Dancing With A Broken Heart

WARNING - YOU DON'T HAVE TO AGREE WITH THIS ONE!!

Today I was confronted with a frightening fact: Anders Behring Breivik is possibly more diligently well-read than me.

I mean I am a great reader who travels far beyond the typical academic or commercial booklist review-of-books. I used to work near enough to the seriously commercial book-publishing industry to know how to find out who really sells the most books – in other words, what books real readers like as opposed to those books that the marketing department arranges the sales of!

Of course by now I'd actually forgotten that when I was an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia I once tackled a certain Prof. Maund with the complaint that the librarian was being suspiciously deceptive regarding the works of Wilhelm Reich which were supposed to be on the shelves – but which weren't. Only many many years later did I discover that a certain City Councillor – one Paul Ritter (the architect and town planner who had laid the foundation stones of the original World Trade Center) – continually 'removed' (as in purloined...) all said copies any and every time the University replaced them on the shelves by buying new copies, until eventually, they stopped buying them.

Kate Bush - wrote Reich-inspired songs

A further fact was that all of this was because of some dispute or other between Ritter and the University itself – and partly also consisting of an attempt by Ritter to get some free press about his socio-psychology ideas that were being decried by the Heritage (buildings) Council based at the University.

The fact that I was the only person who ever did actually really notice the continual disappearances of these books I guess means that popularity is not necessarily a guarantee of quality, or, that quality is a fluid idea when it comes to the written word expressing the ideas of intellectuals and that not everyone agrees on what intellectualism is.

In the past I have tried to read broadly...

But Breivik not only appears to have read broadly, but to have comprehended the significance of some of the intellectuals he has read. The conclusions he reaches are not ones that I can necessarily agree with him about – but the danger of those intellectuals is if anything, testified to by what Breivik did.

People who read along the same lines as Breivik are likely to be 1. very few in number and 2. rather intelligent to say the least.

Is James Holmes one of these? And does he also have a Manifesto out there somewhere, but one that is being presented in disguise and not presently being attributed to him? I believe there is almost a 100% chance that this is the case. I don't think either Breivik or Holmes are lunatics at all. That is, they are only lunatic if you consider Stalin to have been a lunatic, if you see what I mean. They will achieve a certain amount of their ends through the kind of determination that is, I suppose, a little crazy!

Let me show you an example of the power of people like Reich... Reich, I believe, was not the man people have assumed him to be. He has always been thought of as being both brilliant, and likely also suffering a mental disorder towards the end of his life. And that is the fatal mistake about him. Wilhelm Reich was so brilliant that he realised that to actually have the impact he desired, on the type of society and the type of person in society that he wanted to affect, he would eventually as a form of therapy have to play a lethal and probably self-fatal joke on the pathological and neurotic society in which he was living both during the era of Nazi Germany, and post that in the USA. His basic premise throughout his latter written works was that scientists had to be allowed to pursue completely erroneous paths and be permitted and indulged in pursuing virtually obvious complete failure – in order to challenge the psychological straitjacket of a political society that was severely neurotic, traumatised, and disturbed from centuries of violence that we were mistaken in assuming we had coped with without impediment to the sanity of the very system itself. He thought that by deliberately going down obviously erroneous pathways seeking discovery, we might find solutions where by going down the straitjacketed ones by this time in the pathology of society, we most certainly wouldn't at all and only prolong and promulgate ever more neurotic pathology.

I'm pretty sure he personally regarded what he was saying extremely seriously in the same way any doctor would in treating an epidemic. The other side of that coin is mass murder... Of course.

I recommend that you listen to and watch the video by Kate Bush which employs Reichian psychology – song titled 'Running Up That Hill.'

And then I recommend the extremely recent/current hit by the Australian singer Delta Goodrem – 'Dancing With A Broken Heart,' which is essentially the same idea but revisited in the modern musical idiom. Artists often know before others, what is going on. Well, maybe reflect deep feelings within parts of the society before the whole becomes fully conscious of them. Let us not forget, musicians like Wagner were always associated with the rise of Nazi Germany. We are at a distance now from Wagner -, but too close to Bush and Goodrem (pic on the right there) and the trance beat generation to realise the signs.

Calvin J. Bear