Nobody's Talking - Or Saw Anything (Everything's Fine)

 

 Ha-ha! Like a fish to honey, I think I done found me another book to read:

My 1970s California childhood was filled with violent faiths and death cults in a decade feeling the hangover of the Summer of Love and suffering the fallout of the nuclear family. I was five when Charles Manson was sentenced to life for the murders committed by his Family of former hippies, pretty girls whose minds had been opened and broken. I was in Junior High when the bodies were discovered in Jonestown, the jungle commune in Guyana where Reverend Jim Jones had hoped to build a new Eden. I will never forget the shape of them, lying flat and embracing, all having drunk poison punch at his command. I wondered how it was possible to have such faith, such all-consuming, passionate awful faith that you would follow such a leader, however charismatic he was. 

The history of American faith is filled with charismatic leaders, eager to change the world and to destroy it. In a nation founded by religious radicals in search of freedom, we are raised to believe and raised to protect the right to believe at all costs. The faithful pushed their wagons into the empty west, missionaries and prophets spreading the word, building utopian societies with a violent certainty. The Mormon pioneers irrigated and settled an uninhabitable land of salt lakes. Their communal, utopian church would split over the practice of polygamy, which stood in opposition to the government and statehood. The recent raids on the fundamentalist Mormon Yearning for Zion Ranch of Warren Jeffs in Texas reminds us of the history of secret societies, with young women in pioneer dresses, trapped in cycles generations old, of men who must have multiple wives to attain the highest levels of heaven, a tenet of faith revealed by the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Joseph Smith. 

In a post-war world, our faiths have turned darker and deadlier. We have grabbed hold of our freedom with both hands. Urbanization has led to isolation, to a rootless people in search of connection, estranged from the families that might have cautioned them or saved them. New cults formed in cities with followers drawn to a range of new gurus, Sun Myung Moon, Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi, “Fathers” Yod and David “Moses” Berg, Werner Erhard and his Est. All have been accused of a range of abuses, sexual, physical, mental, financial. Groups were made through abduction and maintained through brainwashing. New Age communes developed on the fringes, where charismatic men gathered harems and drugs provided the only escape.

And now - after all that - I'm supposed to accept the rest of these fools didn't also get a heavy cultural dose of the Kool-Aid, when it's remnants, in various forms, are all around for anyone to plainly see? They must be joking! The West walked into it willingly:

"I don't believe in Beatles!"

Acting (On Impulse)

I never go to the theatre. I watch a lot of DVDs, many of plays, but I've got a nagging feeling I also gotta go see a few for myself sometimes.

Not only will it open up the blog but - added bonus - it may even make my life Complete:

Complete is a comic, time-splitting wrangle over the power and perversion of language. When Eve (Bishop) finds out that Micah (Kruse) is doing "The Training," she risks their careers, their relationship and their safety to prove just how destructive the notion of self-creation can be. 

"Complete is inspired by both the language of est and the scientific study of syntax and semantics," explained Kuchlewska in an interview. "I did the est training at age nine. The use of language in that subculture was specific and differed in important ways from the English I had been speaking up until then. This was a potent combination for me as a child-using language to empower myself, but also being confused at times by what I and others were saying. It forever changed the way I think and how I speak." 

Developed by Werner Erhard, est is a system of experiential philosophy that was popular in the 1970s and '80s and was accused by some of being a cult. Inspired by her childhood experience and aided by the deeper understanding of language she gained as a linguistics major, Kuchlewska constructs a fictional "Training," a world in which phrases like "I intend to create a parking space" and "You can create yourself being any way you want to be" are normal statements, even in the mouth of a child. 

As a graduate of and former coach at the Ford Institute for Transformational Training, Jennifer Chambers brings an insider's understanding to the project. 

"There is a very specific language that the self-help industry uses, and it can be viewed as either very helpful or very manipulative," she says. "I want to go back and explore that world now that I have some distance from it."

Can you hand me a better give/take-away line than that last one? 

I'm hearing she's snapped - and now sees an "in" and "out", "before" and "after". 

Well Hell, that's worth grabbing my coat all by itself,…

 

Downsizing The Boss (Instead Of The Downward Dog)

Regarding the Lululemon yoga clothing corporation hiding it's CEO and founder, and it's evil Scientology/est/Landmark Forum arrangement, I wish I could say, "this is a stretch," but it's not:

"It's the first time I've heard of anyone almost directly using the techniques of cults and applying them to their business."

It's not even funny,...

N. Korea? Chicoms? Russia? No, It's In America

Governments are sending adults into it, parents are sending their kids into it, drug addicts are checking themselves into it - and making their lives much, much worse. Is there any way out? Even when, as one person says in this clip, it just changes it's name and continues (as est became The Landmark Forum)? We're actively condemning ourselves to the experience of cultism.

We're condemning ourselves to Hell.

We've Got A Job Ahead (Not What You Think)

At the beginning of the year, we did a post on what the results were of our experience with NewAge Management techniques in business; namely, forcing us to quit or be fired from one job after another - with nothing to back them up - to avoid the totalitarian insanity imposed on someone who was just trying to do their job and earn a living. Now the BBC's Peter Sessions has written a devastating memoir that details his experience of being regarded as a "lunatic" for refusing, as best he could, to go along with the madness.

As much as we'd like to dwell on his NewAge revelations ("Anyone who [looks for climate change information] with a mind not closed by religious fervour,...") we'd rather point out the obvious - that we've never worked for the BBC and The Corporation isn't in the United States. So what's going on? How is it the same NewAge outlook towards management exists on both side of the ocean? Is there something happening that journalists, amongst others, aren't reporting? Of course there is. And it's strangling business, turning it not into a apparatus for making money but (as Mr. Sessions says) a "propaganda machine" for nonsense.

As Lawrence A. Pile revealed in his paper, "The Siren Call of Modern Pied Pipers", this has been accomplished by corporations falling under the sway of cult influences. Here's an excerpt:

In an article in Working Woman entitled "Wacky management ideas that work," Nancy K. Austin wrote, "... making it in modern times requires staking out brave new competitive territory. And to do that, the tool managers most urgently need is imagination."{1} Few CEOs, managers, or even shop foremen would argue with that observation. Where differences arise, however, is in proposals offered to produce or stimulate this needed imagination. Along with new or expanded imagination and creativity, corporations large and small throughout North America are increasingly looking for ways to augment productivity (and profits) by helping their employees to more effective performance through stress reduction, self-regulation, accelerated learning, and accepting a greater share of responsibility for themselves and their companies.{2}

To accomplish these commendable and even necessary goals, numerous businesses are turning to a mushrooming crop of training and consultation firms offering workshops, seminars, and courses which claim to transform employees into highly motivated and efficient visionaries and producers. Among the major corporations which have enlisted these firms are AT&T, GM, Ford, IBM, Calvin Klein, Westinghouse, Dupont, Scott Paper, Campbell Soup, Lockheed, RCA, Procter and Gamble, All State Insurance, NEC, Boeing Aerospace, General Foods, GE, and McDonald's-in short, approximately 20% of the Fortune 500 corporations,{3} plus innumerable smaller companies.

And it is not only business, but also government that is jumping on the creativity training band-wagon. The IRS, CIA, the Army, Navy, and Air Force have all engaged these training companies. Many of the trainers, however, use techniques and promote philosophies at variance with the moral and religious convictions of employees who are urged, and sometimes required, to attend the workshops.

Most often, these techniques and philosophies arise from the broad and variegated matrix of the so-called New Age Movement (NAM). And this fact has caused a great deal of controversy in and around the workplace, reported in numerous books and articles. The core of the controversy is highlighted by Arthur Johnson's statement that "There's a fine line between corporate culture and corporate cults."{4} Consider the following:

Steven Hiatt, an evangelical Christian,was fired from his job as a senior manager of a car dealership after first recommending, and then urging the cancellation of, a New Age training program offered by the Pacific Institute of Seattle. He says he became disillusioned with the program, then called "New Age Thinking," on the third night of a facilitators training workshop for employers he attended. That was when, he says, the instructor "set a very spiritual mood and began talking about life after death. He urged us to question our concepts of truth, and to set spiritual goals using the program's techniques and goals. He said the real reason for the training was to save the world." That was enough for Hiatt, who got up and walked out.{5}

William Gleaton, former manager of human resources for a Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. plant in Albany, Ga., also lost his job after objecting to a training program offered by the Pacific Institute.{6} He sued and eventually reached an out of court settlement with the company.  In May 1989 eight former employees of the DeKalb Farmers Market in Georgia also accepted an out-of-court settlement of their suit against their former employer charging that they had been fired for refusing to attend a training program they claimed promoted New Age ideas and techniques. The program in question was the Forum, said by detractors to be a watered down version of Werner Erhard's 1970s est (Erhard Seminars Training). According to the plaintiffs, "...the Forum's espousal of the supremacy of man violate[d] their belief in the primacy of God or other higher beings. Supervisors who declined to participate and recruit their employees were harassed, humiliated and interrogated."{7}

Also in 1989 five employees of an electronics company in California sued their employer for requiring them to attend "communications and time-management courses" taught by an organization, Applied Scholastics, that proved to be a branch of the controversial Church of Scientology. The employees alleged in their suit that "the training sessions amounted to recruitment and indoctrination into Scientology."{8}

In the spring of 1991 almost three dozen Broward County, Fla., employees were sent at county expense to attend training offered by Lifespring, a program similar to Werner Erhard's est and Forum. Though some workers said they enjoyed the program and even went on to further training at their own expense, other employees disliked it and balked at going further with it, while still others dropped out without completing the first sessions. According to an article in the Broward County Sun-Sentinel, "Employees were required to attend Lifespring after work, from about 6 p.m. to midnight for three days, then all day on the weekend."{9} In February 1992 Franklin County, Oh., Children Services discontinued staff training by the Forum (at taxpayers' expense) after a rash of negative news reports and complaints from the community.{10}

Why all the fuss? Simply that many of the seminars and workshops being offered promote New Age concepts to which some employees object, and they have been charged with using methods and techniques that instill these concepts without the participants' realizing what is happening.

And this is still what's going on, but in a more advanced stage of development, with The Forum (now called "The Landmark Forum") leading the way. Some companies are more open about what they're up to - such as Vancouver, Canada's Lululemon Athletica Inc., as well as Pasadena, California-based Panda Express, and the San Francisco Bay Area's Cafe Gratitude - but what they're up to is what they've always been up to - cult indoctrination techniques - and, with so many larger companies having had a drink of the Kool-Aid long ago, is it any wonder it's difficult to escape cult influence - or the wrong-headed insanity it unleashes - throughout the world?

And what kinds of problems are these programs making for the larger society? As we've mentioned before, we knew Cafe Gratitude was under cult influence after one visit, but what if someone doesn't know what's happening to them? Could they be causing trouble at home? Divorces? Other forms of chaos? Even those who don't fall for the indoctrination techniques can find themselves in trouble once they're out of work for not going along. (And even that situation can land you back under cult influence nowadays - you even get it sitting at home watching Oprah - so there's no escape.) As Lawrence A. Pile mentioned, any number of things are happening out there, including:

Marital or other relationship discord. Seemingly normal "spats" between spouses, siblings, or parents and children can be precipitated by attendance at a New Age (or other) seminar or program. The radical transformation or conversion that often occurs frequently produces a fanatic out of the convert, whether the conversion is to New Age thinking or Christian fundamentalism. Unconverted relatives normally find it difficult to endure the religious/metaphysical obsessions of the fanatic.

Think about it. The skyrocketing divorce rate, all these people with an unknown source of "fatigue", etc., might all be some form of cult strain - something no one's looking for since few even realize we're under any form of cult influence. But take it from us:

We're about as far from controllable as you can get and, believe it or not, we certainly know it's been a strain.

Well: The Rolling Stone Gathers Moss After All

Here's how the people who broke up their marriages, determined to change the world, spent the last ten years - and take note of how the word "we" is used:

Remember the '90s, when we all thought we were crazy? Everyone ran out and got a shrink (New Yorkers got analysts — not just for Woody Allen anymore!). Couples' therapy became a widely chosen ritualistic precursor to divorce, aimed at clarifying for each party exactly when and how their spouse became reprehensible. The middle-aged departed on healing retreats en masse to learn about centering and recovering their inner child. The most fragile souls wound up in stuffy hotel conference rooms under the banner of Werner Erhard's Forum, where an authoritarian patriarch urged them to simply sweep away their "rackets" like so many dust bunnies.

And here they are now - their inner child still insisting on some ethically-challenged, organic, recyclable, utopia of nonsense - hoping someone will feel sorry for them after all the trouble they've caused, the money they've thrown away ("I was a shopaholic") and the lives they've destroyed:



Beating the homeless guy to "the good stuff"?

As Bob Dylan asked, how does it feeeeeel?

Connecting The Dots (Coming Up With Nothing)

"So Werner Erhard’s brother is CEO of Landmark Education, his sister is a Director of Landmark Education, and his attorney is Chairman of the Board of Landmark Education."

-- GuruTruth, proving Landmark Education has nothing to do with est, Scientology, brainwashing, or cultism - even though Werner Erhard began, or is associated with, all four - he's just got his cohorts running things,...um,...to maybe provide,...uh,...The Truth about Human Potential Seminars.

How Soon We Forget (We're Forgetful)

"These types of events, wrapped in quasi-spiritual trappings like ersatz Native American and Asian philosophies, are not really new. Get rich quick schemes have always fascinated many in Western cultures, and in a shallow-minded, materialistic, capitalistic culture like ours facilitators like James Ray are like Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie 'Wall Street.' There’s never been a shortage of suckers, people who like the quick fix and cut corners to get where they’re going, as PT Barnum noted. Cheap and fast, that’s how we like things, intrinsic or extrinsic.

Go back to the whacky film 10 years before that, when in 1977 'Semi-Tough' was released. A thinly-veiled send-up of Werner Erhard and EST, locking people voluntarily in a room until they 'Get it,' some urinating on themselves due to being prohibited from even a bathroom break, audiences laughed at the absurdity.

Inexplicably, that lesson didn’t sink in, for many who watched it howling are now subsequently paid customers for successors like Rajneesh, Mahara Ji, L. Ron Hubbard, Dr. Phil, Wayne Dyer, one might even add the Dalai Lama and Eckhart Tolle, the list goes on and on. Buy their books and tapes, attend their lectures, become the futuristic Nietzschean ideal, the 'übermensch.'"

-- Roger Butow, taking the issues surrounding the James Arthur Ray case from NewAge to Nazi in only three paragraphs - which has to be a record of some kind: I may have beat him somewhere on this blog, but I don't know where - and not only that, but Butow's writing from, appropriately and ironically, Salem News.com.

A Smile Is Just A Frown Turned Upside-Down

"[Barbara] Ehrenreich begins with the history of Christian Science and the other think-yourself-well religions that thrive in the American culture of individualism. Those faiths are the obvious forerunners of things like The Secret. The latter's New Age Wingnuttery claims you can control the world with your wishes and the universe is just one big mail-order catalogue. Of course the corollary of The Secret is that if you're poor, uneducated, or unhealthy it's your own damn fault for not wishing hard enough. (It's just so terribly Ayn Rand, despite its Australian author, Rhonda Byrne.)

But before the law of attraction, there was Protestant minister Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 book, The Power of Positive Thinking, which infected the business world via his proselytizing with sales people. That thinking inspired the money-making 'human potential movement' of the ‘70s, which spawned all sorts of revenue streams in the form of cults delivering self-empowerment workshops and motivational speakers. (Remember EST? Have you heard of the contemporary Landmark Forum?)

Ehrenreich traces how combining religious notions with healthcare led to the self-help movement, including the 12-Steppers, who demanded we all acknowledge a higher power. (As an aside, I had long wondered why reiki practitioners and other energy healers demand their patients have some sort of 'spiritual belief,' which makes them sound like faithhealers from another era. Ehrenreich's history confirms this is exactly what they are, albeit under a new label.)

She takes unseemly pleasure in skewering popular but academically-dubious 'happiness' psychology. In a particularly funny chapter, she fences with University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, the author of pop psych books with titles like Authentic Happiness. She tries to pin down what he's really saying with his meaningless equations and vague terms. But this isn't science-based psychology; it's the armchair version that brainwashes people into thinking whatever serves authorities best.

Seligman is expressly opposed to changing the external circumstances that cause misery, which he writes can be can be 'impractical and expensive,' preferring to get people to adjust their attitude. One can only imagine what Seligman and his colleagues might have said about slavery...

Ehrenreich doesn't mention it, but it's worth noting that in the 1960s Seligman was influential in developing 'aversion therapy' for curing homosexuals -- which reveals the sinister underpinnings of his optimism training, and much of what passes for positive psychology.

Surprisingly, Ehrenreich was blissfully unaware of much of this delusional thinking when she got breast cancer in 2000. She was exhorted to be cheerful or die, which just piqued her curiousity and led to this book. The woman has a PhD in cell biology, so she knows the difference between knowledge and belief. She also knows that the so-called research these people cite about how happy thoughts affect your health is just so much superstition.

But faced with surgery, chemo, and other medical horrors, she needed a distraction. So she began looking at exactly why otherwise sensible people were embracing the notion that you must pretend to be 'positive' to get well. She found that constant demand to be cheerful for the convenience of others, downright oppressive. Or would that be Oprah-essive since, as she notes, many of the silliest positive thinking ideas are touted by Lady O.

Positive thinking has also reinvigorated the opiate of the masses. The so-called prosperity preachers like Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now) advise their flocks to embrace a lavish lifestyle because, essentially, God wants you live large. So be positive and go buy that house with a mortgage you can't afford, assured that your higher power will help you out. Even a conservative magazine like Time has traced the U.S.-led financial collapse to the American obsession with 'spirituality' in all its variations. 'Maybe we should blame God for the subprime mortgage mess,' was the headline on a 2008 article.

Ehrenreich also documents how economists and government officials who warned of the impending financial meltdown were ignored or even fired for being 'negative' -- they pointed out the facts. In fact, the term negative seems to have become codespeak for knowledgeable and realistic. It's obvious to anyone with RRSP that those leadership coaches that advise purging negative employees from the body corporate were (and still are) in the depths of denial. In effect, they're claiming that if you deny the Doppler snow forecast it will guarantee sunny weather. And yet, most of us believe it.

But then, the alternative to spouting upbeat slogans is being labeled with 'a bad attitude,' and as Ehrenreich records that's a career-limiting move.

Besides, there's no arguing with people who believe the Emperor actually has new clothes. Bright-Sided might be funny, if it weren't for the fact that this Dark Age anti-thinking is destroying our economy, threatening our health, and undermining our quality of life."

-- Shannon Rupp, reviewing Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America (yes: again) and discovering pretty much the same thing I blog about - though in Ehrenreich's telling (as with the approach of most secularists) NewAge "spirituality" takes a back seat to the "Oprah-essive" movements it's spawned - and also finding herself similarly repelled, in The Tyee.

Everybody Needs Help (But Of Different Kinds)

"All psychotherapies, most psychiatric drugs, and every mass self-help movement for the last half-century have sought to instill one thought or experience -- 'What, me worry?'

More broadly, they have all tried to get Americans to lighten up, to realize that they are in a relatively good place (the Americans in bad places -- i.e., poor Americans -- don't receive therapy, take meds, or join self-help and support groups) -- in short, to look on the bright side.

EST held sway over America for exactly a decade, becoming something like a mass cult. It then moved on from curing America's malaise to solving world hunger. Well, one out of two ain't bad."

Stanton Peele, explaining why I've never fallen in with this nonsense (and why I ask for donations on every post) and why so many people, with more money than I have, disagree with me/dislike me/refuse to donate to me, while they continue utilizing cultish thinking from the '70s, and reading the cult-oriented and inspired, Huffington Post.

Believing Ain't Knowing

Alternative Therapies Debunked or Denounced in 2009 (LiveScience)

How Feng Shui Is Being Discredited in Hong Kong (TIME)

Cafe Gratitude Employees Grateful to Break Free (NBC Bay Area)

Estate of Jack Slee vs. Werner Erhard - Death During Est Training. Set a Precedent for the James Ray Lawsuits? (Horizons Magazine)

Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Religiosity (The SkeptVet Blog)

"Arianna" Must Be The Greek Word For Stupid

"[Arianna Huffington's] desire to be different became,...clear when I looked at her views about health. In her 2006 self-help book, 'On Being Fearless,' she provides her own definition of preventive care, one that's indistinguishable from Evans' blog post. 'In today's world, where thousands of chemicals are being used all around us, it's essential both to protect against exposure and to maintain some kind of detox program,' Huffington wrote. In the New Yorker, Collins revealed that Huffington has undergone 'mercury detoxification, fire-walking, est, microdermabrasion, infrared saunas' and a long list of fad diets. In 'On Being Fearless,' she gave a description of her own experience with mercury detox, saying she was 'stunned to find how much mercury I had in my body.'

What Huffington may not know is the test used to determine the amount of mercury in the body is a sham, as proven by medical researchers at the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Emory University and other public health institutes. The test artificially elevates the levels of heavy metals in one's body, falsely leading one to believe that they've been poisoned by toxins. In fact, a doctor who routinely prescribed the test has been investigated and disciplined.

In an e-mail to me, Huffington touched on her long and winding road through alternative therapies, dropping the names of major universities (Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, UCLA) with centers for complementary and alternative medicine, where she has been a patient. But health coverage on the site goes beyond complementary medicine. In fact, the more I read the site, the more I realized its health writers were being chosen not in the name of diversity or on the basis of their qualifications. Rather, as Collins revealed in the New Yorker, they appear to be picked by Huffington on a whim."

-- Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., on the piss-poor NewAge medical advice you can find on The Huffington Post - which is the same nutty nonsense he found coming from Oprah Winfrey - which isn't a surprise, except all of this looniness is being covered so well by Salon.

Everything They Hoped For (Just No Change)

"Two journalistic events of the 1970s defined the Age of Narcissism. First, the term 'Me Decade' was introduced by novelist Tom Wolfe in a New York magazine article in 1976. A few years later, Christopher Lasch’s book The Culture of Narcissism provided a more substantive commentary on the diminishing ability of modern society and culture to provide a sense of identity and security for its members.

Changes in cultural values, economic structures and personal relationships, according to Lasch, created a society unmoored from historical measures of status based in work, religion, achievement or lineage. As a result, Americans were caught up in a never-ending, never-fulfilling competition for the symbols of status. You’re unsure of your status, and in fact, it’s almost never clear in your neighborhood just who is the boss of who — or at least who is socially superior. So we’re free to fake each other out with houses, cars, clothes, friends, Facebook pages, cosmetic surgery and other 'big-ticket items' to satisfy our need to be special, and to matter in the scheme of things.

While Lasch saw our narcissistic culture as the result of having lost our historical bearings, Wolfe saw the opposite. The Me Decade, he wrote (an amazing, funny, eloquent article, if you’ve never read it), was a natural outgrowth of the embarrassment of material riches cranked out in the postwar industrial boom. Having satisfied all of our basic needs and many of our big-ticket fantasies for flashy things, a new generation of Americans decided to just bypass the symbols of happiness, going whole-hog instead for direct access to the real thing through some kind of personal enlightenment.

Gurus, spiritual movements, self-improvement programs such as est and Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, fringe therapies such as Primal Scream — Wolfe saw these as an expression of encroaching societal narcissism. Years after the New York magazine article, Wolfe expanded his critique of narcissistic American culture to include the young financial wizards of Wall Street, or 'Masters of the Universe' as he called them in the novel — and later the movie, Bonfire of the Vanities."

-- Russell Collins, a Santa Barbara psychotherapist and divorce mediator, on this NewAge we suffer through, with the Noozhawk.