Cults 1974/2024

“Californians have a special constitutional weakness for new messiahs.” – (Sam Keen -- author and social observer)

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I’ve been thinking a lot about cults lately.? Mostly because I think the followers of Trump have ordained him into a cult leader. The other day I saw a young woman, maybe she was about 30, on a news broadcast from one of his rallies. She was carrying a sign, she was surrounded by folks with the same joyous smile, and she said, “I LOVE HIM, HE’S PERFECT.”? I was scornful and terrified.?

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But I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman, at first wondering if she was an AI creation.? How could any real human being say such a thing about anybody, but DONALD TRUMP, for god’s sake?

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If it’s a cult, with the millions of American Trumpies, what does that mean?? Does that mean that he is the guru that can do no wrong, and will save America and probably the world? Does it mean that followers think of him as the messiah and nobody will break away, ever?

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I was once involved with what I – and many others – have considered a cult. It was EST, Erhard Seminars Training.? This was the 70’s, when everybody was exploring everything: open marriage, bisexuality, personal transformation, meditation, the women’s movement and what we all called “consciousness raising” which covered every mental and emotional state in and out of the norm.? In the most extreme, most horrid case, this new age world included the monstrous cult of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple, where Jones led a mass suicide and murders of 900 members that occurred in 1978 in Guyana.

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EST was, like many such groups, benign. And of course, I never thought it was a cult while I was deeply involved, despite what much of the country proclaimed.? It's impossible perhaps to judge whether a group that one is so immersed with is a cult. Who would ever want to admit that their lovely group of friends, cohorts, and fellow travelers are members of a weird gang? A sect?

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A fact:? Members of a cult never think it's a cult, until they leave.? Then they may look at it completely differently, more critically.

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From my reading: “Cult is a?term?for a group perceived as requiring unwavering devotion to a set of beliefs and practices which are considered?outside the society. These groups are typically founded or led by a?charismatic and self-appointed leader who tightly controls its members.”?

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In 1974, a friend took me to an evening EST meeting at a hotel by the airport in LA. It was a few-hour “guest seminar” as they termed it, designed to enroll attendees in the four-day ?EST training. ?My friend Henry crooned, “I promise that the training will change your life”, a notion that the skeptical journalist in me considered both ridiculous and tempting.? He said I would meet the most magnetic man on the planet, Werner Erhard.? He said that taking the Erhard Seminars Training – or EST – changed everything for him.? The more he talked, the more skeptical and yet intrigued I became.? We went.

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Werner was remarkably handsome, magnetic, with light blue eyes, a piercing voice and an infectious laugh.? There were about 150 in the audience. He talked about how the EST training would give us experiences we had never had before, would have us think and live in a different way than we ever had.? He was both specific and vague – we had to take the training to understand these words and this seduction.

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Attracting an overwhelmingly white and middle-class audience, made up of slightly more women than men, EST provided, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of its participants with their first adventurous taste of the exotic-sounding human potential movement. Of course, there were others who had come to EST after dabbling in a variety of self-awareness programs, from Esalen and gestalt therapy to transcendental meditation and incense-tinged chanting. But they were the exceptions; the training sessions filled up mostly with newcomers to this business of enlightenment.

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At the end of the evening, Werner held out the tantalizing promise of transformation, a concept never precisely defined in the fuzzy jargon of EST. ?As a master salesman, he knew he didn't have to bother with simple explanations because his customers never demanded it. "I don't understand or remember the concepts that happened at the seminars or the training," one EST graduate friend remarked in the late 1970s. "But I'm able to do and handle and create so much more now." Erhard never peddled logic and understanding, both of which were anathema to the EST training itself. In concocting EST out of a myriad of self-help, self-awareness, motivational, and psychological theories he had mastered over the years, he?was interested only in convincing people they could "experience" transformation just by suspending logic and understanding, which he scornfully derided as the "booby prize" in life. Time and again he and other EST trainers insulted and yelled and jeered at any participant who insisted on "understanding" the methods and objectives of the training.But what was it? people still wanted to know before they put their money down. From EST’s earliest days, Werner had come up with a pithy description of his new training that soon was adopted as EST’s official mantra. "The purpose of the EST training," Werner and his followers chanted repeatedly, "is to transform your ability to experience living so that the situations you have been trying to change or have been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself." Of course, the mantra provided no specific answer at all, succeeding only in drawing ever-increasing numbers of curious souls into the ballroom chairs.

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?Erhard and his trainers drummed into the heads of EST participants that they alone caused all the incidents and episodes in their lives. The EST philosophy included no room for victims or excuses. The overweening idea was that we all create our own reality.? Period.

Werner Erhard, born Jack Rosenberg, believed this notion fervently.? Motivated by overpowering ambitionand a career in sales and marketing, he was driven towards fame, riches and continuous self-improvement.? He took courses in scientology, mind dynamics and read myriads of self-help books.? He created the training, two long weekends in a hotel ballroom, promising personal transformation. His message was simplified: “You are what you are, and you are responsible for everything you do.”

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I knew a few things by the end of my evening at the guest seminar. ?I was personally fascinated to do the upcoming 4-day training because I’d never seen anything like this. I thought Werner Erhard was extremely sexy.? And, as a journalist, I felt this would be a damn juicy story, one that hadn’t been written before.? I called the editor at NEW TIMES Magazine in New York and got the assignment.

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I took the training the following month. The rules of behavior were strict, like no talking, and there were very few bathroom breaks.? (That was primarily what everybody discussed over dinner breaks.)??

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?I’ll spare you all the details of the four long days.? There were meditation exercises, lying on the floor, something called the Truth Process, individual connections with the trainer where he might tell you how screwed up you were, in front of the whole room. The message was always about taking responsibility for everything that happens in your life. I’ll just tell you that the training had me look at my life differently than before, helped me give up some dumb behaviors and focus on what enriched my days.

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My piece garnered huge attention, increased EST participation around the country.? I became involved with the EST organization, served for a few years on the Advisory Board, took graduate seminars and, unforgettably, took the 6-day training, yet another EST activity, which took place outdoors in the mountains near San Francisco.? One day you had to climb down a cliff holding a rope – the scariest thing I’d ever done As I started cautiously down the steep cliff, I flipped over upside down and shrieked.? I can’t ever forget that the helper at the top shouted to me, “Marcia, you’ve got to get that your head is where your feet should be.”? (Those were his exact words which I’ve never forgotten.) Another guy climbed down next to me and flipped me over right-side up.

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Werner did odd things during those years of his amazing success: He took to racing cars, he lived on a sailboat, he flew planes, he gave sophisticated divine parties.? EST was different than when I first became involved in the mid 70’s. Everybody talked alike, speaking the same jargon.? The guys on staff dressed like Werner.? A planet of people, all over the country, surrendered their lives to EST.

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At some point, I moved away.? I was experiencing EST as a true cult, Werner as a classic cult leader. I still valued the training and the knowledge I’d taken from EST but contrary to Werner’s thousands of cheery devotees, I was done.

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So what now can I say about Trump? He is of course a cult leader, on a destructive but charismatic path. He has a fleet of devotees who don’t see him as I do. They believe every nutty thing he says, as opposed to Werner, he is crazy and destructive.?I wonder every day if there is anything Trump could do that would drive his MAGA acolytes away??Anything he could say??Nobody has an answer but at this point, I doubt it.?We shall soon see.

MY MOTHER WOULD HATE THIS BOOK is now available in hardcover, paperback & eBook on?Amazon ,?Barnes & Noble , or order through your local bookstore.?https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Would-Hate-This-Book

Check out my website and blog for stories and more:?www.marciaseligson.com

“Marcia Seligson is one of the funniest, most original, and irreverent people I know, and her book carries all those qualities. She can make anything funny, from a Peloton bike to a 40-hour brisket cookery. And she can be touching, deep, and bracingly honest. My advice to readers is make sure you have unbroken time ahead when you pick up this book. Each time I did, intending to read for ten minutes, an hour went by before I looked up. And I’d laughed out loud at least twice.” Sara Davidson, Writer NY Times bestseller Loose Change, Head writer for Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman