I have shown elsewhere that the whole edifice of [Otto] Rank's superb thought is built on a single foundation stone: man's fear of life and death. There is no point repeating this here except to remind us why these fundamental motives are so well hidden from ourselves. After all, it took the genius of Freud and the whole psychoanalytic movement to uncover and document the twin fears of life and death. The answer is that men do not actually live stretched openly on a rack of cowardice and terror; if they did, they couldn't continue on with such apparent equanimity and thoughtlessness. Men's fears are buried deeply by repression, which gives to everyday life its tranquil façade; only occasionally does the desperation show through, and only for some people. It is repression, then, that great discovery of psychoanalysis, that explains how well men can hide their basic motivations even from themselves. But men also live in a dimension of carefreeness, trust, hope, and joy which gives them a buoyancy beyond that which repression alone could give. This, as we saw with Rank, is achieved by the symbolic engineering of culture, which everywhere serves men as an antidote to terror by giving them a new and durable life beyond that of the body.
At about the same time that Rank wrote, Wilhelm Reich also based his entire work on the same few basic propositions. In a few wonderful pages in The Mass Psychology of Fascism Reich lays bare the dynamics of human misery on this planet: it all stems from man trying to be other than he is, trying to deny his animal nature. This, says Reich, is the cause of all psychic illness, sadism, and war. The guiding principles of the formation of all human ideology "harp on the same monotonous tune: 'We are not animals....'"
In his book Reich is out to explain fascism, why men so willingly give over their destiny to the state and a great leader. And he explains it in the most direct way: it is the politician who promises to engineer the world, to raise man above his natural destiny, and so men put their whole trust in him. We saw how easily men passed from egalitarian into kingship society, and for that very reason: because the central power promised to give them unlimited immunities and prosperities. We will see in the next chapter how this new arrangement unleashed on mankind regular and massive miseries that primitive societies encountered only occasionally and usually on a small scale. Men tried to avoid the natural plagues of existence by giving themselves over to structures which embodied immunity power, but they only succeeded in laying waste to themselves with the new plagues unleashed by their obedience to the politicians. Reich coined the apt term "political plague-mongers" to describe all politicians. They are the ones who lied to people about the real and the possible and launched mankind on impossible dreams which took impossible tolls on real life. Once you base your whole life-striving on a desperate lie and try to implement that lie, try to make the world just the opposite of what it is, then you instrument your own undoing. The theory of the German superman—or any other theory of group or racial superiority— "has its origin in man's effort to disassociate himself from the animal." All you have to do is to say that your group is pure and good, eligible for a full life and for some kind of eternal meaning. But others like Jews or Gypsies are the real animals, are spoiling everything for you, contaminating your purity and bringing disease and weakness into your vitality. Then you have a mandate to launch a political plague, a campaign to make the world pure. It is all in Hitler's Mein Kampf, in those frightening pages about how the Jews lie in wait in the dark alleys ready to infect young German virgins with syphilis. Nothing more theoretically basic needs to be said about the general theory of scapegoating in society...