November 28, 2015

"If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to have a very loose relationship with this thing you call 'I' or 'me.'"

"Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central!... Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence! You got a problem with that?"

Said Werner Erhard, a character from the 1970s, who's got a big NYT article about his new training sessions, "Creating Class Leaders," which sounds a lot like his old sessions, which were called EST, except that he doesn't curse at the audience and keep them from going to the bathroom.
“I am committed to the opposite of that idea [that 'there are no second acts in American lives'],” Mr. Erhard said a few weeks after the leadership class in Toronto. “I don’t think there’s a person who walked out of that room who isn’t a second act.” To say nothing of their instructor, who, at age 80, may be more of a third or fourth act.
There was a time, boys and girls — the Me Decade, Tom Wolfe called it — when Mom and Dad wore mood rings, attended encounter groups and in general engaged in a tireless amount of navel gazing... Aspiring “ESTies” flocked to hotel ballrooms across the country for combative training sessions during which they forwent meal and bathroom breaks to take responsibility for their lives and “get it” by discovering there was nothing to get. Diana Ross, Joe Namath, Yoko Ono, Jerry Rubin and several hundred thousand other seekers got it...

Sitting in front of a bank of computers in his hotel room, he read excerpts from the 1,000-page textbook he is working on, such as: “As linguistic abstractions, leader and leadership create leader and leadership as realms of possibility in which, when you are being a leader, all possible ways of being are available to you.” Briefly, the course, which owes ideological debts to the Forum and to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger... Students master principles like integrity and authenticity....
I added the internal links. The "no second acts" line comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald. As the NYT puts it: "Pound another nail into the coffin for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that there are no second acts in American lives." But Fitzgerald shouldn't be pegged down as believing that. My link goes to an NPR interview with the vice president of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, Kirk Curnutt:
CURNUTT: [The line] shows up in an essay called "My Lost City," which is a beautiful sort of testament to New York and was actually very popular in the aftermath of 9/11. The line he says here is: I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days. Clearly he's sort of saying, well, I once believed this but I've been proved wrong. And I think that's what really gets most of us who are Fitzgerald fans is that line is always quoted as saying, well, how naive was Fitzgerald to have said there are no second acts in American lives, when he himself was only a couple of years away from what many people consider the greatest second act in American literary history.... Of all the beautiful lines that I adore that F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote, this is the one I really hate. I wince when I hear it, partly because it's used as a way of saying how sort of naive and shortsighted he was. But also, because for those of us who really adore Fitzgerald, the problem with that is we don't like our man to be cynical. Fitzgerald was an optimist. For all that he went through in life and for sort of how low he was at the end of his life, he really did - like Jay Gatsby - believe in the green light. And he was trying to be optimistic to the core.
I added the link to "My Lost City." Now, onto that other link to that other great essay, Tom Wolfe's "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening." That article, like EST, broke big into the culture at the point in my life when, pre-law school, I worked analyzing magazines in a marketing research firm. I read and coded scores of magazines every month and engaged in the proto-blogging of blabbing with my co-coders about whatever struck us as interesting, which, of course, included EST and the concept of "The 'Me' Decade."
The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else....

By the mid-1960s this service, this luxury, had become available for one and all, i.e., the middle classes... They were encouraged to bare their own souls and to strip away one another’s defensive facades. Everyone was to face his own emotions squarely for the first time....

35 comments:

Bob Ellison said...

I could only skimmed this essay. Sorry. I can't analyze the individual points.

But I do want to say that playing a musical instrument-- any instrument-- changes your perspective. Pick it up and play it. Play it badly. Doesn't matter. Anyone can do it.

Heartless Aztec said...

All that and all I got was the prescience of F.Scott Fitzgerald. Maybe I should go have that first cup of coffee...

Anonymous said...

I despair of ever correcting this in the public mind--it's become another "begging the question"--but Fitzgerald was referring to theatrical acts, of which there are usually three, and he is accusing Americans of metaphorically skipping from the first to the third. That is, Americans look for shortcuts or premature resolutions to our situations, hoping to evade the complications and drama that are a necessary part of success (which, in a play, occurs in the second act). We start out in the mailroom and expect to be president of the company the next day, and it's a shame nobody really knows what the Fitzgerald quote means anymore, because it's more applicable now than ever.

TL;DR: "Second acts" has nothing to do with "second chances."

Lucien said...

Among other famous lines, Shakespeare didn't necessarily subscribe to the principal "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" either, he just put the words in the mouth of a character. And while Keynes really did say "In the long run we are all dead" it is better understood in the context of criticizing economic theories focused on long-term equilibrium, saying that the seas will be calm again after the tempest has past.

Ann Althouse said...

"I despair of ever correcting this in the public mind--it's become another "begging the question"--but Fitzgerald was referring to theatrical acts, of which there are usually three, and he is accusing Americans of metaphorically skipping from the first to the third."

I see that some people say that and it's interesting, but it doesn't have its root in the 2 Fitzgerald texts. Clearly, the Fitzgerald scholar I quoted doesn't see it that way.

I think the correction that's more important is that the published quote from Fitzgerald in "My Lost City" is specifically that the he doesn't believe the idea. It's only stated as something he used to believe. In that context, I don't see him saying that he used to believe people skipped from act 1 to act 3.

For reference, the context is:

What news from New York?'

'Stocks go up. A baby murdered a gangster.'

'Nothing more?'

'Nothing. Radios blare in the street.'

I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days. We were somewhere in North Africa when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert.

'What was that?'

'Did you hear it?'

'It was nothing.'

'Do you think we ought to go home and see?'

'No - it was nothing.'

Sebastian said...

"If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to have a very loose relationship with this thing you call 'I' or 'me.'"

You mean, O is doing it wrong?

Someday historians will wonder at the meaning the Me president who had no emotions to face squarely. O's I = 0.

Johanna Lapp said...

Apparently est was all lower-case for some reason. Latin for "it is."


They specifically insisted that it was not an acronym for Erhard Seminars Training, but the press repeated that so often that the error became the truth.

Ann Althouse said...

There's nothing in the text to work with the skipped second act idea, since he's still looking forward to a second act, in the future: "there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days."

Michael K said...

The EST thing and another one that was popular in southern California in the 70s, which involved a bunch of people going to a hotel ballroom and listening to a tape recorder, ruined some friends of mine. They became cynical and selfish and were convinced that no one mattered but themselves. I could see the changes in them.

Not for me, thank you.

iowan2 said...

Whats the meaning of life? Who should I be?

It's not complicated. Hard, counterintuitive, not complicated.

When in doubt, in any situation. Be of service to others.

That's it

You're welcome.

(the text book is already written,The Bible)

Guildofcannonballs said...

"...all possible ways of being are available to you.”

Sure sure, but only if you are not you but something else, although not necessarily someone else.

robother said...

To paraphrase Herman (of the Hermits, not Hesse): "Second Act, same as the First!"

Eric said...

Didn't John Candy plug EST (OK mention) in Stripes?

Laslo Spatula said...

" They were encouraged to bare their own souls and to strip away one another’s defensive facades. Everyone was to face his own emotions squarely for the first time...."

Setting the seed for the Blog.

I am Laslo.

M Jordan said...

I never buy these "people back then didn't have time to think about life" arguments. People, even slaves, have a mind where chains cannot reach. So you're building the pyramids. Okay, it's drudgery, I get that. But while you're hauling a brick from one place to another, are you really confined to thinking about the damn brick?

My experience has always been ,the greater the drudgery, the more the deep thought.

Laslo Spatula said...

"The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it."

This and other sections of this post made me think of some Althouse's comments yesterday in the "Disability" post.

Excerpt:

"Anyway, the writers are trying to do something, and what they are trying to do affects the audience, and the audience may be affected in ways the writers did not intend."

Erhard's students "master(ing) principles like integrity and authenticity...." are writing the character of themselves, and -- to quote Althouse again -- "the audience may be affected in ways the writers did not intend."

They are not truly looking for authenticity, they are hoping to portray authenticity in a way that people recognize as such. Of course, some may see this and recognize bullshit.

The old quote "Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made" certainly fits in here.

I am Laslo.

William said...

There are no second acts in James Bond movies. Each new movie is simply a remake of the previous one. Bond will win at the gaming tables and drive a fast car fast. I'm not a scholar of Werner Erhardt but my guess is that this is a remake and not a second act.

Laslo Spatula said...

From my previous comment:

Erhard's students "master(ing) principles like integrity and authenticity...." are writing the character of themselves, and -- to quote Althouse again -- "the audience may be affected in ways the writers did not intend."

To tie this in to the Fitzgerald quote: such people are indeed trying to recreate themselves into their own "Second Act."

I'm afraid, though, that most of these 'second acts' look a lot like the 'first act' to the audience that knows them.

And it is the 'first act' that they are trying to rewrite.

I am Laslo.

Hunter McDaniel said...

You can learn everything you need to know about EST by watching the old movie "Semi-Tough".

Nichevo said...

Laszlo 9:29
+1

Laslo Spatula said...

"Who here at this seminar doesn't want to know the Authenticity of Themselves better?"

(crowd noise of agreement)

By finding the Authentic You you can better relate to the World you inhabit, and by your Authenticity you will better understand what is truly Authentic in Your World, and what is merely the Detritus that drags you down."

(crowd noise of agreement)

"You, the young woman in the second row."

"Yes?"

"What have you realized to be the most Inauthentic Part of You?"

"I..."

"Don't be shy: if we cannot be Authentic here in this room how can we hope to be Authentic outside?"

"Yeah. I guess so. Well, the most Inauthentic Part of Me was probably the me that slept with the Boss to get a promotion."

"And by knowing that, how does that make you more Authentic?"

"I got the job I Authentically deserved. I got a killer office, and my own assigned parking spot. I LIKE this Authentic Me."

"See, people? Do you see how this works? You, sir, in the third row -- how about you?"

"THis all stays here in the room, right?"

"We respect everyone's Privacy in this Seminar."

"Well, I guess the Most Inauthentic Part of Me was when I slept with my sister's thirteen-year-old daughter."

(crowd grumbles)

"People! We are not here to pass judgement! We can only go forward by knowing what we are leaving behind. Now, sir, what has that made you learn about your Authenticity?"

"I have learned that the Authentic Me really likes young girls -- REALLY likes young girls -- but would never sleep with a family member."

(crowd noise of agreement)

"And you, sir, in the front."

"The Most Inauthentic Part of Me is probably the part where I buried all the girls I have strangled."

(crowd grumbles)

"The Authentic Me now realizes I should leave the bodies where they can be found. To give the Families' Closure. That would be the Authentic Me."

(crowd noise of agreement)

"Progress, people: what you are witnessing is Growth! You in the back..."

"I believe the Inauthentic Me is my being a Police Officer..."

(a few scattered "Uh-Oh"s from the Crowd).

"No, it's not like that: I am not here to arrest anyone.

(various sighs of relief in the crowd)

"Anyway, I believe the Inauthentic Me is my being a Police Officer and liking to shoot black people."

"(crowd noises of discomfort)

"I now realize the Authentic Me was never meant to be a Cop. The Autentic Me was meant to kill black people without the Inauthentic need for the Authority of a Badge."

(crowd noise of agreement)

"See, People? What if all of America could be this True to Themselves? Wouldn't America be a more Authentic Place?"

(crowd noise of agreement)

I am Laslo.

mikee said...

I, for one, prefer the very short novella "Jonathon Livinston Seagull" as my iconic literature of the era, because it specifies the purpose of all that navelgazing and self-interest: achievement of existence at a higher level than the mundane world.

That this is a fantasy dating back to the origins of every religion on earth is beside my point, which is, who would NOT leap at the opportunity to gain transcendence rather effortlessly, as promised in almost all the fads of the era?

JLS, at least, required seagulls to practice lots of precision flight before becoming creatures of pure light.

traditionalguy said...

I see he appropriated Heraclitus about stepping into the same river twice.

Then making America great again is not possible. Trump is left with making America greater than ever before.

Jupiter said...

Ann Althouse said...
There's nothing in the text to work with the skipped second act idea, since he's still looking forward to a second act, in the future: "there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days."

It appears that he was referring to the Depression as the second act to New York's boom days. So, second act means, "and now for something totally different".

The embedded link in that text says;
'Scott Fitzgerald is often quoted as having said “There are no second acts in American lives” a line from his unfinished manuscript, “The Love of the Last Tycoon.” '

It sounds as if Fitzgerald liked the sound of that statement, but wasn't exactly sure what it meant. Just like the rest of us.

Laslo Spatula said...

"You, the young man in the second row."

"Yes?"

"What have you realized to be the most Inauthentic Part of You?"

"I... I guess the Most Inauthentic Part of Me is the being Gay part."

(crowd mumbles)

"And by knowing that, how does that make you more Authentic?"

"The Authentic Me is a Healthy, Happy Heterosexual that just likes to suck on men's cocks, sometimes."

(crowd noise of agreement)

"I mean, sometimes I REALLY got to suck on a man's cock -- like: really bad. But that doesn't make me Gay, it just makes me Authentic."

(crowd applause)

"And you, Ms, next to him."

"Ummm -- I'm not finished yet."

"Please then, continue."

"Sometimes the Authentic Me wants to feel a cock in my ass."

(crowd mumbles)

"I feel you are making Progress, but perhaps you have misidentified your Authenticity? Perhaps you are Authentically a Gay Man -- how would that sound to you?"

"No, no: I'm as Heterosexual as they come. Some Heterosexual Men like to watch Football. I'm just a Heterosexual Man that likes to suck cock and occasionally have a cock put roughly up my ass. I don't see the Problem."

"There are No Problems here, only Solutions. I just happen to think your Authentic Self is still needing to Truly Emerge."

"Like, go to Gay Bars?"

"If that is what your True Authentic Self desires."

"I go to Gay Bars all the time. It's usually the best place I can Find other Heterosexual Men who will let me suck their cocks. I have no problem with Gay People, it's just that when I get butt-fucked by another Man I prefer him to be Heterosexual."

(crowd mumbles)

"I'm thinking we may need to come back to this. Ms, what was your story?"

"Well, this man is my Husband..."

(crowd gasps)

"No, it's OK: I am comfortable with my Husband being an Authentic Heterosexual Man that likes to suck cock and occasionally have a cock put roughly up his ass. It's just that -- I have needs, too. I have been Inauthentic for too long, denying my needs."

(crowd sounds of approval)

"And what would help you find your Authenticity?"

"I think my Authenticity is that I am a petite White Woman that wants to be fucked by a big black cock. Like a big, black MONSTER cock."

"You've been my Wife all these years, and I never knew."

"That's because you were always out, sucking cocks."

"But sometimes -- as an Authentic Heterosexual Man that likes to suck cock -- I like to suck big black cocks, too."

"What about Big Black Monster Cocks?"

"Whatever I can get my mouth around, honey."

"You know, we might be able to work our Authenticity out, together...."

"See, People: two People being Authentic, leading to an Authentic Life they will live together. THAT'S Authenticity!

(crowd applause)

I am Laslo.

David Begley said...

In his use of the words "I" and "me" as President, Obama has set a record that will never be broken.

Same for rounds of golf.

Historic.

William said...

Desmondwarzel's comment, whatever its pertinence to Fitzgerald's work, is certainly relevant to Fitzgerald's life. Fitzgerald's life got straight to the denouement without any stutter steps, slow build, or mounting tension. He went straight from college to glamorous, successful novelist without any garret years. He had a fairy tale romance with an enchanted Princess who suddenly became the crazy wife in Jane Eyre. Didn't see that coming. Even his failure was sudden and complete without any intervening years of slow decline. In an era when screenwriters had less status among the literati than Republican speech writers, he became a screenwriter and not a very good one. Dalton Trumpbo was much better at the craft. Even his death was sudden without a lot of time to spend contemplating the passing of the years.

retired said...

Why would you bring up that old fraudster from the past. Well you do love there, a college town.

Guildofcannonballs said...

"...all possible ways of being are available to you.”

Proving Slick Willy Clinton justifiably wandered toward the concept of "is" and its variations upon disparate meanings called out when lying under oath as a rapid sex-predator abusing/soiling/raping the office of POTUS in concurrence of the philosophy Joe Smith and Muhamed seemingly lived by were wont.

Guildofcannonballs said...

"Did you have sexual relations with that women, Ms. Lewowski?"

If Der Slickmeister thought as POTUS we were all fucking her, not just him, but USA as CIGAR, technically he might have a ....

eddie willers said...

proto-blogging of blabbing

That snippet is as good as 'no second acts'.

Ann Althouse said...

Thanks, Eddie!

rhhardin said...

thing you call I or me

Actually it's not a label for yourself.

It's taking a place in an account, the thing referred to varying with the account and the claim. There's always a mutual adjustment of reference.

Zach said...

Second act! Second ACT! This is a writer, and he's talking about the SECOND ACT!

The second act in a play is when the original plans run into setbacks, causing the conflict which drives the rest of the play.

A life without a second act goes

1) Introduction
2) ....
3) Climax
4) Resolution
5) Denoument

Everything goes smoothly right up to the happy ending. It's a writer's joke, and it's a clever one.

Zach said...

I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days. We were somewhere in North Africa when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert.

The second act is the crash. All the hopeful nonsense of the 20s (the first act) ran into a setback when the stock market crashed, setting up the conflict of the 30s.