There is an amazing moment in the first Austin Powers movie when our favorite dentally-challenged super spy is thawed out and starts his reorientation to the waking world. His boss, the cleverly-named Basil Exposition, tells Austin he’s been frozen for 30 years. He introduces him to a Russian intelligence officer. Austin is incredulous before Basil tells him the Cold War is over. Austin says “finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes! Aye comrades, aye!?” But then Basil corrects him and says “no Austin, we won.” Austin – “Oh, goovy. Smashing. Yay capitalism.”
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This hysterical moment reveals something curious about our basic everyday orientation to reality. Something similar occurs every morning before we get the sand out of the corners of our eyes. In the dream world anything can happen. Words like capitalism or communism or even Christianity or Islam don’t exist. All meaning is given over to the fluid and often-emotional narratives of dreams. It has its own logic, something definitely not me, not driven by intentional thought. Waking up, however, we go through a quick kind of reboot, charging back up, and within seconds, or perhaps minutes for some, go through a kind of replaying our basic orientation to the world. Who we are, who we know, what we care about, who we love and what tasks we may have to do. They come in like a flood of emails, a daily inventory including our knowledge of the social world and our relation to it. And if your waking life sucks you can’t wait to get back to sweet deep slumber. What possible worlds are there without that heavy damn ideological coat?
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What’s funny is how stubbornly we grasp on to social identities that can in reality be tissue thin. In the self-preservation society instinct, we want to be on the right side of the consensus, whatever we believe the consensus is. As the needle of the consensus moves, so do people who have to catch up to it, to remain secure under its sacred canopy. It begs the question, if we were cryogenically frozen like Austin Powers for thirty years, what unimaginable new world would there be and how quickly would we adapt to the new conditions? If Rush Limbaugh were frozen now in the midst of our own era of neoliberal consensus and thawed in some far future anarcho-communist society, would he become its most ardent defender?
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This was the interesting revelation about the whole Patty Hearst affair. Hearst, the heiress to the newspaper fortune, was famously kidnapped in the 1970s by the militant Symbionese Liberation Army
(SLA). After months in custody however, Hearst was soon seen sporting a sub-machine gun and helped to rob banks in California. It had the nation scratching its collective head and has divided public opinion since. How did this young woman, the heir to a billion dollar fortune, become a Maoist, among the vanguard of radical 1970s American guerrillas? Some folks think it’s the result of communist brainwashing schemes. It’s an alibi she’s used herself years later. But the truth is even stranger and more terrifying. It’s about how thin our social reality really is – based on our alignment with whichever discourse holds the power to broker our consciousness. Years after SLA, Hearst denounces the ideology she once spouted as gospel.
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This seems to be a quick save for those who need to bolster their own comfortable canopies of reality, quietly repeating the mantras like load-bearing tent poles – “Communism good, capitalism bad.” Wait, what’s our ideology again? Um … reverse that. Austin Powers had his Patty Hearst Moment, and each day, so do we all.
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A Fragile Dignity 