Est-The Magic of Brutality
Hoffman, Eva
Confidence has been at a low ebb lately. Hunger for injections of invigorating optimism runs high. Politicians recognize the need to bolster the national ego and stoke collective hopes....
...The process of facing other people is called, not "trust" as it might have been at Esalen, but "danger," and it is felt to be so frightening that people dissolve into tears, terror, or catatonic withdrawal in the mere act of looking another person in the eye...
...Understanding is the booby prize in life," is an Erhard apothegm...
...they are asked to imagine a private office, complete with files of information, an "ability cabinet" from which they can choose any role they please, gadgets like tape recorders and video deck, and the power to summon anybody they wish by pressing a button...
...The simulated...
...The world is bypassed as cause and short-circuited as obstacle...
...Guests at the introductory seminar are regaled with stories of successful requests for salary raises, more mature (i.e., parsimonious) management of money, and better jobs acquired by est graduates...
...Future combatants have to learn how to yield to commands and squelch their own egos in the interests of collective action...
...This Spartan format is filled up by a bewildering mixture of events and ideas...
...Mostly, the participants sit in monotonous rows of straightbacked chairs...
...Jimmy Carter repeatedly exhorts us to have greater faith in ourselves, to trust our strength and virtue...
...In a "process" for feeling in command, the trainees are led through a businessman's fantasy...
...The two programs share aims and some techniques, but est is more ambitious, complex, and invidious...
...Its incentives are utterly pragmatic...
...Choose what is instead of getting stuck in what you want," an est epigram advises...
...It is pointless to judge or change external circumstances, to gripe, complain, protest, or rebel...
...The presumption, not always borne out, behind this insistence on authenticity, was that others—the group—would be sympathetic and supportive, that it was safe to be vulnerable...
...Games", "acts," and other self-protective strategies were seen as evasions or repressions...
...The tacit promise is that two weekends will convert the timid and ineffectual into triumphant executives who "get all the cheese in life," and "make it to the finish line first...
...if you lose, it is because you have not embraced victory ardently enough...
...In the encouragement of competitive behavior, in the hostility of the group, and in the barrenness of est's affective and moral vocabulary, there is an implicit shortage of goods—both material goods that have to be scrambled for and psychological supplies that, in greater abundance, might allow for more sympathy and generosity...
...Work seems to be the most vital interest of est's customers...
...Thus, to be a winner, you only need to dare greatness...
...For, according to the est myth, people "choose," absolutely everything they are and everything that happens to them—the amount of energy they have in the morning, the way they are treated by their boss, their success or failure...
...The contrast between est and the earlier popular therapies is revealing...
...In this fable of untrammeled freedom nothing intervenes between desire and fulfillment except strength of will...
...est rhetoric gives expression to this futility in slogans enjoining people to accept their lot, whatever it is...
...It might be possible to see the contradictions of its message as a salutary lesson about freedom within limits and the liberation attained by embracing necessity...
...The few "sharing" interludes are used to illustrate the uniformity of people's problems, and the trainer responds to public confessions (made through microphones) curtly or with matter-of-fact acknowledgment...
...Experiences are most often described as "games" played by "rules" in which the two poles of human possibilities are winning and losing...
...Within this structure, the trainees are conditioned to the organization game...
...The covert implications of total choice and responsibility are brought home in the training by means more vivid than innuendo—notably, by the treatment the initiates receive from the person in charge...
...The lectures, "processes" and exercises that comprise the training draw on every mind-bending technique fashionable in the last decade...
...If somehow you are equally and automatically responsible for your illness, the latest plane crash, or your failure to become Enrico Caruso in spite of a squeaky voice, then you are accountable without your own intention or participation...
...The central subjects of est revealed by this stripping operation are the desires and anxieties about power, control, and acquisition...
...The est scenario duplicates and intensifies the hierarchical, bounded structure of corporations and other institutions that employ most of est's trainees...
...The est philosophy answers the need to win with the myth of the perfect will...
...But the grandiose conception of volition advanced by est is not only vacuous, it is also surreptitiously cooptive...
...The dialectic between aggrandizement of the will and supression of its power is, it seems to me, basic to est...
...The impetus of encounter groups, and the "human potential" psychology from which they developed, was to uncover and express the essential, "authentic" self, unrestrained by social convention, discipline, or habit...
...The baits est uses to lure potential participants is a recognition of these anxieties...
...Real responsibility, like real choice, implies conflict, doubt, the possibility of mistakes and refusal...
...Anyone, the myth proclaims, can have anything they want if they want it badly and sincerely enough—because each self is a "cause" rather than an "effect" of its experience...
...The trainees' resistance is weakened and their self-esteem deflated by a barrage of psychological abuse...
...But such an interpretation does not capture the tone and the flavor of the est experience—it does not account for the kinds of limits enforced within the training, or the degrading methods used by a martinet...
...The model has rigid limits, but it is empty of moral or imaginative meaning...
...The desired result is disciplined and unquestioning action, maximum effort combined with instinctive obedience...
...It is not surprising that the final apotheosis of the training, the "it" for which the trainees wait eagerly, should be the grim revelation that people are no more and no less than machines—automated wills whose only choice is to function more or less efficiently in accordance with somebody else's directives...
...No wonder the number of objections and protests dwindles to almost nothing by the second weekend...
...The will is rendered impotent despite its omnipotence—inflated into an unverifiable mystique of prowess and control, an invisible energy always in operation, but divested of its capacities for initiative, judgment, rejection, 'IL'] or affirmation...
...These overreaching powers are accompanied by "great responsibility...
...The arena in which games are most avidly played is the sphere of work, and the prizes are distinctly material...
...Detached commentators have responded with amusement, puzzlement, cautious approval, or distress...
...In this transformation, the trainees are assisted by flamboyant assurances of their own capabilities...
...The aim is "Making people responsible for their acts...
...Those who transgress the rules (by bringing "illegal" candy and chewing gum, for example) are publicly shamed, and those who question the legitimacy of the agreements are ridiculed or told "this is how it is...
...These groups were voraciously intent on insight and sincerity...
...For self-realization, est substitutes selfinterest...
...Trying," with its connotations of hesitating or deliberating is looked upon as an inferior mode of action, an indication that the will is not forceful enough to get what it wants by sheer willing...
...for self-knowledge, skillful moves in the game...
...But this overweening emphasis on feeling, interior experience, and personally improvised morality may have been a short-lived anomaly, a thin grafting upon the pragmatic American skin...
...But a movement with some 150,000 followers that has considerable effects on people's attitudes and behavior should not be ignored...
...Why has this program supplanted the Esalen cults of the'60s as the remedy to which people turn to relieve their anxieties and realign their psyches...
...Thus est does not seem to be, as its promotion implies, a preparatory course for executive presidents but the training for a docile rank and file that can hustle and conform at the same time...
...Even though it is not clear how faith can be translated into effective action, people respond eagerly to the stimulant of a more energetic and confident vision of themselves...
...The trainees are handed a list of "agreements" fit for first-graders and, in a characteristic double-think, are told that they are choosing them voluntarily...
...Recently people have flocked to these "trainings," which promise to tone the muscles of their will and teach them strategies for success...
...Trainees are confronted with an arbitrary authority without recourse to argument or rationality...
...The trainer insults and vilifies them and pronounces them worthless...
...IT IS PLEASANT to indulge in the fantasy that external circumstances are so many paper barricades, to be knocked down by the potent touch of our desires...
...The essential task of the trainer seems to be to browbeat his audience into submissive and infantile obedience...
...its rhetoric is often vague and silly, and its numerous inconsistencies baffle analysis...
...they are allowed one food break and 209 one bathroom break daily...
...The simulated ordeal is probably appealing...
...Yet the recruits cannot be reduced to mere passivity since they need to perform at a high pitch of efficiency...
...Complexities of human relationships are given short shrift...
...Their energies and competitive drive are incited by images of success, fantasies of power, visions of financial glory, but their impulses, egos, and personal idiosyncracies are thwarted by sheer coercion...
...In its less coddling and more instrumental view of identity, est is closer to the mainstream of American psychologies and more germane to its time...
...That est works, at least temporarily, need not be doubted, but most testimonies are unclear about the nature of its effectiveness...
...Why do people voluntarily submit to a regimen as harsh and demeaning as est...
...There are sprinklings of Zen, leftovers of Gestalt, fragments of TM...
...In these respects, est is more akin to the rigors of basic training than to the consolations of philosophy, and the resemblance throws some light on the rationale of est's discomposing methods...
...The plot of this scenario is not immediately discernible from the program's surface features...
...This odd phenomenon— part therapy, part didactic instruction, part military drill—has inspired crusading fervor in many of its participants...
...It is hard to know what to make of est...
...You can be faulted or approved for the outcome of any given situation even if you have not planned, schemed, or made decisions, because you have, willy-nilly, chosen that outcome...
...At a time when the economy is feeble, America's prestige impaired, and the authority of its government undermined, there are good reasons for public doldrums...
...The world may be a malleable place, but there is no need to tamper with it...
...The alleged power of each individual will is here quite without efficacy...
...The purposes of est are less narrowly defined than those of basic training, but perhaps, in a not so figurative sense, est also prepares its trainees for combat—the combat of ordinary work life in which most people engage...
...est rhetoric is permeated by images of contests, battles, conquests, and defeats...
...This would surely be a laudable goal, if it were not for the magically encompassing meaning est attributes to this concept...
...In fact, est is neither an impenetrable mystery nor a naive pseudoreligion but a sophisticated scenario for enacting and assuaging disaffections...
...The training is given to 250 people at once, during two long, strenuous weekends...
...But total responsibility precludes the exercise of these prerogatives...
...In a basic training course that indoctrinates people into the army, the uses of deliberate humiliation are quite transparent...
...The self, as the only locus of responsibility, becomes entirely answerable for its satisfactions or discontents...
...Moreover, the naked, unmediated self was seen as a vehicle for discovery, 211 a measure of human possibilities—and those possibilities could lead to embracing entirely new "life-styles...
...There is always something cathartic about surviving a test of mettle, perhaps especially to people whose lives contain abstract rather than physical obstacles...
...The need for such stimulants is evident not only in political campaigns but in a number of less exalted cultural phenomena—for example, the current popularity of "Assertiveness Training" and "erhard seminar training" (est...
...Sensitivity, reflection, insight, and exploration of the past are dismissed as ephemera...
...There is no reason why such a loosely scrambled package should have any calculable effect on large numbers of people, and much of this patchwork is probably ornamental—an obligatory bow to the self-improvement gourmets, a way to fill time and offer some practical good advice...
...It becomes a yielding substance, a fluid field for manipulation by the self...
...In their vignettes they emerge as people more troubled by career Angst than by unruly libido, beset by fears of failure, of losing their jobs, and of their superiors...
...The underlying design of the "est experience" becomes intelligible only if one ignores much of this varnish, as the overtaxed minds of the trainees must, and concentrates on the fundamental motifs of the training...
...To that end, they are spurred on to greater exertions, taught new tasks, praised for competence...
Vol. 24 • April 1977 • No. 2
