The Sterling Men Of Woodstock: A Series (Part III)
The psychology of cults and secret societies
Woodstock Times/August 15, 2002
By Paul Smart
Kathryn May is a New Paltz-based psychotherapist who's had extensive experience deprogramming New Age enthusiasts who have fallen under the spell of cults. Among her clients have been a number of men and women formerly associated with A. Justin Sterling's Men's and Women's Weekends, as well as the ad hoc local "teams" that carry on his teachings. She sees them as an offshoot of "est," Werner Erhard's infamous training movement of the 1970s now known as Landmark Forum or, for those being recruited, as simply "The Forum."
"I first became aware of these groups when I had a client who asked me whether he should go to one of the Men's Weekends and I urged him to stay away because of the dangers that are always involved in such things," says May in a recent interview. "It's basically just a new incarnation of that classic bad idea wherein someone announces, "I have discovered the secret of life and if you will sit in this room with me I will impart it to you and you will have great prosperity." It's a very arrogant viewpoint that encourages people that their happiness is above everyone else's, and to undertake any means to achieve whatever they wish to achieve. It encourages evil through the destruction of friendship, trust, cooperation and any real sense of belonging to a community."
May unequivocally calls Sterling's Institute of Relationships a cult.
"Any therapy that promotes itself as the answer but won't tell you what they actually do is suspect," she says. "It's mind control and mind control is always dangerous. Getting out from under such group-supported thinking is a long, hard process. It means the person getting out has to face the fact that they've been living a fantasy, and nobody wants to know that they've been duped. Sterling presents himself as the good father these men and women are convinced they never had. And he preys on people's wish to find quick fixes for everything. He attracts people who are vulnerable."
May talks about the similarities between cult victims she's worked with. The hardest thing is to get people to actually face the complexities of life and stop wishing for only the good to come. She groups together most of the most successful New Age prophets, from the TM/Maharishi-influenced Deepak Chopra and John Grey to James Redfield of The Celestine Prophecy and Neale Donald Walsch of those Conversations With God.
"Even those right-wing Republicans who think Bush/Cheney can do know wrong are acting cultish," May says. "They all feel they've joined something big and influential and somehow gotten the ear of God. They may vary in their techniques, but it's all about power."
But why does there seem to be such a prevalence of Sterling graduates in Woodstock, New Paltz and other more affluent, seemingly progressive communities? May speaks about the affected towns' long histories of "magical thinking," including great tolerance and attraction for off-beat lifestyles and therapies.
"I just think that attitude of, "I'm doing what makes me happy and that's what's most important so you should be happy too" is not right," May says. "It's a modern sin. And snake oil salesmen like Sterling and Erhard play it up for their own prophet."
I look up some facts on both men to see where May has been coming from.
Erhard was born John Rosenberg, a Christianized Jew, in Philadelphia in 1935. In 1960 he left his wife and children to move to St. Louis, where he worked his way from a car salesman to a management trainer after culling the lessons of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology tomes, psychology's Human Potential Movement, Alan Watts' Zen teachings and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. He held his first Large group Awareness Training session, for nearly 1,000 paying attendees, in San Francisco in 1971. By 1991, his "est" (Erhard Seminar Training) movement had hit some 700,000 converts by the time Erhard sold his "technology" to brother Harry Rosenberg in 1991 and moved out of the country facing bad press for both his movement and a soured personal life. Since then, Rosenberg turned est into The Forum.
Sterling, it turns out, graduated from Brookline High in Massachusetts in 1961 as Arthur Kasajarian. In the 1970s he moved to California, took est, and opened a restaurant. He began to do Erhard-like corporate training until he started noticing how unhappy so many executives were about their work. In 1979 he changed his name and started giving one-day workshops for women. In 1981 he incorporated his Sterling Institute of Relationships. He's been averaging a cool million a year since from his personal appearances, enough to pay for his $10,000 a month alimony and child support load, not counting the anguish of being barred from seeing his daughter, who's accused him of molestation.
Both therapies, it turns out, utilize high entrance fees for initial training weekends. Those weekend seminars, in turn, require expert bladder control to sustain the long sessions without breaks. Trainees are kept up for hours, repeated rote information, urged to change their lives to achieve greater success in all areas of their lives. Ambition and confidentiality are stressed. And the leaders maintain behind-the-curtain, wizard-like personas.
"Everybody has a certain need for certainty," says Woodstock therapist Peter Blum of his town. "You put on a certain pair of glasses, you see the world in a certain light. It takes time to realize that uncertainty is, in fact, better. It seems to be our gestalt to seek groups, be it the volunteer fire department, the bowling league or, God help us, the KKK to find a comforting hierarchy. It's as if everybody needs to belong to a club."
Blum, who's currently finishing a book entitled Good Hypnosis, Bad Hypnosis, says that despite their initial rhetoric, many New Age groups like Sterling work on a principal of exclusivity and the stressing of differences. He mentions the old community ideal of barn building as an anachronistic alternative.
"It all comes down to finding ways of getting the things we need in life," he says. "I feel fortunate to have always had close men friends and good relationships. I think it's important to always stress what we have in common."
Looking through the history of fraternal organizations and secret societies in America, pages and pages of names and acronyms appear. They came in three great waves, the first concurrent with the upheaval of the Revolution and including the advent of Freemasonry and the Oddfellows. During he Civil War, The Order of the Knights of Pythias was founded by a Washington, D.C. businessmen seeking to re-establish a sense of brotherhood among men. He got Abraham Lincoln's blessing and a Congressional charter. Soon, other groups sprang up with equally noble causes. They included the Grange, the Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks, the now right-to-life Ancient Order of Hibernians, and a secret society now known simply as the KKK.
Eagles - another fraternal organization - started the third wave when competing Seattle theater owners got together to create an "Order of Good Things" and finished a meeting with a keg on hand. Eventually, the group grew to 1,700 communities. Six twentieth century presidents were among their members. Among their renowned deeds were the founding of Mother's Day, the plan for Social Security, and the movement towards workman's compensation insurance. Similar turn-of-the-century groups have included the Lions, Kiwanis and Rotary International.
According to Woodstock historian Alf Evers, now in his 90s, the most notorious of local men's groups he's come across in his voluminous studies was the Unified Order of Junior Mechanics, which was organized in the 1840s by local men opposed to immigration of any kind. The group faded after a number of years and then returned in the early part of the twentieth century after the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony came into existence. Artists were seen as immigrants and the Order secretly worked to make their lives miserable.
"There's always been a good amount of spiritual gullibility to the town," Evers says. He lists examples stretching from the Stillwellites of the 1820s, who he described as "confused Methodists," through the introduction of Eastern religions at Overlook Mountain House lectures in the late 1800s to the arrival of the New Age in lockstep with socialism at the Maverick.
"I remember when est swept through the town, with every one going down to hotel function rooms to allegedly better their business minds," notes poet Ed Sanders, as good a contemporary historian for the town as one can find. "Of course this was also the town where Breatharians got a following. There was this creep who came through town saying he didn't eat and lived only on air. You had to pay a fee to see this guy, but then they caught him chowing down on chicken wings at 4 in the morning somewhere in Vancouver. Turns out he lived on late night take out."
Adding in the Rajneesh crowd of the 1980s, various local dabblings into the occult and more recent fascinations with various forms of Buddhism, native shamanism and Hinduism, Sanders turns back to the lessons he learned writing about Charles Manson in his groundbreaking study, The Family. He says modern starvation ranches that charge several thousand a week to worship "fitness" only exist for those vulnerable enough to be gullible to such scams. Ditto the dark power of Yale's Skull & Bones secret society, which seems to have played a formative role in the education of our current President.
"There's always this thirst to perfect one's act," he says. "There's also long been a clubbiness among men in general, from Boy Scouts on up. It's a survival mechanism in the vale of tears, a class thing that allows some to separate from others. I think Mark Twain talked about it all as the Royal Nonesuch. It's not really dangerous until guns come along. Otherwise, it's one of the things protected under our Bill of Rights, as is the shining of flashlights into these dark lairs where the club members hide."
Soon after last week's newspaper came out I ran into a local professional at the same bar/restaurant on the rural fringes of town where I'd just interviewed women about their experiences with Sterling. The man pulls me into a corner of the crowded, festive room and starts to spill his guts about the Men's Weekend, dating in Woodstock, and the problems he's run into as an aging, single man. He confesses two stories that are particularly memorable - one about how he came home to his girlfriend's house after attending a Weekend meeting and she discovered red war paint behind his ear. The slip-up ended his relationship. The second story concerned a once-close friend who'd gotten increasingly into men's teams.
"At first it seemed to do P a lot of good," the professional in the restaurant says to me. "But he couldn't not talk to me about it all the time. It affected all his relationships."
The man pauses a moment as something passes through his eyes. He then starts ranting against the woman who broke their relationship after discovering the war paint. She drove him to it, he says. But then he stops himself again and bluntly confesses how confused it's all left him. "I just want help now," the man confesses, quietly.
I call around town and ask several people who seem knowledgeable about how groups and community work together about their experiences with Sterling men and women. Michael Berg, the visionary founder and director of Family, surprises me with his viewpoint.
"When I look at the overall impact they've had in this organization's life, the good outweighs the bad," he says. Local men's teams have helped him and others he knows with a number of community projects. They helped a lot with construction jobs at the Woodstock Youth Center. They've done invaluable work at all of Family's shelters and administrative buildings. They regularly clean local highways. And they help each other.
It's all very similar to the public work of the many fraternal organizations and secret societies that have long run parallel with that open form of society we tend to see as our only community.
"It's all about building up people's self-esteem and valuation of themselves," Berg continues. "Once a society reaches a place where everyone's doing business and no longer thinking much about socialization, other means become necessary for funneling people into good acts, which are usually only possible when undertaken by groups. Whether the group is Rotary or Kiwanis, the Lions or Fire department, they become a good way for people to bond, not only with each other but with their community."
I bring the whole messy subject up in the company of extended family and pull some words of wisdom from my mother-in-law, Linda. I show her this series. She shakes her head, recognizing a world she knows, albeit in the Midwest and not Woodstock.
"You know," she says, somewhat bemused. "It's like all those dancers who've learned their technique through Arthur Murray Dance Schools. They are great when they dance together but they just can't do it when faced with someone who hasn't had the same training. It's sad, really." I tell her how, sometime in the near future, I'm going to go back to the Sterling fire pit in the manicured forest just off the center of Woodstock. I've promised to explain myself, I tell her. I want to be a mensch.
"Mensch, schmensch," Linda says. "Take someone who knows how they dance. Don't ever try dancing alone. That's not the point."
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