est: The Steersman Handbook
A Review
You’d think I’d’ve read this by now given I got mixed up in Erhard’s est operation fresh outta Princeton, it having gotten rave reviews from both Dr. Kaufmann (the Princeton-based scholar, Nietzsche translator etc.) and David Raymond, an about-town village elder.
I was primed, having grown up overseas and out of reach of “encounter groups” etc. to fulfill my dad’s and my shared curiosity about (and wish to sample) the growing smorgasbord of psychological offerings being cooked up in the USA of that time (our family was based elsewhere, in the Philippines when I did the est Training — dad did it later in Washington DC [1]).
What to note about this book is it predates the est Training and is where Erhard got his inspiration regarding Transformation, by his own admission somewhere. His experience of what Transformation meant resonated with what was between those book covers.
EST = Electronic Social Transformation in some passages, although Stevens is clear about the Latin meaning as well, as in “to be” (also a part of Erhard’s spin).
The book is McLuhanesque in terms of attributing the great generational divide to respective diets in terms of media, between the linear book-reading Establishment of legislators, and the immersed “simulsense” TV generation he calls the Movement.
