Hi All,

A few posts refer to LEC's "7 commandments" including: Be Powerful, be unreasonable, and give up being right.

Can anyone provide a list of the other "commandments" and if possible translations into English?

"Give up being right" also means its entirely acceptable to be wrong all the time and not be concerned that you:
are wrong and;
incapable of taking corrective action - this is what I mean by "translation".

I'd like to thank all of you for your posts, they really help anyone trying to manage a Landmarkian.

Thanks

Herbie_K

Translating The Landmark Forum’s “seven commandments” for being an extraordinary person into English in order to evaluate the hypothesis that they could be correct.

1)Be Racket-Free: give up being right - even when you know you were.

Translation:
if you have no commitment or desire to be right, in other words to being able to objectively assess a situation in a context of experience and demonstrated fact and then respond effectively, then you are comfortable with being wrong all the time.

Once being correct is not important, there is no reason to move from being wrong to any other state or place. If being wrong does not matter its acceptable to go nowhere. In addition you have no use for any feedback mechanism to tell you whether you are moving and headed in the direction you want to travel.

A corollary is that if you become accustomed to being wrong, then you do not have the confidence necessary to make decisions and as a result when a decision is needed, the response is inaction


2)Be Powerful: be straight in your communication and take what you get.

Translation: your interpretation of a statement is paramount and if you are straight you will get a desirable result. If we consider the hypothesis that effective communication is the communication that produces the required and desired result, then there is a clear conflict between being powerful and being effective. Very often one person’s will have no ability to control the interaction, thus it is essential to resort to diplomacy, politeness and social convention in order to engage the other party and give them a reason to play ball. Telling someone how clever you are can put them on the defensive, asking for their help gives them the options of saying, yes, no we cannot help or no we cannot help but we can refer you to someone who can. “Be powerful” and the humility that is integral to“ask for help” are irreconcilable concepts.


3)Be Courageous: acknowledge your fear (not necessarily get rid of it) and then act.

Translation: You become powerful by saying I am scared of snakes and then running away from the cage containing snakes. This is not courage, this is explicitly acknowledged cowardice without a commitment to address the cause of the fear. The effect is to energise the source of fear and increase the fear and its effects on behavior.

Courage is a term that is more correctly used to describe actions that confront the fear in a determined effort to overcome the fear and move on.



4)Be Peaceful: give up the interpretation that there’s something wrong.

Translation: If you mentally process something as OK then it won’t bug you and you will be relaxed and stress free. This might be a useful strategy when you order a coffee and you get a pot of tea, but in the real world this requires switching off your survival instincts and your other radar so that you cannot hear the warning signals. On this basis, when driving your car on a road you know, you notice that the traffic lights are off. If you interpret this as “Something wrong” you will slow down and check for other traffic before driving through the intersection. If you give up the interpretation that there’s something wrong, you just keep on driving (implicitly hoping that everyone else gets out of the way) thereby exposing yourself to extreme risk.

Also, when you give up the ability to identify things that are wrong, you give up the benefits of correcting them.


5)Be Charismatic: give up trying to get somewhere. Be entirely fulfilled in the present moment.

Translation: People who devote all their time to the present and have no desire to move anywhere are charismatic.

Charisma requires energy and people with energy usually want to move to the next place, party, meeting, opportunity. Charismatic people have dreams and goals. They gear their communications to achieve these. The Landmark interpretation of “Charismatic” appears to be unique to Landmark.



6)Be Enrolling: share your new possibilities in such a way that others are touched, moved and inspired.

Translation:

Tell everyone about what you are going to do and get them to work with you to make it happen. Reality Check: What extraordinary arrogance permits you to think that anyone cares who you are, what your plans are and has any interest in helping you make your plans happen for your benefit? We live in a competitive environment and if new possibilities conflict with another person’s it is rational for them to implement a response which could block you. This commandment focuses on talk in preference to action.


7)Be Unreasonable: in expectations of yourself and others beyond what you would think they are capable of.

Translation: We don’t know what we and others are capable of until we push the limits.
Reality check: it might be possible to push someone very far once, but if their personal reward and satisfaction does not adequately compensate them for their inconvenience, you will not be able to motivate them a second time. If you could make a case for this commandment, then it would be limited to incremental gains such as Roger Bannister’s mile in less than 4 minutes would have seemed unreasonable but not unachievable. For a once a week jogger to believe that he can beat a champion athlete in a mile race before undertaking a rigorous training regime is unreasonable, unachievable and stupid.


Stepping Back: What about the Big Picture?

Philosophically, its wonderful to have great dreams. Practically every journey begins with a single step which needs to be in the right direction. Goals are dreams with deadlines so anyone who wants to achieve a goal, needs to be able to assess their progress towards the next milestone, assess whether they are going as fast as they can and identify anything they are doing that is slowing them down, in other words they need to be able to be right, they need to be able to identify anything that is wrong, they need to be able to confront their fears and triumph over them.

Confidence and capacity are built on each obstacle and challenge the person overcomes. If the person is focused on their goals, they be able to move forward systematically without sharing their energy and losing focus by engaging other who have no commitment to the goal and nothing to contribute.


Apparently Landmark’s pitch is that people should recognize their “possibilities” and then pursue them with an all consuming zeal.

In capitalism, the measure of success is return on equity which is maximized by producing the biggest output for the smallest input.

In statistics there is a concept known as a “normal Distribution” which explains the often observed phenomenon that two thirds of the observations will be within one standard deviation of the median. In simple English its like saying that two thirds of the cars on a six lane highway will be in the middle 2 lanes and one third will be spread across the 4 other lanes. Clearly if you want to collect tolls, you would put the booths on the middle 2 lanes and ignore the other 4 lanes. This is concentrating on probabilities.

Landmark apparently encourages its students to focus on possibilities and would man toll booths on the 4 low use lanes hoping to charge a higher price per vehicle. In this case, possibilities translate to more effort and less money which means less value. This is not a precursor to economic success.


When a new student is taught to pilot an aircraft, the initial training devotes a significant amount of time and attention to crash landing if there is a problem on take off. The trainee pilot learns to identify his crash zone before he takes off because if he tries to turn back, he will lose control of the aircraft and crash harder with a higher probability of death. Clearly the reason for this discipline is that its safer to recognize risk and manage it than it is to ignore it and be without the tools to identify, recognize and respond to risk when it occurs.

In conclusion, adherence to the Landmark Commandments is a flawed strategy that has a high probability of an adverse outcome.

Even if you have no interest in flying, there is a high probability that you would get more benefit from learning how to fly a plane than you would get from the Forum.

I hope that this is of use to anyone who has been invited to participate in the Landmark Forum.

Regards

Herbie_K

Hello key-key-key

Your analysis of 'Sophie' at work in the forum is pretty astute. The manipulation going on is plain to see. Glad that she lost control so visibly (less recruits for the LMF).

Which leads me on to another topic. I'm particularly interested in how certain political organisations in the world today are acting more or less like cults. Their elitist doctrinal inflexibility, abuse of power, the Orwellian language they use and the need to translate this into its opposite (to understand the reality behind the lie) is so close to what's going on in Landmark, for example. There was a fascinating 3 part (UK) TV documentary last year called 'The Power of Nightmares' which showed quite clearly how the Neo-Cons in the US and Al-Qaida in the Middle East actually derive their inspiration from the same 1960s fringe ideologue. Ironic, eh?

I was hoping to find out more about the 'Landmark for Business' enterprise BTW, but sources are surprisingly few and far between. Maybe that's because the companies themselves who are involved are so secretive anyway. I think that if Landmark is boasting corporate names like Lockheed-Martin, Microsoft and Exxon (Halliburton next, maybe?), that tells us a lot about the true priorities under their sickening new age facade.

(And this is the only way I can reply to your PM until I have 10+ posts, sorry! Maybe you should send an email in your PM if you want to chat.)