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Scientology and Marching Bands?

Udarnik

Gold Meritorious Patron
From something I stumbled upon while, of all things, digging into Hellen Chen's network:

Pageantry competitions are built upon Erhard Seminar Training, a 1970’s sales tool by former scientologist Warner Erhard. Instead of psychiatry, those seeking help for the self invested up to $300 for Erhard’s lectures in the mid 1970’s and 80’s. Known as EST, the technique involves psychological analysis, new hopes and dreams, a regained sense of control over life, release from past mistakes and the search for a “new self” using religious-like connotations and false discipline. Character is totally irrelevant. Proof of EST influence is pageantries “get with it”, “you don’t get it”, “you need to get it” mentality – the perfect vehicle for George Hopkins “modern art experiments”, using incomprehensible mental gibberish and Larry McCormick football field show designs as “values.”. (Erhard usually warns his audience against thinking – “just be”. It’s all good. Everything has merit.) Like John Dewey’s Seven Cardinal Principles, EST stimulates homogeneity. The Garfield Cadets became EST art experiments using the football field hoax of “three dimensional space”, “cubism” and “surrealism”, whatever they could get naive people to accept as “modern art.” Erhard says everything half a dozen times in different ways, similar to an art salesman explaining animals’ footprints on canvas as “a great artistic statement.” Are the entire Garfield/Bands of America staffs Erhard trained? Erhard was flown in to “teach” McCormick’s staff at substantial cost. Band members who tried out at Cadet camps stated their staff was “strange” and “we wouldn’t buy into their crap.” Of what do they speak?

Warner Erhard grew up in Philadelphia then converted to Episcopalianism from Jewish roots. A used car salesman in the 1950’s, he left his first wife and four kids in 1960 and fathered three more. He seemed to want to hide his past, changing his name, John Paul Rosenberg, to Erhard after reading an article in Esquire Magazine called “The Men Who made the New Germany.” In the late 1960’s, he sold encyclopedias door to door. Warner became involved in scientology and was an instructor in “Mind Dynamics”, a “spiritual discipline” founded by Englishman Alexander Everett.


EST is a combination of Dale Carnegie seminars, Scientology, Zen, Taoism and door to door sales pitches. Seminars might last 16 hours a day for two weekends with a few bathroom breaks. To Erhard, the “experience” is most important. Morality and quality matter not. It just “is”. John Dewey, the destroyer of American education, stated, “We cannot claim to understand anything until we have experienced it.” Experiences differ with each person. There is no socialist “whole consciousness.” Like Dewey, EST has no judgment of right and wrong. Erhard states, “I didn’t say it was bad to be an asshole. It isn’t good or bad. It just is.” Erhard sells the perceived happiness people believe they missed out on. Seminars are emotionally “syrupy” with touching and false compliments.

Did anyone on ESMB know Warner Erhard?
 
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