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A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "
Did you know?" column on
September 17, 2009. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that
William Warren Bartley, author of the biography
Werner Erhard, also served several years as philosophical consultant to
Erhard's
est training? |
This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Following discussion here last March, here are some initial proposals for a re-write of the "Contents" section to give a fuller and more balanced summary of the book. Maybe we can reach consensus here and then icorporate the changes into the article? DaveApter ( talk) 13:02, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
The book covers three related aspects: it describes Erhard's personal life story, including his family relationships; it details the various schools of thought Erhard had come across in his personal search, before creating the est program; and it provides an overview of the basic practical and theoretical assumptions underlying Erhard's outlook, as transmitted in the est program. [1] [2] Erhard wrote a foreword to the biography. [3] He comments that a quote from Søren Kierkegaard selected by Bartley "seems to pierce to the heart of what happened" in Erhard's life. [3]
OK, though the punctuation is poor in the original and needs to be fixed, which I will do once the revision is published. Sensei48 ( talk) 18:24, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
The book recounts how Erhard, originally named Jack Rosenberg, interrupted his education in his final year of high school to marry and support his pregnant girlfriend Pat Campbell. He took on a variety of jobs available to an unqualified school-leaver drop-out – meat-packing, plumbing, construction work - and proved to have an special aptitude for salesmanship, working successfully in several automobile dealerships.
By the time he was 25, Jack and Pat Rosenberg and his wife had four children, but he was feeling increasingly restless and constrained. He formed a friendship with a woman named June Bryde, which gradually deepened into an affair. He secretly arranged a flight from
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with June in 1960, leaving behind his wife and their four children.
[3] They settled for a time in St Louis and severed all contact with his family; it would be twelve years before they would hear from him again. It was at this time that he assumed the name Werner Erhard, and June called herself Ellen Erhard.
After more work in car sales during which he adopted the pseudonym "Jack Frost", Erhard joined the sales staff of ‘’Parents’’ magazine and was rapidly promoted to training manager and eventually appointed Vice-President in 1967. During this period they Erhard moved frequently to different parts of the US as dictated by the demands of the job, finally settling in San Francisco. When Parents Magazine was sold to the Time-Life group, he was recruited by the Grolier Society as Divisional Manager. According to Grolier vice-president John Wirtz the intention of appointing Erhard was that he would bring “integrity, honesty and straightforwardness” to their sales practices
[4].
Shortly after moving to St Louis, Erhard began to ponder the perennial issues of life, and [text is vague and inflated] to embark on a program of inquiry [U.S. sp. for U.S. topic] and self-education. Initially he focused on self-improvement classics [POVbooks such as
Think and Grow Rich by
Napoleon Hill.
[5] and
Psycho-Cybernetics by
Maxwell Maltz.
From there, he widened his search to academic but unorthodox
Human Potential Movement psychologists such as
Abraham Maslow and
Carl Rogers,[both are anything but unorthodox] a range of traditional Western philosophers, and Eastern disciplines such as
Zen Buddhism,
Taoism,
Confucianism,
Subud and the
Martial arts; and also, as well as contemporary movements including
Mind Dynamics, and
Scientology.
[6] Bartley writes that Erhard was "profoundly dissatisfied with the competitive and meaningless status quo". Erhard told Bartley he had a positive experience with Scientology which helped expand his mind, but that he had deep reservations regarding certain aspects of its teachings and methodologies.
Bartley recounts a
revelation Erhard asserted that he experienced in March 1971 while driving into
San Francisco, California to work at Grolier Society.
[7] Erhard described to Bartley what the revelation experience felt like: "What happened had no form. It was timeless, unbounded, ineffable, beyond language."
[8] He told Bartley that he realized: "I had to 'clean up' my life. I had to acknowledge and correct the lies in my life. I saw that the lies that I told about others — my wanting my family, or Ellen (his second wife), or anyone else, to be different from the way that they are -- came from lies that I told about myself -- my wanting to be different from the way that I was."
[7] He set up a business venture for Ellen which gave her the financial freedom to choose how to structure her life and her relationship with him. Erhard and Ellen divorced in 1988. [This is the fact related in the book, sans positive spin.]
His desire to share this experience led to the plans formed later that year to create the est training. The first promotional seminar was held in September with over one thousand attendees, and the first est training took place in October 1971 in a San Francisco hotel.
In October 1972, while leading an est session in New York, Erhard realized that the time had come to reconnect with his family after an absence of 12 years. [3] Although his long absence from his family caused them feelings of confusion and pain, he re-established cordial and loving relationships with all of them. [3] His brother and sister became est Trainers and took on prominent roles in the business.
Key concepts of the est training (depicted by familiar words, used with specialised meanings) as defined by Erhard and described in the book include:
DaveApter ( talk) 13:02, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
Strikethroughs and boldface represent text changes to proposed edits - 10/5/12; italics are my comments. These are initial edits. Sensei48 ( talk) 18:24, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
References
PsychologyToday
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).et8490
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).I am creating this as a new section because I would like to leave DavidApter's proposal undisturbed for ease of consideration. Reacting with strikethroughs or intralinear comments, even in italics, would confuse what the actual edit says. And my thanks to DavidApter for his considerate adherence to Wiki policy of offering a major edit for consideration before incorporating it into the article.
My own reactions are mixed but tending to regard this edit proposal with with significant caution. It is clearly thoughtful and well-composed and certainly well-intended. However, it appears to me to be only a limited improvement over what is in the article already, and rather than creating a more balanced NPOV as DavidApter suggests, it slants and spins details within the book away from neutrality and toward a positive image of a controversial book about a controversial personage. Much of the language in the proposed edit is problematic, but content and removal of sourced material is more significant and needs to be addressed first.
Proposed edit in italics; my responses below.
"Promising" "special aptitude" "working successfully" - all unacceptable POV with a positive spin. How is this better than the text as in the article now? -
"The book recounts how Erhard, previously known as Jack Rosenberg, used the name Jack Frost in his work as a car dealer.[24] Erhard explains to Bartley: "It was an introductory gimmick. I wanted to give customers a name that was easy to remember."[24] The author interviewed Erhard's mother, Dorothy Rosenberg, who said of his skills as a salesman: "He could sell you City Hall."[25] Erhard's aunt, Edith, commented: "Not only would he sell you City Hall. You would think you got it all tied up in a ribbon. Werner sold something to you graciously."[25] Erhard left Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1960, leaving behind his wife and their four children."
The quotations in the passage above appear to be from the book itself - removing them and replacing them with this - "According to Grolier vice-president John Wirtz the intention of appointing Erhard was that he would bring “integrity, honesty and straightforwardness” to their sales practices" is self-evident spin to the positive and in no way objective.
First, as with much of this proposed edit, the passage above is a commentary (and one with loaded and adulatory description) of Erhard and not of what Bartley says about Erhard. This entire section must be phrased and carefully reported as Bartley's understanding of Erhard. The relevant portion of the current article -
"Erhard was self-educated in philosophy, Mind Dynamics, and Scientology.[28] Bartley writes that Erhard was "profoundly dissatisfied with the competitive and meaningless status quo", and was influenced by the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.[29] Erhard told Bartley he had a positive experience with Scientology which helped expand his mind, commenting in the book: "After my experience with Scientology, I saw what it means to see the mind as a machine. I can now operate my mind accordingly, with exactitude. I can do the familiar mind over matter experiments-- the control of pain and bleeding, telepathy, those things."[28] Erhard reconnected with his family after an absence of 12 years.[23] According to the book, his long absence from his family caused them feelings of confusion and pain.[23]" - is greatly superior to the proposed revision in this regard.
This sentence appears in the current edit but needs revision here and across other Wiki articles on Erhard. As a guide and reference, I looked to Wiki articles on Buddhism, Mormonism, and Scientology, selecting those because they are three prominent movements based on the claim of transcendent revelations to the founders. All three include the careful and objective (and non-perjorative) idea of a claim or perception of revelation rather than as a statement of fact.
The current edit does need to be rewritten because it refers to a People magazine article and not to the book. However, this sentence ignores the fact that Erhard had affairs during his second marriage and that they had a negative impact upon his wife. To my memory, Bartley discusses this, but the proposed edit appears to spin and whitewash an unpleasant fact to the end of creating a positive image of Erhard.
The content is acceptable but phrasing needs changing, especially a grammatical subtlety. First and again, this must be phrased an sourced as Bartley, not as Erhard. Second, the "although" most emphatically needs to go - as the proposed edit stands, the feelings of pain appear in a subordinate clause and are (quite naturally) subordinated to the cordial and loving relationships (for which I suggest a direct quote or it is a violation of NPOV). That sentence needs to be compound, both halves then being equal. - as "His long absence from his family caused them feelings of confusion and pain, but he re-established cordial and loving relationships with all of them."
...and the subsequent passages to the end of the section are off-topic and inappropriately violate several Wiki principles, especially OR and synthesis. This section is the editor interpreting est, not a factual report of Bartley's book. The best alternative here would be simply to say that Bartley recounts the basic principles of est and wikilink to the main article about them.
Again, I think we agree that the section needs revision, but extreme care must be taken to avoid removing negatives about Erhard that Bartley reports and phrase the language of the new edit in a neutral manner. regards, Sensei48 ( talk) 16:44, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
I removed the last paragraph of the contents section. It might be the the writer used the Bartley book as a source of info about Erhard, but the article is not written about the book. So it seems to me we can't use the article as a source of information about the contents of the book -- MLKLewis ( talk) 16:36, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
I too want to thank you Dave Apter for diving in and proposing for discussion a change to the content section. Overall, I agree with the proposed edits, along with some of Sensei's revisions, and some other's that I'd like to propose. I like that the proposed edit for the Contents section is split up into the three sections that relate to the "three related aspects of the book." This is an important point about the book that is not adequately handled in the current version. The book is really quite complex and a good portion of it is concerned with Bartley's philosophical and scholarly investigations into the various disciplines that Erhard studied. He calls these chapters of the book, "Intersections." I'd like to see a bit more about this dealt with.
My comments on the Life Story section: I do like Dave's more overall summary of the contents of the book, rather than the current version which cherry picks a few relatively minor points. The book is not even close to primarily being about how Erhard chose his name or names. To lead with "The book recounts how Erhard, previously known as Jack Rosenberg, used the name Jack Frost in his work as a car dealer" is misleading as to the content of the book. The early life section takes up a full quarter of the entire book. Jack Rosenberg using the name Jack Frost when he was a salesman and why he did so is merely a few lines in the book, but if we want to leave it in it should be in context, so I added it with the full quote from the book in my proposed edit. Here is a proposed rewrite:
My comments on the Personal search and self-education section:
Regarding the line, Erhard began to ponder the perennial issues of life, and to embark on a program of enquiry and self-education…. I’ve been struggling with how to write this without sounding adulatory, but this actually captures in summation what Bartley says throughout the whole book quite well. A large part of the book deals with Erhard’s self generated impetus to think, learn, discover and create. In the book it is clear that Erhard embarked on pondering the meaning of life from an early age and that it was his thinking about the “perennial issues of life” that was the seed of the est training. It is kind of the point of the whole book. Perhaps too, this section should be where we look at Bartley’s investigation into the disciplines that Erhard studied. I’ll have a crack at it at a later time. As it is I have spent way more time than I planned to on this, and I have got to get on with my day ... I'll come back later with some thoughts for the last section -- MLKLewis ( talk) 20:26, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
Thanks to Dave for picking this up again. I understand Sensei48's concerns expressed above, about the summary sounding too reverential, but these shortcomings can be overcome. MLKLewis is going in the right direction there. Regarding the line, Erhard began to ponder the perennial issues of life, and to embark on a program of enquiry and self-education a more pedestrian version would be, "Erhard felt a need to understand the meaning of life, and read voraciously" (we should mention the "Intersections" in which Bartley presents Erhard's philosophical background). Lastly, if we mention that his brother and sister became est trainers, we should mention that his first wife too took an office job with est (p. 243). J N 466 10:00, 21 August 2012 (UTC)
It's been over six weeks since the last comment in this debate on improving the 'Content' section of the article, which had been agreed to be unsatisfactory insofar as it fails - in its present form - to give a clear and balanced summary of the book. Maybe it's time to go ahead with making some edits and rely on the collaboartive editing process to refine it? DaveApter ( talk) 10:37, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
On another matter, I feel that the background section remains unsatisfactory. This is a boilerplate paragraph that was inserted into numerous articles on related subjects by an editor who has since been sanctioned for POV violations, and seems to me to be biased towards creating an overly negative perception of the est trainings.
My last edit was immediately partially reverted to re-introduce the terms 'Facistic' and 'Narcissitic'. Surely these are inapproriate in this context in an encyclopedia article? Wikipedia defines Fascism as:
Surely even est's most virulent detractors did not assert that this is a valid description in any literal sense?
Neither is it very helpful to know that some critic applied the term 'Narcissistic'. The wikipedia article on that states:
The reader is left with no idea which of these multiple meanings is intended, but with a vague idea that they didn't like it. DaveApter ( talk) 10:37, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
Hello,
Was Werner Erhard born Jack Rosenberg or John Paul Rosenberg?
If not Jack then the Jack Rosenberg redirection should be deleted.
2A02:2788:22A:2BF:192A:B569:90D3:712D ( talk) 00:30, 28 September 2019 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Werner Erhard (book) article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1Auto-archiving period: 90 days |
Werner Erhard (book) has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "
Did you know?" column on
September 17, 2009. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that
William Warren Bartley, author of the biography
Werner Erhard, also served several years as philosophical consultant to
Erhard's
est training? |
This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Following discussion here last March, here are some initial proposals for a re-write of the "Contents" section to give a fuller and more balanced summary of the book. Maybe we can reach consensus here and then icorporate the changes into the article? DaveApter ( talk) 13:02, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
The book covers three related aspects: it describes Erhard's personal life story, including his family relationships; it details the various schools of thought Erhard had come across in his personal search, before creating the est program; and it provides an overview of the basic practical and theoretical assumptions underlying Erhard's outlook, as transmitted in the est program. [1] [2] Erhard wrote a foreword to the biography. [3] He comments that a quote from Søren Kierkegaard selected by Bartley "seems to pierce to the heart of what happened" in Erhard's life. [3]
OK, though the punctuation is poor in the original and needs to be fixed, which I will do once the revision is published. Sensei48 ( talk) 18:24, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
The book recounts how Erhard, originally named Jack Rosenberg, interrupted his education in his final year of high school to marry and support his pregnant girlfriend Pat Campbell. He took on a variety of jobs available to an unqualified school-leaver drop-out – meat-packing, plumbing, construction work - and proved to have an special aptitude for salesmanship, working successfully in several automobile dealerships.
By the time he was 25, Jack and Pat Rosenberg and his wife had four children, but he was feeling increasingly restless and constrained. He formed a friendship with a woman named June Bryde, which gradually deepened into an affair. He secretly arranged a flight from
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with June in 1960, leaving behind his wife and their four children.
[3] They settled for a time in St Louis and severed all contact with his family; it would be twelve years before they would hear from him again. It was at this time that he assumed the name Werner Erhard, and June called herself Ellen Erhard.
After more work in car sales during which he adopted the pseudonym "Jack Frost", Erhard joined the sales staff of ‘’Parents’’ magazine and was rapidly promoted to training manager and eventually appointed Vice-President in 1967. During this period they Erhard moved frequently to different parts of the US as dictated by the demands of the job, finally settling in San Francisco. When Parents Magazine was sold to the Time-Life group, he was recruited by the Grolier Society as Divisional Manager. According to Grolier vice-president John Wirtz the intention of appointing Erhard was that he would bring “integrity, honesty and straightforwardness” to their sales practices
[4].
Shortly after moving to St Louis, Erhard began to ponder the perennial issues of life, and [text is vague and inflated] to embark on a program of inquiry [U.S. sp. for U.S. topic] and self-education. Initially he focused on self-improvement classics [POVbooks such as
Think and Grow Rich by
Napoleon Hill.
[5] and
Psycho-Cybernetics by
Maxwell Maltz.
From there, he widened his search to academic but unorthodox
Human Potential Movement psychologists such as
Abraham Maslow and
Carl Rogers,[both are anything but unorthodox] a range of traditional Western philosophers, and Eastern disciplines such as
Zen Buddhism,
Taoism,
Confucianism,
Subud and the
Martial arts; and also, as well as contemporary movements including
Mind Dynamics, and
Scientology.
[6] Bartley writes that Erhard was "profoundly dissatisfied with the competitive and meaningless status quo". Erhard told Bartley he had a positive experience with Scientology which helped expand his mind, but that he had deep reservations regarding certain aspects of its teachings and methodologies.
Bartley recounts a
revelation Erhard asserted that he experienced in March 1971 while driving into
San Francisco, California to work at Grolier Society.
[7] Erhard described to Bartley what the revelation experience felt like: "What happened had no form. It was timeless, unbounded, ineffable, beyond language."
[8] He told Bartley that he realized: "I had to 'clean up' my life. I had to acknowledge and correct the lies in my life. I saw that the lies that I told about others — my wanting my family, or Ellen (his second wife), or anyone else, to be different from the way that they are -- came from lies that I told about myself -- my wanting to be different from the way that I was."
[7] He set up a business venture for Ellen which gave her the financial freedom to choose how to structure her life and her relationship with him. Erhard and Ellen divorced in 1988. [This is the fact related in the book, sans positive spin.]
His desire to share this experience led to the plans formed later that year to create the est training. The first promotional seminar was held in September with over one thousand attendees, and the first est training took place in October 1971 in a San Francisco hotel.
In October 1972, while leading an est session in New York, Erhard realized that the time had come to reconnect with his family after an absence of 12 years. [3] Although his long absence from his family caused them feelings of confusion and pain, he re-established cordial and loving relationships with all of them. [3] His brother and sister became est Trainers and took on prominent roles in the business.
Key concepts of the est training (depicted by familiar words, used with specialised meanings) as defined by Erhard and described in the book include:
DaveApter ( talk) 13:02, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
Strikethroughs and boldface represent text changes to proposed edits - 10/5/12; italics are my comments. These are initial edits. Sensei48 ( talk) 18:24, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
References
PsychologyToday
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).et8490
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).I am creating this as a new section because I would like to leave DavidApter's proposal undisturbed for ease of consideration. Reacting with strikethroughs or intralinear comments, even in italics, would confuse what the actual edit says. And my thanks to DavidApter for his considerate adherence to Wiki policy of offering a major edit for consideration before incorporating it into the article.
My own reactions are mixed but tending to regard this edit proposal with with significant caution. It is clearly thoughtful and well-composed and certainly well-intended. However, it appears to me to be only a limited improvement over what is in the article already, and rather than creating a more balanced NPOV as DavidApter suggests, it slants and spins details within the book away from neutrality and toward a positive image of a controversial book about a controversial personage. Much of the language in the proposed edit is problematic, but content and removal of sourced material is more significant and needs to be addressed first.
Proposed edit in italics; my responses below.
"Promising" "special aptitude" "working successfully" - all unacceptable POV with a positive spin. How is this better than the text as in the article now? -
"The book recounts how Erhard, previously known as Jack Rosenberg, used the name Jack Frost in his work as a car dealer.[24] Erhard explains to Bartley: "It was an introductory gimmick. I wanted to give customers a name that was easy to remember."[24] The author interviewed Erhard's mother, Dorothy Rosenberg, who said of his skills as a salesman: "He could sell you City Hall."[25] Erhard's aunt, Edith, commented: "Not only would he sell you City Hall. You would think you got it all tied up in a ribbon. Werner sold something to you graciously."[25] Erhard left Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1960, leaving behind his wife and their four children."
The quotations in the passage above appear to be from the book itself - removing them and replacing them with this - "According to Grolier vice-president John Wirtz the intention of appointing Erhard was that he would bring “integrity, honesty and straightforwardness” to their sales practices" is self-evident spin to the positive and in no way objective.
First, as with much of this proposed edit, the passage above is a commentary (and one with loaded and adulatory description) of Erhard and not of what Bartley says about Erhard. This entire section must be phrased and carefully reported as Bartley's understanding of Erhard. The relevant portion of the current article -
"Erhard was self-educated in philosophy, Mind Dynamics, and Scientology.[28] Bartley writes that Erhard was "profoundly dissatisfied with the competitive and meaningless status quo", and was influenced by the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.[29] Erhard told Bartley he had a positive experience with Scientology which helped expand his mind, commenting in the book: "After my experience with Scientology, I saw what it means to see the mind as a machine. I can now operate my mind accordingly, with exactitude. I can do the familiar mind over matter experiments-- the control of pain and bleeding, telepathy, those things."[28] Erhard reconnected with his family after an absence of 12 years.[23] According to the book, his long absence from his family caused them feelings of confusion and pain.[23]" - is greatly superior to the proposed revision in this regard.
This sentence appears in the current edit but needs revision here and across other Wiki articles on Erhard. As a guide and reference, I looked to Wiki articles on Buddhism, Mormonism, and Scientology, selecting those because they are three prominent movements based on the claim of transcendent revelations to the founders. All three include the careful and objective (and non-perjorative) idea of a claim or perception of revelation rather than as a statement of fact.
The current edit does need to be rewritten because it refers to a People magazine article and not to the book. However, this sentence ignores the fact that Erhard had affairs during his second marriage and that they had a negative impact upon his wife. To my memory, Bartley discusses this, but the proposed edit appears to spin and whitewash an unpleasant fact to the end of creating a positive image of Erhard.
The content is acceptable but phrasing needs changing, especially a grammatical subtlety. First and again, this must be phrased an sourced as Bartley, not as Erhard. Second, the "although" most emphatically needs to go - as the proposed edit stands, the feelings of pain appear in a subordinate clause and are (quite naturally) subordinated to the cordial and loving relationships (for which I suggest a direct quote or it is a violation of NPOV). That sentence needs to be compound, both halves then being equal. - as "His long absence from his family caused them feelings of confusion and pain, but he re-established cordial and loving relationships with all of them."
...and the subsequent passages to the end of the section are off-topic and inappropriately violate several Wiki principles, especially OR and synthesis. This section is the editor interpreting est, not a factual report of Bartley's book. The best alternative here would be simply to say that Bartley recounts the basic principles of est and wikilink to the main article about them.
Again, I think we agree that the section needs revision, but extreme care must be taken to avoid removing negatives about Erhard that Bartley reports and phrase the language of the new edit in a neutral manner. regards, Sensei48 ( talk) 16:44, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
I removed the last paragraph of the contents section. It might be the the writer used the Bartley book as a source of info about Erhard, but the article is not written about the book. So it seems to me we can't use the article as a source of information about the contents of the book -- MLKLewis ( talk) 16:36, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
I too want to thank you Dave Apter for diving in and proposing for discussion a change to the content section. Overall, I agree with the proposed edits, along with some of Sensei's revisions, and some other's that I'd like to propose. I like that the proposed edit for the Contents section is split up into the three sections that relate to the "three related aspects of the book." This is an important point about the book that is not adequately handled in the current version. The book is really quite complex and a good portion of it is concerned with Bartley's philosophical and scholarly investigations into the various disciplines that Erhard studied. He calls these chapters of the book, "Intersections." I'd like to see a bit more about this dealt with.
My comments on the Life Story section: I do like Dave's more overall summary of the contents of the book, rather than the current version which cherry picks a few relatively minor points. The book is not even close to primarily being about how Erhard chose his name or names. To lead with "The book recounts how Erhard, previously known as Jack Rosenberg, used the name Jack Frost in his work as a car dealer" is misleading as to the content of the book. The early life section takes up a full quarter of the entire book. Jack Rosenberg using the name Jack Frost when he was a salesman and why he did so is merely a few lines in the book, but if we want to leave it in it should be in context, so I added it with the full quote from the book in my proposed edit. Here is a proposed rewrite:
My comments on the Personal search and self-education section:
Regarding the line, Erhard began to ponder the perennial issues of life, and to embark on a program of enquiry and self-education…. I’ve been struggling with how to write this without sounding adulatory, but this actually captures in summation what Bartley says throughout the whole book quite well. A large part of the book deals with Erhard’s self generated impetus to think, learn, discover and create. In the book it is clear that Erhard embarked on pondering the meaning of life from an early age and that it was his thinking about the “perennial issues of life” that was the seed of the est training. It is kind of the point of the whole book. Perhaps too, this section should be where we look at Bartley’s investigation into the disciplines that Erhard studied. I’ll have a crack at it at a later time. As it is I have spent way more time than I planned to on this, and I have got to get on with my day ... I'll come back later with some thoughts for the last section -- MLKLewis ( talk) 20:26, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
Thanks to Dave for picking this up again. I understand Sensei48's concerns expressed above, about the summary sounding too reverential, but these shortcomings can be overcome. MLKLewis is going in the right direction there. Regarding the line, Erhard began to ponder the perennial issues of life, and to embark on a program of enquiry and self-education a more pedestrian version would be, "Erhard felt a need to understand the meaning of life, and read voraciously" (we should mention the "Intersections" in which Bartley presents Erhard's philosophical background). Lastly, if we mention that his brother and sister became est trainers, we should mention that his first wife too took an office job with est (p. 243). J N 466 10:00, 21 August 2012 (UTC)
It's been over six weeks since the last comment in this debate on improving the 'Content' section of the article, which had been agreed to be unsatisfactory insofar as it fails - in its present form - to give a clear and balanced summary of the book. Maybe it's time to go ahead with making some edits and rely on the collaboartive editing process to refine it? DaveApter ( talk) 10:37, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
On another matter, I feel that the background section remains unsatisfactory. This is a boilerplate paragraph that was inserted into numerous articles on related subjects by an editor who has since been sanctioned for POV violations, and seems to me to be biased towards creating an overly negative perception of the est trainings.
My last edit was immediately partially reverted to re-introduce the terms 'Facistic' and 'Narcissitic'. Surely these are inapproriate in this context in an encyclopedia article? Wikipedia defines Fascism as:
Surely even est's most virulent detractors did not assert that this is a valid description in any literal sense?
Neither is it very helpful to know that some critic applied the term 'Narcissistic'. The wikipedia article on that states:
The reader is left with no idea which of these multiple meanings is intended, but with a vague idea that they didn't like it. DaveApter ( talk) 10:37, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
Hello,
Was Werner Erhard born Jack Rosenberg or John Paul Rosenberg?
If not Jack then the Jack Rosenberg redirection should be deleted.
2A02:2788:22A:2BF:192A:B569:90D3:712D ( talk) 00:30, 28 September 2019 (UTC)