User:Abd/Landmark Education/Abd/Blaming the victim/Snider

essay moved to here from the page supra, written 3 September, 2014 by Abd (discuss • contribs).

Today I was writing an email to a friend and mentioned the common charge against Werner Erhard, est, and Landmark Education that they "blame the victim." I was looking for a video in which Werner confronts a rape survivor with the story that she has been carrying for many years. I didn't find the video, it may be in the movie about Erhard, which isn't available on the web, I think, though maybe there is some Youtube segment. However, I found much of interest and decided to comment on one document in particular:


 * est, WERNER ERHARD, AND THE CORPORATIZATION OF SELF-HELP
 * IT MAKES ONE YEARN FOR THE DAYS WHEN WE WERE ALL ASSHOLES
 * Suzanne Snider in The Believer, May, 2002.

Quotations here are for the purpose of education and criticism and are posted under a claim of fair use for that purpose.

In 1989, a man named Chuck Palahniuk enrolled in a Landmark Forum workshop.
 * Right off, I notice the anachronism. While it may not be important, does this show good scholarship on Snider's part, or the opposite? I had never seen any reference to the "Landmark Forum" but it was after Erhard sold the technology (essentially copyrights on the scripts for courses and seminars, and trademarks) in 1991 to Transnational Education Corporation, which shortly changed its name to Landmark Education Corporation.
 * The Skeptic's Dictionary has
 * Landmark Forum began in 1985 by those who had purchased the est "technology" from Werner Erhard.
 * ...which is at least partially wacky. Erhard did engage, in the 1980s, in a series of organizational transformations which included sales to various corporations, but they were all basically him or controlled by him. The Forum was a name given to the basic training in the 1980s. What Pressman has on 1985 is that was when the "Forum" was announced as a "bold new program." This may be a minor point, but when an error like that appears in the first words of an article, it does not increase my faith in the accuracy of the rest. It may not matter, let's see.

''He was twenty-six years old and, like many of his co-participants, struggling with his life and what to do with it. Despite his lack of vocational direction, Palahniuk had no problem navigating his way to the closest exit after the first forty-five minutes of the workshop, repelled by the program’s cultiness and rigidity. Later that day, however, he returned to complete the training, and that night began writing what would eventually become his best-selling book, Fight Club—a sequence of events which suggests the Landmark Forum was more successful in helping Palahniuk redirect his life than a barrage of inconclusive personality tests, forlorn meetings with career counselors, or years of expensive psychoanalysis.''


 * That a participant is "repelled" by this or that in the training is routine. Part of the training, indeed, is to lead one to recognize how we make snap judgments, based on past experience. The Forum is a very specific format, it follows a script which has been developed over decades. It is "recreated" by a Leader, highly trained in the "distinctions" and in presenting the Forum in an effective and powerful way. That could easily be seen as "rigid." Yet nearly every aspect of the Forum, every detail, things that may seem inconsequential to someone who has never presented it, is conscious. The seating, for example, follows a very clear and precise pattern. So when the training was presented in San Quentin State Prison -- you can find an account of this on the web -- an inmate grabbed a chair and moved it to a different position. The Leader told him to put it back. The inmate refused. The Leader told him he could leave. The man went out the door, damned if he'd led a bunch of -- whatever he thought they were -- tell him what to do. Later, he came back and took a seat and apparently had a very successful experience. He had been brought face to face with his identity, his "you can't make me," which may have been highly involved with him being an inmate in the first place. The Leader didn't get angry with him, just managed the Forum, as trained. I was a chaplain at San Quention, so I have an appreciation of that population. In some ways, easier to communicate with than the general population.


 * However, in an article like this, a reader may conclude that the Forum is "culty" and "rigid." How one would get that from the first forty-five minutes is beyond me. This is when they go over the course agreements. I remember when it was proposed that people promise to be on time for each session, a salty, already very self-expressed, Hispanic woman stood up and said that this was Anglo cultural bullshit. It was explained to her that if people weren't there, results could not be guaranteed. I think she did agree, and she was on time for every session. We have stories about ourselves, which are also stories about everyone else, and they are very effectively brought up in the Forum. "Story" doesn't mean true or false, when someone speaking Landmartian says "that's a story," they don't mean it is a lie. They mean it is an interpretation, something invented. Snider gets into the Landmark ontology, misrepresents it, and then invents her own interpretation of it, explaining why it works anyway, that -- mirable dieux -- is actually the Landmark ontology.

''For many graduates, it is. The Forum’s boot camp approach to self-discovery and self-improvement is arduous yet brief, and its accelerated results have garnered it a growing appeal not only among artists and writers, but also among more corporate types, from CEOs to personal assistants.''


 * I became very involved with Landmark and as I've mentioned elsewhere, I had the occasion to call every graduate in my area who had contact with Landmark in the last 18 months. It was almost a hundred people. And everyone was satisfied, I could hear something in their voices, on voice mail recording or in person, it's palpable. I remember one woman who was unhappy about the "constant sales pitch." More about that below -- this is very common among Landmark graduates --, but the woman went on to say that the training was amazing, she'd done the whole Curriculum for Living, she just ... didn't like the "sales."


 * There is something Very Bad about Sales. It's a cultural thing. And then we wonder why we are so bad at it, why we can't get the job we want (because we can't sell ourselves), why our businesses fail (because business needs sales), and hey, we have great mousetraps, so why isn't the world beating a path to our door? I.e., we believed that old story. Moving on with Snyder.... after talking more about reported career successes from Forum participation, she has

''While such positive feedback is both convincing and hard to dismiss, few people recall that the Landmark Forum is not simply a career/self-help crash course—its “technologies” (as the Forum refers to them) are derived from Werner Erhard’s controversial est workshop. est, for all its faults, was a major player in the well-meaning Human Potential Movement of the Seventies, a movement which put a premium on human possibility, with an emphasis on the spiritual side of humanity. [...]''

''est founder Werner Erhard emerged on the Human Potential scene in 1971. Erhard, a former encyclopedia salesman and executive, began a typical sixty-hour workshop with a variation on the following observation: “You’re all complete assholes or you wouldn’t be here.” est participants paid $250 for Erhard’s promise of radical personal change, a reward which came after a participant, in est-speak, “got it.” ''

''People wanted to know [...]: How can we expand our minds but expand them into something good, make them open for love (sigh), happiness, and positive change, but not for co-optation? These questions stuck. We have been sick of—or at least bored with—ourselves ever since the Sixties, and still believe we can do better, or rather more.''


 * Who are "people," and who are "we"? The world-view expressed is not that of a Graduate, for sure, or if it is, it's a Graduate who has forgotten the training (which does happen to some degree, if the work is not maintained). Key words: "good", "positive change," "better," and "more." The Forum pulls the rug out from under those concepts, and presents something entirely different, an entry into what can seem like a new realm of existence. In fact, people *do* get "more," sometimes it's more money, I've certainly seem that happen, but my point here is simply that Snyder is describing what Graduates would call an "untransformed world-view," that only allows safe, incremental change, preferably as little as possible. Just some more money, please, some love would surely be nice, and no confrontation of my firmly-held beliefs about myself and life, that's not your business, Stay Away!

''The HPM [Human Potential Movement] (think Werner Erhard or L. Ron Hubbard) credited/blamed each individual as the sole determiner of his or her own experiences, whereas NAM [The New Age Movement] (think Shirley MacLaine, but please think well of her) explored spiritual, metaphysical, and extraterrestrial realms as forces guiding and even determining a person’s life. Consequently, while New Agers wove dream catchers and learned energetic massage techniques, the HPMers engaged in far less soothing awareness-training sessions, filled with screaming and crying and verbal abuse.''


 * Sheesh! I was there, my first teacher once arrived at an airport, and was greeted by an array of hippies in colorful clothing, and someone asked "Who is this?" He said, "This is the New Age, In Person," and that was the title of a book later written about him, Samuel L. Lewis. He did not weave dream catchers and taught no "energetic massage" and what he mostly did was connect followers with ancient traditions, newly invigorated. And, of course, I could tell many stories.


 * Now, about "awareness-training sessions," I wasn't present for est, I missed it, though I certainly heard about it. I was sure it wasn't for me, weren't those a bunch of business types, didn't the leaders wear suits and ties? Later, I knew people who did Lifespring, but they never told me about it.


 * There is very little "screaming" and no verbal abuse in Landmark Courses. There are a lot of tears, often tears of relief or joy, not crying as in "I'm horribly miserable and ashamed." In fact, I remember in an Introduction Leader Training when a woman was crying as she spoke to the group. "I don't know why I'm crying, I'm just crying!" That woman was later the first candidated Introduction Leader in that tranch (two tranches per year, I think) in the NorthEast U.S. An opera singer, a big woman, she had also just taken the Forum, whereas most participants had far more experience. For some reason -- I could come up with some reasons -- she was like a rocket, unstoppable. And cried a lot. And nobody shamed her for *anything.*


 * I remember her critique of my presentation in a practice of part of the Introduction. Uh, frank! Basically, she told me how I appeared. I told a woman I knew well, later, the story, and she literally fell on the floor laughing. Basically, Landmark people love people! In the Introduction Leader Training, we are asking to know how we appear to others. In this case, ridiculous. I'm still smiling! Was that "abuse"? Why am I smiling? It was funny.


 * When Werner told people they were assholes, he was telling them a certain kind of "truth." Not "the truth," that's ridiculous, but that we have judgments of people, we call them assholes, and we, ourselves, do what we think is "assholery." We might be very polite externally, we may be "well-trained," but how we actually think of and treat people can be horrific. And until we recognize this, there is nothing we can do about it.


 * Werner was not blaming people for "being assholes." Quite the opposite, in fact. He knew, all too well, what it was to be an asshole, Pressman takes every part of Werner's life and presents it as proof that Warner was ... something execrable, and there is some basis for some of what Pressman alleges, but Werner also found how to move far beyond that, into a new life. Pressman's story is one of pure evil, of Erhard as an incarnation of scuzzy manipulation and betrayal.


 * People are indeed confronted in the Forum. I told my "tale of woe" about Wikipedia, at the mike (this was 2009), and the Forum Leader said one word: "Racket." And he was right, damn it! I could tell, it was inescapable, there is a characteristic whine. It took me a long time to get the "payoff" and to thoroughly understand my racket and -- Advanced Course distinction -- my "act," and how it had disempowered me my entire life. But "racket," that was instant and unforgettable. Snyder mentions rackets, and misunderstands it (as, by the way, some graduates do. The tipoff is when any graduate accuses someone else of a "racket," and it's a complaint about the person. If that's a persistent complaint, it's a racket!


 * The pot may be calling the kettle black, that's all. We do that, us humans.


 * In Buddhism, there is an image of the lotus, a flower of incredible beauty, which grows in the mud of the swamp, a totally filthy place, with stagnant water, etc.


 * But Landmark has no ontology of the human being as inherently corrupt and sinful, i.e., bad. You might as well call a bear or a snake "bad." A bear is a bear and a snake is a snake.

''HPM groups such as Lifespring, Mind Dynamics, and est aimed (often in competition with one another) to goad us into more fully realized versions of ourselves. These groups disagreed, however, on which dimension(s) we lacked, and what exactly was wrong with us.''


 * First of all, Charlene Afremow, whom I've had the pleasure of meeting, trained Werner Erhard in Mind Dynamics, which was a much more New-Agey movement, in a way. Lifespring was probably an est spin-off, and Afremow, after suing Erhard when he sold the technology to the employees in 1991, and winning, was a Lifespring trainer for a while. She's back with Landmark, as a Forum Leader, that's how I was able to meet her, she led an Advanced Course that I assisted at. Tough as nails, I'd say, no-nonsense, and clearly loves people, mostly works with children.


 * So these are all very much in the same line. Mind Dynamics collapsed with some scandal, after Werner resigned as a Mind Dynamics trainer and started his own training, Lifespring largely dissolved, and Werner did something very unusual for a "guru." He left, while he was still alive. He passed the torch.

Though est began with a program of insults and accidental performance art, it eventually became a trademarked (and financially successful) formula, which persists today, in slightly different form, as the Landmark Forum.


 * The description is sensationalist, est certainly was not a "program of insults." I've seen videos of some of those trainings. I've seen this peculiar phenomenon, and recently. If a neutral description of behavior is presented, the person whose actions are described can consider it an insult, and sometimes others think so as well. What's happening? Well, obviously, sometimes we can incorporate insults in to descriptions in a subtle way, but there is something else going on: projection. I.e., person A says B. C says, if I said B, it would be an insult. Therefore it's an insult.


 * Erhard told people what they had been doing, all their lives, it was quite generic, that's how he could do it. In my Forum, we were told that Landmark has researched this, and they find the same three "decisions" we made in all cultures. (These are the decisions covered in the section of the Forum called the Genesis of Identity.) They are all very simple, and almost all of us agree with them, at the outset and in some way or other. Landmark, then, is confronting a human conspiracy, a set of beliefs that we all have, but that are not truth, they are a story, we invented.


 * My own understanding on that leads me to consider that these stories must have survival value, and that is, in fact, covered in the Advanced Course, to some degree, and the Invented Life Seminar.


 * Something is wrong.
 * I don't belong.
 * I'm on my own.

Still, enrollment never waned, and many people swear est enhanced if not saved their lives, once they got in touch with their inner asshole.


 * I doubt that "got in touch with my inner asshole" was ever used in est. Maybe, those were different times; the author is using cute phrases, it's actually dismissive, though where she is going is to regret the loss of est's radical honesty. I've seen that among esties who are still around, I know many who were there, from close to the beginning, and, of course, Afremow was there before the beginning.

Nonetheless, est (which stands for Erhard Seminars Training, and also means “it is” in Latin) began in the ballroom of the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco, and became the singularly most influential group to emerge from the Human Potential Movement.


 * Actually, the original name was Erhard Seminars Training, the sources I've read claim. Werner used "est" later.

Understandably, this strange new program, consisting of heady imagery, emotional confessions, est-specific jargon (“racket,” “asshole,” “barrier”) and aphorisms (“I know that you know that I love you, what I want you to know is that I know you love me”


 * That sounds not at all like a Landmark distinction, but, then again, the "formats," i.e., scripts that make very Forum like every other forum in certain ways, have been polished and honed, a process that is on-going (I understand the Forum has been extensively redesigned, recently, out of a trial program ran for a short time called Direct Access.) Was that ever part of the est training? I looked for the source, and I found this, a document called "Up to your ass in aphorisms." It is allegedly copyright Werner Erhard, 1973. Not an authoritative source. However, I found another source: Laurence Platt. It's in a more extensive collection of "aphorisms" by Werner.


 * Every Forum Leader makes up part of the Forum as they go. They tell personal stories and they make personal remarks. Some of these are prepared, some are ad-lib. The training started with Werner doing Werner. However, fairly soon, Werner was training Leaders. Werner was, to be sure, "colorful." He said many things that a Forum Leader would not say. Snider is actually ruing the loss of that frank spontaneity. I'm not, but, then again, I wasn't there.


 * Some esties, as I mention, think something has been lost. That's a very old story, a variation on "the world is going to hell in a handbasket." How the "I know that" quote lands with me is "Huh? Maybe you had to be there. And a lot of Landmark technology is like that. You can take the words out of the context and they are meaningless. Ubiquitous experience of new Graduates. They try to tell other people what it was like, and they end up giving up and saying, "You just had to be there!" and then, of course, "Hey, would you like to come to my Tuesday closing session?"


 * If the friend is lucky, they don't follow that with "You really need this, man, you are so lost in your rackets and don't know your ass from a hole in the ground." Even if it's true. Basically, very unskillful! But who is going to gain skill at transmitting this message in three days? Very few, indeed.


 * ("You don't know your ass from a hole in the ground" is still an official distinction in the Advance Course. It wasn't explained well, and is probably there for the Tradition! But, hey, I actually don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, I just pretend and sometimes I pretend so well I even fool myself and others, but what is really happening here, do I know? I make up stories and then believe them. Something else is really happening, not my stories, and experiencing that something is what, to me, the great adventure is about. What I find is that when I distinguish those stories and detach from them something else happens. And people who find this and experience it, yes, sometimes get pretty excited, hence the "cult" image. But that is actually ancient knowledge, certainly Werner did not invent it, he worked quite hard to study what he could find and something then popped for him, on the Golden Gate Bridge....)

''or “If God told you exactly what it was you were to do, you would be happy doing it no matter what it was. What you’re doing is what God wants you to do. Be happy.”), captured the imagination of men and women across the United States.''


 * That's a reframe. It's not the "truth." It's an invented story that can act to remedy our disease, our basic sense that "something is wrong." Call it a counter-story. Werner may have said this in est. There is no mention of God in the Forum, as far as I recall. Nor in any of the courses. This reframe is very old, I know the same basic message from Ibn Ata Allah from the 12th century C.E.


 * Looking at the aphorisms on Laurence Platt's site, I don't find Forum format. I find things said by someone who understands the distinctions that the Forum transmits. For example:


 * INTERESTING PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED.


 * Long-time internet friend of mine just took the Forum. He reported something the Forum Leader said: "If you are bored, it means you are boring." That's really the same comment. Always, the training is pointing toward states of being, whereas the social normal is to look at conditions. I.e., I'm bored because "nothing is happening here, this place is boring, the teacher is boring, this subject is boring," all of which is disempowering, blaming conditions for how we choose to respond. If you, dear reader, think that you have no choice, maybe you should check out the Forum!


 * WHAT I HAVE IS A PLACE TO STAND. NOT THE RIGHT PLACE, FOR I DO NOT PRETEND TO KNOW WHAT IS RIGHT EVEN FOR MYSELF, LET ALONE OTHERS, BUT A PLACE I AM WILLING TO TRY OUT TO SEE IF IT LEAVES ME AS A CLEARING WHERE THE TRUTH CAN MORE POWERFULLY GO TO WORK.


 * That's not put together as a Forum distinction, but it is sythesized from the entire training. "Clearing" is Landmartian, but so is "stand." Here, though "stand" is used rather normally. I've put this to work in my life, powerfully. I take stands, not as the truth, but just as Werner said, as a place to stand, to assert some purpose or goal that I invented -- or perhaps found, but I chose to accept it. And I want everyone in my life to do the same, because I have no fixed idea that I'm right, that my stands are right and that those with different stands are wrong. This concept of "the truth going to work," instead of me going to work as if I knew the truth and could then act "correctly," is again an ancient practice. In Alcoholics Anonymous, it's "Let Go and Let God."


 * "Let Go" doesn't mean sit still and do nothing. It means to abandon attachment to being right, to trying to make the world confirm to our own stories about it. Rather, we do take "stands," just as Werner says he does. A Landmark graduate took a stand for same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, saw what was missing and supplied it, and ... it happened. These results never have the stamp "Landmark Education" on them, but they are all over the place, because Landmark does get people into action.

''Between 1971 and 1984, 700,000 people enrolled in the est workshop to “get it.” Participants who approached their est workshops and the elusive “it” with good sense and literalism were rebuffed. One est trainer responded to a participant’s thoughts with “Don’t give me your goddamn belief system, you dumb motherfucker.” ''


 * In the training of 700,000 people, by a fairly large number of trainers, all kinds of things happened. Is that actually what the trainer said? Maybe. I can understand the sentiment, it's occurred to me to say something like that on occasion. However, I wouldn't, because I'm trained not to dump my own feelings like that in a training context. That trainer had a story about the participant. Now, if I assume he was highly experienced, which is likely, he was seeing something, and it's obvious what he was seeing. Now, was that a skillful thing to say? And how would we know? This is what I think: that story came from someone who heard it, and who had a reaction to it. But the trainer wasn't concerned about that, the trainer was concerned about that "dumb motherfucker," i.e., someone caught in a belief system that was making him dumb. And that's very common. If the person was transformed, it was skillful, and if the man walked out of the room and never came back, probably it wasn't!


 * est was quick, given what it set out to do. So there was no time to pussyfoot around. The Forum takes less time, they shortened it. So Forum leaders can still be very, very direct. I mentioned that my Forum Leader said one word with my story, "Racket." He didn't need to say anything more, it was enough. In fact, saying more would have less impact. He knew I could hear, he saw that I heard and knew. And then it was my work to do to go through all the implications and consequences and sequelae, indeed, several years of training.

''The insults were just the beginning of a regimen which most est graduates nevertheless reviewed in glowing terms. From 1971 to 1984, Erhard challenged participants to lay down their “winning formulas,” and take responsibility for their lives. Promotions, demotions, assault, and divorce were lumped together as the results of the will of the individual.''


 * Here is where she misses and misunderstands Landmark ontology. There are distinctions transmitted. They are not "truths," they are explicitly tools. The tool that is given relating to the above is to consider your life as if you chose it, as if it were your will. This is a stand, not truth. It's completely ridiculous as truth! Yet, as a stand, it has very specific and strongly empowering effects.


 * Well, not "completely ridiculous." In one of the seminars a "myth" is introduced, in which we created this life because we had all power, and that wasn't fun as a game, so we decided to forget that we had all power. And so we did. And then what? What if we actually have power over our life? Those who actually take on this question -- and it is taken on in the training -- know that this is something that most of us avoid. It's scary. After all, Bad Things Happen, right? Yet there are those ancient stories that reframe all that, there is a great story perhaps I'll tell somewhere here, "How Wonderful, How Horrible, How Wonderful, How Horrible," where a series of events are each, in turn, the same event, described as Wonderful and Horrible.


 * Alcoholics Anonymous was created with an understanding that "No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we come to understand how our experience can benefit others." And in that "benefit" comes value to life, sometimes so much value that the descent into hell that the alcoholic experienced was worth it. Of course, there is the impact on others, much more difficult to reframe like that, yet everyone's life is this How Wonderful How Horrible sequence.


 * Taking the stand that I'm responsible, I can then look for how to create what I want. I then look for that silver lining to the cloud, the reason I created the cloud. I look for opportunities instead of believing that my life is oppression through conditions.


 * And transmitting this, Erhard was accused of "blaming the victim." But to put it bluntly, is God to "blame" for creating misery in the world? If the victim created the oppression, there is no blame. And if a rapist raped someone, there is no blame -- in this ontology --, there is a rape and it has consequences which the rapist created for himself, he cannot "blame the victim." He can sit in prison and there is nothing wrong.


 * When we take responsibility, in a religious sense -- which you won't normally hear in Landmark, in spite of the room often having many highly experienced clergy -- we are aligning ourselves with God, assenting to what God did, accepting it and working with it instead of against it. So if I was "victimized" (in my case, say, paddled by an attendance officer at my high school, Totally Unfair I Tell You and I Got Back at Him!) it happened, I can't go back and undo that, but now I have the choice of what to make of my life. This distinction suggests "choosing it," making it an act of will, by a declaration, words.


 * And it works, that's the bottom line. It empowers.

Erhard and staff illustrated the est principles with sharing sessions, guided imagery,


 * There is one exercise in the Forum which uses guided imagery, as I recall.

stare-downs,


 * That's a description of the "Being with" exercise that is only described that way by someone who either hasn't done it or didn't get it. Which might be about 10% of the participants, who think that the assigned task is to stare at the partner. It isn't. Rather, we have a habit of taking simple presence-with-seeing as "staring," as if it is some kind of attack. Being-with is a powerful exercise, properly done. I missed it in my Advanced Course, because my act arose shortly before and I was miserable. I knew being-with from very old training and work. It should have been my cup of tea. But I couldn't be present, I was obsessed. I was trying to figure out how I could get my money back, I'd just registered -- first one, Saturday night! -- in the Self Expression and Leadership Program, and now I was sure this whole thing was going to be like the rest of my life, odd man our, understanding and nobody else understands, and then it all became entirely too obvious!


 * My act! They told us our act would come up, and it sure did! I made a complete ass out of myself in front of the entire group by "being right" in a totally dumb way, I was "right" and "everyone else was wrong." Here, in my thinking, is the genesis of identity, I don't belong. When I realized what was going on, that upset totally vanished and I "got" the Advanced Course, and I could communicate it, without words. Saw it happen many times. In person, that is. With text, not at all so easy!

“trust” exercises and lectures/sermons filled with verbal abuse and expletives.


 * But the times, man! Expletives were used -- they aren't now, or they are quite rare. But Werner was speaking to people as-they-were, not the pretense that passed for social conversation and even formal training. It's not abuse if nobody is harmed. Were people harmed by Werner calling them assholes, given the context and what he was transmitting? Basically, nobody has ever told me, "my life was ruined because Erhard called me an asshole," and I've heard many, many people talk about how their life transformed, how he effectively gave them their life. So where is the "abuse."


 * It's obvious. It's in the mind of the author, and the minds of the critics. It is "bad" to call someone an asshole, period. That's just what's so. For them.


 * What is called "dressing someone down," as in Marine Corps training, that could be abusive. Parents telling their children how bad they are, that's abusive in my book. That doesn't happen in the Forum. The closest thing I've seen to it in Landmark is in the Introduction Leader Training, and the context is such that it's routinely taken as coaching. Basically, a participant may be told to shut up and listen, stop responding to everything with "I know," because you don't know until and unless you actually listen, subtext, "Turkey."


 * Because until we are trained, that's what we are, turkeys. Largely clueless. For the most part. We may have brilliance, here and there, but if it is untrained, it's unreliable. I struggled with this all my life, because I had found certain things, rare things, naturally. But because it was natural, I did not know how to transmit it. I did transmit it anyway, sometimes, but that's a key word: reliability. What was truly exciting to me about Landmark was that, in the Forum, I saw that they had the ancient message, and they knew how to deliver it. It was reliable. (I'd call 90% reliable, I'd never seen anything that high.)

''These tough-love trainings usually took place in hotel ballrooms or conference centers across the United States, over a course of several highly-structured fifteen-hour sessions in which participants could not eat, urinate, defecate, talk, write, sit next to acquaintances, or take off their nametags. Stories circulated about est-ies fainting, peeing, vomiting and sobbing, a horrific scene that held its own inexplicable appeal. In her book, est: 60 Hours That Transform Your Life, author and psychotherapist Adelaide Bry writes that the sessions were known as the “no-piss training” among New Yorkers.''


 * The good old days, pretty much, she comes to that. Not namby-pamby, like the pablum presented in the Landmark Forum, which she doesn't like because people use it to get new jobs, transform their finances, which, to her, is crude and "unspiritual."


 * However, that "horrific scene" apparently never happened. I've never heard an account of pandemonium like that. The Fear exercise, the closest thing to it, was really an extended joke, intended to make people laugh at the silliness of our fear of other people. Some people are really good actors, so they act being really scared and make some noise.


 * The account given makes it seem that one had to go fifteen hours without peeing. Actually, there is an early document where Werner describes the est training, in 1977. He describes four-hour sessions, between breaks. Further, I've never heard that people were locked in the room. I am guessing that somewhere, somewhen, a participant went to the door and asked an assistant at the door if they could go to the bathroom. I've been on the door. When someone approaches, you open the door. You are there so that there is no noise. So you would not engage someone in a conversation. But perhaps someone on the door hadn't been trained, and said what was simply true: "You committed to being in the room for the session" (i.e., until the break). And the participant then went back their seat and suffered, and walked away with the story "they wouldn't let me go to the bathroom." And, my guess, they had other stories in their life like that.


 * Nobody ever asked me when I left a room, why I was leaving. We are expected to take care of business during the breaks, but not to suffer if we fail. It is useless to be there in the room if distracted by pain, and someone who actually peed on the floor simply wasn't taking care of themselves, refusing to admit the basic integrity failure, which was not handling matters in the break. And if someone has a special need, the course instructions say to tell the course supervisor. I've seen them set up a place to sleep in another room, for someone who had cancer. I've seen special chairs and cushions provided. And that's part of the training: to ask for what you need! People go to the bathroom all the time, it is merely discouraged to neglect this in the breaks. It's now very explicit in the legal agreement signed when taking the Forum: you are responsible for your own health.

''Perhaps the fear of incontinence was part of the allure of groups like est, along with the promise of tools to navigate self-imposed mental roadblocks and get on with your life. Something happened within this experience that did not happen outside, and it was something strong and emotional, a transformation you could enact, without (depending where you lived) the cult stigma. The professional truth-seeker was compelled to imagine, from these descriptions, the scene of the swaying est-mass, like a sea anemone, with the sobbing-laughing-staring people as the anemone’s phalanges.''


 * The "professional truth-seeker" would actually go and experience it, or, failing that, interview participants, not just look at critical anticult web sites, which is where she got much of her material. She's right about part: "something happened within this experience that did not happen outside," but that "swaying est mass, like a sea anemone," certainly wasn't the basic est training. All kinds of experimental techniques were tried in various places, I've not heard good descriptions of the six-day course, for example, which later became the much shorter Advanced Course. I think they did the Ropes Course, for example, as part of that training.

Most maddening to an earnest est student in the past might be the goal of “getting it,” a feat no less impressive than getting a “no-soap radio” joke.


 * It's not maddening if you don't try to get it, if you simply allow yourself to experience what happens if you are there and listen. A crucial part of the training is learning to let go and let certain things happen, instead of trying to force them. Old Zen story:


 * The man's father was unjustly killed, and he wanted revenge. So he went to a sword-master and asked to be taught, and how long it would take to become a master. "Five years," the teacher said. "But I don't want to wait that long, so if I try really hard, how long?" "Ten years."

Journalist Stephen Pressman writes in his exposé of Erhard, Outrageous Betrayal, “From illness and disease to auto accidents and street muggings, Erhard and his trainers drummed into the heads of est participants that they alone caused all the incidents and episodes in their lives to occur.”[1]


 * Actually, the distinctions involved here are not "drummed" into anyone's head. The distinction is "being at cause," and that one is introduced in the Introduction Leader Program, though there are variations in the seminars. It's a stand, not the truth.


 * Pressman presents it as if it were presented as "truth." The extra words and the language betray that; nowhere in the training would words like that be said. The word "alone" would not be there, though, in fact, in transmitting the distinctions of choice and responsibility, we were discouraged from taking "partial responsibility," which is actually poison in relationships. It leads to a negotiation: "I'll take care of my mess if you take care of yours." What actually works is "I will take responsibility for the state of our relationship." Once there is a stand, which is what that is (not a truth), there are always breakdowns. If both people in a relationship each stand for full responsibility, the relationship becomes practically indestructible, double breakdowns being rare. If it's partial, "I'll do my part," then there is a "conversation" of what is my part and what is your part, and it's endless. And when there is a breakdown, the relationship breaks, each person convinced that "I did my part, they didn't do theirs."

''In one est seminar, Erhard suggested, according to Pressman, that even concentration camp victims of the Holocaust were responsible for their deaths. A concentration camp survivor present at one workshop protested, but Erhard later claimed she later “took responsibility for putting herself in. It’s that goddamn simple.”[2] Pressman reports that someone present asked Erhard how the woman could have been responsible for her imprisonment and Erhard responded enigmatically, “How could the light be off when it’s turned on? The question is completely stupid.”[3]''


 * Pressman is totally unreliable as to summarizing what happened at seminars. I find the comments quoted unintelligible, taken out of context. In theory, it's easy to understand how someone can be responsible for their own imprisonment, but the real charge here is about the Holocaust, and I know one story to tell about this. I heard it from Roger Smith.


 * He was presenting the Forum in Los Angeles, and there was a Holocaust survivor there, a very successful man, with the concentration camp tattoo on his arm. His entire family had been killed, he was the only survivor. The man had been miserable in spite of all his success. At the closing session, he spoke. "All my life I have blamed the Germans for ruining my life. And I don't even know any Germans!"

It's quite obvious what is done with "blaming the victim": comments are taken out of context and interpreted to mean what they did not mean in context. If this were core doctrine to est and the est Forum, it would still be there. There is something in the training that resembles this, and I've been explaining it. I'm pretty sure that what I've been explaining is what was transmitted then, as now.

''With est’s strong emphasis on personal responsibility and an equally strong deemphasis on events and issues in a person’s own past (“Leave the past in the past”), est offered a troubling etiology of suffering. According to the est way of thought, we have made ourselves suffer, period. Our problems aren’t real, or rather they are only as real as a psychosomatic illness which may be truly felt but not truly present. Those who have been molested or raped, according to est, were somehow responsible for these events. Most troubling is the inherent idea that we are completely and solely responsible for our destinies and all events therein. By further implication, these ideas more devastatingly propose that other people don’t really affect us. Rather, we affect ourselves.''


 * Est does not offer an "etiology of suffering." Basically, the argument above is invented. From Buddhism, suffering is presented as a fact, it exists. The Buddha was asked about the cause of suffering. Now, the basic cause of suffering in Buddhism is "ignorance," but in the story I have in mind, the Buddha said, "when you have an arrow stuck in your side, your first concern is not how it got there. It is how to get the arrow out."


 * The Forum does offer an etiology of identity. It's the section titled "Genesis of Identity!"


 * What is presented above is not a Landmark "teaching." Landmark does not tell us that "we have made ourselves suffer." However, there are many hints and suggestions that trying out the idea is highly useful. There is a saying, I might have heard it in Landmark, but it might be from somewhere else: "Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional." It would be completely stupid to claim that the losses of that Holocaust survivor were his doing, and not the doing of those who ran those camps. Why one and not the other? But the Survivor who took the Forum realized that the years of suffering that ensued were his doing, there were no Germans applying thumbscrews to him, he was carrying it. They killed his family, they did what they did to him in the camp, but they did not control the rest of his life. He did. And he needed to hear that. Was this "blaming the victim"?


 * No, actually. No blame. There are words you won't hear in Landmark, unless someone slips or is merely describing an "occurring," a thought that arose, or quoting what someone said: Blame, Good and Bad (as if they were real), Fault, Sin, Evil.


 * You want to carry pain around your whole life, your choice. But there are consequences of your choices.


 * Once the Survivor heard it and got it, that he was responsible for his life, now, he was able to transform. In researching this, I came across many nuggets. From the

''For many, this idea is liberating if for no other reason than it offers a radical paradigm shift, an excuse to reenvision one’s life as something that can be controlled. The workshop may also work like a placebo sugar-pill, a hinge on which to pivot and make radical personal change.''


 * Perhaps. The placebo effect works. And we appear to have far more control over our life than we are accustomed to admitting. And our health, for that matter.

And why wouldn’t we all want to believe in the sourcelessness of our unhappiness and problems, when we can’t control the true sources, anyway?


 * Here, she refers to "sourcelessness," but above she is talking about blaming the victim. There is a contradiction there. The basic Landmark distinction is, in fact, "Life is empty and meaningless and it is empty and meaningless that life is empty and meaningless." Lots of people have trouble with this. Always, these people neglect the second part, and they make the first part have lots of meaning. It's a distinction, not the truth. And so we come to why I was inspired to write this commentary:

Maybe est works and isn’t “true.”


 * Now, this was written in 2002. est didn't exist any more, it had been the Landmark Forum since 1991. But taking the statement and applying it to Landmark, this is what is remarkable.


 * They say in the Forum, "Nothing we are telling you is the truth." Critics use that to express yet more outrage: "These frauds are so bold that they tell you straight out that they are lying to you! And you idiots lap it up!"


 * But they didn't say they were lying. In Landmark, truth is "what is, what happened," not interpretations. And distinctions are stands or empowering stories, not truths, and like interpretations about what happened, they are neither true nor false. They are tools, to be used; if they work, great, if they don't, try something else.


 * Her "maybe" shows that she hasn't done the work and hasn't shared what she is thinking with someone who has been seriously involved. She goes on with her mixture of praise and criticism, and she makes the same error again, at least once more: she thinks that Landmark should be doing something for humanity, but is supposedly only encouraging personal growth and "making more money."

She has no clue. The Forum is definitely about personal growth, my statement of what the Forum does is that it liberates us from the past. And people do make more money, commonly.

However, the Advanced Course moves far beyond that, into connection and community, and then the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, which completes the major courses in the standard "Curriculum for Living," takes this awakened connection with people out into the world, for "community projects," which can be small or large, but all involve quite what she thinks is missing.

Some of the projects are modest. One participant decided to arrange a family reunion, I coached her. And what came out was how isolated her huge extended family (about 200 people) had become. She found out, making the calls, that relatives were dying and nobody knew. She visited one or two. The reunion she had in mind did not actually take place. Many projects fail. It's expected. It's part of the training, to take the sting and blame out of "failure." If we are going to try to do what is extraordinary, we will fail many times. Just like a baby falls when trying to learn to walk. But then, one day, they actually walk.

This particular baby developed a vastly expanded connection with her family, she will eventually create that reunion, I predict. But the actual goal of the SELP is not the projects, themselves, it is becoming able to create transformation in society, because we need it. If we only transform ourselves, content, Pratyekabuddhas, what actually happens is that we slide back into the muck. Human beings are social animals, we need each other.

Werner Erhard on responsibility
I found a fascinating paper where Erhard wrote specifically about the issue of "responsibility." It is dense, I'm quoting very little of it. This paper is well worth reading in its entirety if one wishes to understand the est training, as seen by the originator of it. It's obviously different from the present Landmark Forum, but the guiding principles remain the same.


 * Responsibility begins with the willingness to acknowledge that my self is the source of my experience of my circumstances. And yet, on occasion, some people think that I think accidents do not happen - or would not happen, if I were 'really' responsible. I am sure you will understand my occasional dismay when I am asked questions of this sort. On reflection, I usually recall that such questions derive from a well-intentioned (though perhaps limited) view of human dignity, an intention with which I can align myself, since my own intention is precisely to show that the experience of responsibility is enabling, not disabling.


 * I have no interest in the justification of circumstances or producing guilt in others by assigning obligation.

"Blame."


 * True responsibility cannot be assigned from outside the self by someone else or as a conclusion or belief derived from a system of concepts. I do not say that you or anyone is responsible. I do say - with me, you have the space to experience yourself as responsible - as cause in the matter of your own life. I will interact with you from my experience that you are responsible - that you are cause in your own life and you can count on me for respect and support as I am clear that I am fully responsible for my experience of you, that is to say, from my experience of the way you are.

Erhard lived that, and trained others to live that. Landmark Leaders are human, they have an active Already Always Listener like everyone else; however, because they have become intensely aware of that responsibility, I've seen them drop a misinterpretation of what a participant was saying, so quickly one had to be alert to notice the momentary lapse.


 * In sum, I affirm that human experience is usually though not necessarily ensnared in a trap of its own devising, born of a wish to survive and remain innocent. And ironically, our stubborn wish to survive prompts us to rely on concepts of life built with records of past survivals, thus reducing self to victim, or at best to survivor or dominator, on which spectrum, every position is one of effect.

There is nothing wrong with our formation of identity, it is necessary, for quite what Erhard describes. However, it is also limiting. The training is generated and formed from a world-view that is blame-free, as far as is possible for us, since we are trained in blame by so many social interactions and personal experiences, and to create "excuses" for failures. I.e., I got sick, I lost the assignment, or the dog ate my homework. Those only arise through a context of blame, for the damage of not doing homework, or not turning it in, is the same whether or not we have an excuse, unless no-excuse is translated to punishment ("blame"), and excuse means "it's okay."

Landmark presents a concept of integrity that is excuse-free. If I promised to be at a session, on-time, and I'm not, I am "out of integrity" no matter what "excuse" I have, and the fastest way to be told to shut up in a class is to start presenting excuses. "The bus must have left early." Basically, we don't care what happened, and we don't want to waste the time of a roomful of people on it. Can we count on you to be here on time in the future? If conditions stopped you, then we can't count on you. What will shut the Leader up is "I'm committed to being on time from now on." If one really wants to tell a (short) story, it might be, "I missed the bus because I didn't make sure to be there early. I will make sure to get there early from now on, I won't cut it close." And the room applauds. That is "taking responsibility," and nobody cares about blame.

"Every position is one of effect" may take some explanation. "Position" here is a stand somewhere in the spectrum of "survivor" to "dominator," i.e., victim to victimizer. These are understood in the training to be stories, invented interpretations, as an effect of decisions or beliefs formed in the past. The training is not to "improve" or "fix" this, but to set the entire structure aside and operate outside it. Otherwise... lipstick on a pig. Frosting on a mud pie.

In Erhard's explanation of his stand on responsibility, notice the usage of the present tense. He is not saying that you were cause in the past, except as an idea to try on, but that you are cause, for your experience now. (Or where is that thumbscrew?) Leaders in today's Forum are trained to see this in participants, to see clearly how a participant is causing their experience, and how that cause is creating their future. It is about what is palpably present in the Forum itself, anyone with eyes can see. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:19, 3 September 2014 (UTC)