There was no way out of it.

So, I figured, I might as well go along for the ride. There might be coffee, sandwiches, and plenty of time to catch 40 winks whilst that idiot Black does his motivation thing. Hell, it might even be interesting to see how much this pitiful imbecile knows about his own subject. With a bit of luck, I thought to myself, I might even prompt the little bastard into some kind of controversial debate, and gain, into the bargain, some admiration from that tasty babe that I’d been eyeing up in the office since starting with the company.

How bad could it be?

I had barely heard of Jack Black before. I remembered reading something about him in a newspaper article several months prior to this event, and thought he was a sinister little fucker back then. “A cross between Billy Graham and Billy Connolly” was the phrase that stuck in my head. Christ, could anything be worse? I mean, imagine having that engraved on your tombstone?

So off we went to the seminar. Into a function hall that was big enough to hold all 600+ employees. As I sat there, like some overgrown kid at a Christmas pantomime, I couldn’t help feeling that there was something distinctly Jim Jones about the whole affair. “If he asks us to get up to take some of his special medicine,” I murmured to my colleague sitting opposite, “I’m getting the goddamn hell out of here.” My colleague just chuckled, whist some brainless gorilla behind me huffed and puffed before fumbling over some MindStore pamphlet that he’d obviously been too keen to find.

By 9 a.m. the event had kicked off, harmlessly enough at first I thought, with some mind-numbing film footage of our CEO telling us how wonderful “our” company was. Once the footage had run it’s course, onto the stage popped the main event.

The first thing that struck me about Black was his smarmy latex-type features. Every time I looked at him my mind was drawn to thoughts of tupperware: a phenomenon that I have observed my brain doing every time I watch a Patrick Swayze movie. In other words, I had unashamedly taken a dislike to the man - that I won’t deny - but the underlying reason for so doing was that I could see from his posturing and movements that we were all about to partake in an event of mass hypnosis.

Although I am a fervent advocate of applying energised enthusiasm to whatever happens to be one’s true pleasure and interest in life, I was quite perturbed and taken aback by just how energised and enthusiastic Black was about his MindStore System. Of course, he could afford to be. At £399.00 per delegate on a two day seminar, I quickly calculated out that this little 9 - 4 gig, taking into account reductions for such a large turnout, would be a nice little pocket filler for our beloved host. And he had no qualms about admitting it: “I used to be a social worker,” he remarked casually, “but the money was poor and the satisfaction minimal. Now I travel all over the world, earn large amounts of cash and give seminars to top executives on goal setting, decision making, personal development and stress management. A clear indication,” he went on, “that my MindStore System works; and it will work for you too.”

Well, I thought, I have no contention with that, except of course that, in this instance, we’re not all top executives and we’ve not all come here out of our own free wills. As for managing stress, well, I am a great believer that stress is something that shouldn’t need to be managed, for if I am stressed about a situation, then surely it is my mind and body’s way of telling me that something is distinctly wrong. Therefore if my work stresses me out, there is something clearly wrong with my job, since no wage is large enough to compensate for a job that is going to damage my mental and physical health.

But Black was slowly gaining the admiration of his audience, for he had already won over their respect by questioning our CEO’s integrity - “What do you make of this guy then? Is he really on the level with you?” - a curious but clever manoeuvre considering that on this occasion our employer was Black’s provider also.

His next trick in order to get the audience on his side was to induce peer pressure, and this he did by attacking the one and only enemy that stood in his way: cynicism. Now, I am a self proclaimed cynic, no doubts about it. In fact, I’m pretty damn proud of the fact, and all my heroes, from comedian Bill Hicks to the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, were self-proclaimed cynics too. Personally I find nothing more ridiculous than facile optimism and nothing more depressing that terminal pessimism. Cynicism to me is to view the world realistically, yet sceptically, whilst retaining a healthy sense of humour about reality’s imperfections. As the late writer Gerald Suster once told me: “The difference between an optimist, a pessimist and a cynic is that an optimist will say: ‘pass the cream please’, a pessimist will ask: ‘is there any milk left?’ and a cynic will remark: ‘yeah, there’s plenty pal, and it’s all gone sour’”.

And things were certainly turning out pretty sour for the current writer, for here we had a man who had now eliminated scepticism from his audience. Despite his insistence that he considered it constructive for the audience to question any of his theories, Black had done such a thorough job of demonizing the cynic that there wasn’t a single person in that hall that would’ve been dumb enough to question him through fear of losing their job.

Remember: many of the top executives, program managers and senior engineers within the company had already paid, out of their own pockets, for personal seminars with this dipstick. They listen to his tapes, they read his books and they no doubt spring out of bed every morning to greet the fucking birds. Therefore anyone, in a similar frame of mind to myself, who wanted to stand up and remark: “Erm! Mr. Black! Do you really think we are dumb enough to believe that invisible rays are coming out of your hands and probing the audience?” would’ve been in grave danger of being forced to clear their desks the following morning.

Yes, there was certainly plenty Billy Graham about this man, but precious little Billy Connolly. For apart from his obvious Glaswegian background, the similarities between Jack Black and the great comedian himself were, to say the least, non-existent.

And incidentally, the “invisible rays” thing was not a joke on my part - that little performance actually took place. Having taken us (except me of course) through what he called “relaxation & visualisation techniques”, he then moved onto to the next stage of his mass mental programming regime: finding out what percentage of the audience were susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. Of course, he didn’t call it that, nor did he call it anything. He merely gave a little talk on latent human potential, and that “despite how dumb it might seem, would the audience be willing to conduct a little experiment?”

Of course they were. And behold the Great Wizard Black advanced to the front of the stage, held out his hands like the Emperor in Star Wars, and moved them from left to right across the audience. “How many of you felt that?” he asked optimistically. And lo, 600+ employees raised their hands in utter astonishment.

At this point I scanned the audience myself, but for me it was in desperation to find some form of humanity. Luckily, however, I found it, for there were small pockets of nervous cynics scattered throughout the audience like gold dust on a beach. They were the rebels, I realised, the heavy drinkers and pot smokers of the company: the unrewarded backbone that keeps an organisation alive and on it’s feet whist the talkers take all the credit.

But give him his due, Black had barely mentioned the name of the company once during the morning’s visualisation techniques. However, by now my head was hurting badly and it was fast approaching lunch time. I suspected that things would change in the second half of the show, after everyone had felt a little more comfortable in his presence.

So fuck the coffee and the sandwiches I though, I need something stronger to “relax” me (the coffee was probably decaf’ anyhow since according to Black “caffeine destroys a person’s energy”).

When I arrived at the pub, I looked around for a familiar face, and there they were: the pockets of humanity again, with pained expressions and cigarettes in their mouths, seated at bar stools, most of them on their own; drinking just as rapidly as I was intending to myself. Poor bastards, I thought. A short silent dialogue of recognition and understanding occurred before more heavy drinking and smoking.

After about four pints of lager I returned to the seminar slightly late. When I arrived, Black was in the middle of brainwashing the audience again, their eyes closed listening to his monotone of a voice. Like some annoying child who had just returned with popcorn from a cinema kiosk, I fumbled noisily back to my seat - and that’s when it happened: the glare of death from Black himself.

The Cynic had been rumbled.

By this time I was getting angry, the alcohol increasing my aggression quite nicely. I was damned if I was even going to appear remotely interested, in fact I was going to make a point of looking completely disinterested. This had become a war, a fight for individual liberty if you like, between Black (the forces of darkness) and myself (the free-thinking occultist). The Brainwasher may indeed possess skills capable of hypnotising an entire workforce, but the Cynic possessed skills capable of counteracting these effects (at least for himself anyway).

And so the nonsense went on: “whenever I am faced with adversity and someone puts me down,” Black remarked, “I use a little visualisation technique which helps me counteract their negativity,” he said looking up at me. “I imagine a glass dome descending from the sky to encapsulate and protect me. I find this works best if I also hum the theme tune to Thunderbirds.”

THE SINISTER BLACKS

At this point I almost burst into fits of hysterics. With his plastic features he even looked and walked like a goddamn Thunderbird (perhaps he was Captain Black from the programme’s sister show?). I visualised his glass dome shattering into billions of tiny fragments and demons from hell taking turns to rape his plastic bottom. What a tosser. “Suck Satan’s cock!” I felt like shouting out aloud.

Then there was The Amazing Strength Of Captain Black. Here he demonstrated how just being in contact with a cigarette weakens one’s vigour. He picked some gullible dupe from the audience and got them to hold a cigarette in their left hand and extend their right arm out at 90 degree from the body. “Now I’m going to try and force your arm down and I want you to resist with all your might,” instructed Black. He did so, and the arm fell. “Now I want you to put the cigarette down and we’ll try the experiment again,” he said. This time he couldn’t budge the arm, and no wonder, I thought. He wasn’t trying. This was an experiment utilising the triceps which are generally the weakest muscles in anyone’s arms. That and the fact that on the first occasion he forced the arm down from nearer the wrist, and on the second he was holding closer to the elbow - simple leverage.

But what struck me was that many of the engineers - some with first class honours degrees (i.e. people who should know better) - were actually buying this crap. Normally you couldn’t get them to admit that anything might exist out-with the confines of the known mathematical universe, and here they were believing that tobacco was to humans what Kryptonite was to Superman.

As the afternoon went on, my head got sorer and sorer, and, just as I’d predicted, Black was now beginning to mention the name of the company more often during his “relaxation exercises”. These exercises were also becoming much more in-depth and were closely resembling basic hypnosis techniques involving methods of trance inducement and suggestibility testing. It was becoming extremely uncomfortable to try and fight it.

By 4 p.m. I left the seminar drained and exhausted, my head spinning and my brain hurting badly. At the time I was playing bass guitar in a rock band and could hardly play a note at rehearsal that evening.

The following day at work the general consensus seemed to be that people thoroughly enjoyed it. After several weeks, however, I learned that this was just a front out of fear of being ridiculed for thinking it was bullshit. Almost two years on, there are still a small minority of individuals (generally program managers and senior engineers) who are devoted adherents of the Black philosophy. They are the kind of people who have no vices (or so they’d like you to believe), live without stimulants, work twelve hour shifts, and replace the word “problem” with “challenge” to avoid that alleged association with self-induced failure. Personally, I like the term “problem” as “challenge solving” just sounds ridiculous.

Undoubtedly however, many of Black’s techniques work and could be beneficial. What I object to is that he, and people like him, are prepared to inflict them on other individuals against their free wills for whatever purpose the highest bidder suggests. Hypnosis and self-empowerment techniques are perfectly acceptable if performed at an individual level, with the individual clearly defining to the practitioner what he/she hopes to gain out of it. That said and done, however, one could do far better than adhere to the techniques of Jack Black. His knowledge is limited, his techniques are flawed (inspiring contempt rather than admiration) and he is clearly advocating a West Coast American business mentality that is blatantly anti-individual and pro-company. To involve oneself in the techniques of Black is to deny an individual’s true nature, encouraging one to bottle up emotions that are better released than repressed.

Hatred, fear, cynicism and negativity are as equally important to us as love, courage, optimism and a positive attitude - for they go hand in hand and make humans what they are. To repress any of these conditions is to induce mental unbalance which will inevitable result is psychosis. As the late Reichian psychotherapist Dr. Francis Israel Regardie once remarked in an interview to Christopher S. Hyatt: “When confronted by temptation, yield.”

media-underground.net