A Phenomenon of the Seventies -- Part IIPreface | Technique | Political Efficiency | Style | Ideology | Practice | Power | Schooling | Epilogue The rules of social behavior taught by the growth movement generally are much fuzzier than the sharply stylized versions taught by such highly ideological groups as EST, and are more open to flexible interpretation. For example, experience in encounter groups, with their emphasis on feeling what you feel and expressing it freely, might well lead a woman employed menially in a sexist organization to object both personally and formally to her superiors about the division of productive labor and reward and the modes of interaction, and to share her realized feelings actively with her coworkers, initiating some organizing process to change their social condition as a whole through collective effort. Such a reading of "personal responsibility" is neither encouraged nor discouraged by the basic, fragmentary frame of encounter. It is still inhibited by other ("outside") cultural influences; but training in encounter alone makes it perhaps more conceivable and practical for the woman and her boss alike. But EST's ideology is more hobbling than encounter's, being phrased as a general answer rather than a useful process. It interprets personal responsibility more explicitly and narrowly, with a solipsistic vengeance, and works actively against such a social interpretation. An EST woman would be less likely to perturb the status quo by expressing unpleasant emotions, or indeed even to have them -- since once one has grasped that oppression is an illusion, that no person other than oneself is responsible for whatever "happens to" one, one has then neither cause nor reason for anger or protest. (One might still then choose to experience one's state as "oppressed" rather than autonomous; but EST teaches also, in many ways, that it is stupid and futile to experience oneself so negatively, or indeed as subject to anything.) An EST woman would instead be more likely to see herself as responsible for whatever she experienced; and set out positively to prove that she personally could be trusted to do the more creative and rewarding work, and were worthy of this as well as of lesser evidences of respect. So much, so good: admirable, necessary. But it stops here. In this task. she would be competing, perforce, in a male-dominated system and its terms, and, if successful, would indeed set a quiet example of nominal desexism -- nominal because it involved integration into rather than transformation of the social order -- but she would also be leaving her old share of the shitwork to be done by some other woman, less talented, responsible, and enlightened, for whom she of course would bear no responsibility. Nor would she bear responsibility for changing this situation, as distinct from any particular employee's state, if she rose to be among its administrators, since her very rise would testify that the situation was okay as it was. All very neat: no fuss, no furor, no action undertaken on any basis other than through private initiative and means and with private intents; no challenge to the basic scheme that divides work and workers into superior and inferior classes, nor indeed any questioning of any social arrangement that might help lead people together to be conscious of and govern their collective condition and work. Instead, the myth of society as a collection of separate atoms, preserved and reinforced by following the basic rule: get yours. Get whatever you can however you can, but get yours, and get it first.
Personal responsibility, as I hear it from EST graduates and so many others in the ideological orbit of growth, ends at arm's length. They do not often put it quite so coldly and self-centeredly, nor see themselves as buying and preaching the moral stance essential For the proposition that you make your own reality, being ultimately responsible for everything that you experience, is only one half of a moral syllogism whose other half is implicit and inescapable. If nothing else -- neither persons nor systems of persons -- is responsible for making things "happen to" you, or for influencing or constraining your choices and interpretations, then by symmetry you yourself are not responsible for anything that happens to or is experienced by anyone else, nor even for influencing any interpretation they make of their experience. Nothing you do, no action you take, no inaction you continue, either directly and personally or indirectly through your participation in any group, can infringe in the slightest way upon any other person's own essential freedom and responsibility. You may still choose to be responsible for imagining or creating your own experience of misery, repression, oppression, or exploitation; but even then you have no responsibility for anyone else's similar experience, no matter what part you play in any system in which they choose to experience it. That's their own responsibility, no skin off your ass; and meanwhile you are morally free to do whatever you want in the interests of being who you want to be and getting yours. If others can't manage so well, that's not even their tough luck -- it's their fault, since it didn't just happen to them, let alone from causes involving you, but instead was their own free choice. (Nor have you any conceptual basis at all for responsibility to or for others, unless you choose to imagine or experience it from whole cloth anew -- in which case, as it contradicts the ESTian premise of exclusively private responsibility, we engage a more subtle dialogue, postponed here. between the truths that EST includes and those it excludes.) Well, I don't know. Surely I've enough to be concerned about in managing my own life without taking on anyone else's problems unnecessarily. And since I do some therapy, I can't help recognizing how much people project maimed, depressing images of themselves into the world and then contract with others to live up to them. Often enough I think of myself as some limping emotional cripple and wonder why I keep doing it to myself. So on the whole, I think that anything that leads people to take responsibility for what they in fact do and might do to govern their own realities is to the good. But also I believe that we must learn to recognize and assume responsibilities which are equally neglected -- our responsibilities for what we do (or don't do) that affects other people, and for how we go about this. I do detest the liberal guilt trip, which doesn't get much done anyway. But the truth I see everywhere, even in the process of the EST training which denies it, is that we are not alone but inseparably intertwined, that we determine each other's realities of self and situation and interpretation as much as we do our own, and are ourselves so determined, in the most intimate intercourse of all. And any frame, like EST's, that is built to deny this perpetuates the most basic and amoral sundering.
This theme calls for eloquence; but as EST is the inspiration here, all I can manage is caricature. Consider the fat man, who comes to the therapist seeking healing for his unhappiness. He is unhappy because he is not jolly (and thus is trapped in a tautology, both of logic and of behavior, of the sort which EST addresses to transcend). He is unhappy because he "cannot" be happy at being not jolly, since everyone else wants him to be jolly, reminds him of their displeasure in various ways when he is not, and reminds) him to feel badly about himself for not being jolly. A jolly Fatman is a dear and noble figure, honored by Shakespeare and the Sunday funnies; a fat man who scowls is not just a fat man scowling, but a Fatman out of character, who troubles our sense of the play (and his sense too, since this sense is largely collective), and should be subtly prompted to be who he should be, or socially penalized for not being a proper citizen, for the sake of his eventual improvement. Of course, he is responsible for his fatness, and thus for its social consequence, because he has chosen in the first place to eat wrongly or to be born with a certain genetic condition or whatever. But suppose he has chosen this, for whatever reasons, and has chosen to scowl at what he has chosen to see of people's response. What can the therapist recommend to him? "Be yourself, love yourself, do not depend on the judgment of others, at least not overmuch." Fair advice, which EST would condone without qualification. The fat man says, "But no woman or man will love me as I am, because they all think I'm sick since I'm not jolly." "Think of it as their loss," counsels the therapist, "and persevere, for somewhere there is someone who will love you." "But I can't feel fully good about myself or truly good unless someone else feels good about me too." "You must bear that, until you can find someone(s) who will do this for you," says the therapist who knows that we need some things from others to be ourselves and whole, which an EST counselor might deny as a cruel illusion. "But I think it's wrong that the public school textbooks always show fat men as being jolly Fatmen," says the fat man. "They and whoever writes and approves them have made it much harder for me to find a lover. Something should be done about this, though it's too late for me to benefit from a change." "Well, that's outside my province," says the therapist, having chosen his or her own condition; adding, if hip, "But if you feel you could grow by trying to change this, go to it." An EST counselor might chide him for trying to blame something outside himself, and return him to the basic proposition: "You feel as you choose to feel about what Is; you can choose to feel or to interpret It otherwise, or to get skinny." And continue to laugh at the Fatman Funnies, without a second thought. The fat man is a Black man, is a woman, is any person objectified through objective social processes which themselves are collectively willed as our collective responsibility. Why should we kick against objectification, prejudice, intolerance, oppression, exploitation, against the personal actions and social agencies that teach them, the institutions that embody and perpetuate them, and the practices that profit by them? Why should we act to undo these? Ask rather why we should not, for there is a reason, a selfish and ESTish one: it is more comfortable and less demanding and dangerous not to, to deny the breadth and depth of our own responsibilities, rather than struggle to understand and meet their implications. And so we fall back again to the posture so many felt was sufficient response to deal with a society of institutionalized racism: "What am I doing about it? Oh, I do try to be unprejudiced in my own relations, when I get the chance: there still aren't any Negroes in my neighborhood, oddly enough, but the office just hired one to deal with Black customers, and I told Thelma straight to her face that I didn't like the joke she made behind his back." Nothing in EST, Scientology, Arica, or the rest implies any more responsibility for exertion on another's behalf than this, if even this much -- let alone any searching of the self to understand it neither as isolated ego nor as transpersonal infinitude, but as an organic member of society. What then of those who in recent years struggled with the realization that in consenting to pay their taxes they were buying napalm to be dropped in their name, and nominally for the sake of their own freedom, upon children of a different skin in an unjust war; and who knew both guilt and helplessness in the knowledge that each daily action of theirs that contributed to maintaining what Is, including the inexorable machine of business-as-usual, contributed also to maintaining this war and every other systemic injustice of American society? From EST's solipsistic perspective they were quite wrong, quite mad, out of touch with "reality," irresponsible to themselves. Granted, it is bewildering to figure out how to move, once we accept all that we can recognize about how our least action reverberates in and transforms the human world. But that's no excuse for wishing the problem away, or for declaring it solved. There is much truth in the line that we choose how we interpret the realities we experience, as almost anyone can learn easily by some experimenting with the sensations called "pain." Much cultural programming can be erased, and new programs of interpretation can be created. But when the flesh is torn, the flesh is torn, whether or not one chooses to cry. There are practical limits even to our most "miraculous" abilities to heal ourselves; and there are perhaps also some limits we should choose for our reinterpretations. It seems useful to choose to experience "pain" in ways which do not incapacitate the self while one seeks, inwardly and outwardly, for help to make the flesh healthy, whole again; it seems unwise to experience it so blissfully or indifferently that one neglects to seek aid, and bleeds to death. And so for our human flesh in society: we face such choices. Too easily, perhaps, the reinterpretation of pain can amount to no more than the old helpless counsel of adjustment -- but with a new mystification, that by adjusting to it, the worse is indeed transformed into the better. Return to: Top There is, of course, a shortcut to Utopia in EST's philosophy, simple and attractive. "If everyone," it is called. If everyone took responsibility for themselves, made known their wants and moved on these with their full, released potential -- why then, it would all work out, because people are basically good ("perfect," "complete") and they will make fair arrangements and validate each other. In short, if everyone were a saint, then heaven would automatically follow. It may be so; and perhaps the dreamers of socialist Utopias are only a bit more detailed in their vision of the mechanics of working it out. But meanwhile, we are somewhere between here and there, and the uses people do actually make of the power they can get give me pause. These lead me to imagine instead a Dystopia -- a Utopia in reverse -- which follows quite as logically from EST's premises and seems a good deal more likely, perhaps because it so much resembles the present state of society, whose lessons EST reaffirms. For what is to inspire the corporate executive, who believes that people make their own realities and that God has granted him license to succeed in business, to change his company's manufacturing and pricing policies, stop lobbying against government regulation of the poison in his product, and stop hiring the best talent he can to sell it to children via TV? The approach of humanistic politics, applied to business, says at least that the executive has the personal responsibility to listen and respond to the individuals affected by his decisions; or so I in charity read it. But the philosophy of EST brooks no "shoulds" as they apply to others. And so it would be, I imagine, for every other character on the social stage, when solipsistically enlightened and realized: no ground for anything but a greedy anarchy of self-interest, unbound by necessary mutual considerations, a wilderness of shrewd contract. Nothing in EST addresses the issue of power as a social phenomenon, or suggests moral injunctions on its use; and these subjects aren't simply omitted from the curriculum but mystified, since the curriculum is sold as all you need to know and deal with about your own power.
This sort of thinking is deep in our tradition, and endemic these days. Currently it appears on the grossest scale in the proposal of "lifeboat ethics" for a world facing hunger pangs: Let those who have the power to feed themselves, or to enforce the trade that feeds them, keep it however they can; let those who don't have it, do as they can by themselves, starve if they must; no blame. The status quo of social reality, with its distributions of power, is a given. There's no point in arguing whether America "should" share its political and agricultural power with the countries whose political, industrial, and agricultural developments have been stunted by the exploitations which helped America to secure this power; nor whether within America the normal operations of food commerce "should" be disrupted to permit her poor to eat properly. Get yours if you can, keep it if you've got it; survival to the fittest or most fortunately located, the more so if they got guns. It is refreshing to see such thinking put so straightforwardly by "objective" scientists. In the milieu of consciousness expansion, it is put much more softly, with rarely an ugly resonance. But psychic me-firstism reduces to the same thing, a Social Darwinist ethic of survival and success. The competitive structure of reality is politely assumed, but scarcely mentioned; what matters is to make yourself strong, a winner. Thus American business and this philosophy of consciousness-development go hand in hand: a commercial approach being appropriate to the education, and the graduates being appreciated in commerce for their mastery of the standard line. And what makes it all the more irresponsible, perhaps, is the stance of groups like EST in selling people not simply a few genuine tools for self-improvement, but the line and belief that this is what "responsibility" is really all about. Lord knows, people do seem eager to buy it. But EST and Erhard must take some responsibility for the act of selling it, and even more for their claim to be acting in fully conscious responsibility. Of course, EST's philosophy gives them the perfect out: they themselves are not responsible for whatever people choose to experience through what they do offer! Since they are kind and not insensitive, however, they do occasionally give people mild warnings, like, " Don't think we're It, It's It." It is a little like setting up a candle flame and then whispering to the moths as they fly by to beware lest they singe their wings.
The world is One; and each of our actions is acted upon the political stage, whether or not we will it or are aware of it as so, just as it is acted simultaneously upon each other stage of consciousness. As Erhard is a teacher, there is a politics to what he teaches, and to his choice to teach it so; and his responsibility, too, has a political dimension. The State does not compel attendance at his school; he seems an independent scholar. But even the overt content of his teaching is so in line with the interests that control the capitalist State, that Erhard functions as a teacher in the State's broad school system. That the frustrations and sufferings of life are only personal and subjective; that change is only a private affair -- these precepts underlie the isolation and powerlessness which permit institutions and the State to function as they do for whom they do. This essential ideology is preached subtly by the processes of all our institutions, but nowhere so nakedly as by certain gurus of the Inner Way. Therefore, in terms of the present politics of our society, Erhard is an exemplary servant of one particular line, however highly his teachings may be valued in the higher spiritual domain (where, to hear him, there is only one party line). That the State's tolerance of the teachers of consciousness who teach this line is political may be seen by thinking in reverse. Suppose Erhard et al. were teaching people to seek not simply private achievement for private gain, private remedy for private distress, but also private responsibility and public justice for public oppression, collective responsibility for the collective spirit and its realization, and change in the State itself, as well as in the practices of powerful persons, for the ultimate sake of human being. Would the State and the empowered so tolerate their schools, if their prospering might trouble the operations and institutions of power? Something like this did happen in the 1960s, during the last main wave of consciousness-raising. Many raisers of political consciousness may well have had only a scanty grasp of the inner reaches of the spirit, but even those who had more were subjected to the same response by the State: surveillance, infiltration, manipulation, disruption, repression and persecution of their teachings, themselves, and their taught, and occasionally execution. Some would blame this all on the coarse manners of upstart minorities and the political Left, the unfortunate ways they went about trying to change consciousness. But I think it was also, and perhaps more, because men who control the real secular powers which we have (not always consciously) granted them perceived quite clearly the fact of threat to their possession and reacted accordingly, with all the power at their disposal, up to the highest levels, as has recently been revealed. I don't think the present managers of power in our society are omniscient, but I know they're paranoid and hard to pull a sneak on. For example, it has taken over two million arrests for the public authorities to begin to decide that marijuana, despite its early promise, was not a vile threat to social homeostasis but would rather, on the whole, be used by people to adapt themselves to an unchanged society; and therefore to relax the persecution of this particular way of exercising the "freedom" to change one's private consciousness. [Alas for such optimism! By 2008, the cumulative cannabis arrest figures topped fifteen million, with relaxation still well in the future.] If the campaign against the stronger psychedelics remains unrelaxed, it is at heart perhaps because they can open people to seriously new consciousness directly, without mediation and without the strong frameworks of social values and interpretations which EST and other spiritual disciplines place upon such experiences. No, I think society's managers are quick to scent the possibility of subversion in new teachings and new tools, if only because their power affords them analysts to do this very job. Reformers of the spirit, of communication, of authenticity, who see their teachings as a holy rot which will infect the foundations of social enterprises and transform them invisibly, without active opposition, count perhaps too much on the blindness of those whose job and goal is to keep the superstructure intact; and too much on the efficacy which they hope their teachings will retain after they are sanitized to pass inspection. The moneychangers work in the market and temple still, despite Jesus, grown grosser while they worship in his name; and those others of a new Name who chuckle at having cozened them to tolerance should ask whose secular interests they themselves really serve. [Power]During the 1970s, EST was one of several new-consciousness franchise training programs whose creative spark and stylistic guidance were due to "former" salesmen. Few of the functional skills of consciousness which they taught were in fact new. Methods for training people in "positive mental attitude," visualization, "entering alpha-space," and other such aids to self-programming had been well-developed for at least half a century in the sales profession, and were advertised more publicly from era to era (as by Emile Coue, with his "every day in every way I am getting better and better" routines). These teachings in turn were to a fair extent adaptations of occult traditions, Eastern and latterly Western, or rather of techniques isolated from these. In this sense, the spiritual face of EST and kindred enterprises represented a re-sacralization of a functional heritage whose secularization was never total anyway, given the continuing involvement and influence of adherents of such "mentally active" Western religions as Christian Science in sales practices and trainings. Even so, selling is in a sense its own religion; and it was equally proper to see the sudden flowering of self- and spiritual salesmanship in more industrial and economic terms -- as if a well-established and defined industry had suddenly found a rapidly expanding market for its product, suitably recosmetized or reengineered, and were retooling and branching out to exploit the opportunity (all the more effectively because the product, salesmanship, was itself the means of its own promotion). This reading is suggested by the prevalence of such commercial biographies as Erhard's among the leaders of the new-consciousness wave. Their chief competition was foreign, a host of Indian, Tibetan, and other Eastern sages attracted by the spectacle and opportunity of America's opening to spiritual quest. Throughout the 1970s, there was not a running show more comic, nor more passionate and deeply meaningful to many people, than this motley, brilliant cavalcade of entrepreneurial gurus provided as they traversed the land, performing in main tents and sideshows, vying to entice the populace to retreats and inductions, spinning off so many local franchise operations that the psychic crossroads of each significant cultural center came to appear a maze of holy Kentucky Fried Chickens, Mc Donald's, and Jack-in-the-Boxes. If the celebrated mid-decade Retreat of the Gurus in Colorado (near Boulder) turned out, as from accounts it did, not as an ecumenical council but as the sulky tangling of a dozen prima donnas, this may in part have been due to the character of their collective enterprise. For on the whole, all their operations were selling not simply submission and peace but power -- power over the self, and through this means power in the world, to people in need or quest of both -- and there was no reason to expect competing purveyors of such a product to get along. But they did learn from each other's examples in adapting to the market; and a detailed history could retrace the way spiritual enterprises of consciousness-change came also to emphasize their worldly, practical benefits even as the advertisements of more secular enterprises were coming to assume a more spiritual cast. That the spiritual dimension of EST and others was economically convenient does not mean that Erhard and other leaders did not experience it as genuinely, and express it as sincerely, as did many of their followers. But at the least, given the commercial ambiance and background of their enterprises, there was potential for some confusion between the impulses of sales and spirit as these fused.
The essential scenario of salesmanship is a contest of the will, or so the salesman sees it and so his training prepares him. He gathers all his persuasiveness, all the force of his spirit and affirmation; he projects as vivid an image as he can of the potential reality of the customer's happily using the encyclopedia or driving away in the car. He projects it in his own mind, and in other ways for the customer, inducing the belief of both parties in this reality, repeating the vision and the implied command to the subject, while screening out as much distraction as possible from the subject's consciousness. The subject may be unaware that it is a contest of will; he may feel purely helped; so much the worse for him. Dagwood may be inept, but he isn't dumb. He knows it's a contest of will. Like the others, the encyclopedia salesman is out to sell him a product (in this case, of instant enlightenment) which may well be useless to him. Dagwood knows he's lost if the man gets inside his door, for he knows the salesman knows how to get him, given half a chance. He feels the terror of the untrained, unwilling gladiator against a trained opponent. The salesman can do something strange, can hypnotize Dagwood; sometimes Dagwood resorts to loud music or to other antics to try to screen out the command. We laugh at Dagwood. It is a complex laugh, for the cartoon Dagwood lives in a quaint history and salesmen rarely knock on the door anymore. Still, there are those moments when you rush out to buy the newest Gizmo, cheerfully realizing you've been had; and that feeling of being mesmerized in the supermarket, which has at last been recognized in a few psychological studies as, indeed, a trance state. The skills of consciousness in which salesmen are trained formed much of the functional product of 1970s new-consciousness enterprise, somewhat rephrased to fit the purpose of selling oneself to oneself and the world. Thus, the skills which EST and such sold were the skills used to sell them. It was exquisite: here again, as in the magical inner experience of EST, consciousness was applied reflexively to itself. In such metaplay lie our most precious and potent capacities, as well as our most unsettling. It is no wonder that the EST package was such a novelty item and so much in demand that EST did not descend to knocking on doors or buttonholing random people on the street as the Scientology and Krishna crews so obnoxiously did. Rather, people flocked to EST for curiosity or for deeper reasons. "I'm looking for a vehicle." "Well, my friend, I've got the one that's just right for you! Has it all over that undependable LSD-25, much more get-up-and-go than the old TM. Is that a flaw in the chrome? Naw, it's just a trick of the light. Here, take it for a spin. Hear that power hum?! Pretty snazzy, huh? Hell, I don't care if you don't buy it, the factory can't keep up with the demand. And you know the price'll be higher next year. Don't mean to insult your intelligence, but you're stupid if you pass this opportunity up." Me, I don't know what it all means, that they use the same skills to sell us as they promise to teach us. That does seem harmonious, in a way. But it seems also, in this case, a peculiar harmony of humiliation and ennoblement -- as if the ultimate proof that Dagwood should buy the encyclopedia were the very fact of the salesman's outtalking him with its aid. Convinced of the product's power, Dagwood realizes that his defeat was a blessing, and plans to use it on Mr. Dithers and Blondie, the forces ruling his life. In the middle of an encyclopedic speech to Blondie, she points out the gravy on his tie; when he thinks he has Mr. Dithers hypnotized and is dozing at his desk, the old man comes up and clouts him on the head.
EST sold both a product and an ideology; each had both a visible and a hidden side. The overt product was a process of personal empowerment, i.e., personal power; and the ideology mainly concerned power's nature and purposes. This harmony was natural, as power generally comes with instructions for its use, being most dangerous (and tempting) otherwise. But as usual, the ideology had an implicit side, connected with the covert product of EST, which was a particular sort of personal impotence. The ultimate power involved was the power of will, paradoxical, self-transcendent. And one core teaching that EST shared with many other groups was that this power is not fuzzy and metaphysical but literal, a direct rather than indirect cause of event and phenomenon in the material world. For in the beginning is the Word, the image, the metaphor, through which Will works this world into being; and in teaching the simple, basic skills of making visualizations and energizing them with will (which form the functional core of so many various teachings, old and new), EST was dealing directly with the primal substrate, with power indeed. What the explicit EST ideology taught was that the power of will is raw, unmediated, and private property: that it is the power to work your own will in and on the world, however you can. ("Your reality is what you make it.") It was the philosophy of Manifest Destiny reduced to individual scale, square in the American tradition of autonomous power as a God-given right. Nor did the ideology quite dodge the question of responsibility. We all are citizens of society; and in society, duty without power is slavery, and power without duty is license or tyranny. What then was the duty of one empowered (yea, as unto a minor god) by EST? The duty taught overwhelmingly was to oneself, one self only, the shrunken remnant of society left after ideological narcissism and solipsism ("you are totally responsible for the reality you experience") had dissolved one's connections to the world. If you want the food, take it; if he wants it too, let the more powerful will prevail. Isolated atoms in the free market; but where, where is the human bond nourished? The contradiction within this closed system, the door leading from its airy isolation to the fetid human basement, was actually accessible through EST's own terms. (If few EST graduates sought it through them, this was perhaps not alone due to the metaphysical delicacy of the argument which my summary somewhat brutalizes, but also to some mesmerized paralysis of will and imagination.) For the essential tenet of Erhard's teaching was that there is a reality, both material and social, "out there," a reality essentially distinct from our interpretations of it; and that we each are ultimately responsible for choosing to make the interpretations that we do make. Both clauses are true, so far as I understand "truth." The kicker is that this ultimate act of choice-of-interpretation, like any other choice, is ultimately of the will, i.e. (as I understand the matter) of the primal substrate of reality, the essence beyond our grasp and naming. We can never quite catch hold of this act of choice at its original root; wherever we actually grab it, we are already in the domain of interpretation, however subterranean. Likewise, though indeed pure breakthrough beyond formerly-held interpretations of reality often occurred when people "got It" in EST, whatever consciousness and knowledge they subsequently retained of their experience of these moments was again couched in interpretation. In particular, wherever and however we catch hold of the way we create the reality we experience, we can recognize others' participation inseparably in our creation (but only if we choose to do so). Thus we do not know, and indeed have reason to doubt, that the ultimate root of the act is strictly private. As for the domain we can grasp, recent studies show that even the cellular structures through which we experience vision (in both senses) are shaped by the collective forms of our culture. Each word and concept we use to interpret our experience was shaped by many mouths and minds and is freighted with their power; and the new words and concepts we make for use are equally children of the old. Our responsibility for our interpretations and our choices may be inalienable; yet it is never ours alone, as both they and our very recognitions of them are shaped and limited by others' interpretations and choices. So it was, for those to whom EST taught that they alone were responsible: not one experience of their own reality did they have through the EST process without having with it EST's words and ideas and frames immediate for use. For these to determine their interpretations totally was no doubt rare, or rather impossible. But for these to determine their interpretations not at all was equally impossible, if only because our perpetual human need to share consensual reality is strongest in the presence of strange new experiences, and EST's terms for defining reality were the main ones available. In short, the idea of total responsibility for one's experience of reality was -- even in the unqualified way it was promulgated, let alone in how people interpreted it -- a subtle and total contradiction. The operational and ideological corollary which many drew from it -- that one has, alone, the power and license to transform one's reality at wili -- was simply false, as no EST graduate could transform his or her experience sufficiently to experience Erhard's refunding his or her money and welcoming him or her to co-leadership. The subtler corollary -- that one can transform one's own interpretation of one's experience at wili -- was more nearly true, as most graduates could transform theirs enough not to care about this or any other "negative" social fact about EST. Yet even this corollary was false if taken to mean that one could do so without limits or influences from others, in pure private responsibility, as EST had it. The ultimate truth of EST seemed rather that one could choose to remain ignorant of what influenced one's choices and interpretations, and of the very fact that they were influenced.
Meanwhile, in the real social world, the idea that one determines one's own experience is contradicted, or at least faced with its own limits, as soon as one's desires and needs grow beyond one's own power to enforce or fulfill them. To cope with this reality, EST's ideology had an implicit side and argument. Given that there is a structure of (human) power outside the self which limits and otherwise determines one's own power, all that one can do is (a) "be realistic," play along with the powers that be to get what one wants; and (b) if that doesn't work, then adjust, change one's desires and needs and interpretations to fit the situation. Thus the (unacknowledged) limits to private power became, from the other side, the outlines of private impotence, which EST covertly reproduced and reinforced. Both of these implicit propositions are much broader than my churlish phrasing makes them seem at first glance; and as broad propositions, both are broadly reasonable. We have indeed some ordered place in the power structure of the universe, of reality. However much we wish to fly unaided, it seems the Earth has gravitational power which functions to prevent this. Those who would fly must make alliance with other agencies of power to evade or overcome this force, bending their natural operations to favor the flyer's ends, and in return being subject to their demands and uses. So it is for gliders obeying the wind, and for jets burning the ancient benison of plants, excreting it into the life cycle again (to trouble our breath). Those who still would fly unaided must curb their desire, or else modify it to fly with the mind alone, leaving body behind. To resent the Earth for her gravity, or any other limitation of our place in the universal power structure, is crazy, in the literal sense of being out of touch with reality. We learn, or are taught, to apply this metaphor to social reality. (*) We experience the structure of power as primordial, and our limited potential for empowerment in its scheme as a given. We would fly, would aspire to that sense of motion, exhilaration, pure ease, alone, in relation or community; but the weighty influence of our institutions, from industry and economics to culture itself -- mostly invisible forces functioning by mostly invisible laws -- holds us down. Why protest this gravity? Only a crazy man walks off a cliff to be smashed on the rocks below; a sane one limits his desire, to jump only as high as he can, given the inexorable weight; and at most seeks training, as from EST, to have stronger legs, more personal leaping power. This vision makes for peace of mind and social homeostasis; but it's too simple. For our social reality is not a fundamental given, but an ephemeral and mutable construct of our will -- more directly and accessibly so than the material universe, which may also be so. We choose to obey the laws we create together, and to suffer the consequences we ordain for their breaking; but we can choose also to change them, to change the constant and content of social gravity, perhaps to fly. Why should love, the mutual flowering of personhood in supportive relationship, be bound down by the sex-role and gender stereotypes our institutions perpetuate? True, a couple reaching for the sky can struggle alone to unencumber themselves alone of this old baggage, and to shrug off its daily reassignment at the office, which needs them, for the sake of business, to carry it everywhere they go. But they might equally work to change the way the office runs and the definitions of being men and women which it recreates, change these to take some weight off other lovers in the office and the future: an "unselfish" act which provokes its own reciprocation, and which can only be motivated by a larger vision of the self, which knows the self as just another lover in the office, child of the past and parent of the future; and knows that every weight or levity felt by another self adds a fraction of the same to one's own, despite the illusion of the separateness of flesh. What EST and such ideologies taught was to mind your own business, in both a positive, literal sense, and in the usual negative sense, which permits "others' " business and the business of business itself to proceed uninfluenced, unchanged. Don't mess with the power structure and you won't get frustrated or hurt; accept the limitations and directions its gravity assigns as natural; by climbing on another's shoulders you can add his small buoyancy to your own, and rise a bit higher in our thick medium. Thus runs the traditional American line; but EST's solipsism took it further. To accept such limits as being only your own choice and responsibility is to be deeply mystified not only about their nature, but about your own freedom to choose. Moreover, if no one else shares the responsibility for determining the limits of your experience, then no one else shares your power to change them; and you thus have neither ground nor motive to look to others for help in this (other than to manipulate them as you can). In sum, the personal impotence implied by EST's ideology was as comprehensive and absolute as the personal empowerment taught as its complement.
All this, I think, was implicit in EST's ideological teaching, which bore no more positive social lesson to counter or balance it. But how sadly limited it was! For what, after all, is "my own business"? If each cry of pain in the world echoes in every mind and heart (as I argue elsewhere, it quite literally does), then each source of distress is my business. Part of my most serious business upon this planet in present time is my involvement and responsibility in making this entire social reality as it is made anew each instant. My business is to create the value and meaning of social gravity, the character and shape of the forces which bind our human matter together and into one -- the unity which EST denied. A busybody, everyone's daddy-mommy, a megalomaniacal meddler. Why should I not be? Like you I am god in this small heaven, full peer of four billion other crippled deities. And I bring suit against Erhard for false advertising, in the courts of higher heaven and in the common council of humankind. For his promises implied that through his lens we might recognize the full extents of our power and responsibility; yet it was narrowly formed and was pointed in one direction only, to show us but the half of who we holy are. I bring similar suit against Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalogue fame, though I hold personal treasures from him and believe that his vision has in many ways enriched us. For he said it out front, in his catalogue's dedication: "We are as gods, and may as well get good at it." Yet when I looked within his compendium of enablement, I found listed many tools for changing material reality, and many for changing the reality of private consciousness; but none for the changing of social reality, which lies between. And no apology, worse, no mention or consciousness of this great omitted spectrum of technology and empowerment, let alone of its being integral to the others. Who among those who invite us to realize our wholeness through their teaching, their lens, will not be named in this suit? Who will offer a chisel for fine cabinetry, a mantra to refine the mind, and a seat on the police review board, all three; and help us learn to use them all well and wisely and together? Sri Aurobindo seems to, and there are others; so pleading the more usual commercial standards will not dismiss the suit. No, the mutability of social power and our collective responsibility for it must be addressed; and the precept of EST to "go with the flow as given" was no more adequate a response than the "do your own thing"-ism of the hippies, which it slicked up for sale. The precept was, however, implicit not only in the ideology but in the social organizational practice of EST, which conditioned its participants to obey this injunction. For if my contact with the world of EST was any guide, within EST a powerful set of socializing norms was constantly in action, evidenced by a continual, general, upbeat attention on what was the right thing and the right way to think and speak and act. And I've never seen a context of this sort where the existential rules of participation, the laws of inner gravity, did not say this: you can try to rise higher in the power structure, perhaps displacing someone else; but don't try to change the structure itself, how it works, unless you're on top. Return to: Top Insofar as the EST experience taught -- or more properly, conditioned -- its participants to a certain view of reality, the social order, their places in it and how to act, EST was a school. In any school, students learn two curricula, one of content and the other of process. The content here was EST's ideology and certain skills of self-management. The process was a process of social relation in learning, of the sort discussed more generally in my essay "Pedagogy of the Guru," which applies word for word to this case. Yet though EST was in no wise unique as a school, it exaggerated certain themes of style which bear further mention here. For the motto engraved on the lintel over the schoolroom door of EST, the sentiment repeated each time Erhard or his surrogate addressed new classes and prospective clients, was: You dumb assholes! You can't learn unless I hit you over the head and make you learn! And in this advertising, Erhard and his school were more honest than the State, whose teachings theirs served and extended. You start learning EST by making a deal with your trainer. He says he will force you to realize. You agree to be forced. He says, "You can't speak, eat, stand, shit, or sleep until I give the word." This is what he's selling; you agree to it when you buy it, and again when the process begins and he repeats the rules. You have made a contract; he tells you reality is a matter of the contracts we make together (together! ); it is true. Later, your body feels "hungry," "tired;" you decide you want to eat, to sleep; lowered blood sugar and fatigue help mind-body you to feel angry at the trainer for not announcing chowtime, naptime; attendants muscle you back when you head for the john, the door to the outside is locked; you protest. "You jerk!" says your trainer, "you can't even keep a contract you make! Wise up!" You know he's right. How can you be mad at him, when you have betrayed yourself? You adapt to the situation: perhaps cheerfully, realizing you are not (just) the creature of your body; perhaps reluctantly, nursing your anger and still too well behaved to pee in your chair. Either way, your trainer's got you, when he says at the end, "Did you get It? You bet you did!" If you know you've experienced a profound shift in levels of consciousness, you nod in agreement; if you know he's run a trick on you and "made" you sit still for a cruelly and unnecessarily long time, he says, "Yep, you're right: that's the reality you chose to experience. You got It!" If you still don't get It, and whine, "But you cheated me, you didn't teach me anything!," he says, "You fool! You're always running to others looking for what you think you don't have yourself, and now you've done it again! Now don't say I never taught you nothing!" So what do you learn about learning itself, through such a process? You learn that an absolute authority is necessary to define what you should learn and how you should learn it. You learn that it's okay for Benevolent Power to put you through whatever painful experience it deems necessary for both your education and its own purposes, once you assent to its authority. You learn that you learn by agreeing to be coerced, passive, and dependent; by feeling (as a friend of mine who loved EST put it) controlled, abused, powerless, alone, fearful, wrong, stupid, and bad; and by so completely accepting these feelings and the objective circumstances which lead to them that you are no longer bothered by all this. All in all, nothing new: these are the lessons about learning and citizenship that are conveyed in the course of fraternity initiation, and (usually less blatantly) throughout the processes of institutional education in general. In EST, pushed to extremes, people learned to be the sort of learners they had already been trained to be, through a kind of process-lesson so familiar in its essence that people hardly noticed it as such, however much some noticed and objected to its exaggeration. Many people, my friends included, had re-geared themselves after leaving the school system to become quite admirably self-directed learners and autonomous citizens. Nonetheless, under the intense particular stresses of the EST process -- for this is how such circumstances affect us -- they found themselves regressing to former and more primitive (childish) ways of being selves and learners, ways which moreover were explicitly reinforced and normative there, and were mystified by being defined as progressive rather than regressive; and came out knowing that something odd had happened to them but not quite what, as the EST curriculum, though otherwise quite sophisticated, never quite got around to dealing explicitly with styles of meta-learning. All this, I think, helps to account for some of the sense of creepy contradiction that people had about EST but could never quite pin down. But from this perspective, the contradiction is quite clear. EST intended overtly to teach people to be autonomous, self-responsible learners, and often did so on one level; but the EST process taught them precisely the reverse on another, subtler level. And the contradiction extended to the depths of the person: EST went about teaching people to be responsible for generating and managing their own view of reality, by programming them with its meta-view. It was no more than they deserved, perhaps, for signing up for a process so explicitly (if mystifyingly) advertised to sock it to them; but still … All this might have been okay, in the sense of being necessary, if Erhard had been right when he said, "You can't learn unless you let me hit you on the head." Perhaps he was right, at least for many; but I am reluctant to believe this. I think rather that what one learns most from such processes is about getting hit on the head and liking it. No blame; everyone to their liking. But as for the particular skills and tools of self-perception and self-control which EST did teach, and even the fullest leaps of consciousness it induced, there is not one, nor all together, that cannot be taught and learned in many different styles, paces, and webs of social and educational relationships and processes. Most of the psychological insights are humane, useful, and well known in gentler therapeutic contexts; the experiential states of altered consciousness can be generated and interpreted in many different ways; and the ideology can go hang. Erhard said up front, while his whole charade convincingly denied it, that EST had nothing new, that all of its elements were derived from other sources. All that was unique was EST's capacity to inspire at least temporary belief in and learning from their amalgam, through its extreme, intense, and skillful use of paradoxical intention and direction, and the gloss of its glib verbal gloss of the matter. I do believe that all of value that EST taught can, in particular, be learned in ways whose social process and implications are quite the reverse of EST's (though not defined so counter-dependently!). I may be wrong; men and women may learn and live best, or at least more efficiently, under the psychic lash. But I choose to create another reality, agreeing with EST that this is my privilege, and ours. Return to: Top So much for the parties concerned, as a model for what may come, magnified. As of July, 1978, EST and Werner Erhard are still very much alive and on the move. Vague reports about their Hunger Project have been accumulating for a year now; and the most recent local publicity had EST volunteers showing up to staff refreshment-and-aid stations for the 3,000 runners in the Second Annual San Francisco Marathon this past weekend, wearing their "Ask Me About Hunger" buttons. I thought the symbolism was marvelous. Running-around-in-circles has become the main dance of this decade, now more popular in California than disco, having completely replaced the dance of running-naked-in-the-streets to which the young were moved when everything seemed so immediately to be falling apart at the decade's start. And for EST so to bless the grandest runaround of all (and advertise the fact, for they scored a blurb for Erhard's Hunger Project right in the middle of the San Francisco Chronicle's front-page story on the race -- efficient as ever) while I was running around in typewriter circles chasing EST myself has left me, like Erhard, feeling myself part of some grand harmony. I hope I've made my respect for the holy task of re-inhabiting our bodies clear enough, in "Notes on the Tao of the Body Politic," not to offend my many jogging friends when I suggest that the figure we trace in our efforts, though it serves many other uses and interpretations as genuinely, has also a political and mythic character that reflects and helps to determine the cultural conditions of our day. And similarly, in describing EST as the sort of runaround I have assessed, with its political character and implications, I must beg the pardon of my friends. For a fair number -- several powerful journalists, old political cronies, a therapist, some others, and several quite dear to me -- are still heavily involved with EST and Erhard, not only in crediting their influence personally but in lending energies actively to their efforts. For the most part, we have never quite seen eye-to-eye on political matters, on what forms of power relations are desirable and how they are to be developed; and I see, looking back now to our dialogues in the 1960s, that the key issues and implications that divided us then have come, through EST, to divide us further, or at least perhaps more clearly. Despite this, I do not see them, in their learning from and work with EST, as simply the tools of a tyrannical design or potential. Rather -- and as they are my random sample of EST's population, I take them as somewhat representative of all the other EST-influenced people whom I do not know -- I know them generally as intelligent people, generous of impulse and competent and serious in their purposes, generally strong in ego and will, and concerned to work good in the world for more than selfish reasons. And so I see them still, even when they sing EST's line and Erhard's praises as if hypnotized -- for few of these qualities have changed in any of them through the sudden shallow "transformation" which EST affords. These qualities of strength and grace, of concern for the textures of society and of the human bond, continue largely to animate their ordinary conversations, actions, and commitments -- and even the work they undertake for EST, being indeed its saving grace and contradiction, so far as I can tell -- however much their expression may at times be inhibited or confused by the ideas and loyalties they have chosen to hold for this season. Nor have they in truth taken Erhard's closed system to replace their own, despite this sometimes seeming so. Rather, they have tempered his lessons with their own, in ways doubtless more complex than they (let alone an observer) could describe; and may yet, I trust, finish sorting out what is useful and discard the rest, though the time and energy this takes might perhaps have been put to some wholer purpose. All I can say is, this is how we are, gloriously rich with contradiction, pursuing our purposes and being through frames of interpretation that never quite describe them and always gape somewhere wide to the mystery of higher order which we call Chaos. As for my friends, though my interpretation of the deeper meaning and broader implications of the ESTian circle they've been running around in is necessarily similarly flawed, I must leave it stand so; and ask them, for both our sakes and more, to address the issues it raises more seriously than any yet have done -- for their significance in our society and time is far wider than the case of EST alone displays -- lest we betray what we most desire.
As for Erhard's Hunger Project -- whose title is curious in itself as an expression of intent, or rather characteristically paradoxical -- so far it seems strictly from hunger as well as to. But it merits description, if only for being among the more bizarrely logical social enterprises of a decade which, all in all, has turned out to be quite as much a carnival, if a more quietly agonizing one, than the 1960s were. Erhard kicked off the Hunger Project in San Francisco's Cow Palace, appropriate stockyards theater, in mid-1977. Twenty thousand EST devotees joined him for the occasion, to hear an hours-long speech which boiled down to this: Erhard declared that it was right to end hunger in the world, and that the time had come to begin; that it was possible to do the job within twenty years; and that hunger would end when enough people determined to end it. To this end, he asked the people to join him in determining this, however they would, and to fast for a day, contributing their food savings along with their admissions and other donations to a treasury for this purpose. Many observers saw the project and its attendant hoopla as Erhard's belated move in response to the criticism, by then two years mounting, concerning EST's lack (to be polite) of positive social purpose. Some saw it also as a stalking-horse for Werner's personal political ambitions. But surely the goal was admirable in itself, appealing to every constituency and everyone's most progressive sympathies, and offending no one -- except perhaps those who asked how hunger was to be ended. For Erhard had perhaps drawn his inspiration from Buckminster Fuller. A decade earlier, Fuller's World Game, that global calculator, had described the fact that humanity's present and readily developable resources were adequate to feed it well, if only they could be so employed; and publicity planted this idea fairly widely in a generation's imagination. The only thing was, Bucky and his game had said nothing about the social mechanisms and political processes that might actually be used to bring this employment about. Nor, so far, has Erhard had anything to add on this score; his contribution instead has been to define the idea itself as an effective agency and apply his talents and organization to selling it as such. By now, hundreds of thousands of dollars and lord knows how many thousands of volunteer hours have gone into the project, apparently devoted principally to publicizing it and seeking subscribers for no duty more firm than subscription to it. Erhard's reception on the road has been mixed, from what I hear. Some Rotarian and Junior Chamber of Commerce conventions and some general groups are said to have greeted the project enthusiastically, if not unanimously so. But all accounts I've seen of his presentations to persons and agencies professionally concerned with hunger, or with the actual management or transformation of any social system, agree that his reception has been quite dismal and hostile, and that people have found his project and his role as Hunger-Banisher, if not also Erhard himself, to be quite unbelievable. [As this goes to press (11/78) disbelief grows more public, with the publication of a Mother Jones expose alleging that the Hunger Project, legally a separate entity, is feeding EST itself -- both indirectly, through a complex fiscal interlock involving offshore tax shelters, and directly, since (whatever its purpose) the main visible function of the Hunger Project seems to be to recruit its volunteers to take the EST experience. If the first is true, I'd be disappointed, having thought the Project a classy act. As for the second, it seems to me more natural than reprehensible.]
And here it sits, a social phenomenon still in progress. The hell of it is that Erhard is right. We could end all hunger if we all (or enough of us) chose to; we could figure out how, just as we could change for the better every feature of our social, political, and technological practices (and would have to change a great many to end hunger). And we may yet, despite all the effective undermining of this historical potential by the meta- lessons and -workings of such organizations as EST. Nor is Erhard's style of going about it to be totally kissed off as ludicrous, unless one is so deeply atheistic and ignorant or discounting of human potentials as to deny totally the efficacy of prayer. Rather, the Hunger Project kickoff was done in first-class style, in accord with millennial practices of human magic. Around the shaman, invoker of the powers, the (fed) community assembled, dedicating itself by sympathetic ritual experience; intention and image were energized with will, to resonate in the causal and acausal fabric of the world. So it has long been, the old tales crediting also that those who work such ways are as oft as not surprised and betrayed in their conscious intents by the results, yet persist anew nonetheless, for the sake of goods also realizable through them. That no positive political mechanisms are specified (and some negative ones implicitly involved) concerns me still; yet, as I argue in my essay on the technologization of parapsychology, even our rational Western science is now beginning to open to the proposition that the world works also in such strange ways. Nor will our accounting of political processes remain unchanged as the synthesis of these long-separated cultural frames proceeds. For this reason alone, we would be foolish to consider the historical book on the Hunger Project closed in advance, however inadequate we may accurately account it in present time; and more foolish to discount the political and social potencies of such attempts in general to apply consciousness to the task of transforming itself. Howsoever Erhard's project and EST's fortunes fare, each aspect of their show still stands as a light-weight rehearsal for the first act of a heavier leader and organization who will realize such techniques and implications more profoundly. Nor in America's current social climate, moving so strangely toward 1984 and the millennium, were we wise to discount this potential, or the responsibilities incumbent upon those who recognize it. 1975, 1978
(*) In particular, we couch our ideas of social hierarchy in its terms, acknowledging each other as "higher" or "lower" in various ways; and this persistent couchment in turn imparts social definition and nuance to our every use of these spatial qualifiers. The very idea of "higher" consciousness seems in itself a cognitive failing, using a gravity-based (i.e., explicitly material) metaphor for what is (presumed to be) independent of the material world. It is doubly unfortunate because each time we use it we subliminally credit this consciousness with specific social as well as spatial meaning, endow its presumed possessors with social status, and reprogram ourselves to do so. Return to text. Return to: Top | Part I | New Age Blues | Home |