SEMI-CONSCIOUS LIBERATION ORGANIZATION, Continued...
On December 1st, 1981, less than a year after being told to become a machinist, Stein received a memo instructing her to begin training as a computer programmer. She had reached a new level in her “organizational development.”
Stein says that a lot of modern cults get into computers. “You remember Heaven’s Gate? They were all computer programmers. ‘Cause you can make a lot of money as a programmer.”
Towards the end of that same month, Stein was told to break up with her boyfriend and enter into a Personal Relationship (or “PR”) with “Stan” from Minneapolis. She remembered having been repulsed by Stan. Stein wrote back to suggest that she might be more compatible with Stan’s roommate Ted Brodsky.
That winter, Stein was formally disciplined for engaging in “anti-organizational activity.” While on a family vacation in Florida, she received a phone call telling her to return to Oakland immediately: Stein had failed to clear the trip ahead of time. Stein was warned that her relationship with her parents was “upholding her bourgeois side.”
Stein flew home to Oakland, where she found a memo lying on the dresser: her request for a “PR” had been approved. She was to move in with Ted “with the strategic aim of having a child.”
“I suppose, at that point I saw the Organization as a secret cadre disciplined organization,” says Stein. “So it kind of made sense: I was going to join this organization that was a revolutionary organization. And they’re also providing me with a revolutionary partner. It seemed perfect, actually. So that kind of overrode the weirdness.”
Stein’s experience with Ted was not typical of the "O." “...Because I actually, as the British say, ‘fancied’ this guy -I thought he was cute.” Others were not so lucky. Many couples were broken-up as a “Method of Correction.”
Stein thinks that she got her first choice because Theo, the leader, wanted to cement her relationship to the organization. Theo had an almost intuitive sense of where people were at; he was good at doling-out punishments and rewards. “Like the thing where he offered me this guy who I was repulsed by, and I said ‘no’ -he didn’t push that. At that point, I would have left. It would have been too much for me then.”
“Nonetheless, having said that, I got into a relationship [with Ted] without hardly knowing him. Let me explain that –I fancied him, but I didn’t know him!”
On May 1st, 1982, Alexandra Stein relocated to Minneapolis to begin her “Personal Relationship” with Ted.
“When we first got married – and we got married within a very short time of my arriving -- we hardly knew each other! I knew that he had a regular job, and then he would go from his regular job to his ‘program.’ And I wasn’t supposed to know what that was. I guessed that it was a print shop, because he would come home with ink all over his fingers. You didn’t have to be a detective to figure out what people were doing, but you weren’t supposed to talk about it. And we didn’t.”
Everyone in the "O." was assigned to a “program.” Working on a program meant volunteering at one of the numerous small businesses owned and operated by the cult: a bakery, a software company, a daycare center, a print shop, an apartment complex, a building contractor. All of this was supposed to be kept secret –even from your spouse.
“If you worked in a ‘program’ you weren’t supposed to talk about it. And that was all based on the idea of the classic cell structure: the less you knew, the less you’d be able to tell when the State pulled your fingernails out.”
For next nine years, this was Stein’s entire life: after working full time at her day job, she would put in a full shift at the bakery or the print shop, before collapsing from sheer exhaustion.
“We weren’t even doing anything political! We’d churn out business leaflets for some of the various computer businesses that were part of the cult’s front groups and moneymaking groups. So you’d be churning out these computer things –and doing a really bad job of it, ‘cause these presses were ancient.”
“What dawned on me at a certain point,” she says, “was that the ‘security’ was real bullshit. Because if anyone had wanted to find out the links between all these things, it would have been really easy! We’d do things like take the garbage from a print run out to a Cub Foods dumpster so it wouldn’t be found in the daycare’s rubbish."
"It dawned on me after many years that this was completely irrational. It was just part of the control thing. ‘Cause if you really wanted to keep things secret, you wouldn’t have a print shop in [the basement of] a daycare center.”
“It was kind of erratic security, but it served a purpose because you couldn’t really talk to anyone about what was going on.” |
