birth to death of each living person subject to its control. The bio-core layer is the center of the human biopsychological organism radiating healthy natural impulses fueling the striving for love, work, and knowledge.
In the post-modern liberal / leftist / socialist/ communist, the social facade or face that he presents to the world is a fake and pathological humanitarianism masked by “democratic” ideology with an overlay of anti-life junk science. The leftist makes no distinction between healthy sexuality and biopathic sexuality (equating both). The secondary layer contains murderous repressed rage from stale bioenergy against all healthy potent people, and life itself. This layer holds the destructive murderous impulses that want to reduce and ultimately kill human energy and the free-flowing movement of the human bioenergy in love, work and knowledge. Almost every single policy of the Lefist is designed to kill life movement and joyful expansion. The core, with its natural impulses, is usually lost within the human organism surrounded by thick layers of hypertensive biopsychological muscular and intellectual (ideological) armor. See the work of Dr. Wilhelm Reich.
The reason dialogue of any kind is difficult with those who embrace extreme leftist ideology is that the ideology is used to bolster or compensate for weak individual identity, orgastic impotence (see the work of Wilhelm Reich), and emotional insecurity. Without the ideology, extremists lack the prop that keeps them functioning on a day-to-day basis. Even the surface immobile muscular “smiley” mask that she presents to the world disintegrates. The ideology represses and compensates for a constant feeling of inferiority (see the work of Alfred Adler). It was called “character armor” by Dr. Reich, and is functionally identical to biopsychological rigidity and hypertension. This is the reason that truth and facts are rejected in favor of the ideology (be it communism, fascism, racism, etc.). Sometimes this fact pattern is seen in people and public or private organizations where economic interest takes precedent over truth. This was seen with Big Pharma and the COVID bioweapon (in fact they are still promoting lies about the “vaccine” that have repeatedly been scientifically and statistically refuted). Individuals pushing lies to protect economic interest, political power, and professional prestige, frequently are sociopathic. They have little concern or empathy for people destroyed by their lies. Individuals who are contemporary examples of this social and individual pathology are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Anthony Fauci, and Bill Gates. Many others could be cited on all levels of priate and public society.
Appeals to reason and good will have little chance of penetrating this ideological armor. MAGA youth organizer Charlie Kirk tried reasoning with these walki-talkie human robots and was assassinated for his efforts. Such appeals should almost always be made, but once a person or organization has revealed this syndrome, don’t waste your time. Only a free media asserting truth in politics / law/ society can protect people from their lies.
Generally speaking, those on the extreme left have heavy intellectual character armor. They live in their heads, feel little, and reject the truth of reality in favor of their preconceived ideology of fake “humanitarianism.” Typically, they function from the superficial layer of the personality. Ideology replaces the truth of objective reality (as far as it can be rationally known) for intellectualized words and rigid ideological concepts. Complex reality is reduced and simplified to fit the preconceived contours of their ideology. The leftist ideology is holding their character structure together, and without it they would fall apart. Their self-esteem and identity is dependent on it. They will rage at anybody who expresses truth that threatens their sociopathic leftist ideology. For this reason, they are compelled to censor and repress anybody speaking truth to power. For comparison, on the right side of the political spectrum, the typical conservative character has mainly muscular armor and feels deeply (with varying degrees of distortion). The conservative places freedom first and believes in limited government. The responsibility of the individual for their own welfare and self-development is stressed. The collective “solution” is rejected. Typically, many are religious. Careers favored include the military, police and business. The leftist by contrast seeks to centralize power and control the population completely just as his brain predominates in his own life. The leftist seeks jobs with primarily intellectual work. The right-wing person wants a government that protects the core human functions of love, work and knowledge. Power is local and decentralized. The leftist is a conformist and mass herd collectivist. People are treated as members of a stereotypical group identity (remember Joe Biden telling black people that they are not “black” unless they vote for him). There is a leveling down of people to the lowest common denominator. The productive are penalized by high taxation and heavy business regulation. The leftist seeks to tyranize and totally control the individual’s life. The conservative lives more from the heart and believes in “live and let live.”
See, among many other sources, Man in the Trap, chapter 13, pgs. 153 – 198, on “Socio-Political Character Types,” by Elsworth F. Baker M.D. (Princeton, N.J., ACO Publications); Clueless – The Great Human Disconnect by Charles Konia (Princeton, N.J., ACO Publications, 2023); The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich (N.Y., Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1980); The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich (N.Y., Noonday Press, 1967); The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich (N.Y., Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973); The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (N.Y., Harper, 2019).