What the Orgone Deception Says About Our Fractured Reality
It isn’t OK to believe whatever you want
It isn’t OK to believe whatever you want
Listen to A Fake Cure for Real Problems on Apple Podcasts
Orgone is supposedly a kind of energy, but it is completely made up. podcasts.apple.com
One of my first insights into how fragile reality is was when I finally got a handle on how many people truly believed in the power of orgone and how diverse those people were.
Orgone is a mystical element powered by such a strong delusion that it is embraced by conservative Christians and earth-based spiritualists.
I can’t think of one other talisman that crosses so many spiritual boundaries while essentially keeping its use. This mystic energy features pretty heavily in my book, Dragged into the light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult and whenever I speak with a book club or a reader reaches out to me, many if not most of the questions have to do with why people believe in it so deeply.
The short answer is they don’t feel like they have any other choice, but I want to throw some “whats” at you before I get into the whys of orgone. The odds are you have seen some version of it.
Think of the glass-looking colorful pyramids or pendants that are pretty common in knickknack shops. Sometimes they’re multi-colored, sometimes they’re clear with different new-agey symbols either embedded or attached, sometimes they’re lumps referred to as “pucks” that are made in cupcake trays.
Google it if you have the time to kill, but I gotta warn you, you’re going to spend a lot more time shopping for orgone than you ever planned, if you do.
Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Orgone
Orgone is supposedly a kind of energy. The pyramids and other talismans are the vessels that capture and transmit this energy. Some people think of it as a kind of filter that turns negative energy like radio and cellphone waves into positive energy, others think of it more as a beacon that amplifies positive energy to deflect or offset negative energy.
Of course, since it is made up, orgone power can be whatever you want it to be. That is easily the most important and attractive thing about it.
Orgone energy was popularized by Wilhelm Reich, a doctor of psychiatry turned madman or thief, who claimed to have discovered it as part of his inquiry into sexual repression.
Reich worked at Sigmund Freud’s Ambulatorium, and his insights into the relationship between sexual repression and psychosis endure to this day, but his passion for “curing” sexual repression either made him a little nuts or hamstrung his scientific ability.
The shortest version possible is Reich claimed that when people have orgasms, they experience pure orgone energy. He claimed to be able to harness this power using metal and crystals in a specially made box he called an orgone accumulator. The idea was to create a greenhouse effect for orgone energy.
For context, all of this was going on in the early 20th century. Atomic energy and the expanding periodic table were introducing a formerly invisible world to science as well as the general public, and it captured people’s imaginations.
Reich reportedly met with Einstein about his theories, but one of Einstein’s research assistants debunked his orgone accumulator without much effort.
Rather than accept that he might be wrong, Reich decided that science hadn’t yet developed the tools necessary to measure orgone energy. To this day, people use orgone accumulator boxes and report an overwhelming sense of well-being after a session.
I’ve spoken with people who get the same sense of peace from the various orgone totems as well.
Reich’s adventures after that were many. Again, if you Google him you can lose several hours and part of your ability to tell truth from fiction. You can even look into the still-in-operation American College of Orgonomy in Princeton, NJ, but the short version is that when he started selling orgone accumulators as a cancer cure, the FDA put him in jail, where he eventually died serving out his time.
True believers claim it was an assassination by the New World Order to prevent the truth about orgone from reaching the masses. The result is that in addition to regular new-agers, it is the sacred object of choice among many conspiracy enthusiasts.
Facts About Fiction Don’t Matter
Talk to an orgone enthusiast and they will rattle all sorts of physics and electromagnetic facts about why it works at you. The fact that it is all unsubstantiated or tangential baloney doesn’t matter because, the thing is, once you start talking about orgone like it is a real energy source, the normal rules of conversation no longer apply.
When I think about why people believe in orgone and in the orgone accumulator process, it reminds me of my acupuncture experience. I started getting panic attacks after my experience with the quit-smoking drug chantix. It was the only time I ever took a prescription where suicidal depression was one of the listed side effects.
I spent a brief period taking Zoloft until the depression waned and the panic attacks started not long after with a trip to the hospital. I thought I was having a heart-attack. I’m mostly better now and, if pressed, I’d have to admit that acupuncture was a significant part of that cure.
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I had been assured that acupuncture could help with my panic attacks and, as their frequency and strength increased, I tried acupuncture almost out of desperation. After my recent experiences, I wasn’t ready to look for chemical relief.
The acupuncturist was a standard-issue white guy with an easy demeanor. I can’t remember what he looks like anymore so in my memories he is played by Jeremy Piven.
He was matter-of-fact about the weird gray space between art and science that acupuncture occupies and that made me feel better. I’m always wary of true-believers.
He invited me to lay on the table and trained a heat lamp on my lower abdomen, explaining that heat excited the bacteria in the gut that makes seretonin. Then he stuck needles in and around my earlobes, the common place to start with people having panic attacks.
I can’t remember whether he asked me to close my eyes or if there was a blindfold provided, or whether I kept my eyes open the whole time, but I don’t think that’s significant.
The point is that once I was fully pricked, he left me alone in the darkened room with soft classical music playing in the background. When the first session was over, he suggested that if I was feeling anxious between appointments I put a heating pad on my stomach.
Two sessions later I was cured. To this day, if I’m feeling tweaky at bedtime I use a heating pad, though I probably haven’t done that in more than a year.
What occurred to me after, was that if I had lain in a darkened room listening to classical music for half an hour under a warm light with one of those pointy birthday hats on my head, I likely would have had the same effect.
It was the first thing I thought of when I heard about how much people felt they benefitted from spending time in an orgone accumulator and, maybe to a lesser extent, focusing on orgone pyramids, pendants, and the like.
Tricking People Into Meditating
I don’t know if it is so much a placebo effect as it is the result of accidental meditation. If you can quiet your mind for long enough, you’re always going to feel better. What’s critical to remember is that there’s nothing about the orgone that makes this happen.
And here’s where it gets a little dicey. I know that people listening believe in the power of crystals and even in the power of orgone specifically. I don’t want to begrudge them that but I’m also beginning to suffer from belief indulgence fatigue.
I mean, orgone is demonstrably made up. There’s no anecdotal evidence that can overcome the fact that it was invented by the kind of person who was willing to sell false hope to the terminally ill.
We gotta let that sink in for a second because this isn’t a difference of opinion.
Orgone will not cure cancer but its inventor would rather let people die than admit that he was wrong.
And even though orgone will not cure anything, it makes some people feel like they have control and protection that doesn’t exist. That is why it is most effective for mitigating threats that don’t exist.
If you use orgone to protect yourself from demons or from 5G waves (as many people do) it is going to work because demons and 5G waves aren’t real threats. But rather than admit we are too impotent to protect ourselves in a world that is changing so very quickly, we concoct precautions to make us safe.
We all have a deep and abiding sense of powerlessness that has only been heightened since the turn of the century. Addressing that powerlessness is complicated and difficult. Pretending that it isn’t powerlessness but something bigger and more nefarious is so much easier, and that’s what makes it more attractive.
It’s also gone way beyond the fringe and into the mainstream, where inventing cultural rights that we have to defend or parroting complicated pseudoscience and history that we clearly don’t have a grip on is preferable to accepting our frailty and ignorance in the face of shifting culture.
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I mean, Christ!, I’ve been hiding in my house for two years because there’s literally nothing I can do to make this disease go away or to make other people take it seriously.
It is absolutely infuriating precisely because it reminds me how little I matter, and how much less my worries and even my life matters to the people around me.
If the pandemic has done nothing else, it has amplified my sense of my own insignificance, and that is a goddam tough pill to swallow. So much so that it almost makes sense that so many people prefer to live in denial.
What’s weird is how long and enthusiastically many of us embraced a different kind of denial, but centuries of saying it is ok for people to believe whatever they want regardless of sense or coherence is finally taking its toll.
Private Realities
Now anyone can occupy a different reality whenever they want, and impose it on the rest of us. What better time to do that than in the face of insurmountable evidence that you don’t really matter?
That’s what I think is at the heart of all the destructive and self-destructive behavior from the anti-maskers to the January 6thers. I don’t see crazy, I see wild impotence. I can’t imagine being that terrified, like a wolf gnawing off its foot, ignorant of the trap and consumed only by fear and blind self-preservation.
I’ve written recently about seeing vaccine cures among the conspiracy crowd, which brings this inevitably full circle to me. Where people needed to get vaccinated to keep their jobs, they’re turning to pseudo-cures like orgone or sound and light therapy to filter out whatever bad juju the vaccine contains.
My New (Cursed?) Orgone Pendant
When you buy orgone you’re paying for a story not magicbytonyrusso.medium.com
You see, orgone can successfully protect people from the ill-affects of the vaccine in the same way it protects them from the negative energy cell towers are beaming all over the place. And that’s the really frustrating part, there will always be made-up cures for made-up threats.
A big part of this Manifesto for me is learning to come to terms with being on the losing side of cultural decisions. People being not only allowed but also encouraged to believe whatever they want is the toughest one so far.
I’ll admit that I never liked this idea that people’s religious freedom meant they could believe whatever they wanted, so in this case, the hardest thing for me to come to terms with is my surprise that it has spun so far out of control.
Given that it has how difficult it is for me to at least accept it, to at least understand or find some purchase where I can say: “This makes sense.” The closest I can come is to relate it to orgone, which is a made-up cure for a made-up problem.
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