American author, lecturer and entrepreneurial guru, a merchandiser of self-improvement and enlightenment, who founded “est” (Erhard Seminars Training) which operated from 1971 to 1984. His high-energy brand of instant salvation flourished in the mid-’70s, making him an equally instant multi-millionaire. His organization spawned a network centred on the principles of transformation. In 1977 Erhard, with the support of John Denver, Robert W. Fuller and others, founded The Hunger Project, an NGO accredited by the United Nations in which more than four million people have participated with the goal of establishing “the end of hunger as an idea whose time has come”. From the 1970s Erhard became the object of popular fascination and criticism, with the media tending to vilify him over several decades. In recognition of his humanitarian work around the world, in 1988 Werner Erhard was awarded the Mahatma Gandhi Humanitarian Award.
In 1960, John Paul “Jack” Rosenberg left his first wife Patricia Fry and four children in Philadelphia and changed his name so they could not find him. He chose “Werner Hans Erhard” from Esquire magazine articles he had read about West German economics minister Ludwig Erhard and physicist Werner Heisenberg. After five years without contact, Patricia Rosenberg divorced Erhard for desertion and remarried.
In 1961, Erhard began selling correspondence courses. In January 1962, Erhard began working at Parents Magazine Cultural Institute, a division of W.R. Grace & Co. Over the next few years, Erhard moved up the ladder into management and brought on as Parents staff many people who later became important in est, including Elaine Cronin, Gonneke Spits, and Laurel Scheaf.
After moving to Sausalito, Erhard easily fit into the California subcultures of human potential movements, pop psychology and eastern metaphysics. The story goes that he “got it” one day in an instant while stuck on a crowded freeway, the awareness that he was not his emotions and beliefs and intellect, but he was the creator and source of his experience. In 1970 he became involved in Mind Dynamics and began teaching his own version of Mind Dynamics classes in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Erhard, the one-time used-car salesman, studied the consciousness disciplines of east and west to integrate his own brand of group therapy workshops. Starting in 1971, est, short for Erhard Seminars Training and Latin for “it is”, offered in-depth personal and professional development workshops, the initial program of which was called “The est Training”. The est Training’s purpose was to transform the way one sees and makes sense of life so that the situations one had been trying to change or tolerating clear up in the process of living itself. The point was to leave participants free to be, while increasing their effectiveness and the quality of their lives. The est Training was experiential and transformational in nature.
It was reported that est attracted 700,000 people, including such public figures as actress Valerie Harper and singer John Denver. Much of the jargon of est became part of the culture of the “me generation,” such as “getting it” and “creating your own space.”
In 1982, enrolment in est began dropping and the IRS claimed that Erhard owed $2 million in back taxes. When Erhard retired est in 1984, he came up with another program called “The Forum” which was pitched to people who wanted to “make it happen.” It began in January 1985. The Forum jumped the price from $475 for an est session to $595 for learning to “get a decisive edge in your ability to achieve.”
A handsome man with a raspy voice thickened by cigars, the executive Erhard wore sleek European jackets and exercised power that extended well past his original est weekends. WE&A (Werner Erhard and Associates) projected gross revenues of $39 million in 1988. From 1984, Erhard also ran Transformational Technologies Inc, a management consultant firm that brought in an annual $25 million. The third leg of his organization was The Breakthrough Foundation, a nonprofit entity that worked in the area of juvenile delinquency and in combating world hunger.
In January 1991, a memo from his Bay Area company recommended bankruptcy. That year Erhard retired from business and sold his existing intellectual property to his employees, who then adopted the name Landmark Education, renamed in 2013 Landmark Worldwide.
His adult kids, in interviews, told the press horror stories of abuse. For example, his daughter, Celeste, told a San Jose paper: “You never knew when he was going to go off and throw things or smack mom.” Erhard’s daughters later retracted the allegations of sexual abuse they had made against him. Celeste Erhard featured on 60 Minutes, sued John Hubner and the San Jose Mercury News for $2 million, accusing the newspaper of having “defrauded her and invaded her privacy”, saying she had exaggerated information, been promised a $2 million book deal, and appeared on 60 Minutes to get publicity for the book. Celeste claimed that her quotes in a Mercury News article were deceitfully obtained. The case was dismissed in August 1993, the judge ruling that the statute of limitations had expired, that Celeste “had suffered no monetary damages or physical harm and that she failed to present legal evidence that Hubner had deliberately misled her”, which is legally required for damages.
In 1993 Werner Erhard filed a wrongful disclosure lawsuit against the IRS, asserting that IRS agents had incorrectly and illegally revealed details of his tax returns to the media. In April 1991, IRS spokesmen were widely quoted alleging that “Erhard owed millions of dollars in back taxes, that he was transferring assets out of the country, and that the agency was suing Erhard”, branding Erhard a “tax cheat”. On 15 April, the IRS was reported to have placed a lien of $6.7 million on Erhard’s personal property. In his suit Erhard stated that he had never refused to pay taxes that were lawfully due, and in September 1996 he won the suit. The IRS paid him $200,000 in damages. While admitting that the media reports quoting the IRS on Erhard’s tax liabilities had been false, the IRS took no action to have the media correct those statements.
In 1960 Erhard wed his second wife June Bryde who then changed her name to Ellen Virginia Erhard. She separated from him in September 1982 after 22 years of marriage and three children, Celeste (born 1963), Adair (born 1964) and St. John (born 1968). In 1983 the couple divorced.
Link to Wikipedia biography