Wikipedia Sucks!

https://vimeo.com/695814554

Above is a 12 minute film built on a 1972 interview of Gene Church, who had suffered through four days of "Large Group Awareness Training" in the winter of 1970 in Palo Alto, California. He was a sales manager with Holiday Magic, Inc. which was tied into the Leadership Dynamics Institute, both being run by William Penn Patrick. Pretty much it was group torture - stress positions, "trainers" screaming at the "students", absolute degradation. Church went on to write The Pit about it. The LDI and Holiday Magic imploded in 1973; Patrick had turned Holiday Magic into a pyramid scheme, and the LDI was sued into oblivion.

Obligatory Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_Dynamics

An entry about Werner Erhard (includes a small paragraph about est) but only a very sideways entry about EST which speaks to parody and placement in TV and film. So you have a marginal entry getting airtime and a major entry getting no time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EST_and_T ... ar_culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Erhard

Plenty of "est" here;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-gro ... s_training

PS ask a millennial about est and you will hear crickets.

Just FYI: the whole subject of Werner Erhard, EST, and its spinoffs has been editwarred on Wikipedia for a long time.

From the book wiki:

Created by Werner Erhard in 1971, "Est" became one of the leading "self-esteem" movements during the 1970s, especially in America. Corporations frequently hired Erhard's organization to "train" their employees in "seminars" that often resembled psychological warfare and torture. It spawned many lawsuits, an embarrassing 1993 book, and some parody. After changing its name to "Werner Erhard And Associates" and conducing further sessions under the name "The Forum", Est finally fell apart in the early 1980s. Former Est associates later started Landmark, which undertook similar "training" sessions. Similar projects were run by cosmetics millionaire William Penn Patrick (which supposedly inspired Erhard to start his own "motivational" firm) and PSI Seminars[1], plus others. As a "human potential" movement, Est had connections to groups as diverse as Scientology and Objectivism.

* Wikipedia's relationship to Est and Erhard has been weirdly erratic and articles dealing with it were inconsistently handled. Notorious insiders Cirt and William McWhinney have been greatly responsible for some of this. (Ironically, Erhard started out as an encyclopedia salesman.)
* Another "human potential" effort was Neurolinguistic programming, the favorite subject of insider FT2.
* 16 March 2012 "So I happened upon a Burt Reynolds football movie called "Semi-Tough", and its WP article goes on and on about "est" and Werner Erhard. Like, it mentions "est" 20 times, and Erhard more than that. Very little mention of football. That seemed a bit weird, like someone was trying to make a really big deal of "est", so I looked at the page history to see who wrote the thing, and here we are. A cursory scan through these threads and the "est" articles themselves seems to indicate that Cirt hates Scientology, and Scientologists hate est... so is Cirt talking about est a lot to poke at Scientology? Or is he poking at est itself? Or what? Forgive me for not slogging through all the threads, there's rather a lot and I figured someone knowledgeable would have a quick answer."
* Which seems to be true. The March 2012 version of the film's article is all about EST.

EST spinoff Landmark Worldwide was another major "trigger item" for Wiki-nits. From Wikipediocracy, 2014-15
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtop ... 52#p111952
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtop ... =14&t=5988

Who wrote most of the article about the movie Semi-Tough? Go ahead, take a wild guess..... EVERYWHERE in this subject area you will find Cirt and his sockpuppets fighting with people. In recent years, someone called MLKLewis has been grinding it instead. Satisfied Erhard customer, victim, or what? As usual in the EST area, it is difficult to tell.

Just a small aside: where I live in Lake County, the name William Penn Patrick is a long-standing joke. He lived in Marin County and started Holiday Magic there. He owned a ranch in High Valley (not Lakeport as the damn Wikipedia article says). And he killed himself by crashing his P-51 fighter into the hills above his ranch in 1973. You'll have to look at the NY Times article, because the Wikipedia article has been fucked with by Cirt and gets many details wrong....Patrick made a LOT of enemies locally, and a couple of them have talked to me about it. He was an unbelievably abusive, arrogant prick, as well as filthy rich. And he was also just charismatic enough to get away with it. Notorious for his 1966 run for the GOP nomination for governor, during which he accused Ronald Reagan of being a "phony conservative" and a "Hollywood liberal elite" type. (Where have I heard this before?) Even Werner Erhard knew when to quit.

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/06/10/arch ... crash.html

In case I haven't been clear enough: Cirt is one of the worst "Wikipedians" I've ever encountered. Not because his political bias or his hatred of Scientology has biased WP content; mostly because, a bit like Patrick, he got away with writing megabytes of bad content. By abusively manipulating people. It's been joked that Cirt probably underwent Lifespring or similar "training" and may have learned how to heel Wikipedia there.

https://cameronfreeman.com/personal/con ... nes-print/

The blog above has a n early chapter of Frank Church's book The Pit: A Group Encounter Defiled (1972), plus a scene from the early '80s film Circle of Power which fictionalized the book heavily. Cameron Freeman is a believer in the sort of "human potential" groups that came out of LDI. I see LDI as the abusive melding of the bootcamp mentality with the group therapy of Gestalt; it is like paying $1000 to be part of Philip Zimbardo's infamous prison experiment at Stanford, except you only get to be a prisoner and not a guard.

http://visupview.blogspot.com/2017/02/f ... ry-of.html

The anonymous writer ("Recluse") of Visup is a conspirtologist, so take what he says with a heaping bowl of salt. That said, he claims that William Penn Patrick was involved with the faar-Right Minutemen group in the mid-1960s when Robert DePugh (Minuteman founder) was trying to get a "Patriot Party" off the ground and W. P. Patrick would have been George Wallace's Veep for the 1968 US Presidential election; instead Curtis LeMay ran with Wallace on Wallace's American Independent Party. in the 1970s, Patrick was a backer of Dan Smoot of the Dan Smoot Report, an ex-FBI agent who started doing the conspiracy newsletter thing you would see with a lot of far-Right people. One of Smoot's earlier backers was H.L Hunt the wealthy Texas oilman. What "Recluse" doesn't know but I do is that H.L. Hunt also backed Robert LeFevre of the "Freedom School" proto-Libertarian seminar* in Colorado Springs, Co. before LeFevre met the Koch brothers in the mid-1960s. "Recluse" points out that members of Patrick's LDI later started working for Werner Erhard's est ("Erhard Sensitivity Training"), and claims that Stewart Emery's recounting of the LDI "Pit" impressed Erhard so much that a version of it was used to train est trainers; they called theirs "the fish bowl." Erhard himself had been an employee of W.P. Patrick's "Mind Dynamics" company in the early 1970s under his birth name John Paul Rosenberg. Mind Dynamics took the ideas of Alexander Everett (who stole them off Jose Silva) and used them to create exercises in controlling the brain's alpha waves; Everett's system took 32 hours to complete, shorter than Silva's 48 hour course (which was split into four 12-hour sessions.) Rosenberg/Erhard seems to have been taking notes on how the LDI sessions were going and built est in ways that would not get him in legal issues; no physical violence, no forced nudity, no cruel tricks. Instead, he combined elements of Dale Carnegie, what he learned in Scientology, the Silva/Everett system, Zen Buddhism -- and the system brainfucked people very well**. That is why est was watered down into The Forum, and then Landmark Training; it was too damaging. And we know that it takes about twelve years to clean Scientology's techniques out of an ex-member's mind.

The Visup blog is a rabbit hole, but interesting nuggets come out of it from time to time.

_____
* Before this, LeFevre had been a flunky of Merwin K. Hart (creator of the "National Economic Council", crypto-fascist before WWII, Bircher at death) and an editorial employee of R. C. Hoiles (owner of a newspaper chain, bitter anticommunist.)

** http://www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsam ... s/est.html

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 30, 2022 11:24 pm

Who wrote most of the article about the movie Semi-Tough? Go ahead, take a wild guess.....

that was a damn fine film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x1vBV3SaIE&t=365s

badmachine wrote: ↑

Sun May 01, 2022 11:18 am

that was a damn fine film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x1vBV3SaIE&t=365s

Some of Burt Reynolds' best work. But I get the feeling his fans thought it was "undignified" or something.

"Recluse" points out that members of Patrick's LDI later started working for Werner Erhard's est ("Erhard Sensitivity Training"), and claims that Stewart Emery's recounting of the LDI "Pit" impressed Erhard so much that a version of it was used to train est trainers; they called theirs "the fish bowl." Erhard himself had been an employee of W.P. Patrick's "Mind Dynamics" company in the early 1970s under his birth name John Paul Rosenberg.

And "PSI Seminars" was started by Paul Willhite, also a former employee of Patrick's at Mind Dynamics. Willhite took over the High Valley Ranch after Patrick died. He ran very similar exercises there, with his wife and several other former Patrick "trainers". Nearly all the spinoffs of LDI and Mind Dynamics started as trainers at those companies. Patrick's employees openly stole his ideas and elaborated on them.

Willhite turned out to be almost as eccentric as Patrick. He took up stunt flying and managed to kill himself in a Pittman aerobatic plane in 1983, crashing not far from the site of Patrick's demise at the ranch. Unlike LDI, Willhite's wife kept PSI going. It is still in business today, although I think they have moved on from the beatings and torture and use a more "subtle" approach. They have a proper "office" in a Clearlake Oaks strip mall and still use the High Valley Ranch for the "seminars". Certain longtime corporate clients keep them going. Now they're called "personal growth training" or "team building exercises".

On Google Maps you can still see the ranch's entrance, with "PSI Seminars" listed on the other side. Most people in the area have no idea all this is happening. Across the street from the ranch is the entrance to the recently-built, magnificent Brassfield Winery. Plus there's an ongoing attempt by several companies to use the ranch to grow cannabis commercially. The county BOS keeps denying permits because the people living in the valley object to the "noise and dirt and traffic and crime". Plus there's always a water shortage. It is a really quiet place--except when the winery is hosting a party, or PSI is running a training session. So it's not as quiet as it used to be.

High Valley would be a beautiful place, if not for all the nutcases running around loose.