Follow-up : The Richard Bandler Post Tested on My Friend . . . . . . . . . (Former Friend?)

I printed out page one of the scanned article from Mother Jones Magazine about Richard Bandler (a co-founder of Neuro- Linguistic Programming, NLP) and gave it to Lenny in the restaurant today. Immediately it put him on the defensive and a back 'n' forth, heated discussion ensued. He claims I see only the negative and that I am afraid of success.

The number of tortuous arguments for dissociating the school of NLP from its disturbed and disturbing founding father that Lenny laid on the table was like grabbing from straws. He jumped from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein to whoever. "It's not the man who invented it, but the science's ability to enlighten us that matters. I don't care about Bandler. Take the workshop, read the text. Don't go into it with all this negativity."

Enough. Basta. It's too easy to rehash my arguments here and have no one but a straw man as the butt of all argument. (Unless my dozen or so readers wish to start commenting and taking sides, I won't do dialogues of the fictional sort in blog post to air issues that embody real-world disagreements with real friends in day-to-day encounters.

I quit Lenny's table in as natural and polite manner as possible and joined Mark and his 18-month-old baby daughter (with her beautiful copper hair). The cook came out and took baby Rhena off as our discussion about L. Ron Hubbard, Ayn Rand and this Richard Bandler became more engrossing. (The cook is a shirt-tail relative and welcomes babysitting baby Rhena like her uncle.) Mark and me continued to discuss Slavespeak.

One conclusion Mark and I came to: You cannot casually engage serious convert about his or her cultish belief system and ever expect to get beyond square one. The convert is hanging to their dogma like post-crash Titanic passenger would cling to some floating plank -- a buoy and lifepreserver in the midst of the chaotic and chilling waters of their existence. To openly question the solidity of their position and invite the man or woman tossed overboard to let go and swim relying on their own strength is to invite them to commit psychic suicide under such circumstances.

So Mark and I took 15 or 20 minutes advantage of the break from his fatherly responsibilities to drag out all the 'negativity' we savour in our store of conversational tidbits about the founders of Mormonism, Scientology, the Raelians, and the NLPers. We cut Joseph Stalin a very little bit of slack but pondered the starvation of 1.5 million Ukrainians in the late 1940s. I like to chat with both Lenny and Mark. And any wrongheadedness in cultist perspectives doesn't automatically mean that Mark and I know shit about the "Mystery and Magic of the Universe" or that Lenny is always out to lunch. All three of us can share insights and all three, as fathers, know how to change a diaper. We willingly get stuck with the job when we can. It's just that we'll be damned if we'll ever talk about it!

I hope this copy of the first page of an article about Richard Bandler is more readable* within the pages of Cheap Priceless Editions. Go down two posts from here for a link to the online version.

I click on images and use the 'Enlarge' 'Decrease' icon on the resulting image (put cursor over it) to bring it up to a readable size. Or just go to the original link.