William Steig’s Illustrations for Wilhelm Reich’s Listen, Little Man!, 1945

“They call you ‘Little Man’, ‘Common Man’; they say a new era has begun, the ‘Era of the Common Man’. It isn’t you who says so, Little Man. It is they, the Vice Presidents of great nations, promoted labor leaders, repentant sons of bourgeois families, statesmen and philosophers. They give you your future but don’t ask about your past.”

– Wilhelm Reich in Listen, Little Man!, 1945, illustrated by William Steig

 

Published in 1945, Listen Little Man (Rede an den kleinen Mann) is a 1945 essay by Austrian-born Jewish psychologist Wilhelm Reich (4 March 1897 – 3 November 1957). It was published by Reich’s own Orgone Institute Press.

In it, Reich attempts to talk to explain how the we – the Little Man – destroys himself by saluting his enemies, hurting his friends and becoming a worse version of what he once despised. He wanted to show the man-in-the-street how he “forges his own chains by his unquestioning acceptance of prevailing norm”; how the price of quiescence is “tyranny, war, and a distorted and deprived sexual life”.

To change, the average man and woman must “assume a personal responsibility for themselves and their children”.

The book is illustrated by cartoonist and author William Steig November 14, 1907 – October 3, 2003), the New York-born son of Jewish-Austrian immigrants best known as the author of the children’s book Shrek! (1990), upon which the films were based.

 

 

I understand you. For, many thousands of times, I have seen you naked, physically and psychically, without a mask, without a party card without your ‘popularity’. Naked like a newborn, naked like a Field Marshal in his underpants. You have complained and cried before me, have talked about your longings, and have disclosed your love and your grief. I know you and I understand you. I am going to tell you how you are, Little Man, for I honestly believe in your great future. There is no doubt, it belongs to you. So, first of all, have a look at yourself see yourself as you really are. Listen to what none of your Fuhrers and representatives dares tell you:

You are a ‘little Common Man’. Understand the double meaning of these words: ‘little: and ‘common’.

Don’t run. Have the courage to look at yourself

 

I shall begin with the Little Man in myself:

For twenty-five years, in the written and spoken word, I have advocated your right to happiness in the world; have accused you of your inability to take what belongs to you, to secure what you had gained in the bloody battles of the Pads and Vienna barricades, in the American emancipation or in the Russian revolution. Your Paris ended in Petain and Laval your Vienna in Hitler; your Russia in Stalin, and your America could end in the regime of a KKK. You knew better how to win your freedom than how to safeguard it for yourself and others. I have known this for a long time. What I could understand was why, every time you had fought your way laboriously out of one morass, you got into a worse one. Then, slowly and gropingly, I found what makes you a slave: YOU ARE YOUR OWN SLAVE-DRIVER.

Nobody else – nobody except you yourself carries the responsibility you’re your slavery. Nobody else.

That is not new, isn’t it? Your liberators tell you that your suppressors are Wilhelms, Nikolaus, Pope Gregory the Twenty-eight, Morgan, Krupp or Ford. And your ‘liberators’ are called Mussolini, Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin.

I tell you: Only you yourself can be your liberator!

 

 

They know your worst weaknesses m a way in which only you should know them. They have sacrificed you to a symbol, and you carry them to power over yourself. Your masters have been elevated by you, yourself, and are nurtured by you, in spite of the fact – or, rather, because of the fact- that they dropped all masks. Indeed, they told you in so many words: ‘You are an inferior being without any responsibility, and you are going to remain so.’ And you call them ‘Saviors’, ‘New Liberators’ and yell: ‘Heil, Heil!’, and ‘Viva, Viva!’

 

 

This is why I am afraid of you Little Man, deadly afraid. For on you depends the fate of humanity I am afraid of you because there is nothing you flee as much from as yourself. You are sick, very sick, Little Man. It is not your fault.

But it is your responsibility to rid yourself of this sickness. You would have long since shaken off your oppressors had you not tolerated oppression and often actively supported it. No police force in the world would be powerful enough to suppress you if you had only a mite of self-respect in practical everyday living, if you knew, deep down, that without you life would not go on for even an hour.

Did your liberator tell you that? No. He called you the ‘Proletarian of the World’, but he did not tell you that you, and only you, are responsible for your life (instead of being responsible for the ‘honor of the fatherland’).

You must come to realize that you made your little men your own oppressors…

 

 

 

You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Since you have never learned to create happiness, or enjoy and protect it, you do not know the courage of the upright individual.

You want to know Little Man, how you are? You listen on the radio to the announcements of laxatives, dental creams and deodorants. But you fail to hear the music of propaganda. You fail to perceive the bottomless stupidity and the disgustingly bad taste of these things, which are designed to catch your ear.

 

 

With the greatest consistency, your thinking always misses the truth, just as a playful sharpshooter is able consistently a, hit right besides the bull’s-eye. You don’t think so? I’ll show you. You could have long since become the master of your existence, if only your thinking were in the direction of the truth. But you think like this:

‘It’s all the fault of the Jews.’ ·What’s a Jew?’ I ask. ‘People with Jewish blood,’ is your answer. ‘What’s the difference between Jewish blood and other blood?’ This question stumps you; you hesitate, become confused, and answer: ‘I mean the Jewish race.’ ‘What is race?’ I ask. ‘Race? Why, that’s simple; just as there is a German race, so there is a Jewish race. ‘What characterizes the Jewish race?’ ‘Well, a Jew is dark-haired, has a long hooknose and sharp eyes. The Jews are avaricious and capitalistic. ‘‘Have you ever seen a Mediterranean Frenchman or Italian together with a Jew? Can you distinguish them?’ ‘Well, not really.’ ‘What, then, is a Jew?…

That’s the way you drivel, Little Man. From your drivel you create armed formations and these slay ten million people as ‘Jews’ though you cannot even tell what a Jew is. That’s why one laughs at you, why one avoids you when one has serious work to do, that’s why you stick in the morass. When you say ‘Jew’ you make yourself feel superior.

You have to do that because you really feel miserable. And you feel miserable because you are precisely that which you murder in the alleged Jew. This is only a tiny bit of the truth about you, Little Man.

 

 

Or you are a ‘Marxist: a ‘professional revolutionary’, a would-be ‘Fuhrer of the proletarians of the world’. You want to free the world from its sufferings. The deceived masses run away from you, and you run after them, yelling: ‘Stop, stop, you proletarian masses! You just can’t see yet that I am your liberator! Down with capitalism!’ I talk to your masses, Little Revolutionary; I show them the misery of their small lives.

 

 

About a hundred years ago you learned to parrot the physicists who built machines and said there was no soul. Then came a great man and showed you your soul, only he did not know the connection between your soul and your body. You said, ‘Ridiculous! “Psychoanalysis!” Charlatanry! You can analyze urine, but you cannot analyze the psyche.’ You said this because in medicine you knew nothing but urine analysis.

The fight for your mind lasted some forty years. I know this hard fight, because I, too, fought it for you. One day you discovered that one can make a lot of money with the sick human mind. All one has to do is to let a patient come daily for an hour over a period of some years and have him pay a certain fee for every hour.

 

 

One has gotten your number, Little Man; one has seen behind your facade of wretchedness and pitiableness. One wants you to determine the course of the world, with your work and your achievements does not want you to replace one tyrant by a worse one. One begins to demand of you ever more strictly that you submit to the rules of life just as you ask it of others; that you improve yourself as you criticize others. One recognizes better and better your gossiping disposition, your greed, your freedom from responsibility, in brief, your general disease which smells up this beautiful world.

I know you don’t like to hear this that you prefer to yell, Heil, you bearer of the future of the proletariat or of the Fourth Reich. But I believe you will succeed less than in the past. We have found the key to your secret of thousands of years. You are brutal behind your mask of sociality and friendliness, Little Man. You cannot spend half a day with me without giving yourself away.

 

 

You want to continue to be the informer and defamer, to get your innocent neighbor in jail when you don’t like his way of living, because he is kind, or free, because he works and does not pay any attention to you. You are very curious, Little Man, you snoop and defame. Aren’t you protected by the fact that the police does not
give away the identity of an informer?

 

Wilhelm Reich: The Orgone

As aforesaid, Listen Little Man! was published by Orgone press. Reich’s orgone was an orgasm machine.

Reich believed that sex and a satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. It was the cure for all ills, including fascism. He coined the term “the sexual revolution”.

In his 1927 study The Function of the Orgasm, he concluded that “there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction”.

He discovered what he called “bions”, bacteria-destroying organisms that he believed were released by decay and existed in a state between living and dead matter. Noticing his skin seemed to tan when exposed to these bions, Reich surmised that they emitted a kind of radiation. This he named orgone, the pure energy of life, the raw power of orgasm.

Christopher Tuner adds:

To harness it, Reich developed the Orgone Energy Accumulator (Orac), a box alternating organic and inorganic layers that, he theorised, would contain and amplify beneficial orgone energy. The accumulator was used by such countercultural figureheads as Norman Mailer, JD Salinger, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Dwight Macdonald and William S Burroughs. In the 1970s Burroughs wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the Accumulators I Have Owned”. In it, he boasted: “Your intrepid reporter, at age 37, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas.” At the height of his James Bond fame, Sean Connery swore by the device, and Woody Allen parodied it in Sleeper (1973), giving it the immortal nickname the “Orgasmatron”.

Olivia Laing continues:

Reich believed the orgone accumulator could automate the work of liberation, obviating the need for laborious person-to-person therapy. He also hoped it might cure disease, particularly cancer. This latter claim triggered an exposé, which in turn drew him to the attention of the Food and Drug Authority, initiating an investigation into the medical efficacy of the orgone accumulator that lasted almost a decade.

On 7 May 1956, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for refusing to stop selling his invention. His books were burned, in what remains the only federally sanctioned book burning on American soil. The following spring he was sent to Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, where six months later he died of a heart attack in his cell, a brutal end for somebody whose life was dedicated to enlarging the freedoms of others.

Via: Internet Archive, Wilhelm Reich Museum