Customer Reviews

Outrageous Betrayal: The Real Story of Werner Erhard from Est to Exile

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I find it fascinating that most of the other reviews give the book either 1 or 5 stars - similar to the thoughts of most people I know about est/Landmark who have either gone thru est/Landmark or known someone who has. I read this book as the "other side of the coin" against Erhard's biography, and was disappointed. I think that for a work like this, the author needs to provide better documentation for his information. There are footnotes in places, but I was looking for rather thorough documentation, and this is lacking. It ended up being a view of Erhard and est that offsets Erhard's version of things, and little more. In the end we are left with a he said/he said argument. Like the earlier reviews suggest by their polarized ratings, people have already chosen their sides. So this book doesn't advance the debate, but it does flesh out the story.

I find it interesting but predictable that Werner Erhard has often been described as a "used car salesman" (when he was in his twenties-like we all had great jobs then, right?) but never as someone who went on to become a lauded executive of a Fortune 500 Company before his founding of EST. Just an unbiased, unintended oversight, I imagine.

I also find it almost amusing that serious consideration was not given to hundreds of thousands of EST and Landmark alumni from some of the world's most respected disciplines and vocations including educators, clergy, business executives, medical and psychiatric professionals, philosophers, government leaders, etc. who have praised and then recommended first the EST and then the Landmark Education programs to others. If one is to believe Steven Pressman they must all be stupid, duped, gullible fools, unlike him, upon whom Erhard simply would not put one over.

That Mr. Pressman was not interested in finding the well documented contributions of Werner Erhard to millions world wide (The Hunger Project, etc.) should not stop anyone else from doing so.

Since my first experience of EST in 1981, there is not one day that goes by that I don't use something I learned from the Werner Erhard programs I attended. Of course it helped that I, unlike this author, did not have a glaringly obvious bias starting out.

So I can believe my own experience and those of hundreds of thousands of others who say they have benefited greatly by their course participation, or I can buy into this author's subjective misrepresentation of Erhard and his long lasting, proven programs. As someone who became a CEO, best selling business book author, successful parent and contented human being, I make no apologies for crediting very much of what I have to Werner Erhard's work. Easy choice.

EEEEEEEEEyyyyyyooooowwwww!!!

It all came flooding back to me, the EST training, followed by a communication seminar, an advanced communication seminar, the Six Day training (where we were to become "commandos", were required to watch some, er, "offbeat" movies, and talk about real personal stuff), then Mastery Of Empowerment, where we did Zen like meditations, repeatedly acknoledged that Werner was Source (of ??? not exactly specified), and got a jolly good vibe going.

Oh yes, there were also seminars with Fernando Flores, an interesting fellow who was once the finance minister for Salvador Allende, heavily into language and information theory... once upon a time Werner's left brain, so to speak, who inexplicably wasn't there on Mount Olympus one day...

Needless to say, there's a lot of stuff, many narratives woven together that many self proclaimed Forumites don't know about, weren't there when it happened, all of which got simplified and cooked down into easy to digest tales of days gone by.

Let me tell ya something. It never is so simple, never was, never will be. Pressman's book Outrageous Betrayal rings true as pure coin to my ears, it succeeeds in capturing the flavor of the 70's into the 80's hustle, the strange blend of improvisation, amateurishness, needfulness, as well as the intensity, the drive, the self deception, and the absurdity of that era. Werner was kind of an uber-manifestation of all that.

Somewhere along the line I found myself growing. The sense of community and shared purpose that once was sustaining and uplifting turned stale and oppressive. It was time to move on,
grow up another notch, leave the great psychodrama behind for another generation to project it's unresolved collective issues on.

Reflecting on it, there is no way that something as intense and nutso, while mind expanding and challenging too, could have possibly happened had Werner Hans been a normal run of the mill dude. You couldn't get there from here without the sound and the fury.

Its that complexity, trickster archetype, puer aeternus and senex stuff that James Hillman talked about that Pressman can't wrap his mind around, 'cause he's treating Werner as just another scandalous mountebank when he was much more than that.

I still loved reading the book, no qualmes with the truth telling approach, Pressman is right on with what he says, only too bad he couldn't fold it in with the larger story, which isn't all that sweet and perfect either, just larger, weirder, more glorious, and kinda creepy too...

To this day I ask myself, what the heck was THAT ???

The I discovered a fantastic little book written in 1895 by Gustave Le Bon titled The Crowd... most highly recommended for anyone thinking about LGATs or mass thinking of any kind. This incredible book put it into perspective for me. I think it should be required reading for every college student in America.

If you are considering any large group spiritual or self help-transformative seminar, please take the time to read Le Bon's masterpiece carefully, and read it twice, and take notes, before you sign on the line.

Bon Voyage kiddos... life can surpass any fiction ever written

It amazes me no end how hard the cultists of cultism work to try to bad-mouth the est Training & Werner Erhard and the new Landmark Education Forum, as in a few reviews below. I did the est Training in 1978 and have been using the technology of transformation in my life every day since, something the cultists cannot fathom. And that is so even when I'm not able to participate in Landmark courses, such as the multi-week seminars. I saw a redneck bigot give up his bigotry in a weekend during the CAP Course, and that was not even a covered topic -- the man moved from racial slurs to asking to hug the 250-pound black man that he had offended the day before.

I honor Werner Erhard and the est/Landmark technology because it happens to work quite well when applied to one's life. Didn't work for a reviewer below? Maybe because he needs a reason for his life not working... My life might be full of tribulation, but applying the Landmark technology turns things around every time.

Ever notice the scariest est stories always seem to come from a some girl who heard from a guy who heard from ... blah blah blah. Like California, est is most hated by those who've never been. Well, folks, guess what? The unknown is always scary. And the less experience you've had with other ways of thinking, the more things scare you.

I completed the est training and it was one of the best experiences of my life. In the course of a couple of weekends, I cleared up a lot of trauma and bitterness that had been haunting me for years. As for cost, go ahead and see how much trauma and bitterness you can clear up for $400 (in 1980)using typical counseling and psychotherapy. I thought it was a bargain then and I still do.

No, I did not become a cult member. In fact, once "graduated" I never attended another est event. All you have to do is say no.

I agree with Bill Ryan. This kind of tripe makes a scarier and therfore better-selling story than the truth. But don't kid yourself, it is pure tripe.

Some of Pressman's descriptions of the Est training are pretty accurate. For example, the way the training was set up with straight back chairs arranged theater style in a hotel ballroom and assistants making sure that the room was in order. Pressman correctly describes the duration of the day's training, the meal breaks, and bathroom breaks and so forth.

Very soon, however, we are introduced to pejorative language which, far from being a description of what is taking place, is heavily loaded with negative connotations. Phrases such as "fuzzy syntax-twisted jargon of est" is used to categorize the promise of transformation.

Pressman says that "Erhard never peddled logic or understanding' and "was interested only in convincing people they could "experience" transformation". Trainers, he asserts, "yelled and jeered at any est participant who insisted on understanding the methods and objectives of the est training".

People who enrolled in the training in the early 70s wanted to change the direction of their life, but because the approach was so new and so different, there was a lot of resistance to change. People were skeptical as I was but by the morning of the second day when people were given the opportunity to leave with a full refund, only a handful ever did.

Transformation was clearly defined when contrasted with change. Werner said that he was not trying to change people or make them better. That implied that something was wrong with them. The idea of transformation was a shift in the quality of one's life so that the things they had been struggling with simply cleared up in the process of life itself.

To understand what Werner meant by "understanding is the booby prize" is to understand that truth cannot be known as a concept but only through personal experience. Thus the training was not about information or techniques, it was experiential, that means it was about experiencing how powerful you really are to have the things you want to have in life. This was done through processes that allowed people to look at their lives and take responsibility for it.

As far as the trainers yelling, well the trainers did yell. To encourage people to shift ingrained and non-productive thought patterns and behavior in the course of two weekends required a lot of attention getting.

As was said about the great Hindu teacher Nisargadatta is also true of Werner, "I just think that this was part of his teaching method. Some people need to be shaken up a bit, and shouting at them is one way of doing it." It was clear right from the beginning, however, that people's act was running their lives and they needed to be shaken so that the loving, open, communicative being could emerge. As one blogger put it, "Sometimes the hardest things you hear, the stuff that really infuriates you, is the stuff you need to hear."

It was also pretty clear that the ground of being of the training, where the trainers were coming from, was love and support. It did not take a genius to figure that one out after the first twenty minutes or so. Those who clung to the notion that they were being attacked by some fascist apparatus were clearly those who could not receive support, misread it as an affront, and had their lives run by paranoia and fear.

Pressman also says "For the first several hours of the training, Erhard and his other trainers kept up a nonstop barrage of verbal insults, taunting the participants in the straight-backed chairs, insisting they were all worthless human beings who clung to beliefs about themselves and their own lives that were rooted in ridiculous notions about reason, logic, and understanding."

Never did Werner or any of the trainers state that the participants were worthless human beings. I think I was in enough trainings to know this is entirely a Pressman invention. Never did any of the trainers say or imply that people's lives were rooted in ridiculous notions about reason, logic, and understanding.

This is totally false. What was said that people's lives were run by their belief systems, act, their rackets, making others wrong, and not taking responsibility for who they really are. Underneath that is a profound respect for the power of human beings to live a satisfying and fully productive life in which they are able to give and receive love. I have never in my adult life experienced such total love and support as I did during the two weekends of the training.

The trainers never asked anyone to believe anything but only validate it through their own experience in the processes during the training. Whatever techniques were used during the training were used because they produced the desired result, that of having people's lives turn around in a very short period of time.

People spend thousands of dollars going to psychiatrists for years and even decades often without any measurable result, yet they continue to go only because it has the approval of society.

Werner was an innovator, a man who had the courage to step outside of the box and produce programs that changed people's lives for the better. He could have written his ideas in books or gone on the lecture circuit. Instead he put everything on the line by confronting people in the flesh, producing results that have to be considered amazing. He was the greatest teacher I have known.

I took the Training, and I also took one of the follow up seminars, Be Here Now. I also volunteered several times. There were no commandos, no cults, no weird movies. There was however, tremendous pressure from the organization on all of us to concentrate on serving the attendees and to not become zealots. There was a "trainer" i.e. the instructor, and he/she did a tireless job with poise and dedication. It was an amazing experience. What I learned made me more honest and at peace with myself and my relationships than I thought possible. The staff who ran the seminars were invisible when they needed to be, and precise in their work, and mostly were volunteers. These were the best run events I have ever attended, and I attend conferences all over the world.

Every person who starts something like EST goes through his/her own transformation and that may include turning their old lives upside down. They may also make money with their new mission. So what? Why not? Why go after Erhard? He didn't hide his background from attendees, staff and volunteers. Perhaps it was personal. Perhaps, since Erhard didn't spend much time dealing with criticism in the press, it was easy timing for Pressman to write a slam book and get his name known. I am not an enlightenment junkie. Recently I decided to take a few personal growth workshops to see what's new and I will tell you that what Erhard gave to me back then far surpasses a lot of the work going on now. I am sorry that the author had a bad experience, or more likely, chose to write up a selection of bad experiences. Each person's experience is their own. I watched some truly amazing transformations take place that were painful for every one of us at first, and for the persons that I know that took the Training, the good has stuck with them all these years.

EST is an individual experience. Two people side by side in the Training could be at opposite poles in terms of their experience. Erhard himself admitted that and it was made clear to you on the first day as you sat in your seat. Believe me when I say that a person with a negative experience CANNOT SPEAK for a person who had a positive experience. Those of us who had positive experiences don't need to write a book, we get on with our lives.

I think that the main reason that EST didn't last is not because of books like this, but because Erhard wanted to do other things. He also had other projects such as The Hunger Project. THP didn't meet its original ambitious goals but so what? Can you name another group that has trained 600,000 Africans in how to stop the spread of AIDS? They have also given business loans to women in Africa and are helping women in India to run for public offices. I don't know about the author and the reviewers who agree with him, but I have not launched so many amazing and memorable projects. I am sure that those reviewers will dismiss my opinion. But that's the point, isn't it?

I looked at the list of Pressman's publications. I can't see anything there that will transform my life nor that I would particularly want to read. Before you spend time concerning yourself with this book, consider that a book like this could be (or has been) written about every leader of every seminar, every philosophy and every religion. Go have your own experience.

I took the Forum training in 1988 and it was the best thing I'd done for myself to that point. It gave me some direction and the ability to commit to what I wanted my life to be. I have since been trained as a family therapist, and that training was also intensely rewarding. Those who have described Erhard as a "charlatan" should think again. I don't know how he acquired the ideas that were presented in the Forum, but the concepts are well accepted in traditional psychology and counseling practice. Specifically, the relatively new and highly touted ACT treatment model uses the very same concepts that were presented in the forum. I was involved in the Forum trainings for a couple of years. It wasn't a cult as far as I could tell. I didn't leave my family or friends even though none of them wanted to do it. I was actually able to accept their choices better as a result of the training. I saw Erhard speak twice. He was inspiring and very dynamic. How is that so wrong? This sort of training can be transformative for people, especially if they realize that they always have the choice to take what they can use and leave the rest. My thanks to Werner Erhard.

For those of you who have done Landmark Education and reaped benefits ... this is a great book to read. ALthough Landmark has some useful programs, the dark side of the organization is the multi-level marketing coercion tactics to get you to take more and more courses. Once you do the Landmark Forum, you really need not do anything else within the company's course catalog. If you do, then make sure it is truly your own free will choice. Read this book to separate myth from reality about what is the true "what's so" about Landmark. Be a conscious consumer and do your homework. There are too many people who have spent money through the hard sales strategies of Landmark staff and volunteers. If you are keen to have information as power in your arsenal to say NO to Landmark, Pressman's book is invaluable. Based on cour reports and interviews, this is a detailed overview of a man whose life seems as "inauthentic" as much as his company preaches "authenticity". Don't fall into a codependant, addictive relationship with Landmark courses to fix yourself by reading what is really behind those "enrollment" conversations and heady jargon. Landmark's encounter style is a reflection of Erhard's seemingly loving yet ultimatley controlling perspective on human relations. A must read for Landmark graduates who found wonderful breakthroughs but don't want compulsive calls from their Landmark Center telling them that the next seminar will deliver more. In the end, YOU are a much better guide for your life when you are emotionally healthy, instead of some Forum Leader whose more interested in you as a statistic than anything else.

Do yourself a favor, glean what you need to from this book, and know that leaving Landmark behind is a step forward to your own personal empowerement.

If you are looking for deep personal healing and a program that has been endorsed by credible individuals ... research the Hoffman Process or check out the Hendricks Institute on Relationships. Unlike Landmark, these programs do not have all the "severe baggage" associated with them.

Thousands of adults freely signed up for, participated in, and benefited greatly from the EST trainings. Many of them took multiple courses. While there was clearly a cadre of "insiders", most people took what they needed, integrated it into their lives, and moved on. Erhard did some pretty reprehensible things in his life (so, by the way, did the founder of the world's largest religion) but, on balance, Erhard helped many more people than he injured. Pressman's book is really just a "hack-whack" at Erhard. You probably should read it, but, for balance, also read one or two of the more positive analyses of EST.