New Solidarity

December 1980

Books

Who Is Werner Erhard?

by Lydia Cherry

NSIPS Paul Kacprzak

'Est' cult leader Werner Erhard in performance.

Werner ErhardThe Transformation of a Man: The Founding of est. A biography by W.W. Bartley, III, 1978 At the Dec. 5-7 Eurosocialist conference in Washington, D.C. called to plot the destabilization of the pro-growth Reagan administration and laud the coming postindustrial society, private meetings were held nonstop. At one such meeting, sitting at a table with West German Social Democratic Party Chairman Willy Brandt, Swedish Social Democratic Party Chairman Olof Palme, and Senator Edward Kennedy, was Werner Erhard. What has Werner Erhard to do with high powered international politics? What is the connection between Socialist International head Willy Brandt and the founder of a California cult? They both have a common mother the flagship psychological warfare Institution of British Intelligence, the London Tavistock Institute. Brandt's path was to form the Socialist

International while Aldous Huxley was sent to the United States to deputize Gregory Bateson and Alan Watts to assist him. Erhard is a protege of Watts and Bateson. Today the paths converge. Their common deployment is to force the coming of the postindustrlal age. 'The Transformation of a Man' According to his biographer London philosopher W.W. Bartley, Werner, a high school graduate and crack car salesman, in the early sixties left his wife and family, changed his name so he wouldn't be traced and journeyed "westward and inward," and incorporated the philosophies of Watts, Maslow, Bateson, Alpert, Heisenberg, Wiener, William James, Hubbard, Heidegger, Jung, Sartre, Fromm, Skinner, Maxwell Maltz, and Dale Carnegie which he synthesized to create est. Alan Watts and Gregory Bateson were the two most prominent individuals utilized by British intelligence operative Aldous Huxley as part of MK-Ultra in establishing the acid-rock culture; Abraham Maslow is the founder of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, the paramount group in the field of psychology committed to replacing science with Aquarian introspection; Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Das) ran the project at Harvard which launched the LSD movement on the East Coast; Martin Heidegger was the pro-Nazi German philosopher who despised the Platonic Christian notion of man's having dominion over nature and insisted that man can only have stewardship with nature; cybernetics whiz-kids Wiener and Maltz, pragmatist William James, existentialist Sartre, ad infinitum. It was in connection with Werner's latest "creation," the Hunger Project that he was invited to join the Club of Romethe international organization set up by NATO in the late 1960s to invent and disseminate post-industrial era movements, which will fit in with their stated intention to wipe out 2 to 4 billion people by the year 2000. The Hunger Project, described by Bartley as "extending Werner's aim beyond individuals and institutions to the whole world community," has nothing to do with hunger. The 1.6 million membership is discouraged from adopting any particular programmatic outlook on how end world hunger, and the organization does not advocate to its members that they get involved in any hunger-related organizations at all. The est approach to hunger, which received rave reviews in Marilyn Ferguson's blueprint for the new era,

The Aquarian Conspiracy, to "make as many people as possible aware of their own true feelings about hungerthe problem lies in the self-conception of individuals." Members are encouraged to: fast on the 14th day of every month and "experience hunger." The Hunger Project's newspaper, A Shift In the Wind praises the efforts of the Council on Foreign Relationsinfluenced Global 2000 report and the Brandt Commission Report. Werner's biographer Bartley has interesting credentials too. His institutional connections are the traditional bastions for disseminating British epistemology. Bartley is "Werner Erhard's most unlikely biographer," so we are told, a well-known philosopher who after graduating from Harvard taught at the Warburg Institute of the University of London, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University. As an est "graduate," however, Bartley joins the authorship of other books on the market selling est. The author tells us it was est president Don Cox (former professor at Harvard Business School and general manager of the Coca-Cola Co.) who suggested that a biography of Werner be written and that Bartley was the person to write it.