Get Confident, Stupid!
The Landmark Forum is a self-help program that offers to make you a new, more powerful dude.
The catch? Try three days of scant sleep, humiliating revelations, and verbal abuse. So why are
people signing up by the thousands?
BY JAMES O'BRIEN
May 2005
The catch? Try three days of scant sleep, humiliating revelations, and verbal abuse. So why are
people signing up by the thousands?
BY JAMES O'BRIEN
May 2005
The leader's pale face has gone paler. His voice is taut with urgency. I think I see spit flying. He is a master of dispersed eye contact, and it is as if he is speaking to everyone and no one. Throughout this harangue, he repeatedly insists that none of us, not a single one of us, has even a shred of integrity. Our word is worthless. We are dishonest. His voice rising, he says, again, "You have no integrity!"
I sit in anxious silence with a hundred other hopeful souls as the leader berates us for an impressive two hours straight. I must be some sort of masochist, because even though I haven't done a damn thing wrong in all the time I've sat in this hard plastic chair, I'm thrilled with this chastisement—no doubt meant to urge me, to urge all of us, toward some kind of life breakthrough. It is indeed a crazy new world inside this brightly lit ballroom.
···
At first, the Landmark Forum and its marathon group-encounter sessions seemed marginal to me, a thin hippie residue like the stringy-haired septuagenarian Deadhead I'd see at my local grocery every so often. But then veterans of the seminar began popping up everywhere in my life.
The Landmark Forum is the streamlined, slightly gentler offspring of that pinnacle of the '70s encounter movement, est. In est's heyday, large groups of groovy seekers were reportedly locked in rooms for as long as twenty hours a day over two consecutive weekends and subjected to fascistic group pressure, verbal abuse and brutal honesty, all in the name of self-empowerment, personal transformation, and the ego of est's creator, a onetime car salesman turned publisher named Jack Rosenberg a.k.a. Werner Erhard. In 1991, with lawsuits pending and a potentially damning 60 Minutes exposé about to create loads of bad publicity, Erhard sold the technology of transformation to a group of his former employees and split the country.
His followers eventually formed a company called Landmark Education. Landmark now has over 400 employees in twenty-one countries. Its 2003 revenues were approximately $67 million. The Landmark Forum is the flagship seminar, a $400 three-day public/personal inquisition through which participants seek a transformation, a breakthrough to "living powerfully."
Landmark Education does very little advertising and relies on the example and persuasiveness of its transformed army to attract new generations. I'd heard that its adherents invited supportive friends to ballrooms to celebrate their completion of the Landmark Forum, only to abandon their guests to a wide-eyed hard sell in a faraway room.
Many succumb. Nearly 75,000 people take the Forum each year. In fact, many then go on to take the increasingly expensive and intense courses in Landmark Education's "Curriculum for Living." Each devotee is no doubt attracted to the promise that, through the teachings of Landmark, you can have "anything you want for yourself or your life." In my own bleak moments, that promise could sound awfully sweet.
So I took a Forum veteran* to coffee and asked her what it was all about. She was not a true believer, but like others I'd met, she could talk about the experience at length while revealing little.
She used words like energy and self-discovery. "The brain," she'd learned, "functions to make assumptions prior to fact." The Forum helps you kick that habit. Even in a room with a couple of hundred people, she said, the experience was very personal and had caused her to deal with a long-held grudge against her beloved mother. But how? "I don't know. You talk to the person sitting next to you." The obscurity was frustrating but also tantalizing. How could something so substantial, so life-altering, remain so ethereal?
Then I heard about a couple, friends of friends, who'd taken the Forum and soon separated, then divorced. One day they were seemingly happy in their little suburban home with their adorable child. The next day: separate houses, shared custody, lonely lives. Even though I knew them only casually, their dramatic reaction to whatever they seemed to have learned about themselves in the Landmark Forum shocked me; every time I ran into someone who knew them, I'd ask anxiously if they had reconciled. The answer was always no.
And it scared the shit out of me. Especially as it became increasingly clear that if I were ever going to understand Landmark's enduring, defiant appeal, I'd have to go in myself.
After all, who was a better candidate for a new and powerful life than me? I was just on the sinister side of 40, with a floundering career, a tiny and cluttered apartment, a dented car, a gloomy demeanor, and an illegible inner palimpsest of failed friendships and estranged siblings: It was very much the grim season of my own discontent. I worried I'd be susceptible to whatever it was Landmark was selling, but I had to know. This enigma that in a weekend could so profoundly change a life was calling me.
···
My ballroom of transformation is the heart of Oakland's intense little Chinatown, where I am surrounded by a group composed of the weepy, the wounded, the self-help sluts, and bubblegum Buddhists who populate this wonderful part of the world in which I live (and where first est, and now Landmark is based), Northern California. I'd say there are a few more women than men. We range in age from late teens to nearly 70. We are a great American mix of white and black and Asian and Latino. We are grizzled and coiffed, urban and suburban, dorky and hip.
There are rigid rules of Landmark Forum behavior, circa 2005: The three days go from 9 AM to around midnight. Always have your name badge visible. Do not eat in the room. (Water is okay.) Do not speak unless called on. Stand when you speak. Otherwise, sit. There will be occasional half-hour breaks and one longer dinner break each evening. Otherwise, do not leave the room. If you absolutely must leave, well, go ahead, but you thereby forfeit your right to expect transformation. Do not be one second late in the morning or when returning from a break. Do not take notes. And if you really are committed to this thing, refrain from aspirin or alcohol until we're done.
______________________________
* Identifying details and actions of all Landmark Forum participants have been changed to protect their anonymity
TAGS Self-improvement, Men's Lives, landmark forum, self-help
Page 1 2 3 4
I sit in anxious silence with a hundred other hopeful souls as the leader berates us for an impressive two hours straight. I must be some sort of masochist, because even though I haven't done a damn thing wrong in all the time I've sat in this hard plastic chair, I'm thrilled with this chastisement—no doubt meant to urge me, to urge all of us, toward some kind of life breakthrough. It is indeed a crazy new world inside this brightly lit ballroom.
···
At first, the Landmark Forum and its marathon group-encounter sessions seemed marginal to me, a thin hippie residue like the stringy-haired septuagenarian Deadhead I'd see at my local grocery every so often. But then veterans of the seminar began popping up everywhere in my life.
The Landmark Forum is the streamlined, slightly gentler offspring of that pinnacle of the '70s encounter movement, est. In est's heyday, large groups of groovy seekers were reportedly locked in rooms for as long as twenty hours a day over two consecutive weekends and subjected to fascistic group pressure, verbal abuse and brutal honesty, all in the name of self-empowerment, personal transformation, and the ego of est's creator, a onetime car salesman turned publisher named Jack Rosenberg a.k.a. Werner Erhard. In 1991, with lawsuits pending and a potentially damning 60 Minutes exposé about to create loads of bad publicity, Erhard sold the technology of transformation to a group of his former employees and split the country.
His followers eventually formed a company called Landmark Education. Landmark now has over 400 employees in twenty-one countries. Its 2003 revenues were approximately $67 million. The Landmark Forum is the flagship seminar, a $400 three-day public/personal inquisition through which participants seek a transformation, a breakthrough to "living powerfully."
Landmark Education does very little advertising and relies on the example and persuasiveness of its transformed army to attract new generations. I'd heard that its adherents invited supportive friends to ballrooms to celebrate their completion of the Landmark Forum, only to abandon their guests to a wide-eyed hard sell in a faraway room.
Many succumb. Nearly 75,000 people take the Forum each year. In fact, many then go on to take the increasingly expensive and intense courses in Landmark Education's "Curriculum for Living." Each devotee is no doubt attracted to the promise that, through the teachings of Landmark, you can have "anything you want for yourself or your life." In my own bleak moments, that promise could sound awfully sweet.
So I took a Forum veteran* to coffee and asked her what it was all about. She was not a true believer, but like others I'd met, she could talk about the experience at length while revealing little.
She used words like energy and self-discovery. "The brain," she'd learned, "functions to make assumptions prior to fact." The Forum helps you kick that habit. Even in a room with a couple of hundred people, she said, the experience was very personal and had caused her to deal with a long-held grudge against her beloved mother. But how? "I don't know. You talk to the person sitting next to you." The obscurity was frustrating but also tantalizing. How could something so substantial, so life-altering, remain so ethereal?
Then I heard about a couple, friends of friends, who'd taken the Forum and soon separated, then divorced. One day they were seemingly happy in their little suburban home with their adorable child. The next day: separate houses, shared custody, lonely lives. Even though I knew them only casually, their dramatic reaction to whatever they seemed to have learned about themselves in the Landmark Forum shocked me; every time I ran into someone who knew them, I'd ask anxiously if they had reconciled. The answer was always no.
And it scared the shit out of me. Especially as it became increasingly clear that if I were ever going to understand Landmark's enduring, defiant appeal, I'd have to go in myself.
After all, who was a better candidate for a new and powerful life than me? I was just on the sinister side of 40, with a floundering career, a tiny and cluttered apartment, a dented car, a gloomy demeanor, and an illegible inner palimpsest of failed friendships and estranged siblings: It was very much the grim season of my own discontent. I worried I'd be susceptible to whatever it was Landmark was selling, but I had to know. This enigma that in a weekend could so profoundly change a life was calling me.
···
My ballroom of transformation is the heart of Oakland's intense little Chinatown, where I am surrounded by a group composed of the weepy, the wounded, the self-help sluts, and bubblegum Buddhists who populate this wonderful part of the world in which I live (and where first est, and now Landmark is based), Northern California. I'd say there are a few more women than men. We range in age from late teens to nearly 70. We are a great American mix of white and black and Asian and Latino. We are grizzled and coiffed, urban and suburban, dorky and hip.
There are rigid rules of Landmark Forum behavior, circa 2005: The three days go from 9 AM to around midnight. Always have your name badge visible. Do not eat in the room. (Water is okay.) Do not speak unless called on. Stand when you speak. Otherwise, sit. There will be occasional half-hour breaks and one longer dinner break each evening. Otherwise, do not leave the room. If you absolutely must leave, well, go ahead, but you thereby forfeit your right to expect transformation. Do not be one second late in the morning or when returning from a break. Do not take notes. And if you really are committed to this thing, refrain from aspirin or alcohol until we're done.
______________________________
* Identifying details and actions of all Landmark Forum participants have been changed to protect their anonymity
TAGS Self-improvement, Men's Lives, landmark forum, self-help
Page 1 2 3 4