Excerpts and Illustations from Listen Little Man!
Written in 1945 by psychoanalyst and Freud Colleague Wilhelm Reich. While reading it, I felt it was extremely relevant to what is happening in the world today. I felt as though this man was speaking directly at me, at people I know or knew , at teachers and preachers i’ve met, heard and believed so blindly. His words are especially aimed at politicians, at identities and illusions we hold as “truths”. Listen Little Man! is the most brutally honest talk anyone has ever had with me ! This “we need to talk” book (which, from what I read was not supposed to be published) is an invitation for each and every one of us to turn the mirror around and see what we look like behind all those masks we wear , to look at ourselves hard and long and finally see WHERE humanity’s misery stems from.
“Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.” -Wilhelm Reich
LISTEN LITTLE MAN!
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 dare to 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!
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.
No, you did not ask yourself whether your thinking was erroneous. Instead, you asked yourself what your neighbor was going to say about it, or whether your honesty might cost you money. This, Little Man, and nothing else, is what you asked yourself.
You do not believe that your friend could something great. Secretly, you despise yourself, even when – or particularly when you make the greatest display of your dignity; and since you despise yourself you cannot respect him who is your friend.
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.
True enough, you want to have ‘geniuses’ and you are willing to pay them homage. But you want a good genius, one with moderation and decorum, one without folly, in brief, a seemly, measured and adjusted genius, not an unruly, untamed genius which breaks down all your barriers and limitations You want a limited, wing-clipped and dressed-up genius whom without blushing, you can triumphantly parade through the streets of your towns.
That’s the way you are, Little Man. You are good at scooping up and ladling in, but you cannot create. And that’s why you are what you are, all your life in a boring office or at the designing board or in the marital straitjacket or a teacher who hates children. You have no development and no chance for a new thought, because you have always only taken, only ladled in what somebody else has presented to you on a silver platter.
You long for love, you love your work and make a living from it, and your work lives on my knowledge and that of others. Love, work and knowledge know no fatherlands, no customs barriers, and no uniforms. They are international and comprise all humanity. But you want to be a little patriot, because you are afraid of genuine love, afraid of your responsibility for your own work, afraid of knowledge. This is why you can only exploit the love, work and knowledge of others but can never create yourself. This is why you steal your happiness like a thief in the night; this is why you cannot see happiness in others without getting green with envy.
Now as to your freedom giddiness. Nobody, Little Man, has ever asked you why you have not been able to get freedom for yourself, or why, if you did, you immediately surrendered it to some new master.
‘Listen to that! He dares to doubt the revolutionary upsurge of the proletarians of the world, he dares to doubt democracy! Down with the counter revolutionary! Down!’
Your yelling ‘Viva!’ and ‘Down!’ is not one step closer to your goal, Little Man. You have been believing that your freedom is secured when you ‘put people against the wall’. For once, put yourself in front of a mirror.
If you, Little Woman, by mere chance, without any special qualifications, have become a teacher, simply because you did not have children of your own, you do untold damage. Your job is to handle and educate children. In education, if one takes it seriously, this means correctly to manage the children’s sexuality. In order to handle the children’s sexuality, one must, oneself have experienced what love it. But you are fat, awkward and unattractive. That alone is enough to make you hate every charming, alive body with deep and bitter hatred. What I am blaming you for is not that you are fat and unattractive; not that you have never enjoyed love; not that you do not understand love in the children. What I am blaming you for is that you make a virtue out of your unattractiveness and your incapacity for love, and that, with your bitter hatred, you strangle the love in the children, if you happen to work in a ‘progressive school’. This is a crime, ugly Little Woman. The harmfulness of your existence consists in your alienating the affection of healthy children from their healthy fathers; in our considering the healthy love of a child a pathological symptom. It consists in your being barrel-shaped, your going around like a barrel, your thinking like a barrel, your educating like a barrel; in your not modestly retiring to a small corner of life, but, instead, trying to impose upon this life your barrel shape, your falseness, and your bitter hatred hidden behind your false smile.
You built your house on sand and you did all this because you are incapable of feeling life in yourself, because you kill love in your child even before it is born; because you cannot tolerate any alive expression, any free, natural movement, because you cannot tolerate it, you get scared and ask: ‘What is Mr.Jones, and what is Judge Smith going to say?’
You are cowardly in your thinking, Little Man because real thinking is accompanied by bodily feelings, and you are afraid of your body. Many great men have told you: ‘Go back to your origin – listen to your inner voice -follow your true feelings -cherish love.’ But you were deaf to what they said, for you had lost your ear for such words. They were lost in vast deserts, and the lonely criers perish in your dreadful desert emptiness, Little Man.
Through the centuries, you will follow the braggarts and will be deaf and blind when LIFE, YOUR LIFE, calls to you. For you are afraid of life, Little Man, deadly afraid. You will murder it, in the belief of doing it for the sake of ‘socialism’, or ‘the state’, or ‘national honor’, or ‘the glory of God’. There is one thing you don’t know nor want to know: That you yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day; that you do not understand your children, that you break their spines before they have had a chance really to develop them; that you steal love; that you are avaricious and crazy for power; that you keep a dog in order also to be a ‘master’
‘Grab him! Examine him!’ Does he have a license to practice medicine? Proclaim a Royal decree that he cannot practice without the consent of the king of our free country! He does experiments about my pleasure functions! Jail him! Throw him out of the country!’
‘He is a megalomaniac! He’s gone crazy, absolutely crazy!’ I know, Little Man, you are quick with the diagnosis of craziness when you meet a truth you don’t like. And you feel yourself as the ‘homo normalis’. You have locked up crazy people, and the normal people manage this world. Who then is to blame for all the misery? Not you, of course, you only do your duty, and who are you to have an opinion of your own? I know, you don’t have to repeat it. It isn’t you that matters, Little Man. But when I think of your newborn children, of how you torture them in order to make them into ‘normal’ human beings after your image, then I am tempted to come close to you again, in order to prevent your crime. But I also know that you have taken care to protect yourself well by your institution of a Department of Education.
You always think in too short terms, Little Man just from breakfast to lunch. You must learn to think back in terms of centuries and forward in terms of thousands of years. You have to learn to think in the terms of living life, in terms of your development from the first plasmatic flake to the animal man, which walks erect but cannot yet think straight. You have no memory even for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and so you keep repeating the same stupidities you said 2000 years ago. More than that, you cling to your stupidities, such as your ‘race’ ‘class’ ‘nation’ religious compulsion and suppression of love as a louse clings to a fur. You do not dare see how deeply you stick in the morass of your misery. Every once in a while, you stick your head out of the morass to yell, Heil! the croaking of a frog in a marsh is closer to life.
Little Man; one has seen behind your facade of retchedness 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, Heill, you bearer of the future of the proletariat. We have found the key to your secret of thousands of years. You are brutal behind your mask of sociality and friendliness.
Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; low more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when the mood of Beethoven or Bach will be the mood of your total existence (you have it in you, Little Man, buried deeply in a corner of your existence); when your thinking will be in harmony, and no longer at variance, with your feelings; when you will be able to comprehend your gifts in time and to recognize your ageing in time; when you will live the thoughts of great men instead of the misdeeds of great warriors;
when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license; when you will recognize errors in thinking in time, and not too late,as today; when you will feel elevation in hearing truths, and feel horror of formalities; when your adolescent daughter’s happiness in love will delight instead of enrage you; when you will only shake your head at the times when one punished little children for touching their love organs; when human faces on the street will express freedom, animation and joy and no longer sadness and misery; when people no longer will walk on this earth with retracted and rigid pelvises and deadened sexual organs.
You are great, Little Man, when you sing the good old folk songs, or when you dance to the tune of an accordion, for the folk songs are warm and soothing, and are the same all over the world.
hippielu 