Estholes and Evangelists

[ecosophia]

I've been thinking quite a bit of late about the odd state of mind people get into when they evangelize. That's largely been driven by the behavior of some people over the last week on my blog, but of course this isn't the first time, or the thousand and first, that I've encountered it. 

I'm thinking among other things about a guy I knew, normally thoughtful and courteous, who got talked by his wife into taking the current version of EST with her. (I think it's called Landmark Forum now, but it's the same schtick.) When he finished the training, he immediately spammed all his friends, including me, with this four-screen-long email that sounded like an advertising flyer. I emailed him back to warn him that somebody had hacked his email and was using it for spam.

He responded saying, no, it was him, and he just wanted to share with everybody how wonderful the training had been. I expressed a lack of enthusiasm, and he responded with baffled hurt -- why, everybody he knew was treating him as though he'd just started preaching to them about Jesus. I explained to him that this was basically what he'd done...and he literally couldn't hear it. No, the slick four-screen sales pitch he'd dumped on all his friends was just him expressing his enthusiasm, and why were we all being so mean? (In case you're wondering, no, our friendship didn't survive this.)

There was a term for such a person back in the day: "esthole." There were a lot of them, and they had exactly the same odd blinkered attitude toward their actions: fifteen-minute-long sales pitches for EST on every conceivable occasion, to every conceivable person, was just ordinary enthusiasm for something really wonderful, and why did everyone react so badly to it? 

I got a corresponding situation over the last week on my blog, after posting something on the fallacy of insisting that a single diet or dietary theory was right for everyone. I was pleasantly surprised, I should note, by the way the vegans in my readership reacted to this; there were some raised hackles, to be sure, but I'd used veganism as an example in uncomplimentary ways, so by and large I didn't consider their reactions out of line. Nor did I field many long screeds about the evilly evil evilness of eating animal products. It seems possible, in fact, that the vegan movement may be getting over its awkward phase and achieving maturity, in which case it may be around for the long term. 

No, the estholes this time were the fans of Weston A. Price, a Cleveland dentist from the early 20th century who came up with an elaborate dietary theory based on his research into traditional diets. It was the same behavior pattern as with my esthole (former) friend: the long comments all circling back to encomia of Weston A. Price and his theories, the insistence that anybody who didn't join them in singing hallelujas to WAP was being unreasonably hostile, and so on, ending in a habit I particularly detest -- the WAPpers on the list having lengthy conversations solely with each other, in which they loudly praised each other for glorifying WAP and took pot shots at those of us who weren't on the WAPper bandwagon. So I declared the subject closed and started deleting attempted posts, and immediately fielded thank you notes from a flurry of other readers who were as bored with the WAP evangelism as I was. 

It's useful, mind you, to have advance warning of what the next big evangelical diet cult is likely to be, so I can systematically delete all attempts to proselytize for it on my blog, and take such other steps as one takes to deal with tiresome evangelists of every stripe. Still, it has me wondering: what is the state of mind that makes estholes and other evangelists so imperceptive? I suppose it's funny that somebody with Aspergers syndrome like me would be blinking in surprise at someone else's blindness to basic social courtesies, but there it is...

Comments

Cheech and Chong's Law of Evangelism

[degringolade]

My ex is an ex-ESTie and was seriously into it for a while. Still love the girl, but when she went all in on the Christianity thing after EST "failed" her, the relationship didn't exactly thrive.

Most people who go seriously into the evangelism shtick of any flavor will tend to bounce around a bit. I tend to think that it is the evangelism itself that they find so pleasing. The actual belief system is actually secondary to the point. The evangelism is what provides the pleasure, along with the formation of a social bond with other folks who have led them/follow them in their current particular belief system.

Now, folks here might want to correct me on this particular source, but I do seem to remember that it was Cheech and Chong once stated:

"I used to be all f%$^&d-up on drugs, then I found Jesus, now I'm all f%$^&d-up on Jesus".

John-Michael, as an aside to an earlier correspondence, diet remains fairly similar, still feel OK, by wheat has found it's way back into the diet in the form of two pizza slices per week. I am coming to the conclusion that gluten-free pizza crust is an abomination.

[(Anonymous)]

@voiceoftaredas:

Terry Prachett said much the same thing about stories, and even proposed a Theory of Narrative Causality:

"Stories are important.
People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.
Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, knowledge is power.
Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived, and they have grown fat on the retelling . . . stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.
And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.
This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.
This is why history keeps repeating all the time. [. . .]
Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself."

(From his "Witches Abroad")

Pratchett wrote fantasy fiction, but his work is riddled with serious thought abot the nature of reality, and about magic.

And there is also Muriel Rukeyser's wonderful throw-away dictum in one of her poems:

"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

-- Robert Mathiesen

Cancer treatment and belief

[(Anonymous)]

When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer many years ago I deliberately refrained from any criticism of her treatment--which was conventional lumpectomy followed by radiation and some chemo. I use homeopathy myself, along with some allopathic medicine, but I feared that endless prating about alternative therapies and assaults on the medical establishment would threaten her faith in her treatment, which I considered important for its success. She was cancer free for about fifteen years, had a recurrence at which point her surgeon recommended double mastectomy. That was about 10 years ago. She is in her 80s now.

[(Anonymous)]

Someone must take a contrarian view here. I always assume that when there's an intense argument between two sides, that it is not all the fault of one side. I.e., it takes two to tango. You seem, sir, to have run-ins rather often, that you don't like, with proponents of various diets. You have made clear what you consider inappropriate about their behavior. But is there a reason you often find yourself in these situations? Or perhaps karma......

[amritarosa]

Yes, indeed.

One of the things I am working on being more discerning about is being able to tel the difference between a beneficial harmony between myself and and org/system/egregor and noticing when I have been "glamored" by such.

This strikes me as a very similar thing to what was being discussed in a recent thread (here or on the blog? can't remember) about spotting the difference between actions that are a result of fate/karma, and those that are the result of will in action.

Kayr: I can relate. It's much like that, complete with "withdrawals" after intentional severing, and some regular practices simply ceasing to work the way they did before, at least in my case. Thank goodness -that's- something I can check off my life experiences list.

Bonnie

[https://openid-provider.appspot.com/bryanlallen]

Esteemed and oh-so-prolific Archdruid, you wrote: “I suppose it's funny that somebody with Aspergers syndrome like me would be blinking in surprise at someone else's blindness to basic social courtesies, but there it is...”

Hah hah hah! In many ways I think that may be the Aspie’s dilemma: we (yup, I’m one too) are in several ways often MORE sensitive/courteous, sometimes to a fault, but the social system (psychological and otherwise) has branded our form of sensitivity as Not Normal and therefore Not Courteous. The entire Aspie branding is problematic, which is why I suspect DSM-5 got rid of it and just lumped us under the Autistic label.

As per your question about what makes Estholes and other evangelists so imperceptive, my hypothesis is that they are coming from a viewpoint that says We Are All Alike, and since they have their particular infection of evangelical fervor they assume/know everybody else does too. Hmmm, being an Aspie tends to slam you up against the wall of “wow, I’m not like everybody else” at least occasionally, and I suppose those more typical evangelistic folks have not had their nose bruised on that particular wall very often.

Best regards!

Ah yes, those sorts...

[ferngladefarm.blogspot.com.au]

Hi John Michael,

I reckon the less something works in reality, and the more it promises to work, the louder the screeching from the believers seems to be.

Mate, those true believers bore the daylights out of me, and on hearing them I start thinking about parsnips instead. Not sure what that means!

I am a self confessed music geek and the only thing I know about EST is that the delightful band REM sang about it in their very sad, but outstanding song: "Country Feedback". I'd have to suggest that the cheeky scamps weren't too polite about the reference either. After hearing those lyrics I was on my guard against the true believers noise... Their braying does not influence me.

Cheers

Chris

[(Anonymous)]

Haha that gave me a chuckle, having spent so much time around weston a pricers (I do enjoy much of his recommendstions but don't evangelize it). You'd probably find it ironic that many in the weston a price crowd are comprised of evangelical Christians. I had a feeling that your diet post would stir them up as those who evangelize for wap are quitr easily stirred. I just keep quiet and enjoy my raw milk, butter, bacon, kimchi, and sourdough.

Berne, et. al

[(Anonymous)]

I was into Transactional Analysis for a while before I got into Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP inoculated me against several of the TA claims. One was when I learned that Dr. Berne was a Freudian, and he still used Freudian analysis for himself. The other was when we got into sub-personalities, and the instructors said that the only people they'd seen with Parent, Adult and Child sub personalities were people who had been through TA. And they all had them. Apparently TA creates those sub personalities.

One of the things we were being trained to do was avoid unconsciously imposing our own biases on people we were working with. A lot easier said than done!

The TA books are still useful as catalogs of problematic behaviors.

John Roth

Re: He-Whose-Name-Will-Not-Be-Mentioned

[ecosophia]

If people want to do heavily marketed self-help seminars, I have no problem with that. If they're polite about it, as you are, I have even less problem with that. I don't think you'd be entertained if I were to go through the training, though; my usual approach in such situations is to sit back, go through the motions as necessary to avoid drawing unwanted attention to myself, and leave as quickly as circumstances permit.

[ecosophia]

Hmm! That seems plausible.

[ecosophia]

Ganesh, I don't think it was Neophyte Syndrome; the guy had a Ph.D. in philosophy and had been involved in the neopagan scene for a while. Watching him certainly cured me of any faint lingering interest I might have had in est...

Re: Berne, et. al

[ecosophia]

Of course Berne was a Freudian, and used Freudian methods; TA is basically a reworking of Freudian ideas. The Parent, Adult, and Child subpersonalities are better known as the Superego, Ego, and Id from Freudian psychology -- Berne simply found that the less fancy terms were easier to use to communicate. As for your trainers's claims about the subpersonalities, that baffles me; I've never been through TA analysis -- I learned from books -- and have found the subpersonality patterns to be very useful as tools for understanding human behavior. Still, your mileage may vary; I read a number of books on NLP back in the early 1980s and found it unhelpful and rather vapid, but I know a lot of people like it.

Re: Can't shut up vs. Can't hear

[ecosophia]

Oh, granted. Just as the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea, the opposite of one bad habit is usually another bad habit.

[ecosophia]

One of the many ways in which religious ideas get rehashed in secular drag. A doctorate is the secular equivalent of priestly rank, proclaiming your right to speak for (the absence of) God.

[ecosophia]

Thank you. Yes, let's definitely get that one into circulation.

Re: Cheech and Chong's Law of Evangelism

[ecosophia]

Cheech and Chong are a good deal wiser than a lot of authorities -- including dietary ones! As for pizza, dear gods, yes. Gluten-free imitations of most breadlike substances are the kind of abominations that make Lovecraftian horrors back away, crossing themselves...

[ecosophia]

Funny. I'd like to suggest an experiment. Go onto some public forum and propose that different people thrive on different diets, and don't back down the moment the first diet evangelist challenges you. I'll be interested to see if everyone just nods and smiles, or if you get the same kind of flack I did for suggesting that bit of heresy!

[ecosophia]

That makes a great deal of sense. Thank you!

Re: Ah yes, those sorts...

[ecosophia]

Parsnips? Hmm. The Freudians would have fun with that one!

[ecosophia]

I don't find that ironic or surprising; a lot of evangelical Christians these days have gotten into natural-health ideas of late. I'll definitely agree about bacon and kimchi -- I make my own kimchi these days, in half gallon canning jars -- but since my wife is allergic to cow's milk and all gluten-containing grains, a lot of the WAP diet wouldn't be an option for us if we wanted it to be. And of course that's a large part of the problem with so many of the current round of dietary theories -- different people really do thrive on different foods!

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who favors the nutritional wisdom of WAPF (I think they're smoking their freaking shorts about vaccines), it really made me sad to read that so many of its advocates are behaving like the vegans I remember from Politically Correct Co-op Land in my college-student days. It just goes to show that human beings never seem to get tired of finding new ways and opportunities to be disappointing.

I will say that I think probably everybody would be better off avoiding white sugar (HFCS is even worse), white flour, white rice, and commercial vegetable oils (polyunsaturated oils in clear plastic bottles become rancid quickly). But even I make an exception for pasta. I've tried the whole-grain pasta and it's....not good. And people who are passionate about Italian-American cuisine will think you're a big jerk for using the whole-wheat kind of pasta!

evangelism

[(Anonymous)]

I have been thinking about this quite a bit. Having been brought into this world and reared by evangelical Christian missionaries, evangelism is "in my blood" so to say, or at least it has been a big feature of my upbringing. The closest descriptions of the mindset of an evangeliser that I have ever read are contained in Eric Hoffer's "True Believer: Anatomy of a Mass Movement". What he outlined was that the evangelist is missing is not so much lack of belief in their message, but lack of belief in their SELF. Any message could then become the focal "filling" resorted to to fill up the sensed deficiency in the self. Especially if the message connected the person to a greater sense of belonging. Now I know that Christian evangelism relies on a simple heuristic "we got to get them lost, before we can get them saved" (this is a quote from an autobiographical book "Don't Sleep, there are Snakes" (which highlights one man's journey away from "evangelising" after encountering the people he had thought he'd be "saving"). But, in any case, evangelism never makes any headway among those who are content with their lives and with their vocations and with their relationships and ultimately with themselves. On the other hand, when there is a whole society full of people who feel "damaged" or "ruined" as Hoffer points out, mass movements can easily coalesce around any message that offers itself to become the "good news". My two cents. Scotlyn

[ecosophia]

Wholegrain flours and brown rice are good if you can digest them. Many people with certain kinds of digestive difficulties can't -- the bran causes what's colorfully labeled "dumping syndrome." There are also, as with pasta, issues of taste and texture. Back before my wife's celiac disease flared and all gluten-containing grains had to vanish from our kitchen, I used to make bread with 3/4 unbleached white flour and 1/4 barley flour, and even my picky vegan friends considered it some of the best bread they'd ever eaten. Yes, I made the occasional wholegrain loaf, but they simply weren't as good.

Re: evangelism

[ecosophia]

That makes a vast amount of sense. I didn't realize that Christian evangelists were so honest about wrecking people's lives in order to "save" them, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised As a regular target for evangelization attempts back in my younger years, I was impressed by how systematically Christian evangelists ignored that little bit about not bearing false witness in the Ten Commandments; whenever they opened their mouths about other religions, among other things, they lied with a degree of bland conviction that would have made an old-fashioned con artist blush.