Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" (1952) has a chapter about orgone therapy. The next chapter is on dianetics, which Scientology originally was. MG noted that orgone believers were very indignant that the book associated orgone therapy with dianetics, and dianetics believers felt likewise about associating dianetics with orgone therapy.
Even fraudsters are offended by fraudsters. I'm sure that Trump would be outraged if anyone tried to pull a scam on him.
These are rank-and-file believers, not leaders.
Martin Gardner described his career in "Orgonomy" in "Fads and Fallacies".
Wilhelm Reich was a protégé of none other than Sigmund Freud himself, and he became a prominent Freudian, holding several teaching and administrative posts in Freudian organizations in Vienna, and writing for Freudian journals.
He started out in the Austrian Socialist Party, then when he moved to Berlin, he joined the Communist Party. Arthur Koestler, in his contribution to "The God That Failed" (Communism), wrote about WR. “Among other members of our cell,” writes Koestler, “I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich, founder and director of the Sex-Pol (Institute for Sexual Politics). He was a Freudian Marxist; inspired by Malinowski, he had just published a book called "The Function of the Orgasm", in which he expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the Proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cock-eyed than it sounds.”
But the Soviet Communist Party dismissed his writings as "un-Marxist rubbish", and differences with Sigmund Freud and his followers led them to expel him from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1934.
"Having written in 1933 a book attacking German fascism as the sadistic expression of sex-repressed neurotics, Reich was not looked upon kindly by the Nazis when they came to power."
He fled to Denmark, then to Sweden, then to Norway, where he discovered orgone. After a furious press campaign against his work there, he moved to the US in 1939. After teaching for two years in New York City, he left and founded an Orgone Institute in Long Island, later moving to an estate in Maine.
MG then proposes three interpretations for WR's later career.
(1) He became the world’s greatest biophysicist.
(2) He deteriorated from a competent psychiatrist into a self-deluded crank.
(3) He merely switched to fields in which his former incompetence became more visible.
finance.yahoo.com
List of fraudsters. This may seem like an omission, but I think that he has to be convicted of the frauds first. The Citizens United ruling should have fleshed out the list with more politicians, since they can command such large sums of money now, but many of them come by their wealth as handouts from donors expecting to cash in on influence peddling. Trump, however, is probably one of the most successful fraudsters in American history through his skillful use of the legal and tax systems to accumulate wealth and power. He even managed to rise to the presidency on the success of his ability to scam people, sometimes quite openly and brazenly, without having to pay any consequence for the behavior. We have yet to see whether any of his multiple trials lead to any serious consequences. Most of the people who made the fraudster list only got there because they got caught and punished.
www.bbc.com
