COWBOYS AND SANYASIS
In the early 1980s, the era of gurus and seekers was finished in America. The Christian right had seemingly put the last nail in the coffin of the counterculture. Ronald Reagan was president. The Official Preppy Handbook was hot. And greed was good.
But in one rural corner of Oregon, where a handful of ranchers and retirees had hunkered down and waited out the radical ’60s and psychedelic ’70s, a new revolution was brewing, filmmaker brothers Maclean and Chapman Way suggest at the outset of Wild Wild
Country, a documentary series about America’s encounter with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho.
What’s stunning about the sixpart Netflix series is its subtlety. There’s something archetypal about the story: like Socrates, Osho is mainly a cipher, his wisdom sketched out by the memories of his disciples. Like Jesus, he comes to destroy the conventional order of things and is eventually betrayed. Or like Mao Zedong, he cleverly shifts the blame for his excesses onto his personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela—a sort of Jiang Qing figure who presided over her own version of the Gang of Four.
But the Way brothers aim to do more than investigate Rajneeshis’ alleged crimes—which included what prosecutors dubbed the largest immigration fraud in American history and the largest mass poisoning. The series is pitched
to a contemporary American audience, and designed to shake the conventional notions of today’s liberals and conservatives in a way that Osho—an admirer of the 19th century Greek-Armenian philosopher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff—would no doubt find pleasing. (Gurdjieff thought most people live in an oblivious somnolent state and used unconventional mind traps to awaken his disciples.)
In the contemporary interview footage, the supposedly ordinary citizens of Antelope, Oregon, present as exotic, while the one-time Rajneeshis feel familiar. Dressed archaically in farmers’ overalls and unfashionable glasses and carping about “evil”, the townspeople look and sound like the white nationalist supporters of Donald Trump. In contrast, Rajneeshis like former Los Angeles lawyer Swami Prem Niren (aka Philip Toelkes) look and sound like the coastal liberals who are now culturally dominant, quoting the constitution and condemning “bigots”.
This clever use of context invites the liberal American viewers who comprise the series’ intended audience to identify with the Rajneeshis and to see the townspeople in the same light as recent rural holdouts against the march of the New York-California brand of modernity—such as Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters, who in 2014 took up rifles and shotguns to resist the government’s attempt to make the cowboy pay $1 million in fees for grazing his stock on public land.
As the series unfolds and more and more details emerge about what was really going on in Rajneeshpuram—which was supposed to be a boundary-busting community dedicated to creativity and individualism, not just uninhibited sex—the Gurdjieffian trap springs shut.
Spoiler alert: stop reading and start watching if you want to be surprised by what unfolds.
The first inkling that something is amiss comes midway through the series, when the Rajneeshis begin collecting homeless people from cities all around the
US and bringing them to Rajneeshpuram to live.
It’s a brilliant manoeuvre. After purchasing a defunct desert ranch that’s larger than the island of Manhattan, Osho’s followers have seen their dream of creating a utopian city of some 10,000 disciples frustrated by a bureaucratic interpretation of landuse laws. But because they outnumber the 40 townspeople many times over, they’ve taken over Antelope by democratic means. With the addition of the thousands of homeless people, they aim to take over all of Wasco County. As one of the townspeople puts it, they offered food, shelter, healthcare, even a ration of two beers a day, and “all you had to do was vote”. But when one of the homeless men runs amok—many of them suffered from psychological disorders—a syringe full of Haldol comes to the rescue, and the individualists come to a frightening decision. They decided the best way to control the street people would be to tranquilise them, without their knowledge or consent, explains Ma Shanti B. From there, it is a road to stockpiling guns and organising a militia.
What once seemed reasonable is revealed as insane. But because it appeared rational initially, its destruction is destabilising rather than comforting—the exact opposite of the solving of a crime at the end of a detective novel. You cannot return to your comfortable opinions about the contemporary analogues for the townspeople and the Rajneeshis—refugees and undocumented immigrants and redneck white nationalists and gun nuts and crusading liberals. Or, perhaps, in India, to “bigoted” Hindu nationalists and “pseudo” secularists.
THE RAJNEESHIS DECIDED THE BEST WAY TO CONTROL PEOPLE WOULD BE TO TRANQUILISE THEM —Jason Overdorf