November 3, 2022 - 3:00pm

Exactly 65 years ago, Wilhelm Reich died in a US prison cell. It was a sad end to the life of a wayward genius. Born in 1897, Reich became a noted psychoanalyst, working with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. 

He was a communist intellectual, who tried to reconcile Marx with Freud (though he eventually fell out with his comrades). Keeping one step ahead of the Nazis, he moved to America in 1939. There, in what he thought was safety, he developed his ideas, which were bizarre even by the standards of 20th century Austrian shrinks. 

It’s almost impossible to sum-up his thinking, but he’s best-known for the concept of ‘orgone’ —  a sort of orgasmic life energy that he believed to be a fundamental force of nature. It was analogous to older quasi-scientific ideas like phlogiston and aether.  

The attraction of orgone was that it supposedly held the key to physical and mental health. The associated theories of sexual liberation were an extra draw. Reich believed that orgone energy could be harnessed and used to the benefit of humanity. He ‘invented’ the orgone ‘accumulator’ (basically a Faraday cage), in which people could sit to ostensibly curative effect. Then there was the ‘cloudbuster’ — best described as an orgone cannon through which Reich hoped to induce rainfall (the only real achievement of the device was to inspire the Kate Bush hit ‘Cloudbusting’). 

Needless to say, it was all nonsense. But instead of allowing Reich to continue his work — just like thousands of other fringe therapists and eccentric inventors — the American authorities decided to persecute him instead. The US Food and Drink Administration led the crackdown. Reich and his colleagues were made to destroy their inventions and his publications were impounded and burned. For violating a court order, Reich was sentenced in 1956 to two years imprisonment, from which he never returned. 

It seems extraordinary that this should have happened in the ‘land of the free’. Indeed, it’s tempting to dismiss this episode as belonging to a vanished age — the bad old America of anti-communist witch-hunts, prudish censorship and racial segregation. 

And yet the story of Wilhelm Reich is a warning from history that is still relevant today. Earlier this year the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was forced to backdown after setting up Disinformation Governance Board to regulate public discourse. 

According to The Intercept, the DHS still plans to target what it deems to be misinformation, for instance by working with social media companies on issues like “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

There are controversial matters on which cranks, conspiracy theorists and bad actors spread unsubstantiated claims and deliberate lies. However, for the government to set itself up as an arbiter of truth risks doing a lot more harm to democracy. Even the ACLU, very much not part of the Trumpist Right, is alarmed.

65 years on from Wilhelm Reich’s lonely death, we need to think very carefully about where the modern-day misinformation scare is leading us. Truth is real and precious, but like most other good things it is something that must be freely accepted. People have a right to be wrong. Take that right away and it won’t just be fraudsters and propagandists who suffer, but misfits and dissidents. 

One needn’t believe a word that Reich wrote to see how dangerous that would be. 


Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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