SEMI-CONSCIOUS LIBERATION ORGANIZATION, Continued...
Upon her arrival in Minneapolis, Stein took a taxi to a radical bookstore, where the workers ran out to the payphone to check on her credentials (everyone used payphones to avoid wiretaps).
Stein tries to put this in historical context: “We had come out of a really violent time: the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement… the Black Panthers were getting killed quite often -it was not a rare occurrence. Coming out of infiltration by the FBI into Left organizations… It was the kind of tenor of the times.”
Later, at a house in South Minneapolis, Stein’s host introduced himself by turning up the radio, and putting the telephone in the refrigerator “for security”. Stein was presented with a list of house rules, told to begin volunteering at the bookstore, and after several days of living in isolation (with no casual conversation, no music, and no television), she was given her political assessment: her “Personal Internal Contradiction” was “seeking Enlightenment based on personal judgment.”
In order to overcome her “bourgeois mannerisms” and her “metaphysical nature,” Stein should begin training to become a machinist, while working on developing her full potential within the "O."
POLITICAL BACKLASH: THE REAGAN REVOLUTION
Following her political assessment, Stein remained in Minneapolis for another month, during which she wasn’t allowed to contact any her of friends in San Francisco.
“I was there for six weeks, and I think it was enough to get indoctrinated. There’s a process that happens when you don’t sleep, and you’re cut off from everyone.” Stein thinks that the instability in her personal life, combined with the unfamiliar setting, made her much more vulnerable to someone “trashing” her identity.
“I think the leader, Theo, was very good at knowing where you were at. And cult leaders are generally extremely smart about people and their personalities."
"Part of the process (and again, this is true of all cults) is that you go through this thing where you tell them everything about yourself. So when I had that assessment done, they knew my whole history, my crazy family… They have all this data about you, and if they’re smart, they can use that.”
“The dangerous part,” she says, “is, once you start using words like ‘transforming,’ there’s an assumption that who you are is basically bad. It’s what I call the ‘Original Sin’ assumption.” This gives the organization “a lot of psychological power” over the person whose identity is being called into question. “In my case, I am a very intellectual person, and that was turned against me. So it was a way of doing an end-run around my ability to think myself out of the organization.”
Stein returned to San Francisco, where she began receiving written notes from “P.S.” -her Program Secretary. All communication from the "O." was sent to a central location, before being forwarded by Stein’s official “contact.” The memos urged Stein to continue to working with them to overcome her “Bourgeois World Outlook.”
Having spent the past six weeks living under very unusual circumstances, Stein was pledged to secrecy: even Andy wasn’t supposed to know what had happened during her trip to Minneapolis. “In a way,” she says, “it’s like a battering relationship, where batterers isolate the people they are battering.” As a result, Stein was plagued by recurring nightmares. "I think in my unconscious I was frightened of this group.”
In 1981, Stein received written permission to move in with a woman named “Julie” –another member of the "O." The two of them rented a house together in Oakland, while Stein trained as a machinist, eventually landing a job manufacturing axle parts at FABCO.
|
