Right? The guy never caught a break from persecution. However wacky he became, Reich was one of the few in psychiatry to focus on prevention over treatment of

Right? The guy never caught a break from persecution. However wacky he became, Reich was one of the few in psychiatry to focus on prevention over treatment of mental illness. When he investigated the root causes of mental illness in his patients, he saw the conditions of modern life were often the source of the harm. He advocated a radical re-engineering of society so that it meets people's fundamental social, spiritual, and organismic needs. He saw fascism as a symptom of structural failures to meet these needs. Fascism is not so much an authoritarian political movement as mass mental illness. His model suggests that in such circumstances you'd see disordered thinking across the political spectrum. People's tolerance for ambiguity diminishes, tribalism increases, and we grasp at simple solutions. This flailing fails to address the systemic problems leading to positive feedback that further corrodes the social fabric. That sounds like an accurate description of the present moment.