Lessons from Poland: Elites and the Bonds We Forge

One of the great gifts of my life was wandering into a class on Contemporary Poland in college taught by a humane and deeply knowledgeable man named James T. Flynn. There, for the first time, I was forced to address something that many Americans, it seems, go to their grave never having thought seriously about: that nations (a cultural reality) and states (a juridical reality) are very different things and that the occasions when the two of them have been aligned in a relationship of congruence during modern history have been quite rare.

I did not know it then, but by forcing me to confront the reality of the almost always messy interplay between nations and states, he was gifting me with a topic of enduring interest, one around which I would eventually build much of my academic research agenda later in life. 

But that was only one of the many gifts he gave me. 

Another was putting a small mimeographed sheet on his office door each Spring that said “Study this Summer in Poland at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow,” and in smaller letters, “Room, board and an intensive 8 week Polish Language course $350.” 

Broke and totally confused about what I wanted to do after finally graduating from college in 1982, I went home to my parents’ house and read for a few months, and tiring of that (or perhaps more accurately my parents tiring of me doing that), took a job as a house painter. 

Ten months later, having discovered the true, often depressing reality of hard and often boring work for the majority who had no return to school on the horizon (or any other reprieve for that matter), I was looking for a path of escape. 

With $350, but not much more in my pocket, my mind went back to that old offer on Pr. Flynn’s office door. In addition to being fascinated with Polish history, I was a child of the Cold War who had always been desirous—as the “doubting Thomas” my mother would only half-jokingly call me—of seeing the supposedly unspeakable evil of communism with my own eyes. Moreover, with the election of the Polish Pope and the subsequent formation of Solidarność under the leadership of Lech Walesa, that country was witnessing the Eastern Bloc’s first sustained challenge to Soviet rule since the Prague Spring of 1968. 

I decided it was now or never, and within a month or so, in early June 1983, I found myself on a midnight train from Vienna to Krakow, armed with bribes of chocolate and pantyhose for the machine gun-toting Polish and Czechoslovakian border guards who, acquaintances had said, would probably demand them along the way. 

I arrived at the Krakow train terminal under a sunny sky (I honestly had half expected it and the bright green trees below to be grimily grey!) the next morning And it is no exaggeration to say that my life changed forever on that day. 

Over the course of the next two months, I learned many things. The first was that the idea that hard work more or less always translates into progress and/or success was not necessarily true. Hanging around the dormitory where we were housed I met an endless stream of brilliant people, whose knowledge of history, culture and, of course, languages made me blush with shame at my own ignorance and provinciality. 

No one I had met at my allegedly exclusive college could have come to match any of them in terms of intellectual depth and breadth. While the educational system may have force-fed them Marx—something they all bitterly denounced—it managed, despite that, to give them an amazing ability to locate themselves and their culture in space and time. 

And despite all the censorship, they were amazingly well-informed about the world outside the Iron Curtain. It was as if the scarcity and distortion of information had sharpened their senses and forced them to examine each morsel of knowledge that came their way with enormous care and circumspection. 

And yet when it came to their prospects for future success, nothing was clear at all. Getting ahead was dependent on playing the right political games with a Communist Party that most seemed to consider wholly illegitimate. Waiting for Godot was, for many of them, not just a work of theater, but a way of life. 

The daily economic realities were even more absurd. With the 250 or so dollars of spending money I had brought with me, I lived better than I’d ever lived in my life. While the official exchange rate was 22 Zlotys to the dollar I was getting 680-720 on the black market. 

This meant I could buy a new, if already falling apart, Soviet-made bike for 5 dollars and go out to the best restaurant in Krakow, Wierzynek with a date, have caviar and Hungarian Champagne for starters, followed by a full meal for the two of us for 3-4 dollars. Today a prix fixe meal for one at this restaurant founded in 1348 and which lies at the heart of the city’s historic center costs 73 Euros. 

The message that I had been trained through my own country’s propaganda (yes we have it, and it was well entrenched in our culture long before it took on the cartoonishly unsubtle forms it has taken on since 2020) to take from experiences such as these went more or less like this: 

“See, what a mess communism makes. I’m so glad I’m an American where we do things right which, of course, is why everyone wants to go there, and barring that, work feverishly to imitate all our ways of organizing life and culture in their own countries.”

But something inside stopped me from adopting this triumphalist pose. I had always disliked the tendency in both people and institutions to breezily summarize complex realities in simplistic ways. And I wasn’t about to start now. 

No, rather, than getting a sugar rush of patriotic self-affirmation by consuming the low-hanging fruit of communist disfunction, I decided instead, as an American, to ask what, if any of the problems so self-evident in communist Poland might also be present in greater or lesser measure beneath the shiny exterior of our own culture. 

Was the link between effort and success as clear as we told ourselves it was in the US? Were our universities really the “best in the world” as we were constantly told? Were there not great absurdities and distortions in our way of distributing goods and services among our population? After all, hadn’t a guy named Gary Dahl become a millionaire only a few years before my visit to Poland by selling pet rocks? Did that make sense in a culture where teachers still earned next to nothing?

Lest I be misunderstood, none of this is to dismiss communism’s obvious failings but rather to ask when we see faults and misfortunes in others, what do we do with it? Do we pump our egos up by limiting the field of comparison to things we do well? Or are we aware that each culture challenges us in light of the flaws we see in others, and might be there, under the radar albeit in somewhat different configurations, in ourselves? Do we even dare to ask what those who, according to our own criteria, appear to be serial bumblers, might be doing better than us? 

It was in asking and answering this last question that the importance of my time in Poland hit home and changed me forever. 

It’s nice to think that all of the abundance and relative freedom that we Americans born in the lee of World War II enjoyed was all about our society’s superior intelligence and virtue. But what if it wasn’t necessarily the case? 

What if it was much more the result of simply being the only Allied power that emerged from the conflict with its access to low-cost natural resources and its industrial base fully intact? What if, in other words, we had hit the lottery but instead convinced ourselves that we had forever solved most of life’s more vexing civilizational questions? 

Sudden windfalls of wealth tend to change people. And often not for the better as they tend to retreat from the rituals and behaviors that allowed them to cope and stay grounded in leaner times. 

Call me a killjoy, but it was precisely such a retreat from what I call essential patterns of true human thriving that I believed I was witnessing in the go-go cocaine-laced America of the early 80s. And like Eeyore, some no doubt saw me as I was already wondering what I would need to concentrate on when, as was inevitable, the fluffy fruits of our somewhat accidental prosperity would begin to dissipate into thin air. 

What Poland taught me was, first, that a good bit of the control we think we have over our destinies is illusory. We are often at the mercy of forces greater than ourselves. Roving gangs of bandits had always existed in society and had always sought to game the system in their favor, heedless of the effect of their maneuvers on the many. And these anti-social marauders almost always clothe their assaults on the commonwealth in high-toned moralizing rhetoric, and are brutally efficient when it comes to dispensing with those whom they perceive as treating their actions and their flimsy excuses with something less than childish reverence. 

In environments such as these, notions of individual freedom and social progress as we learn about them in textbooks have little relevance. And given the vast disparity between the bandits’ and the general citizenry’s access to the tools of organized violence, neither do elaborate insurrectionary plans. Sound familiar? 

No, in times such as our own, and those I observed in late Communist Poland under different cultural coordinates things inevitably move to the realm of spiritual struggles, that center, or at least should center, on the practice of preventing one’s mind from collapsing inward upon itself into listlessness and/or self-pity under the weight of the bandits’ organized campaigns of lies and distortions. 

And my Polish experience showed me this is done by engaging in what I have come to call mindful schizophrenia. 

With one part of our mind, we must carefully, indeed, obsessively, document and catalog the serial depravities of one’s would-be masters in great detail. Why? So that we, as their intended victims, can begin to predict, and from there foreclose the effectiveness of their tricks as soon as they are deployed. 

When studied carefully, the thinking patterns and control techniques of thuggish elites almost always show themselves to be quite unimaginative and repetitive in nature. They only succeed because most people allow their brains to be sloshed about in the soup of informational novelties of limited transcendence generated by the elites’ servants in the media. For the thuggish elites, anything that keeps the would-be slaves’ attention away from the rigorous analysis from their long-term structural efforts to achieve near-total dominance over the culture is viewed as a strategic victory. Hence the need to not get caught up in their ongoing campaigns of distraction and to keep attention on the institutional measures they implement to constantly narrow the field of “thinkable thought.”

With the other part of our minds, however, we need to completely turn off our analyses of the creeps and their gambits and devote considerable time and space to engaging in a completely freeform and celebratory manner with people perceived as being in our trust. 

To live under a regime that wants to achieve what the bandits of today are calling cognitive security (read mind control) within the general population is exhausting for those who choose to admit what is taking place. And as we know, exhaustion can often lead to demoralization, which of course is exactly what our authoritarian elites want to generate within each of us.

The celebration of small joys in an environment of trust and humor is the best antidote to creeping demoralization. In Poland, a barebones apartment room, a few bottles of vodka, and some hastily made cucumber kanapki became a cause for celebration, and, more importantly, a reminder that it was still possible to think and emote outside the ever-more restrictive realms of official thought, or to put it in the language of the great Catalan philosopher, Josep Maria Esquirol, to effectively create a site of intimate resistance against the encroaching culture of nihilism. 

To huddle with loved ones in the generalized absence of electronic devices (with their disloyal cameras and microphones and in-built bias toward presentist thinking) is, almost invariably, also to reflect upon the small-bore historical epics that we as friends, along with our forebears, have forged together throughout time. And this, in turn, reminds us of both our own innate capacity to build, and when necessary, to endure and suffer in the name of care and love. 

It also expands our notions of time. A prime goal of our oppressors is to kettle us into a space devoid of visible reminders of the past and hopes for the future, where all of our perceptions are bounded by the chaos they are purposely generating in the present, whose aim, of course, is to generate hopeless entropy in our souls. 

To know and recount with others the fact that ambitious efforts to sink our humanity have been tried in the past and have ultimately failed gives us a much-needed license to dream. 

The warmth of togetherness also makes it easier for us to do the one thing that ultimately brings down fear-based tyrannies: an ability to resist the petty inducements and threats of privation that form the operative core of their regimes of control. 

For better or worse, contemporary Western culture is primarily driven by the individual citizen’s pursuit of material comfort. Knowing this, and the ever-diminishing appetite for sacrifice that this comfort obsession generates over time, our elites, like their tyrannical forebears in the Polish communist government, subtly but persistently remind us of the fragility of what we might have gained in this realm, and how one false step, like the use of a politically incorrect term or an unusually piercing critique of something they have ensconced as sacred, might land us in the realm of the destitute. 

Only real bonds of trust and loyalty, forged by the only way they are ever truly forged—through repeated and unscripted face-to-face engagements over many months and years—give us a chance to withstand this top-down bullying with our values and our ability to continue struggling intact. 

This is why, in the face of the rise of Solidarność in 1981, General Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland with the cutting of telephone lines, strict curfews, and drastic limitations on inter-city travel. 

And all the silly verbiage about “stopping the spread” notwithstanding, this is the reason, indeed the only reason, why our “betters” across the Western world locked us down intermittently for more than two years. 

More than most of us, it seems, our bandit class understands the enormous power of solidarity and how it is the only thing that can derail their plans for an ever-tightening control of our lives. 

Finally, it is only through the creation of tight huddles of friends, ready to be linked, Venn diagram-like, to other similar small circles of trust, that we can hope to effect the type of large-scale peaceful counter-programing that is really the only way to defeat governments that have forgotten that they work for the people and not vice-versa. 

What do I mean by counter-programming? 

On July 22, 1983, the Polish government ended the martial law they had inflicted on the people for more than 18 months. They did so on the so-called National Day of the Rebirth of Poland, which commemorates the signing, in 1944, of the Stalin-backed manifesto for the recreation of Poland along Soviet lines and under de facto Soviet control. Get it? After abusing the people more than usual during those 18 months, the government was sending the message that all’s well and we will once again forge ahead as socialist brothers. 

But most Poles were having none of it. Rather than showing up for the official parades and commemorations, or even engaging with them in a critical or confrontational way, they organized a massive march to the site of the patron saint of Poland, the Black Virgin of Czestochowa. Neither before nor since have I experienced anything as frightening and wonderfully powerful as that of having with my sweaty body pressing against, and being strongly pressed by, millions of other people ritually announcing the end of whatever remaining beholdenness they might still have had to the regime of lies under which they had suffered for so long. 

Insurgencies—and let’s not kid ourselves, that’s what we are—only move forward successfully through trust. And trust is built through, more than through anything else, time spent at that table with others. If you’ve got one, how about inviting someone new over to sit at it with you on the chance that another relationship of trust might begin to emerge from the unrehearsed proceedings?