From Fascia to Ideology to Fascism: The Nervous System of the Collective

Reich’s Theory Expanded + Rohr & Non-Dual Śiva Tantra

If you haven’t read my three-part series on De-Armoring, it might help to start there. It gives some context for what follows, especially if you’re not familiar with the work of Wilhelm Reich.

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Wilhelm Reich looked at how the body armors itself against trauma, chronic tension that stifles emotions, distorts posture, and shapes our behaviors. Armor doesn’t only appear as tension and tightness. Sometimes it takes the form of emptiness, a kind of collapse where sensation and muscle tone are cut off. In that sense, we can generalize the two nervous system responses behind these patterns as fight and flight representing the tight kinds of armor, while freeze and dissociation are the hollow, empty kinds. Both distort perception and cause disconnect, and both are adaptive and simply our system trying to protect itself and keep us alive.

What if entire cultures do the same?

Just as repressed emotions crystallize into rigid musculature, unprocessed collective trauma calcifies into social structures. Institutions, media, and ideological thinking become the “connective tissue” of cultural armoring, defensive, reactive, and increasingly brittle. The more a belief system is threatened, the more it contracts into dogma.

This is not a metaphor.

Neuroscience confirms that when what we believe feels threatened, the same neural pathways as physical threat, amygdala activation, cortisol spikes, and cognitive shutdown are triggered.

Polarization might appear in politics, but it starts out in our physiology. And, like bodily armor, cultural rigidity creates the instability it seeks to prevent.

The Paradox of Protection

Armor exists for survival, but over time, defense becomes the disease.

Aliveness and tissue that can no longer respond, whether due to being locked in contraction or collapsed into disconnection, have lost function and become “dead”.

Reich showed that armor distorts perception. Tension in the Jaw, diaphragm, and pelvis shapes not only movement but how the world feels, and how we interpret experience.

The same is true collectively. When a society is gripped by chronic tension and repression, it loses the ability to distinguish between real threats and misfired reflexes. It overreacts, doubling down on control, mistaking contraction for strength.

De-Armoring the Collective Nervous System

Reich’s somatic therapy principles translate eerily well to societal healing. As a practitioner, I see firsthand how chronic tension shapes not just the body but perception itself. Clients often describe the relief of releasing held patterns as seeing the world differently. I experience this myself daily… noticing how my inner felt sense shapes the way my brain processes and deciphers the raw experience of life.

Each of our nervous systems is a drop in the ocean of collective perception. Our wiring accumulates bioenergetic frequencies and radiates them outward, broadcasting to the world around us. Collectively, our social structures become the sum of each of our inner experiences.

Just as trapped energy in muscles requires movement, unprocessed cultural trauma tends to harden into rigidity.

But attempts to restore fluidity, whether through dialogue, creative expression, or institutional shifts, often fail when approached from a system that is still misfiring. If the individual's nervous system is dysregulated, external efforts to create safety or connection will carry that same dysregulation. A locked-up psoas doesn’t relax just because someone tells it to. It releases when the body perceives safety from within.

The same is true on a collective scale.

Without the internal work of finding our own felt sense of safety, without re-parenting ourselves enough to know what it feels like to have our own backs, efforts at discourse become debates before anyone even opens their mouth, expression becomes performative, and community-building becomes another battleground.

When we operate from a braced state, even well-intentioned attempts to create change can reinforce contraction rather than finding resolution and balance.

Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation puts it another way: contemplation is the soil that lets action grow from the roots of loving awareness rather than from the discomfort of needing things to be different. Their work introduces contemplative practice that inspires loving action.

When enough people engage with and attend to their inner world in the present moment, a genuine sense of safety and connection arises within themselves, and the actions that emerge take on a different quality.

Dialogue becomes possible when listening is no longer filtered through a survival response.

Art moves culture when it comes from a place of embodied truth rather than reaction.

Nervous system regulation, through breath, movement, or simply how we show up in space, becomes a quiet force that shifts the field around us.

None of this happens through force.

A body that has been armored for years doesn’t soften because it “should.” It softens because it feels something different, an invitation, an opening, a possibility that wasn’t there before. And when enough people create those openings in themselves, they create the conditions for others to do the same.

The system changes not because it is torn down, but because it no longer holds the same charge as the energy propping it up gets redirected towards something new.

This dynamic, the way our individual armor ripples outward to create systemic disconnection… shows up in healing spaces in very obvious ways.

Healing, at its core, is an attempt to make whole what has been labeled fragmented.

However, what is whole cannot truly be fragmented; what we call fragmentation is more accurately a distortion in our perception.

Approaching healing from a lens of “brokenness” or “dysregulation” sets us off in the wrong direction from the start. Wrong direction is fine… we notice, we course-correct… but it’s worth naming.

From the perspective of Non-Dual Śiva Tantra or Kashmiri Śaivism, all things are expressions of consciousness. The only one who judges anything as bad or wrong is our brain when it fails to see the beauty in what it fears. Life itself has no agenda to feel wrong.

A fragmented, transactional, or consumerist approach to healing inevitably falls short.

In a social structure like ours, even the “solutions” to our problems become problems themselves. That’s how systemic, deep, and persistent this thread is. But our biology can’t be tricked… it knows… and eventually we catch up to it.

This is where the ontological mutiny comes in: when our inner sense rises, quietly or violently, against the misalignment and the collision between what we claim to stand for and how we actually move through life.

This idea of Ontological Mutiny comes from Nigerian philosopher Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé. He uses it to describe a profound, often disruptive shift in how we understand and inhabit our own being, especially in the context of colonialism, modernity, and systemic oppression.

Part Two: The Ecology of Rigidity

In the body, chronic tension does restrict movement, but that’s not the full picture; it also distorts sensory input. What came first, and does it matter?

We can pretty easily rehab our movement patterns, opening up the area’s of tension that ristrict us on a physical level, and reconnecting with the area’s that have gone numb or empty, the reason its a bit more complicated then that and why many people never see results… is because the “block” really lives just as much in our perception and sensaory experience of that part of our body, so we have to not leave out the nervous system sensory/motor input dysregulation too.

A nervous system without responsiveness does not know how to respond because it does not actually have the ability to perceive; therefore, we can easily mistake safety for boredom or stagnation and movement for danger.

The same thing happens socially. Rigid ideological structures misperceive what’s happening, seeing change as a threat and possibility as betrayal. Even direct kindness or good intent can register as an existential threat, feeding cycles of hypervigilance and reactivity. Someone being honest? They must have a secret agenda. Their honesty must be for show. Or maybe they’re trying to pull one over on us.

At a certain point, what looks like paranoia or narcissism is just the collective nervous system losing its ability to trust itself. To trust others. And the harder we fight our way toward some idea of progress or the top, the more we stay trapped in the same loops of fear and suspicion.

Just as a body needs a diverse gut microbiome to function properly, culture thrives on diversity of thought, experience, and expression. When the gut lacks diversity, it loses balance and self-recognition. In the same way, when societies enforce monocultures of belief, factions trying to dominate or suppress competing ideas, they replicate the logic of industrial monocropping, where pesticides kill anything growing near the profit crop.

Fragmented and misaligned, we collectively begin to forget who we are on a deeper and deeper level. And as we get further from ourselves, it becomes more painful to wake up and acknowledge it, like a parent losing their temper with their child. The guilt, grief, and pain of that realization can feel devastating, and yet this happens because we fail to extend the same love and care that we have for our children to ourselves.

So the idea that it really starts with us, with me, is true. Otherwise, we mistake the planet for something separate rather than our home, just as we have mistaken our bodies for not being a place of safe refuge. And in doing so, we poison it as we poison our own biology, feeding ourselves junk we wouldn’t otherwise touch, forgetting the intelligence inherent in life itself.

As Jane Goodall observed, humans are the most intellectual species on the planet, but we are not intelligent. True intelligence doesn’t destroy its only home. What we call cleverness, the mind’s ability to solve problems in abstraction, must learn to work alongside the intelligence of our bodies. Only when our thinking brain reconnects with the wisdom of our embodied selves does intelligence, real intelligence, arise.

This is the story of biology trying to survive, of survival strategies that have become maladaptive over time. And it is also the story of each of us personally, arriving at a point in life where our bodies demand we look more closely at the patterns we inherited, the ways we learned to protect ourselves, and how those strategies may no longer serve us.

The option to change emerges not from willpower or ideology, but from curiosity, attention, and the choice to start living in a way that actually reconnects us to who we are.

To do that, we first have to get to know me.

The Ecology of Openness

If we’re actively practicing living a de-armored life, we’re offering an invitation to those we interact with, a chance to soften, to feel something beyond their reflexive defenses. Nervous systems co-regulate. Just like a calm presence can settle a room, an armored one can set off a chain reaction of contraction.

This, however, starts within. It starts with getting to know ourselves, offering kindness and presence to the inner parts that are often ignored or judged.

Something Darryl says…. this being my attempt to translate his words, which tend to point at a deeper sense of things that leaves the intellect confused for a while…. conflict isn’t born in this or that, we don’t have conflict in us, we create conflict by choosing not to pay attention to certain parts of ourselves.

Typically, there are at least two parts that seem at odds, and struggle arises when we listen to one and ignore or judge the other.

So we come back repeatedly to Darryl’s invitation: Stop, Pause, and Notice. Slowing our cleverness down enough to feel what is happening below the level of mental strategy.

Re-parenting ourselves in this way means asking the questions that really matter.

Again, Darryl has this to say: Who am I? What sound do I make? What do I want? What is my purpose?

These aren’t abstract or philosophical; they’re invitations to pay attention, to begin to inhabit ourselves a little more fully with honest curiosity.

Our inner narrative, our dialogue with these parts, shapes and is shaped by the body: the Kanda/Lower Dantien/Enteric nervous system, the brain stem, the gut-brain axis, the vagus nerve, the immune system, and all the subtle organ signals that give us a felt sense of self.

We are these things, and these things are us, as are they each other. Darryl would say that the vagus nerve and the Immune system are the same thing.

Cultural rigidity shifts when enough people are willing to lower defenses, creating a tipping point where safety is no longer outsourced to external control but generated from within.

Safety isn’t the absence of threat; it’s a process of maturing, of becoming adults enough ourselves so that we know, deep in our bones, what it feels like to have our own backs. And for this to happen, we have to remember who we are, and this is the process of getting to know me, the sound that I make.

And if the body’s natural state is fluid, dynamic, and nourished by diversity, why would we expect culture to function any differently?

Reich believed armor blocks life force. Today, our cultural armor stifles collective vitality. But resilience isn’t found in fortress-building; it’s in the ability to move with change rather than against it.

A muscle atrophies when immobilized. A gut, when deprived of diversity, becomes dysfunctional. A culture, when rigidly protected from challenge, becomes brittle.

Maturation isn’t about eliminating struggle; it’s about developing the internal flexibility to meet it without shutting down. Re-parenting ourselves means learning to stay, to trust our own ability to respond rather than react. The more of us who do this, the more we shift the collective state… kids today don’t trust adults, I never trusted adults, currently.

True stability isn’t the absence of challenge, but the capacity to meet it without ossifying. Aliveness requires vulnerability, not the elimination of threat, and the ability to move through it, adapt, and expand is what our biology is designed for.

Because until we feel how the mind performs its own form of armoring, even our attempts to soften can harden into ideology.

Written by Daniel Rainwater