Unhinged Friendly Philosophy Uprooted at its Core

Autodidacts are everywhere. A surprisingly great number of self-educated people may never have questioned the origins and authors of pseudo-sciences they loyally claim validity for and buttress with their own charismatic arguments if anyone will listen.

New Agers from every walk of life pick up bits and pieces of pop psychology, cosmology, and alchemy or witchcraft and spin their own quirky narrative that is then tested in endless casual conversation with their acquaintances; people they run into on the street, at parties, in cafés . . anywhere.

Recently a fellow I enjoy chewing the fat with over morning coffee has claimed that what guides him in his gainful endeavors is Neuro-Linguistic Programming. But Lenny, let's call him, cannot cite chapter and verse about this pseudo-science despite adhering to NLP's basic principles.

Well Lenny is going to have an earful from me the next time we meet.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder are the 'fathers' of NLP. The briefest search on the Internet reveals that both have taken each other to court fighting over the school they joined to launch as a commercially lucrative seminar circuit and cultish Chautauqua across the USA. A little further searching and one discovers how Bandler's behaviour is nothing short of psycopathic; at least according to eye-witnesses interviewed by serious and probing reporters.

There may be a success story down the road for NLP as a religion of super-sales mindsets. The NLP appears to be a starfish capable of regenerating lost appendages.

Here are the links and a scanned page from a 1989 issue of 'MOTHER JONES' MAGAZINE. I still think I will wade through the conference notes from one three-day long NLP workshop. In keeping with the top-down, authoritarian character of the Bandler-Grinder bandwagon, these notes are published under their names, not the workshop participant who penned them originally. ("Frogs into Princes", Real People Press; my edition is in French translation as "Les Secrets de la Communication" and published in 1982 by Le Jour, éditeur in Montreal)

After scanning what Mother Jones reports below: Would You Read One of Bandler's Book? Am I merely polluting my brain?









If you cannot read these scans here, and to access all eight pages online, click on the title of this post at the top.