Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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I will quote briefly from a letter I received from a young woman, Magi Discoe, just after she completed the est training. The letter reports on the cathartic moment when the trainer reveals to the trainees the beauty of the concept that there is nothing to be done about anything:

"Stand by for revelation. After our minds are in the appropriate mush state, the trainer winds up for his greatest moment. He looks us over and begins, letting his voice rise to a booming crescendo: 'IT IS ALL HOPELESS,' he says to us. No use whatsoever. There is no hope. That's what is. It's not depressing or anything else, it's just hopeless. Not only that but we are hopeless. We are also machines. And so that we 'get' what machines we are, we are told to be in touch with our own little voice saying 'I am not a machine.' That's how much we are machines. We are stimulus-response machines. That's just the way it is. That's what's so.

"Up until this point no one involved in the training has smiled. Exactly when in this harangue the trainer began to smile, I am not sure. I was perceiving a difference and finally it dawned on me that the man was beginning to smile. A shared secret smile. The entire environment of the room changed at this moment. The fact that we were machines was surpassed by the fact that we were for the first time being included in the world of est.

"A lot of people were still functioning well enough, even after this long period, to get upset at the idea of themselves as machines. It was their last hold on resistance. By the end, however, people either stopped commenting or agreed. If people held out too long, the trainer got into a smiling tirade about then having to be `right,' that all they were doing was trying to survive by making someone wrong. It was another one of those circular processes he always used which made it impossible to argue with him or even to remember, once you were swimming in his words, that it was he who needed to be right. est depended upon it. But he had all the cards from day one.

"The amazing thing is that even with everything I know about how fascism operates, after a long-enough time I lost touch with my logic and began wanting and needing the approval of this asshole and the smiling, plastic robots around him; there was a moment there when I was with them."

I don't think that Werner Erhard is a particularly dangerous person. I've met him several times. He attends a lot of San Francisco cocktail parties. He strikes me as another aggressive, success-oriented man who fell into something hot because of his years around auto showrooms, management seminars and Scientology workshops. What makes him not dangerous is that he has never figured out television. Though he would like to push est through television, when he gets on he goes flat. He doesn't "work" on television, to put it in his own terms. He knows the medium changes his message but he can't figure out the dimensions of the change.

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