I responded to a similar question so long ago now that the thread is lost in the mists of antiquity (or at any rate, it’s in the archive, where the links to it from threads that are still active don’t work and you can’t search for it). But my experience and take on it were very similar to WhyNot’s. I personally got a lot out of it, as they offer a lot of valuable insights and strategies for living. They’ve combined them with techniques of influence and persuasion (many of them the same ones used by interrogators, psych-ops personnel, advertisers and marketers, and religious groups) and packaged them together in an effective bundle.
Yeah, I’m aware of how loaded that last sentence is, and that was deliberate. As others have pointed out, there’s very little in the content provided in the Landmark Forum that’s revolutionary or startling – it’s mostly stuff that, at some level, you already know. So why does it have the impact it does? It’s not just the long hours and fatigue and hunger and all that, though those do have an effect. A lot of it is the creation of a sense of acceptance and intimacy among the participants. You see all these other people talk about very painful, emotional, or difficult topics, and while the Forum leaders won’t hesitate to call “bullshit” on what’s said, they carefully do so in a way that’s accepting of the person while rejecting their “story”. We’re nearly all hardwired in ways that make us predisposed to like and identify with others with whom we have shared some kind of intimacy, and the topics brought up in the Forum very often are things the participants have only discussed with the people closest to them, if at all. And suddenly here’s this whole group of people who are willing to listen to you and accept you and not attack or ridicule you. This establishes connections between the participants that might take years to accomplish, if at all, outside that context. A lot of this isn’t even conscious – the emotional intimacy that gets established kicks off all kinds of physiological changes (release of oxytocin, etc.) that creates a feedback loop that reinforces all of this. Once you begin to identify with the group, then it’s almost shockingly easy to be led down whatever path the group is on – the acceptance and approval of the group becomes extremely important, and going along seems better than disagreeing or being contentious and risking the loss of their acceptance and the good feelings that it brings. This is one of the main reasons why isolation is important.
It’s also critical to get people agreeing to things. It almost doesn’t matter what it is, but it does matter that you get people to expressly say yes to things. Once you’re doing that, it’s easier to get them to accept and agree to the fundamental premises that the rest of the ideas are based on. If people begin to rethink that agreement later, pointing out that they’ve already agreed on the premises, and that the conclusions logically follow from them. The effectiveness of this type of technique has been pretty conclusively proved experimentally.
One of the most effective bits is the insistence that things don’t inherently “mean” anything – that whatever meaning we ascribe to them is self-generated, that things mean what we say they mean, and our interpretation of events is just that – our own interpretation. This is useful for helping you understand that generally people aren’t out to get you, that they don’t “mean” something insidious by everything they say, and that how you choose to interpret things effectively becomes reality for you. All quite true, quite helpful, and it’s surprising how few people actually understand and live that. This set of ideas is, however, also useful for deflecting criticism – anything you might criticize about the Forum or Landmark or anything to do with it is simply “your interpretation”, not what actually happened. And the things that they in fact actually do or say are all carefully crafted to stop short of crossing any lines of responsibility – if there’s an implication that you should browbeat your acquaintances into coming to your Forum “graduation” and being subjected to a sales pitch, well, that’s your interpretation – what they said is that you’re encouraged to invite others so that they can see how it has affected you and hear from others what it’s all about.
Once all of that kicks in, it’s very easy for the leader to steer the group toward the conclusions he/she wants to arrive at – the desire to please the leader takes hold of nearly everyone in the room, and they provide more and more of the type of “sharing” and comments that they think the leader wants.
Like any other techniques for persuasion, they can be used for good ends or bad. Most people I know who’ve done the Landmark Forum consider their lives better for it, myself included. On the other hand, the same techniques that help you reconsider how you go about living are also applied to getting you to take more courses and sign up more people for the Forum and the other courses, and it’s natural to regard anything self-serving like that as suspicious, particular when it employs many of the same techniques as cults, albeit to different ends.