The Monster in the Basement of Rationality

Wilhelm Reich and the Solution to Modernity

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece here on Substack about the idea that constantly trying to exert more control over society could lead to a kind of “safetyism singularity.” Like many of us learned early on that exerting control over our environment could alleviate anxiety and help us to feel safer. And how that becomes a learned behaviour that we simply go to whenever we feel anxious or unsafe. “Oh, I’m feeling anxious. Therefore I need to exert more control.” And that a negative feedback loop can start to manifest where, as our world becomes more controlled and safe, we start to lose our resilience through not getting the developmental challenges that we need. Resulting is still more need for safety. Until we find that we’re living 24/7 in some hyper-monitored and regulated environment. Where we still don’t feel especially safe!

In a sense, this retreat into more and more self and social control is analogous to creating a society based solely on reason and rationality. On the surface, it looks as though making society more rational is just a really good idea. We can cut down on a lot of mindless prejudice, around skin colour, gender, religion or sexual identity. We can remove a lot of the pointless bureaucracy that has developed around our interactions with the state or social systems, be they to do with health, transport, taxation or more. It just seems, on the surface, that rationality is a win-win for humanity.

But there is, inevitably, an issue.

Being rational requires us to use our frontal lobes, those two big hemispheres in the top part of our brain. They allow us to work with information and give us a level of power to reshape our world way beyond that of other primates. But that very same human brain did not evolve in an environment that favoured rationality. Being rational is merely a program that we run in our brain. Our brain evolved, at the end of the day, to maximise the chances of a strand of DNA, that we carry around, continuing after we have died.

Thus the human brain is not optimised for rationality and there are psychological issues that tend to develop and compound the more rational that we are. These were first identified by early psychologists such as Freud, who referred to them broadly as “the Id” - the notion of a blind and irrational, libidinal force that our ego tries to keep repressed. But which at times tends to burst out in acts of violent irrationality. All societies that have aspired towards rationality have also had to develop ways to try to keep this libidinal force in check, invariably with only limited success.

MGM famously depicted the Id as an invisible wild animal in their mid-fifties sci-fi movie, Forbidden Planet.

As our society increasingly moves towards still greater levels of control and rationality, what concerns me is that no one in power seems to have factored in the “monster in the basement” - the human Id. The more we tighten the screws of control and reason, so the stronger this force becomes, til one day I think it will inevitably burst free in acts of vast bloodshed and wanton destruction.

Yet, a century ago, Wilhelm Reich had already isolated a solution to this issue. The physical locus of the ego’s suppression of libidinal energy is the body. Our brain represses energy and emotion into the fascia and muscles of our body. From there, it can be worked and released. We can keep the monster in our basement at least mostly civilised and, at the same time, gain psychological development and greater self-awareness.

What I think it’s important to understand from all this is the nature of the relationship between the following:

• being rational

• the libidinal, irrational “id”

• the hardening of the body fascia and muscle system

By trying to always “be rational” - by running the rationality program in the hardware of our brain - we simultaneously create a hardening of our body fascia and muscles and increase the charge of libidinal irrational energy held within. If this relationship is not understood, then we risk unleashing, at some point, a destructive madness within our psyche and our society.

Thus rationality and some form of Reichian or similar therapy need to go hand in hand. We cannot simply utilise intelligence at a cerebral level or, over time, it will become destructive. We have to progressively embody our intelligence and be willing to undertake the “work” necessary to achieve that end.

Reich’s theories never made it to the mainstream. And because of this, we still face the same social issues that we did a century ago. Tech regardless, we have made essentially zero progress in this field. All we have done is to develop different ways to try to keep that irrational libidinal energy suppressed. But it is still there. And you can feel it when you walk the streets of any modern city. The monster in the basement has not gone away. And it’s getting stronger with each new surveillance tactic or narrative control device that our society deploys.