Frogs, Boiled and Frozen

On ill-timed self-reliance.

Brumating (frozen) wood frog. (Photo: Janet M. Storey) Source: Long Point Basin Land Trust

This week we saw a breakthrough in modern science, where surgeons were able to transplant a frozen kidney to a pig. Organ transplants are difficult because the procedure needs to happen between 24 and 36 hours. A postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General, Shannon Tessier, wondered if studying the metabolism of Canadian wood frogs might offer a solution for that time constraint. These frogs have the ability to freeze themselves during winter— an extreme form of hibernation where its cellular processes and its heart stops; the frog is basically dead, until the weather warms up and then it comes back to life. The frog produces high levels of glucose which prevents ice from forming inside its cells. By replicating the procedure, the researchers at Mass General were able to make the pig kidney transplant.

Beyond the medical breakthrough, and the political reality being what it is, the frog story got me thinking about the utopian possibility of willingly dying for a while and reviving at a later time, hopefully under a more benign world.

The simile came to mind because the category of frogs we currently see ourselves as (using one of the most overused clichés in American political commentary) is the boiling kind—the idea that if you place a frog in a pot of water and slowly raise the temperature, it won’t notice the heat until it’s too late and it boils alive (in reality, frogs do sense temperature changes and will try to escape, but the metaphor persists regardless). Watching our civil liberties and the rule of law erode before our very eyes while we pretend to keep normalcy in our daily routine make us those proverbial unsuspecting frogs. Some of our friends are beginning to quietly share ideas about fleeing to Canada or Mexico. Another sent me yesterday a news item about how Norway is trying to lure American academics. These are some versions of figuratively freezing oneself and waking up in a more hopeful future.

This personal, Bartleby-esque impulse to escape from the American political system, more like a retrenchment, is rather a concession of defeat— but more on that later. First, it is important to understand where this impulse comes from. While it might feel unique, in fact this type of sentiment has been recurrent in the contemporary era. Most recently we saw it with the Great Resignation after the pandemic, and, on a more gradual basis, as a response to the encroaching dominance of technology in our lives, which generated techno-skepticism or neo-Luddism. Over the last decade or so there have been a myriad of books, podcasts and other writings embracing a kind of neo-self-reliance; they range from the philosophical defense of missing out (the title of a book by Adam Phillips), to novels about the tyranny of social media (like Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle) to survivalist books about living off the grid and more manifesto-like essays rebelling against the tyranny of the interconnected technological world. I admire and have learned quite a bit from various of these books, and share the same fear and frustration about technology which, as Phillips argues in his book, being a basis for desire, the fact of not being able to satisfy it ironically gives us a sense of self. So, this impulse of total rejection of technology feels tempting; so much so that we forget that it is often as unrealistic as it is disingenuous.

This disingenuousness also has its historical roots. In one of the social practice courses I routinely teach, my students and I often explore Thoreau’s Walden in the context of how artists seek to re-engage with the natural world while rejecting the mechanized one. Every time the ironic fact that Thoreau’s mom (or his sister) routinely did his laundry while he was living at Walden Pond surfaces in conversation, and while Thoreau never denied it, the group consensus is that this fact undercuts his larger philosophical argument about self-reliance — which connects to a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "Every American politician wants every voter to know that he was born in a log cabin that he built himself".

But beyond the fact that many now wear self-reliance as a badge of virtue-signaling, there could hardly be a worse moment in American history to embrace it in practice. The concept has been eagerly co-opted by the hard right, just as a Darwinian political ethos—survival of the fittest—is gaining alarming traction. And in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, the erosion of progressive, collective ideals is driving some liberals to abandon solidarity and adopt a very similar, if not simply compliant, survivalist mindset. It’s as if, in response to the rising authoritarian tide, we’ve chosen to go into emotional cryogenesis—like the Canadian wood frog—freezing ourselves for the next twenty years in hopes of thawing out once the storm has passed.

Around the time of Trump’s first election, I began to notice a curious trend. Perhaps thanks to a deus ex machina-style intervention from a troll farm in an authoritarian, ex-Soviet state not so far away, a wave of conservative propaganda—thinly disguised as paeans to self-reliance—began circulating across social media. On Mexican social platforms in particular, several of my contacts started sharing a flurry of “inspirational” Ayn Rand quotes. These posts echoed her familiar critique of the collective’s exploitation of the individual, masquerading as progressive reflections on justice and fairness in labor. Stripped of context, the quotes appeared to champion dignity in work and personal autonomy. But as we know, Rand’s philosophy—riddled with fallacies about self-interest and radical egoism—has long provided the ideological scaffolding for conservative movements hostile to altruism, collectivism, and the social safety net. This phenomenon is examined incisively in Adam Weiner’s How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Origins of the Financial Crisis, where he unpacks how Objectivism, cloaked in literary ambition, smuggled flawed economic ideas into the mainstream under the guise of novelistic insight. Part of the problem with this antiquated fascination with rugged individualism lies, first, in the difficulty in discerning the line between independence of thought and outright detachment or disengagement, but also in the fact that the larger problems we face today —climate change, pandemics, economic inequality— simply cannot be solved without collective action.

Recently, the political counter to the notion of contemporary self-reliance has been most compellingly expressed by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor in their 2024 book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, which offers a comprehensive exploration of solidarity, tracing its historical roots from Ancient Rome to modern movements like Black Lives Matter. Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor argue that solidarity is both a principle and a practice, essential for fostering interconnectedness and collective action in an era marked by division and crisis. They critique both conservative and liberal approaches that undermine solidarity and propose a transformative vision centered on mutual care and justice.

And finally, to wrap up this string of batrachian analogies: in 2010, a viral meme featuring Kermit the Frog sipping tea—captioned with the snarky line "But that’s none of my business"—became the emblem of passive, ironic detachment in the face of crisis. Laced with schadenfreude, it offered a smirk instead of a solution, a seat on the sidelines rather than a call to action. Over time, activists began to subvert the meme, exposing how its shrugging cynicism mirrored a deeper societal flaw: the myth of self-sufficiency, of going it alone while the world burns. By 2025, Kermit might just as well be those of us who choose to disengage—frozen frogs, mistaking the coolness of the moment for safety, even as the ice beneath us thins into deathly boiling water. The danger is real, and the illusion of isolation is fatal. In this grave moment, Astra Taylor doesn’t offer a suggestion, but a warning, a lifeline, and a demand all at once: “Solidarity is the only thing that can save us.”