The Con-Forumists

Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary. Everyone, that is, who's willing to buy into the self-improvement package peddled by the Landmark Forum, a three-and-a-half-day seminar concocted by the mastermind behind the 1970s favorite encounter group, est.

Swing Generation, November 1998
by Jana Martin

It's a gorgeous Friday morning in June, and 150 of us sit in a windowless conference room on bent-steel chairs, arranged in a dense semicircle. On a small, wooden platform in front of us sits a small man on a high director's chair. His silver nametag reads "Brian."

It's our first day of The Landmark Forum, a self-help seminar held at the Landmark Center in Edison, New Jersey. Brian is our course leader. Before beginning, he tilts his head as if to consider us all: teachers, secretaries, football coaches, social workers, singers, graphic artists; all colors and ages, some from the suburbs, some from the inner city. There are more women than men, many in our late 20s to mid-30s. We wear the initiates' pale green nametags: first name big. We breathe the same canned air.

Brian is quiet looking. But when he speaks through his cordless mike, he fills the room. "You're all here," he says, "because something isn't right in your life, right?" He scans the room as we nod. "And unlike so many other people, you have taken the first step because you know you can be different." As he says this, a mother and daughter, both heavy and swaddled in gray sweat suits, push their lower lips forward in a gesture of introspection.

"In so many ways we mess up our lives," he continues. "But we can be 'extraordinary, powerfully self-expressed--Like Gandhi, Galileo. They may have lived before The Forum was invented. But they embody what it is about.

The Forum promises to help you turn your life around in just a few days. For $325, you are immersed in a three-and-a-half-day language and belief-system seminar. This involves freeing the good parts of yourself (joy, enthusiasm) from the bad (excuses, destructive habits, emotional baggage), so that you can have a whole new life. It's a promise that has lured about half a million people, from Texas to Zurich, about one-third of them between the ages of 25 and 34, to enroll in its group-therapy-style training. You attend seminars for 15 hours a day, including breaks and meals, during which you are instructed to "go with two or three other folks, just to talk about how things have gone so far." Finally, after taking a day off to test reentering the world, you return to celebrate your metamorphosis on graduation night.

In fact, this is only the first course in a "curriculum" of seminars offered by the San Francisco-based Landmark Education Corporation. After you graduate, you're encouraged to go on to "Communication: Access to Power" and "Self-expression and Leadership." With seminar tuition ranging up to $900 per class, Landmark took in $48 million in 1997.

The Forum advertises solely by word-of-mouth, so you don't hear much about it unless one of its graduates decides you, too, should go through it. Five years ago, when I was living my happy, riot-girl life in Tucson, a small-talk friend invited me for dinner. Around her table were a group of girls my age with Stepford wife smiles and obedient hair, held in place with headbands and bobby pins. As they passed a bowl of sticky potato salad, they introduced each other: "This is Sandy. We met in the leadership intro."

No one ever said the word "Forum," though later I found out they were all recent graduates. I'd naively taken them for young Christians. A few years later in New York, I met a singer-songwriter whose enthusiasm for building his career seemed oddly over-the-top. Turned out he'd done The Forum, too, and credited it with his growing success, though he rarely mentioned it by name.

If you do hear rumblings about The Forum from non-members though, they're likely to be ringed with suspicion-that Forum people stick together like one happy family; that once they decide to recruit you, they transcend the meaning of "persistent"; that there's something cult-like about the group although Landmark insists that it's not a cult (for one thing, followers are not cut off from the outside world, one of the key defining factors of a cult). Maybe all the skepticism stems from the rumor that The Forum is just a '90s mask for the '70s slash-and-burn encounter group est. notorious for slamming egos and forbidding bathroom breaks. Actually, EST's controversial founder Werner Erhard did modify EST into The Forum in the mid-'80s. In 1991, before he disappeared amid damning press reports ranging from child abuse to tax evasion, he transferred control to a group of loyal employees led by his brother Harry Rosenberg, who retooled Erhard's multimillion-dollar empire into the Landmark Education Corporation.

When I bought my first car, the salesman let me in on a secret. There were five "selling boxes" he needed to move me through in order to clinch the deal. Box one: Get them into the showroom. Box two: Pique their interest. Box three: Make them think they're making the choice. Box four: Clinch the deal. Box five: Be sure to sell them the maintenance plan. It's worth noting here that Werner Erhard began his career as a car salesman. And when I asked Forum graduates to describe the course, I got the inevitable answer: Come see for yourself.