The Happiness Fantasy summary

The ideas behind the happiness fantasy came into prominence during the 1960s and 1970s in California, where they became associated with the era’s countercultural movements. However, their roots can be traced back even further – to 1920s Vienna, where they germinated from the rather unusual life, work and thought of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich.

Starting from a very early age, Reich claims to have been driven by an obsession with sexuality, which was sparked by a series of sexual encounters in his childhood. These included masturbating his younger brother’s nursemaid at the age of five, which Reich himself later retold as him reaching “feverishly for her genitals”. At the age of ten, he eavesdropped on his mother having extramarital sex with his private teacher, and at age eleven, lost his virginity to the family’s chef.

A scattering of seeds does not grow into a forest overnight. They take years to develop and spread. The same is true of influential ideas and the movements into which they eventually blossom.

Such was the case for Reich, whose ideas first took root in California in the late 1940s and 1950s. There, groups of young, left-wing and anarchistic bohemians who became known as “hipsters” were beginning to gather. A number of signifiers marked them out from the masses of conventional society: beards, sandals, corduroys, makeshift furniture, abstract art and words like “affective,” “fluid” and “orgastic.”

To follow the path of Reich’s ideas from the hipsters of the 1950s to the hippies of the 1960s, we first need to make a stop at writer Henry Miller’s residence in scenic Big Sur, California.

As the infamous author of sexually explicit novels that were banned in the United States, Miller became a countercultural icon in the 1950s. When he settled in Big Sur in 1957, his friends followed his lead, and soon the area was known as “West Greenwich Village” – the Californian version of New York’s famous epicenter of bohemian life.

Before he took up a five-year residency at the Esalen Institute in 1964, Fritz Perls dressed the part of a traditional psychiatrist, wearing collared shirts and sports coats. Once he arrived in Big Sur, however, he ditched them for vibrant jumpsuits and a Santa Claus-like beard.

However, despite his radical change in appearance, his work at the institute represented a continuation of Gestalt therapy – a Wilhelm Reich-inspired approach to psychotherapy that Perls developed back in his more buttoned-down days.

The story of Werner Erhard begins with the story of John Paul Rosenberg.

In 1959, at the age of 24, Rosenberg abandoned his wife and four children in Philadelphia. He then changed his name to Werner Erhard and fled to San Francisco, where he became a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.

Given Erhard’s influences from the human potential movement, you might expect his est training seminars to have been hippy-dippy affairs, full of peace and love. But the truth was quite the opposite.

To begin with, the seminars were physically demanding. Each seminar consisted of four sessions, and each session lasted 15 to 19 hours and participants weren’t allowed to eat or get up from their chairs, even if they had to urinate. The only permitted exceptions were a few short bathroom breaks and a single meal break.

If success is just a matter of effort, and anyone can accomplish anything if he tries hard enough, what does it mean if someone fails? Well, by the same logic, it means he didn’t try hard enough. And that means he has no one but himself to blame for his failure. After all, thanks to his all-powerful will, he is responsible for everything that happens to him, both good and bad.

From this logic, Werner Erhard drew the most extreme conclusions possible. Not only were business people responsible for their career failures, but victims of rape, murder, cancer, war and even the Holocaust were to blame for their suffering, he claimed.

When Werner Erhard’s self-development training organization changed its name from the slightly hippyish-sounding est to the more professional Forum in 1984 and then Landmark Worldwide in 1991, the transformation wasn’t just cosmetic. It reflected a deeper metamorphosis not just in Erhard’s organization, but in the human potential movement as a whole, of which est had become the vanguard. In a word, it was becoming commercialized.

In the 1970s, the movement had already spread from a relatively small group of West Coast bohemians to an increasingly mass-scale, mainstream middle-class American audience. In doing so, it underwent a sort of Fritz Perls-style makeover in reverse – ditching its “out there,” bushy-bearded stylings for a more buttoned-down demeanor.

Beginning in the 1970s, American corporations faced a problem. Employees’ average working hours were increasing while their wages remained stagnant. That was great for the corporations’ bottom lines, but it made their workers unhappy.

On top of that, the younger members of the workforce had come of age during the heyday of the American countercultural movements. They’d been steeped in the era’s unconventional ideas, many of which derived from the human potential movement and the radical political activists of the time.

One of the nice things about studying corporations is that you often don’t have to do any guesswork to figure out their objectives. In many cases, they openly reveal themselves in their official communications.

Such is the case with Zappos, which explains the rationale behind its amusement-filled workplace right on its website. Immediately after touting its embrace of individuality and fun, it explicitly states its objective: rather than promoting “work/life balance in the traditional sense,” the company seeks to cultivate “work/life integration.”