Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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There are absolute rules on exactly how to wear your own name tag, how to sit, how to hold the microphone when speaking into it, how to acknowledge other people's reports (whatever the content, what you say is "good"), how and when to look into people's eyes. Above all, you must follow instructions immediately and to the letter. If, for example, someone does not wear the name tag in exactly the prescribed manner, or shows up a minute late, he or she is publicly humiliated and threatened with expulsion. The violator is told she or he is breaking an agreement, but of course there was no real agreement in the usual sense of two parties working out a contract or understanding. This is "agreement" in the hierarchical model, as in a military situation where rules are predesigned and then imposed. You "agree" or else you are punished. est can't put you in the brig, so the punishment is exclusion.

All these rules break any contact with outside grounding. In this new floating environment, the trainers become the absolute authority (1984) and the source of all salvation, although they continually give credit for all the rules and activities to their absolute authority, Werner Erhard. "We do this because Werner says this is what works." What it works for is never explained because either you "get it" or you don't.

But I am happy to tell you that what you "get" in the end is training in a new pattern of thought and a floating logic.

The trainers lead the trainees through a series of long, repetitive exercises, which include the use of implanted imagery and hypnosis. These are combined with a series of games, including deliberately silly, funny games which, nonetheless, require full participation, that is, submission to the game, before one is permitted to stop. Included are self-humiliation and humiliation by the trainer. The only purpose of these is to break ordinary mental patterns and let go of earlier "tapes and records." Once that is done, new ones can replace them. This is not to say that breaking "tapes" cannot be useful therapy, but in the case of est, you get Werner-tapes to replace parent-tapes.

Time is a critical element in the training, because it takes quite a while before all the trainees become unified in the experience of living up to the instructions of the leadership, discovering the appropriate responses, and developing a peer-group understanding of what is expected. Meanwhile, the trainer retains a grim visage.

People who protest are told they are bringing their own belief system in, which is just what they are there to stop doing.

People are told not to compare what goes on in the est training with anything else they have experienced—in this way est maintains its floating, separated quality, like the sensory-deprivation subject floating for hours in a liquid tank, or the astronaut in the space station. Slowly the isolated environment, the endless series of instructions, the fixed patterns of behavior, the repetition and the boredom raise the volume of immediate experience, so that any connection with the world outside, including past experience, recedes and disappears as though it is the abstract and the room the real (Solaris). The room becomes the whole world. The people in the room are all of society, embodying all values as delivered from the mountain (Erhard). The trainers are the ultimate authorities. Reality is here and now. Nothing else exists (1984) .

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