OST

Steve Sailer has some thoughts about the possibility that we may be experiencing the results of Obama Seminars Training (OST).

A reader speculates that Obama might have undergone some form of "est" training, or at least was an interested observer of it. That might explain some of the success of the Obama Campaign in 2008 in mobilizing the kind of people who fall for est and its various re-incarnations.

I don't see any evidence for this, but it's not impossible or even all that implausible. These "encounter" sessions, whether run under the original est banner by Werner Erhard or by its offshoots such as The Forum (run by Erhard's brother's Landmark company), were all the rage when Obama was a yuppie in Chicago in the 1980s and early 1990s.

....

In my experience, est wasn't exceptionally sinister. It provided a service -- Let's talk about Me! -- that a lot of people were willing to pay for, and it held out the hope of change (hmmhmm, where have I heard those words before?). est was just the usual pyramid scheme where each initiate had to recruit more marks to be milked. After awhile, there's nobody left who hasn't paid yet and the bubble collapses until it can be re-inflated under a different name.

The wildly successful volunteer aspects of the Obama campaign bear a lot of similarities to est.

If the Obama volunteers movement is modeled on est, then Obama has switched the ostensible locus of transformation from self to world ("this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal"). And he has flipped the focus from individual to communal ("We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek"). But it's still a cult with him at the top rather than, say, Werner Erhard.

(Perhaps, most successful mass movements organized around one man are going to look like a multi-level marketing scam, so maybe est didn't have to be directly involved in Obama's education in marketing himself as an Erhard-like Messiah, but it would be interesting to know more about it.)

Barack Obama would be too verbally agile to get caught using clearly est-ian verbiage, but his wife Michelle, who is much less facile with the English language, occasionally lets loose with classic "California Uber Alles" formulations of the Obama Cult that sound a lot like est:

"And Barack Obama will require you to work.

He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourselves to be better, and that you engage.

Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual - uninvolved, uninformed..."