Tedious Existentialism

"Costumes raise existential questions." Reich goes on, "they confront a person with questions never posed in our society—questions of identity and self." I don't know where Reich has been the last century or so, but I would have thought that such existential questions were posed so often and so widely in our society that yet another verges on the tedious. It may be that the questions aren't answered or that implications of the answers aren't realised, but such question-marks stalk us from bookstacks of pop or text psychology, track us down in the columns of Sunday newspapers and hound us from the TV set Existential questions, like consciousness, are a fad.

Let's grant Reich's premise that costumes raise existential questions for the person wearing them without delving too deeply into the individual's predisposition to answering such questions, How is it that the matador-salted Consciousness II person invariably avoids these questions and the gangster-suited Consciousness III person invariably confronts them? The implication is that it must be the Consciousness itself — in which case we must accept that what we are concerned with is not the costume but the way it's worn. But where in Reich's book it this distinction made clear? Whereas his theory leads to the not very original conclusion that some goodies may wear matador suits and those in gangster suits need not be goodies — all depending on the Consciousness of the person — his rhetoric leads to the implication that matador suits equals baddy and gangster suit equals goody. Even if this is true for the reasons Reich give, just what 'transcendent reason' is 'revealed' by wearing 'gangster suits, military dress, phantom cloaks, and boots of all kinds'?