Toward Ecosophy

We ended last week's post in this sequence with Wilhelm Reich safely ensconced in the United States, constructing his first orgone accumulators using alternating layers of conductive and insulative materials.  He was by this time certain that he'd broken through into an entirely new field of scientific research, and that orgone was a reality -- an energy closely related to biological life and health, which bridged the gap between psychology and physiology.  It was a busy time for him; he was teaching classes at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, training physicians in the techniques he'd already devised, getting his books translated into English, and pursuing further researches into orgone. 

Unfortunately for him, he began looking into the possibility that orgone treatment could be used to benefit cancer patients. When he first began this research in the late 1930s, that wasn't a problem, but it became a massive problem for him once the Second World War ended. 

I'm not sure how many of my readers realize that today's sky-high rates of cancer are a very recent phenomenon.  In the 19th century, cancer was an uncommon disease, mostly found in old people -- childhood cancers were so rare that individual cases were written up in medical journals. That started to change between the two world wars, but it was after the end of the Second World War that cancer rates soared and cancer became the #2 cause of death in the United States. Readers of my generation and older will recall the flurry of books and movies in the 1960s about young adults dying of cancer -- Love Story, Brian's Song, Sunshine, and so on through a very long list.  Those made such a splash because young adults dying of cancer was a new and shocking thing at that time. 

That made cancer an immense challenge for the medical and pharmaceutical industries.  They had just succeeded in getting a stranglehold over health care in the United States, and all of a sudden they were faced with a widespread health crisis for which they had no effective treatments. Nor could they address the cause, because it was recognized quite early that the major causes of cancer were environmental, resulting from the explosive growth of the chemical industry and the saturation of the environment with an ever-expanding list of toxic compounds. (There's a reason, in other words, why the American Cancer Society gets most of its funding and many of its board members from the chemical industry.)

What made all this a potential disaster for the medical-industrial complex was that some alternative treatments seemed to work against cancer in at least some cases. That was why, from the 1950s on, anyone outside the medical industry who claimed to be able to treat cancer could count on facing an all-out attack by the medical industry and its lawyers and media flacks. 

Reich was completely unaware of this. He was caught up in his research, trying to push the boundaries of his new science of orgonomics. He experimented with the effects of orgone accumulators on radioactive material and nearly ended up with a disaster on his hands -- the result was a devitalized form of orgone that Reich named DOR, "deadly orgone radiation."  He found by accident that orgone directed from an accumulator toward the sky appeared to cause changes in weather, and developed a device -- the "Cloudbuster" -- which was tested successfully in drought conditions in Arizona and Maine.  He built a new home and laboratory in Rangeley, Maine, where he pursued his work.

Meanwhile the medical industry followed its usual game plan. Mass media denunciations came first. Next was an investigation by the FDA -- then as now controlled by the pharmaceutical industry via the "revolving door" policy, by which FDA officials retired into well-paid corporate positions as a reward for decisions that benefited the industry they were supposed to regulate. In 1954 the FDA got a compliant judge to issue an injunction forbidding Reich to ship orgone accumulators across state lines and banning his books -- this latter under the pretext that the books in question were "labeling" for the accumulators. 

Reich made the mistake of trying to fight this by proving that his methods actually worked. Under American law, once the injunction was issued, all that mattered was whether Reich obeyed it, and once one of Reich's subordinates transported several accumulators from Maine to New York City, the FDA had what it wanted and set the legal machinery in motion. Reich was thrown into prison, where he died.  By court order, all his laboratory notes, manuscripts, and unsold books -- three tons of them -- were burnt, and all his equipment was destroyed. Only the fact that many copies of his books had already been published and some orgone accumulators were in other hands kept his life's work from being completely erased.