More Radionics

 

Cubism / Ben Nicholson/ 1943-45 (St Ives, Cornwall)

Be sippin’ coffee and pondering.  

Getting sidetracked from the task of reading up on Reich.  Sloggy work that.  A lot of the time psychology/philosophy reads are not quick reading.  At my age, Cliffs notes kinda make more sense.  My brain has trouble running at the speeds that it used to run at, and the actual bandwidth itself is narrower than it used to be.  If my brain at its peak was a 10th generation G7, I figure right now I am running on a 486.  Sigh.

Back to Reich and psychology/philosophy.  Looks to me that Reich was onto something.  Not that he was seriously right or anything, but, like Jung, he repurposed some eastern philosophy (to me, he sounds a lot like Tantric, but who am I to judge) and overexplained it in the paaaattient aaaavuncular tones of a very self-absorbed academic.  Gee, I wonder why it annoyed folks.

What I found interesting was how psych-types dismissed Reich’s work as “unscientific”.  Wow!!

I have not even got a serious start on Reich’s writings.  I suppose that I am in the phase of the process described by Salvor Hardin in “Foundation”

Hardin continued: "It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weight the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that?"

What I find interesting is that Radionics actually builds something that purports to do something with orgone.  So there is actually something to test.  I also think that there might be a certain paucity of valid data replete with positive and negative controls, clear definitions of expected results, a ruthless and clear minded evaluation of the results.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Ernest Rutherford

So, gonna finish up some reading in the next couple of weeks.  Then I have to decide if pursuing this is worth the effort.  I got to drink a couple of beers yesterday down at the Decibel and chat with Eddie about tubes.  So the technical part has been broached.  I’ll keep y’all posted.