{"id":141384,"date":"2021-07-23T12:20:14","date_gmt":"2021-07-23T20:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141384"},"modified":"2021-07-23T12:32:09","modified_gmt":"2021-07-23T20:32:09","slug":"everything-now-lessons-from-the-city-state-of-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=141384","title":{"rendered":"Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2021 book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* In 1921, John Steven McGroarty, a poet who later became a congressman, wrote, \u201cLos Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies\u2014no day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before.\u201d The author Eve Babitz had her own version of this: \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to stand L.A., which is why it\u2019s almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained, to say nothing of lovers.\u201d<\/p>\n

* One word that never appeared in Aunt Lydia\u2019s lectures at M.I.T.T. was Lifespring . Lifespring was a popular self-help program from the 1970s and \u201980s, similar to groups like Landmark Forum or EST. As a large-group awareness training program (LGAT), as they were known among psychologists, Lifespring had offered a five-day \u201cBasic\u201d training followed by an \u201cAdvanced\u201d class, followed by a \u201cLeadership\u201d program, all part of a self-help curriculum.
\n Marc Fisher, a journalist for The Washington Post , attended one of Lifespring\u2019s Basic trainings in 1987. While reporting on the group, he learned that Lifespring\u2019s executives had known for years that some trainees experienced adverse reactions. The group\u2019s founder, John Hanley, told Fisher, \u201cIf a thousand people get benefit from the training, and one person is harmed, I\u2019d can it.\u201d And yet, according to Fisher\u2019s investigation, over the years there were dozens of \u201ccasualties,\u201d Lifespring\u2019s name for people who left the training with severe psychological issues.
\n By the time the Post story went to print in October 1987, according to its reporting, about thirty-five trainees had sued Lifespring; six people had died. In one case, which Lifespring settled, a man who couldn\u2019t swim was persuaded by his trainer to dive into a river to overcome his fear and drowned. \u201cLifespring denied any responsibility, saying that no one forced [him] to jump in the river,\u201d Fisher wrote. \u201c\u2018The training doesn\u2019t cause anything,\u2019 Hanley said then. \u2018Life causes stuff.\u2019\u201d In another example cited by the Post , a woman had an asthma attack during a training. Trainers told her the asthma was self-induced. \u201cWhen she finally left the room, she wandered into a parking lot, collapsed and died after five days in a coma.\u201d Lifespring denied responsibility and paid the woman\u2019s family $450,000 to settle their claim.
\n Thanks to Lifespring\u2019s success, Hanley became a multimillionaire. Previous to Lifespring, he had committed a felony, Fisher learned. In 1969 Hanley and a partner were found guilty of mail fraud. In a separate case, the Wisconsin Justice Department sued Hanley and others for running a pyramid scheme, unrelated to Lifespring, which he paid to settle in 1973.<\/p>\n

* Fast-forward to 1998. A Dutch woman named Margo Majdi, a Lifespring trainee and the owner of a beauty salon in Beverly Hills, purchased the rights to the trainings from Hanley. After a publicist told her that Lifespring had gained a bad reputation and she should consider rebranding, Majdi renamed it, coming up with M.I.T.T. \u201cWhen I made it Mastery in Transformational Training, everybody thought I was crazy,\u201d she told me later during an interview at her home. \u201cNotice now everything is called mastery, mastermind, master this, master tribe\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

* the main purpose of M.I.T.T. seemed pretty clear to me: to make Ms. Majdi, Aunt Lydia, and whoever else a bunch of money, in a system where the biggest epiphanies were still one course away. And surely, even more faucets of cash would be opened if they persuaded us to draft our friends and family to join. Multiple people informed me that close to 100 percent of trainees were referrals\u2014M.I.T.T. didn\u2019t advertise\u2014in part because students were eventually expected to recruit, or \u201cenroll,\u201d outsiders.<\/p>\n

* Marc Fisher was now a senior editor at the paper. \u201cThis is the perfect time for a resurgence of interest in these kinds of programs,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re living in a time that\u2019s tailor-made for an M.I.T.T., a Lifespring, or an EST. It\u2019s a time of tremendous dislocation in people\u2019s careers and the economies of families. It\u2019s a time of political polarization. It\u2019s a time of loss of community as a result of social media. It\u2019s only natural that people are craving the connections and the meaning that these programs promise.\u201d I asked him what stood out in his memory from thirty years ago. \u201cThe relative ease with which the guy running the program could assert control over a large room of people. And not just the willingness but the eagerness of people to be led and for someone to take authority over them.\u201d He added, \u201cAnytime we\u2019re in a crisis of government, or parenting, or family structure\u2014all those things that made this society so unsettled\u2014for somebody to come along and tell you, \u2018This is how things are going to be. This is what you need to do to fix it. And then everything\u2019s going to be okay, or better\u2019\u2014that\u2019s pretty powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n

* It is not difficult to find people in Los Angeles seeking transformation, and also those who would help them. Mystics, psychics, preachers. Life coaches who advertise their services on telephone poles. In the San Fernando Valley, a man known as \u201cThe O-Man,\u201d an orgasm whisperer, was said to make women reach ecstasy dozens of times in a single session, though in the manner of a personal trainer. \u201cI fix their posture and mobilize their joints,\u201d he said in an online interview. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty simple, just a twenty-to-thirty-minute massage followed by two hours of coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

* In On the Road , Jack Kerouac called Los Angeles \u201cthe loneliest and most brutal of American cities.\u201d Around the same time, the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Winnicott, writing in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis , called the capacity for a human to be alone a sophisticated phenomenon. \u201cIt is closely related to emotional maturity. The basis of the capacity to be alone is the experience of being alone in the presence of someone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2021 book: * In 1921, John Steven McGroarty, a poet who later became a congressman, wrote, \u201cLos Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies\u2014no day passes … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-los-angeles"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t