After the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in which several young school children and their teachers were killed, I wrote about psychological illness that may cause this type of violent and unpredictable behavior in my article, Sandy Hook elementary School tragedy. In response, a reader recently sent a comment, questioning the authenticity of this story and accused the government and President Obama of lying and conspiring against the people for political gain. We did not post that comment because the claim could not be substantiated. However, this comment did raise the question of distrust and deception, which are closely related. Deception between and among the people and their government is ubiquitous, not only within the United States, but within many countries, and this deception ultimately leads to distrust, more deceit and an unhealthy society.

Examples of deception abound over the last few decades: Nixon's deceit and abuse of power in the Watergate scandal, Clinton's denial of his extramarital affair, George W. Bush's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq while England's former Prime Minister Tony Blair concurred, adding that Iraq's government possessed missiles that could quickly destroy England. In response, the British press satirized Blair, depicting him as a liar

Caricature of Tony Blair

In his book, Sex, Lies and Politics, Larry Flint, publisher of Hustler, underscored the irony of the many representatives and elected public officials who morally criticized Clinton while they themselves were living double lives. In fact, one official of the Republican National Committee stated, "I don't have any moral values, I just talk about them on television" (Sex, Lies and Politics, by Larry Flint, Aurum Publishing , P 24 ). And in third-world countries, the lies of the government are so prevalent, so transparent that most people believe nothing that their government says. One glaring example of this deceit occurred just prior to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran when a horrifying fire in a southern Iran movie theater killed 300 people after the theater's doors had been sealed. The arsonists were never caught, and the Shah's enemies blamed his regime for the unconscionable violence. Although later investigations raised major doubts about the veracity of this claim, the Shah's regime was so discredited that even the Shah's advisors recommended that he avoid challenging the accusation since the people would not believe him.

Historically, ancient Iranians considered the effects of lies to be as catastrophic as the effects of famine and enemies. In one Zoroastrian prayer, Darius the Great, King of Persia (521-486 B.C) implores Ahura Mazda, the highest divine spirit in the religion, to "save this country from enemy, famine, and lies"

Darius The Great

Clearly, the ancient Persians recognized lying as something that could destroy the nation and prayed to God (Ahura Mazda) to save their country from it. But how can a nation possibly be protected from lies?

In 1949, Reich conducted a series of clinical lectures and discussions with medical students in which he formulated the basic principles of orgone therapy. In one of the lectures, he discussed the special characteristics of an individual who has successfully completed the final phase of the therapy: After armoring is resolved, the patient develops Christ-like characteristics, and he or she becomes incapable of lying and cheating.

From an orgonomic point of view, lying is ingrained in the structure of the armored person–one who is raised in an authoritarian, anti-sexual family. Such a person develops a muscular and emotional contraction, referred to as armoring. Since most cultures raise their children in such families, structural distortions are, therefore, prevalent in those societies. Such physical and emotional distortions can shape an honest infant into an armored and scarred adult, one who is physically and psychologically distorted and becomes deceitful. These distortions are so prevalent among the member of society that it gains the proportions of an epidemic, resulting in neurotic symptoms and deceit throughout the masses. In his book, Function of Orgasm, Reich stated, "Freud knew, and he said so in writing, that humanity is sick. The connection between this general illness and the catastrophe that took place in Russia and later in Germany was as alien to the thinking of the psychiatrist as to that of the statesman or political scientist." (Function of Orgasm, Wilhelm Reich, Translated by Theodore P. Wolfe, Noonday Publishing Eight printing 1969, Page 186 ) Within this same book, Reich stated:

After the First World War had destroyed many of the compulsive authoritarian institutions, the European democracies tried to 'lead mankind toward freedom'. But this European world, in its striving for freedom, made a grave miscalculation. It overlooked what the destruction of the living function in the human over thousands of years had cultivated into a monstrosity; it overlooked the deep-seated, general defect of the character-neurosis. And then, the great catastrophe of the psychic plague, that is, the catastrophe of the irrational human character, broke out in the form of the victory of the dictatorships. The forces which had been kept in check for so long by the superficial veneer of good breeding, the artificial self-control, now, borne by the very multitudes that were striving for freedom, broke through into action:
In the concentration camps; in the persecution of the Jews; in the destruction of all human decency; in the mowing down of civilian populations by sadistic monsters to whom machine-gunning civilians is a delightful sport and who get a feeling of life only when parading in goose-step; in the gigantic mass deceit in which the state claims to be representing the interest of the people; in the engulfment of tens of thousands of young people who, helplessly and loyally, believed that they were serving an idea; in the destruction of billions' worth of human work, a fraction of which would suffice to do away with poverty all over the world; in brief, in a St. Vitus dance which will continue to recur as long as the bearers of knowledge and work do not succeed in eradicating, within themselves and outside of themselves, that mass neurosis which calls itself "politics" and which thrives on the characterological helplessness of human beings." (Function of Orgasm, Wilhelm Reich, Translated by Theodore P. Wolfe, Noonday Publishing Eight printing 1969, p. 205)

Although Reich expressed these ideas in the 1940s, there is no reason to believe that things are changed now and above statements continue to be relevant today. Authoritarian and anti-sexual families continue to produce individuals who are physically and psychologically distorted. The children from these families continue to be suppressed–their yearnings for emotional and sexual happiness restricted, causing contractions in their tissues and muscles, blocking the instinctual forces that would otherwise be expressed naturally, lovingly, and bring them happiness with respect for happiness of others. Over time, these physical and emotional contractions distort the physical and psychological structure of the child who thus grows into adulthood with unhealthy, distorted yearnings and impulses that had once been healthy but were not gratified. Such a structure is itself a lie, a distorted and disingenuous structure, familiar to deception and lying. The prayer of Darius the Great to protect his country from lies will never be heard by God unless His children are brought up the way they are ordained to.

In Reich Speaks of Freud, Reich stated:

"Unless medicine, education, social hygiene succeed in establishing such a bio-energetic functioning in the mass of the population.... Nothing will change. I have had much medical experience in that. I have pulled many a child out of that mire. As long as that is going on, nothing will happen in the right direction. Nothing! No constitution, no parliament, nothing will help. Nothing, I say. Nothing will change for the better. You can't impose freedom on the ruined bio-energetic systems of children." (Reich Speaks of Freud, Wilhelm Reich discusses his work and his relationship with Sigmund Freud, A Condor Book Publishing, 1972, P. 31,).

In order to achieve this freedom, Reich argued:

You have to establish youth centers, you have to train many physicians. You have to teach sex economy. You have to bring human psychology into your politics. You have to do more. You have to revamp your whole way of thinking, so that you don't think from the stand point of the state and the culture and this or that, but from the stand point of what people need, what they suffer from. Then you arrange your social institutions accordingly. Not the other way around. Now that is foreign to the mind of Marxist politician today. They only think in terms of "productive forces" they think in terms of state. I think in terms of human beings and what they need. If I had anything to say politically, everything which exists would be arranged in accordance with what the child needs, the infant needs, the adolescent needs, you need, I need, and everybody needs. Now here sociology becomes separated from politics for the first time. (Reich Speaks of Freud, Wilhelm Reich discusses his work and his relationship with Sigmund Freud, A Condor Book Publishing, 1972, P 49)

For Darius the Great's prayer to be realized and to avoid repeating disasters caused by emotional plague, we must, as Reich implores us, revamp our thinking to move toward a social order that is based upon children's need to respect and promote genuine feelings and desires–to choose health over sickness, to let the children grow as they are ordained to and become adults incapable of lying and cheating.