Politics & Power Quote by Wilhelm Reich

Reich’s move here is to puncture a common alibi in political argument: the slide from “it’s real” to “it’s justified.” Ideologies, he suggests, gain authority by sheer mass and momentum. They become institutions, habits, flags, family scripts. Then they start to feel like gravity - permanent, natural, beyond choice. Reich refuses that enchantment. He’s insisting on a basic diagnostic distinction: prevalence is not legitimacy, and social force is not moral necessity.

The plague analogy is pointedly rude, and that’s the point. He drags ideology out of the realm of noble abstraction and puts it beside an indisputable horror that also reorganized society, dictated behavior, produced rituals, and shaped history. The subtext is that ideologies can operate like pathogens: contagious, adaptive, and devastating, thriving on fear and crowd psychology rather than on truth. If you’re tempted to defend an ideology because “people believe in it” or because it “structures society,” Reich is calling that what it is: surrender to symptom.

Context matters. Reich wrote in the shadow of European mass politics, when fascism and Stalinism weren’t theoretical disputes but total environments. As a psychologist steeped in psychoanalysis, he’s also arguing that political commitments often ride on unexamined emotional needs - anxiety, libido, aggression, the craving for certainty. His intent isn’t quiet skepticism; it’s a provocation to treat ideology less like destiny and more like something societies can outgrow, cure, or refuse.