Landmark Forum predecessor EST "a faddish New Age con game"

Quote


"I think I first noticed it back in the 60s and 70s when people I knew would spend a lot of money to sit through a weekend at EST, a faddish New Age con game concocted by Werner Erhard. The thing I remember best was that the gullible fools were made to sit through extremely long sessions without taking a bathroom break. I guess it was supposed to show discipline. But I suspect it ushered in the age of adult diapers.

The point of the program seemed to be that selfishness was a virtue and they should never feel guilty about anything they did or would ever do because they were great, and, besides, nobody else in the world mattered in the slightest because they were stupid, poor and had really tiny bladders.

In case you’re too young to have heard of EST or Erhard, he was born John Rosenberg. But when he got married for a second time in 1960, he signed the marriage certificate Curt Wilhelm von Savage. The little woman, whose real name was Celeste Radell, signed on as June Bryde . It seems something else the Baltimore city clerk neglected to notice was that the date was April First. Apparently, Ms. Radell also failed to realize it or she might have more appropriately assumed the alias, April Phool.

When I would ask these latent sociopaths what they had come away with from EST, aside from an aching bladder, they would struggle for words. After losing the struggle, they would say something condescending along the lines of “It was a very profound experience and you really wouldn’t understand.”"