I was never too clear on what EST was, but it was fairly prevalent in the early to mid eighties (a “me” philosophy for the “me” decade). Then I understood it became “The Forum”: if you gain a bad name, change your name and start over.
I understood it to be a cultish motivational philosophy/organisation that recruited aggressively and at a high cost to initiates. Hey, maybe they all became Scientologists.
Anyone have the SD on what exactly EST was and what became of it?
EST was overthrown by the evil EDT empire on April Second of this year. The Second Coming of EST has been prophesied to occur on this October 29. Millions are anxiously awaiting this date in anticipation of the Prophecy. So it is written; So it shall be.
It got absorbed into Amway?
EST is Eastern Standard Time. It went away back around Easter, replaced by EDST - Eastern Daylight Savings Time. EST (and it’s companion, EDST) is most certainly not a “cultish motivational philosophy”, but is instead the one true time standard. Did you know those ijits on the West Coast think college football games start at 9:00 in the morning? Real people aren’t even awake at 9:00 on a Saturday morning! And Monday Night Football starts at 6:00 PM? Really! Hard workers that we are, East Coasters aren’t home from work by then. But then West Coasters aren’t exactly known for their industriousness, are they? I guess they put up the surfboards at 4:00 and hitch hike home for the game. I won’t even address those dumb furiners who think it’s midnight when it’s really only evening or Thursday when it’s really Wednesday. A pox on them all!
Never fear, though. EST will be back this fall. It always is.
And while we’re at it - how come you never see any mood rings or pet rocks around any more?
O.K. I realised after I posted that EST also stands for Eastern Standard Time.
If you’ve all had your fun now, does anyone remember the cult/organisation EST, from the eighties? Nothing to do with seasons or time zones.
Yeah, I remember EST. I had way too much experience with the EST-holes who used to come into the restaurant I worked, I suppose in order to torment the wait staff and other customers. They met up the street (this was early 80’s Hollywood, an ideal spawning ground for self-absorbed people looking for philosphies that justify their chosen existance). You sort of captured the basic philosophy - look out for number one, you are entitled to whatever you can grab, not taking advantage of someone else’s niceness is a big mistake, etc. Basically, it is your inherent right to be as big an asshole as you want to be. It went along with such other gems of '80’s philosophy as Terry Cole Whittaker’s “if God loves you He shows it by making you rich, so screw the poor”.
Near as I can tell, these were all designed to give the emerging yuppie scum class a place to go where everyone was right behind the idea that trampling the faces of anyone who gets in the way of you making another million did not mean you were a bad person.
In other words - Tony Robbins took over.
I thought ‘est’ (it always seemed to be rendered lower-case)
came a lot earlier than the late 70’s. To the best of my
recollection it stood for “Erhard sensitivity training”, or at least the first word was somebody’s name. The styling of the movement’s acronym in lower case, plus the use of the word ‘sensitivity’ hardly seems suited to a “me-first”
philosophy.
I recall in the movie Animal House (about 1978) the future
occupation of Steven Furst’s character ‘Flounder’ was projected to be as an ‘est trainer’. Even in 1978 we thought of est as something from back in those wacky 60’s.
EST/est may certainly have come from the '60s, but I didn’t, so I think of it as an '80s thing.
“Erhard sensitivity training” may be a doctrine of conscientious self-sacrifice. But then again, it may not. The use of the word “sensitivity” doesn’t guarantee a philosophy of sensitivity to and consideration for the feelings of others. It could just as easily be sensitivity to the manipulate-ability of others.
Or it could be something else entirely. I don’t know if my EST and your est are the same thing.
…gonna check around now.
EST = est = Erhard sensitivity training.
A quick web search granted me little more than that info. Among a total of three hits were a page detailing the political landscape of San Diego 1973-1977; an essay entitled “What if Human Nature is Historical?” which mentions EST in passing as something for “weekend hippies”; and a site devoted to explaining R.E.M. lyrics, including this:
“The EST in “Country Feedback” is probably the
self-assertiveness encounter therapy called EST, which stood for “Erhard Sensitivity Training”. Werner Erhard, in the seventies, concocted weekend “self-improvement” seminars to make people “tougher” and more “responsible.” He made tons of money by locking large groups of future yuppies in Holiday Inn convention rooms, yelling at them a lot, and refusing to let them leave, even to go to the bathroom (this was supposed to make them more successful in life).”
(If this is accurate, I stand by my skepticism of “sensitivity” in the title.)
Aviddiva: if you want to see what’s become of EST, check http://www.landmarkeducation.com, and particularly the “Past Controversies” link from the main page. I have some personal experience with the Landmark Forum, but haven’t the time to detail it now; I’ll try to do so later tonight or tomorrow.
The article rackinsack linked to defines est as Erhard Seminar Training.
Thanks, rackensack.
The “Past Controversy” link was inactive, so I couldn’t connect to any info there. Some of the articles they provide links to are interesting, though. However, I reserve a sizeable degree of skepticism for the content and slant of articles on an organisation provided by that organisation (notwithstanding some (really fairly benign) references in some of the articles to past controversy of parent org. est).
The percentage of unpaid volunteers does remind me of Scientology, too.
Plus, there’s just something creepy about the whole thing, from the claim that “It allows people who are already successful in their lives to create something that is truly extraordinary” to The Wisdom Course, $1900 (US).
…ah well, idle curiosity pretty much satisfied, anyway. I was pretty sure they hadn’t just disappeared. There’s way too much of a market these days for inspirational/motivational seminars not to capitalise.
(I can’t help but picture Tom Cruise, from his role in Magnolia.)
As the link I mentioned earlier indicates, Landmark Education was founded to continue using the techniques developed by Werner Erhard and originally used in his EST programs. According to Landmark, these techniques have been refined, supplemented, and in some cases replaced by other techniques over the years. I have no notion to what degree Landmark’s current approach follows or diverges from EST; I only have personal experience of the Landmark Forum, but it’s certainly fair to characterize Landmark’s programs as descendants of EST.
In an environment of skeptics such as this, it’d be easy (and probably safer) to pretend that everything about Landmark and its programs is worthless. I’d be lying if I said that about my experience. While there’s much that I believe to be potentially harmful about their approach (at least for substantial segment of the general populace), I have to admit that my life has unfolded in very different, much more positive ways after experiencing the Landmark Forum. I gained from it a number of valuable insights about myself, about relationships, about responsibility for one’s own actions and what happens to one, about how one’s perception of the world and of other people is very near to being one’s reality, about the control one has over one’s interpretations of the words and actions of others, and about the power of commitment to goals, that have informed my actions and my thinking ever since.
While Landmark takes great pains to dissociate itself from any religious or psychological intention, however, and provides a number of statements from nominal experts on cults to the effect that Landmark’s programs are not and do not resemble a cult, the techniques of the Landmark Forum would be quite familiar to cult leaders, psy-ops personnel, and indoctrinators everywhere for the simple reason that they are effective in shaping the thoughts and behaviors of indviduals in a group environment. They include isolation, a style of persuasion that involves obtaining acquiescence in wholly unobjectionable premises and proceeding stepwise to draw from those premises conclusions that the participant would never have agreed to initially (essentially, the Socratic method), development of a strong sense of identity with the rest of the group and a strong inclination to conform with certain normative ways of thinking and behaving in the context of the group, and a consistent emphasis on the the fact that the participant is acting freely without any coercion on the part of the leaders or other participants. Most of the techniques used in the Forum, however, would be completely ineffectual in a one-on-one or smaller group setting, depending as they do on human instincts to conform to group norms and the pressure (in some cases unintentional) that groups bring to bear on individual beliefs and actions.
Participants are encouraged to discuss painful details of their lives and relationships with others, and while these revelations may indeed be beneficial in illustrating the prinicples the Forum teaches and in helping participants to a better understanding of themselves and others, they also have the effect of binding participants together and making them feel connected to one another in ways they’d never have thought possible coming in. Typically, these revelations are met with acceptance and positive feedback from leaders and other participants, which seems to trigger a deep-seated human instinct to feel a bond with people who respond positively to such intimate disclosures, who can accept us and like us despite having seen or heard about us at our worst. This in turn ties into our natural inclination to “go along to get along”, to identify with the goals, beliefs, and practices of groups to which we belong, and our equally natural inclination to accentuate the difference between groups to which we belong and those to which we do not.
Since the leaders are able in large part to shape the beliefs of the participants by drawing them along chains of premises and conclusions, reaching by nearly imperceptible steps the desired set of beliefs, nearly the entire group is pulled, with almost shocking rapidity, into the attraction basin of whatever point the leader is making.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the Landmark approach is the constant emphasis on the principles that no one is coerced to believe or do anything against their will, and that we are each of us responsible for ourselves and what happens to us. Quite true, in both cases, but the former omits consideration of the ways in which our “will” is shaped by instincts formed when survival as a lone individual was practically impossible and membership in a band (probably made up mostly of close relations) was the only way to have any hope of living for long. These instincts toward group identification can be, and are, exploited quite powerfully by the techniques Landmark uses, so that while a participant cannot be said to have been coerced in any commonly accepted sense of the term, participants’ behaviors and beliefs are directed into particular channels with astonishing success.
When combined with the principle that everyone is responsible for their own choices and the consequences of those choices, and the idea that we do not react to events but rather to our interpretation of those events, this offers Landmark a wonderfully powerful shield against criticism: you freely chose to believe and do as you did; if you made a mistake or chose poorly, you yourself must bear the responsibility for that, and in any case what you describe as having happened is only your interpretation of what happened.
One of the things about Landmark that’s easiest to criticize is their blatant exploitation of the effect the Forum (and from what I’ve been told, their other programs) can have to further their own business success. Participants are strongly encouraged to invite other friends and relatives to a final session on the third day, part of which is devoted to making a strong pitch to sign the guests up for a future Forum session. The same arguments and persuasive techniques that have been used for the last three days are deployed at full strength to enroll participants in additional programs; any objections raised by the participant to committing to further programs are expertly countered and (apparently) drained of validity by skilled Landmark employees and volunteers. Landmark uses the fact that 90% of Forum participants are referred by prior participants as a mark of the value the program has, and to some extent that’s no doubt true. But it’s also an indication of the degree to which participants can be induced to recruit others, the effectiveness of Landmark in “closing the sale” once they have someone engaged in conversation, and the degree to which people are bad at saying no once they’re engaged in a relationship, however tenuous and recent, with someone who’s persuasive and determined to get them to say yes (the same problem that ensures the continued existence of telemarketers).
In summary, I personally dervied enormous benefits from my participation in the Landmark Forum. I can point to numerous definite actions taken and decisions made as a direct result of my experience that have had profound effects on where I am today (my marriage, my financial and professional success, my ability to cope with life’s vicissitudes, etc.). But persons who are more desperately in need of connection to and acceptance by other people are highly susceptible to exploitation, and Landmark’s techniques allow them to do so with surprising success. Landmark does, of course, shield itself from this charge as well, both in the ways described above and through the variety of waivers and disclaimers participants are required to sign before the program begins. These include statements that the participant has no physical or mental health problems that might preclude their successful participation in the Landmark Forum, as well as a requirement that no one under psychiatric or psychological care participate without the express consent of their doctor. Nevertheless I’ve known people who became so wrapped up in Landmark’s programs that it virtually took over their lives for some period. Or that’s my “interpretation” of events. Landmark’s interpretation, of course, would be that this was merely determined commitment to a worthwhile goal, helping other people to derive the benefits of their programs. Neither, of course, is what “really happened”, but I stick with my interpretation.
Thanks again, rackensack. That’s about what I thought, of both EST and The Forum, from what I read.