Kurt Andersen ~ The New Yorker ~ Empowerment: the new EST

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - October 20, 1997

Son of est

The terminator of self-doubt

by KURT ANDERSEN

I NEVER took an est seminar, but I've always thought that Werner Erhard's human-potential scheme was way ahead of the curve: by squishy seventies standards, est was unsentimental in both form (you got yelled at; you had to pay close attention) and in substance (you are responsible for making yourself happy; there is no divine secret of life). Erhard was on his way to becoming the baby boomers' Dale Carnegie, but then, during the first few months of 1991, it all went phffft: "60 Minutes" aired an exposé of Erhard and est; he sold the business to some employees; the I.R.S. came after him; and he went into exile.

But, once again, Erhardism, like disco and marijuana, is ascendant. Erhard's former associates, reconstituted as the Landmark Education Corporation, have morphed est into something called the Landmark Forum. Landmark hasn't received much press attention. This is partly because there is no high-profile charismatic leader like Erhard. There is also Landmark's three-year-old lawsuit against the Cult Awareness Network. But Landmark is evidently becoming very popular, like est before it, among the semi-stylish upper-middle class. More than a hundred thousand people a year attend the forums and the programs it is associated with, and, since graduates are strongly encouraged to recruit family and friends, the growth may be approaching some exponential tipping point.

The forum takes place over a long weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, for fifteen hours each day), plus a Tuesday-night wrap-up session. In New York, the cost is three hundred and fifty dollars, or about seven dollars an hour-pricier than a movie (with less comfortable seats), cheaper than private-school tuition (more comfortable seats), about the same as an Off-Off Broadway, show (equal seat comfort).

When I called to register, I had to give a credit-card number, describe an "issue" I wanted to resolve, and listen for half an hour as the Landmark order taker recited boilerplate-medical caveats, psychological warnings, legal indemnities. I shouldn't come, she said, if I were "unwilling to encounter enthusiasm... fear, empathy; sadness, or regret" in myself or others, or if coming to grips "with what it means to be human" might prove too "difficult and unsettling." I had to tell her whether my wife approved of my attending the forum. I had to confess whether I had ever quit therapy against a therapist's recommendation. Finally, regarding "any issue or claim" I might subsequently wish to file against Landmark, I had to be prepared to agree to "freely giving up my tight to a jury or court trial."

Each forum consists of between a hundred and a hundred and fifty people and is conducted in New York every two weeks in a big, tatty third-floor room off Fifth Avenue. It's like a marathon version of certain first-year law- or business-school classes-a lecture course where the teachers are gregarious dictators and classroom participation is expected. Sometimes it's a matter of anonymously shouting answers to the leaders' fill-in-the-blank exegeses ("You get annoyed with your parents because you want... what?"), but people also stand, give their names, and "share" relevant personal anecdotes, "Oprah"-style. There are short breaks every two or three hours, during which the leaders are available to answer questions privately.

Jerry, the more electric of my two forum leaders -- imagine Martin Short doing Stuart Smalley live -- gave us a capsule history, naming Erhard as the organization's founder. Jerry also said that he had "been doing this since 1975," suggesting a certain unashamed continuity between est and Landmark. Yet when a young woman went to one of the microphones to declare her qualms about Erhard and her fear that the forum was "a con game," Jerry replied, "Who conned you when you were young? This is about that." When Jerry explained a point to the group, he habitually said "Capeesh?" He also repeatedly mentioned that he was a former professional dancer and that he had recently fathered a darling son.

A central forum idea is that people cling unnecessarily to dissatisfactions in order to make themselves feel morally superior -- what the forum calls "running rackets." The leaders spoke constantly of "causing possibility" and of "being your own life's cause." A piece of paper taped to a table reminded the staff that its goal was to make us all "audacious, self-expressed leaders." The words "sharing" and "listening" were nouns. Everyone used "empower" a lot. The goal was not happiness, exactly, but something more sci-fi neutral: "the result," which involves a kind of existential "completion."

It's easy to make fun of any freeze-dried patois, but this clunky new language is the means by which Landmark purports to reëngineer its followers' lives. Landmark employs "a language structure that creates possibility," Jerry said. "You make the interpretations. Rewrite them." There is a Landmark graduate seminar that is actually called "Inventing Oneself." The basic idea is that if you accept Landmark's epistemological conventions -- scrupulously distinguishing, for instance, between facts (e.g., "She didn't call") and invidious interpretations of facts (e.g., "She didn't call because she hates me") and then start using its particular tough-love vocabulary, your life will improve. It's as if an Up with People troupe had forsaken Scripture in favor of Derrida: deconstruction as an American applied science of cheerfulness --happy and unhappy are mere linguistic constructs, and it's up to you to assert control.

But even though Jerry was slightly terrifying and ridiculous, even though I reflexively loathe almost everything about the Landmark Forum (the jargon, the big classrooms with fluorescent lights, the one-size-fits-all feel-good doctrines, the talking to strangers about my inner life), and even though I dropped out after the first day, I found that I mostly agree with its precepts: that contentment lies within oneself; that the glass is half full; that it's pointless to belabor the past; that whining is bad. "We just made this up," Jerry told us when someone wanted religious certainty. "This is not the truth." Brian, our other leader, added, with a note of irony, "There are places you can go for truth." If I were going to start my own cult (and I am in no way implying that the Landmark Education Corporation or any of its employees constitute a "cult"), it would probably be a lot like this. But I don't think I'd hire Jerry. ©