Landmark Education sues Elle Magazine
For the last decade or so, I have dipped my toes into a variety of
evangelistic groups. Some of them I've dipped substantially more than my
toes into. One of those groups is Landmark Education
http://www.landmark-education.com/ ], the offspring of Werner Erhard's
"est" seminars so popular in the '70s. Landmark Education puts on a seminar
called The Forum all over the world. it is an intense personal-growth course
characterized by long hours, confrontational facilitators, and a heavy
emphasis on "enrollment" (their term for evangelism of their product). Staff
members of the $48 million company work 12-hour days, six days a week, for
minimal wages and are frequently seen in hours-long meetings watching
training videos produced by a corporate office headed by the self-exiled
Erhard's brother and sister Harry and Joan Rosenberg (Erhard changed his
name from Jack Rosenberg).
Memetic theory predicts that cultural organisms -- viruses of the mind if
you will -- evolve to become better and better at perpetuating themselves.
There are two main strategies for keeping a mind virus alive: evangelism and
self-protection. The emphasis on evangelism at Landmark is nothing new. What
is new is their decision to start protecting themselves by suing people and
organizations who they believe are defaming them. On August 31 Landmark
announced it was suing Elle, a women's magazine, for $10 million in actual
and punitive damages. The press release can be found at
http://x1.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=386629542
An article by Rosemary Mahoney in the September 1998 issue of Elle details
the author's experience doing The Forum. [The magazine has not made the
article available on line; however, there are copies posted on the web. One
I found through DejaNews is at
http://x1.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=383756280 ]
The article is typical of journalists who do one of these courses for the
purpose of writing a story. The Forum isn't a movie; you can't watch it and
report what it was like. The experience comes from participating in the
thought exercises; in trying on new points of view about formerly unshakable
beliefs. It is difficult to maintain a journalist's objectivity while at the
same time diving in head first into the ontological whirlpool. Yet Mahoney
does an admirable and fairly even-handed job of honestly reporting her own
experience.
If fact, the scary thing about the lawsuit is just that: it's difficult to
imagine that any jury would find this mildly worded article the least bit
libelous. So why then is Landmark suing? Says Landmark Attorney Art
Schreiber in the company's press release announcing the suit:
"Although the Elle article made it clear that Landmark and its programs are
not
cult-like, the lack of research and the thoroughly evident intent of the
writer
to denigrate the reputation of Landmark and our employee Beth Handel with
irresponsible statements and shoddy research require a legal response."
In other words, even though the article was true, they are planning to sue
anybody who portrays the cu--- ... er, I mean company --- in an unfavorable
light? Can't be, can it? Using the legal system to harass enemies and chill
criticism? [See Meme Update #20 http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/mu0020.htm
for news of similar tactics used by the Church of Scientology.]
Still, this is more than an isolated incident. When reporter Tracy Hukill
was researching a story on Landmark for the July 9-15 issue of San
Francisco's MetroActive news weekly
http://www.metroactive.com/landmark/landmark1-9827.html ], she received
from Schreiber
"a 10-page letter advising me of his 'serious concern' that I might defame
Landmark. What followed were six pages explaining why Landmark is not a
cult, a page of why Landmark cannot be said to brainwash its enrollees, a
page and a half of why I must not defame Werner Erhard or est, and a tedious
summary explaining that should I 'leave Landmark and its programs depicted
in a false light ... Landmark is fully prepared to take the appropriate
legal action. He included 23 letters of recommendation from happy Forum
grads; a letter like mine addressed to Self Magazine, whom Landmark sued in
1994 for calling The Forum a cult; a newspaper article describing a lawsuit
by Erhard's daughter against a San Jose Mercury News reporter; and
statements from Margaret Singer, author of Cults in Our Midst, and Cynthia
Kisser, former director of the Cult Awareness Network, that Landmark is not
a cult. Landmark has sued them both."
I've seen the six-page "why we are not a cult" document; it was standard
stock in the supply room during the months when I was doing their programs.
Part of the volunteer work we were required to do in one of the programs
(which had a stated objective of grooming participants to be "world
leaders") was tidying up the supply room. We also spent a lot of time lining
up pens perfectly straight on the table where guests would fill out
information cards. But not as much time as we spent using those information
cards to call them the next day...week...month...and attempt to enroll them
in The Forum.
Landmark CEO Harry Rosenberg, speaking to a group of 1300 Landmark
"stakeholders" in New York, said "In the United States, we have altered the
public conversation about our work and our enterprise. For example, it is
no longer possible for informed people or publications in the United States
to pin pejorative labels on us.
And in fact, the public conversation is beginning to turn to the value and
benefits of our programs"
"Conversation" is Landmark jargon for memes. Apparently Rosenberg was noting
that their strategy of chilling public criticism of Landmark was working.
And to tell you the truth, it was bothersome even to me to see uninformed
name-calling in poorly thought-out articles about The Forum prior to the
piece in Elle. But what kind of group needs a six-page document explaining
why they are not a cult? They maintain that they have been the victim of an
organized smear campaign by a certain unnamed religious group and also
subject to the confusion and fear that goes along with any new ideas. Both
statements are probably true. But then they baldly assert that they have
none of the four cult "symptoms" as defined by Landmark (see
http://freeweb.digiweb.com/education/randr/art.html -- a letter from
Landmark General Counsel Art Schreiber to Linda Chase, maintainer of the
"Landmark Rants and Raves" web site
http://www.inlink.com/~dhchase/forum.htm )
"(a) The members are required to give over to the organization ownership of
all or a substantial portion of their assets. "
The straw man first. They do not exhibit this symptom at all. Landmark is
much cheaper than Harvard and demands mostly your time and attention rather
than your money. Allusions of "pyramid scheme" made in the Elle article are
incorrect. The self-replication aspect is there; the financial pyramid is
not.
"(b) The members are separated from their families and friends, often to the
point of excluding any contact with such people. "
This seems totally off the mark when you consider that much of The Forum is
about sharing your experience with friends and family. However, the time
demands of higher-level positions in Landmark such as the 7-month program to
train volunteers to lead Forum sales events (at least 10-15 hrs/week plus 4
weekends of essentially 24-hour immersion) or staff positions (at least 72
hrs/week) provide a de facto separation. Still, it's all voluntary and you
can leave at any time with no retribution other than losing all your
Landmark friends and perhaps some lingering guilt.
"(c) There is a theology or dogma or doctrine that the members are required
to believe in and follow and in some cases worship. "
It's hard for me to believe that Landmark denies this. While they surround
it with a slippery film of choice, you won't make many friends around
Landmark if you balk at adopting such Landmark-serving concepts as
"coachability", "rackets", and "enrollment". While they don't use the words
"believe", "follow", or "worship", immersion in those concepts makes them
memetically real nonetheless.
"(d) The members are restricted in their actions so as to no longer be
involved in activities outside the cult. "
Again this is only de facto true for those who find that the hours spent at
Landmark interfere with their outside interests. My personal experience was
that while outside activities were not discouraged, they were hard to
manage. And to get to the higher levels you must explicitly agree not to
participate in any other kind of training.
Landmark's bottom line is they're tired of being called a cult. But rather
than change the practices that keep making that appellation surface,
deserved or not, they have decided to hire more lawyers. That's their
prerogative, of course, but I'm guessing it will work to their detriment
rather than their benefit as people decline to be associated with a group
that so bares its fangs regardless of any benefits it may promise.
More than anything, though, I have a vague sense of what-might-have-been
about the workings of the company. In some ways, it's a good place to do
personal growth, especially for the hard-headed who need a boot camp to tear
them down and build them back up. I have recommended The Forum in the past
to a few specific people who I thought could benefit from going through the
courses. And it certainly isn't the kind of harmful David Koresh nightmare
that you think of when you hear the word "cult." But they are unnecessarily
harsh on nice people, and I don't like that. And worse than that, they
commit a sin so unforgivable that for that reason alone I can't recommend
them.
They take themselves too seriously.
------------------------------
OK, then what seminars DO you recommend?
The more different courses I do, the more I like Context Associated's
Excellence Series, which I first did nine years ago: playful, respectful,
and centered about your individual life purpose. They first introduced me to
many of the ideas in my best-selling book Getting Past OK
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/gpok.htm ]. Find them at
http://www.contextassociated.com
------------------------------
Why is Richard Dawkins a Secular Humanist?
Ever want to pick the brains of some really smart people and find out how
they came about their major ways of looking at life? Richard Dawkins, coiner
of the term "meme," and other noted humanists reveal why they choose that
philosophy in this article from Free Inquiry magazine.
http://www.spacelab.net/~catalj/humanist.htm
-------------------------------
Book of the Week: The Father of Spin
Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations
by Larry Tye
(Crown, 306 pp.)
Edward L. Bernays was such a master meme-spinner that we'll probably never
know for sure just how much of the art of public relations he invented and
how much he has just spun for himself in a propaganda campaign. The man who
bragged that Hitler's minister of propaganda favored his book over all
others has a colorful career of questionable ethics and unquestioned
excitement. Among his claims: getting women to start smoking cigarettes in
public, orchestrating the overthrow of the Guatemalan government, and
changing the dominant color in fashion one year to green so women's clothes
wouldn't clash with their cigarette packages.
Tye's light and fast-paced treatment of this fascinating character leaves us
hungry in parts, but reading about Bernays should be part of any memetic
engineer's curriculum. To order at your Amazon.com Memetics Bookstore
discount, click on
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517704358/memecentral
---------------------------------
Mind Virus of the Week: The Wishing Game
Thanks to reader Nick Knowles for this one. It's one of those psychological
games that's fun and interesting enough to make you glad you did it and want
to pass it on. To give the evangelism an added boost, well--- look for
yourself. To quote Nick,
"note the amount of emotional sucking up it does before slipping in its
evangelizing. This is true mind virus stuff as it is trying to sneak past
defences. Interesting though how moot is the borderline between eu-memes
(which help their host or give her some payoff, eg a joke, an idea, or an
insight) and kaka-memes (which are pure parasites or detrimental to their
host)."
Looks like Nick is doing some meming of his own with those new terms
"eu-meme" and "kaka-meme." At any rate, I predict this one will spread
quick. All my experimental viruses have counters at the bottom so you can
tell which ones are winning
Here's the link to the newest Meme Central Experimental Mind Virus, "The
Wishing Game": http://www.brodietech.com/wishgame.htm
All the best memes,
Richard
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