There was an article on the English-language website of Der Spiegel today http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,655522,00.html by Alexander Osang. It’s about his time as a journalist in the waning days of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and how his editor changed one word in a story that reversed what Osang intended to convey. The story, Osang mentions at the end, has occasionally been dug out and copied, and sent out by people who don’t like him, to show what he ‘really’ used to think and believe.
Several of us who were in The Process have worked to help fellow former members disentangle the good feelings and ideas in it from the long-lingering, sometimes awful experience itself. And this blog has tried to expose some of the organisational hypocrisy and failings.
Comparing The Process to the GDR is clearly a stretch – we entrapped people’s hearts and minds, but we could leave without earning a jail sentence or getting a bullet in the back as you ran. The model of totalitarianism, though, is always the same, on whatever level it’s practised. Osang says:
“I remember all the times I was warned to ensure my personal interests matched those of the society in which I lived. It was always automatically about everything. If you fell asleep in class, you were putting global peace at risk. And sometimes you had to kill your personal interests to bring them into line with those of your society.”
It is very empowering to lead someone to identify with a broader idea than themselves. Some fundamental existential issues of identity and purpose are resolved (or seem to be) when that happens. Conversely, to leave such an other-focused community becomes an act of betrayal of the community and thus of oneself. One’s compromised self, we should say. It’s part of the anguish of political dissidents and defectors: trying to assert individual identity in the face of the group-think seems like courage to outsiders, but feels like treachery, both to those still in the system and to the dissident.
When I left The Process, I was distressed and depressed for at least a year. I had neither a philosophy nor an identity any more in which I could believe, other than the dubious opiate of a pseudo-romantic sense of emptiness and loss.
Against this, there are many people whose involvement with The Process, while fervent, was less affecting than it was for full-time members, and they don’t see what the fuss is about. They encountered a church, hung out and worshipped there for a while, and were sad to see it change and move on. But they moved on, too.
Osang’s former editor Fritz Wengler is unrepentant. He believes the GDR’s brand of communism will one day be vindicated (history, not Lenin or the proletariat, is the true, ineffable god of communism), and that self-indulgent individualism is for whiney losers. Similarly, there are very few left now, but there are former Processeans who will still profess strict belief in the whole mythos and corpus of teachings.
In both cases, it’s a viewpoint that has to be accepted: it falls within an individual’s sphere of assessment, according to how the people involved experience and appraise life. Will the world revert to a socialist model as capitalism continues to stumble? Maybe. Will everything end cataclysmically as The Process predicted, with a concurrent, transcendent unification of spiritual forces? Maybe that, too, as any fan of the 2012 scenario will attest.
Looking back, I see a series of decisions – hesitant, tacit, passive or unconscious ones, much of the time – that led me into a remarkable if marginal group of seekers after fundamental reality. It’s possible to help others see the threads running through their own lives, and today I’d call those True Will. But identifying that central dharma of one's life can be a long job. Osang worked for a true believer in the GDR system, and can’t erase the results of that. It’s a determinant in his life’s passage. The many of us who sought refuge from our unruly selves in the spiritual and semi-spiritual groupings that emerged from the goulash of the 1960s counter-culture and its precursors four decades ago similarly have to look at the personal myths we wove for ourselves, and continue to weave, about the significance of the lives we’ve lived.
Reaching complete objectivity about our lives is a fantasy – if we attained it, would there be anything more to live for? But moving towards ever greater detachment about our own strivings, and thus contributing incidentally to more sanity in the world, is virtually inescapable as the years roll on. If anything redeems the cruelty and absurdity inherent in time spent in any totalitarian situation, it’s such reflection, and the glimpses it grants of the dynamic centre that is always operative in us through the years of our lives.