From: "Richard Brodie" <richard@brodietech.com>
To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: RE: On 'information transmission'
Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 11:07:18 -0800
In-Reply-To: <fc.005b8ff1001b1daf3b9aca00f889bf93.1b1e96@amazon.shu.ac.uk>
I.F. Price wrote:
<<Richard, do you happen to know whether Landmark yet see themselves as a
designer mind virus group. I agree with you they are. For the record
Shifting the Patterns had one of its roots in an attempt to make sense of
Landmark derived methods and reconcile them with others, including classic
NLP and Senge's and Pascal's work. My co-author was someone who had
deliberately chosen to add mutation to his replication of the Landmark
approach.>>
Well, I have yet to meet any Landmark graduate who has read Virus of the
Mind and NOT concluded that Landmark is a designer mind virus as I define it
in my book. There is a difficulty with asking if "they" see themselves this
way, because as with any mind virus there's really nobody in charge. I
haven't talked with the company executives, Werner Erhard's brother and
sister Harry and Joan Rosenberg, so I can't answer for them. I would
certainly doubt they would like to see themselves in that light, especially
since they so devote themselves to combating the label "cult."
Some of the Landmark teachings are very good, I think, and it's certainly
not any more abusive of adherents than, say, Microsoft or Harvard Medical
School. I use the term designer mind virus not as a good or bad thing, but
to describe the self-replicating nature of the group: it perpetuates itself
by training members to evangelize for it.
Richard Brodie richard@brodietech.com http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/
Author, "Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme"
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/votm.htm
Free newsletter! Visit Meme Central at
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/meme.htm
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