Zendik

I find it strange that you don't align yourself with the others that have decided Zendik is committing some serious crimes against humanity.

They advertise freedom YET they run themselves like Amway meets Metallica.
Thats Fucked Up and if you thinik they are justified in creating a situation like
that you should get your head examined. Read some Einstein quotes and
wake up.

 

“Strange that you don’t align yourself with the others...” This implies that I wrote my little message to make alliances, or confirm what others already have decided, and of course, I didn’t. I wrote it to report what I saw, and what I didn’t see in my year at the Farm.

“Serious crimes against humanity”? If you know where the mass graves can be found at the Farm, then why haven’t you called the FBI yet? (This rhetoric is appropriate for describing the crimes of the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials...and certainly not the Zendiks, even on their worst day.)

You think that I should get my head examined because I don’t agree that they “run themselves like Amway meets Metallica.” I honestly have no idea what this image is supposed to convey...that they run themselves badly, I guess. Yes, they do...I suggested so in my posting.

 

"godlesscommie" has it pretty much right, as far as I see it, although some people who show up at Zendik are more vulnerable than he because they were more committed to the Zendik ideal or perhaps had nowhere else to go.

What I'm trying to say is that the Zendiks aren't devils, but they're certainly not the wonderful benevelent idealists that they claim to be. Also, since Wulf's death, it appears as though Arol has staged a sort of coup and expelled all opposition. My impression from talking to people who were at the farm more recently than 1996, is that Zendik has become more cult-like in the last few years as Arol has tightened the noose and perhaps gone a bit bonkers.

I do take issue with this whole idea of criticising the Zendiks as not being "classy." Speaking the truth as you see it is right - no need to sugar coat - the Zendiks certainly don't sugar coat their attacks on the culture as a whole so no need to handle them with kid gloves, either.

 

I was being a smartass with the classy bit...though my point wasn’t that criticism of the Zendiks as such isn’t classy (notice that I developed a mini-critique of the Zendiks in my original posting), but rather hysterical and uninformed criticism. The message that followed mine would be precisely this sort of criticism...crimes against humanity is a legal concept that means, essentially, killing lots and lots of people. The Zendiks may be guilty of making people feel bad about themselves, just as my 8th grade gym teacher made me feel bad about myself...but we don’t call this sort of thing crimes against humanity!

By the way, I agree 100% with Greenhornet’s previous posting, where he lists a few things to keep in mind before visiting the Zendiks: know what you’re getting into, don’t turn your brain off, have somewhere else to go in case it doesn’t work out...etc.

 

Let me introduce you to a more evolved abtract definition of "crime against humanity"
Humanity: The freedom to be yourself, to seek company with those who would accept you, to find honest work, to seek truth in it's purest form.
Thus a crime, perhaps not in a legal sense as todays laws would have it ,but in a "what is right" sense. Thus a different definition of "Crime against Humanity".

Sometimes highly intuitive expressions need to be created with what the english language has to offer, which is not always adequate, and so you need to use pre-existing phrases to describe something that is not frequently discussed if at all ever before. Where are the priorities when a person is expected to use the same phrases to describe something new, what do you want me to say instead "awe, it's a damn shame but they have the right to do it cuz it's not illegal".
I consider myself fortunate because my father showed me to question everything. So my fate is protected from Zendik, so we should all just turn our heads and say "oh well". It's not like I am in a position to do anything about it actively, but I look upon Zendik taking in wayward loners as I look upon the oppression of women in the islamic culture.
But be that way if you must. It's what is holding your sanity together is'nt it.

 

So there's something wrong with me, Amberfilter, because I don't speak the "more evolved, intuitive" language that you speak, where words mean whatever you want them to mean at any particular moment. Um...we relatively unevolved and unintuitive people who speak English have a word for the condition suffered by those who can't communicate with others, who make up their own private languages, which make sense only to themselves: schizophrenia.

I started this semantic argument by giving you shit about the "crimes against humanity" line in your last post, so it's my fault that we've detoured from the original topic to this unproductive path. I got on your case initially to make what I thought would be an uncontroversial point, to the effect that we should be responsible and sensible about what we say, and not exaggerate, inflate our rhetoric, or shoot our mouths off about what we’re ignorant of...but you don’t seem to want to hear this point, as you've now gone from comparing the Zendiks to war criminals to comparing them to “oppressors of women in the Islamic culture”...

 

the womyn i've met from zendik didn't seem oppressed or angry with their situation. and nobody is forced to stay there. their philosophy and structure may be warped but they are not kidnapping people or imposing it on people who don't want to accept it. their philosophy and structure will certainly limit their effectiveness as creators of change or builders of the new world. but to call them criminals against humanity seems excessively emotional. godlesscommie, who lived there for a year, seems to have a good handle on an objective analysis and presentation of their good and bad points. seems to make sense to learn from their experience and do better in our community creations. they have kept their community together for 30 years or so and spread the message to probably millions of youth that the capitalist system is a deathkulture and that we must create an alternative. they are just a little warped in their understanding of what that alternative is and therefore will be limited in their abilities to help achieve it. there are worse mind control situations. check out mainstream schools, jobs, tv, and evangelical religions. as far as i know they haven't killed anyone and don't plan to. so let's try to be less emotional and more objective in our analyses as we try to learn how to build our community based alternative society. peace

 

Someone who did not know better may not be "forced to stay there", but that individual is going to be subject to those conditions because they lack the understanding or resources of thier own to try a better way.

I did not say that Zendik mistreated women anymore than men, it was a comparison to the oppression of women in muslim culture. Could it have been emotion that guided you to understand what I said in that fashion?. and PS if you did not notice i am a NON tri-pod, fyi, our emotions have the volume turned up more frequently by mother nature, through the same process that alots us the duty of continuing human life, and they are just as funtional in world progress as a tri-pods inclinations are. Not that I am suggesting you feel differently.

World change comes about from people getting passionate about things
and taking action. Passion comes from emotion. So how could it be so bad.

Nwrfrd, I disagree with your perspective on the flexibility of the term "crime against humanity" and I will explain more why below, here is a quote from Nwrfrd that is really clever:
"as mao said, the future is bright but the road is torturous. as the beatles said, it's a long and winding road. as the grateful dead said, what a long strange trip. anyone who expects a super highway to the new world has the wrong map. but again as the dead said, we will survive. we are charting the course in a major transformation of humyn society. nobody promised us a rose garden. the old world is rapidly aging but they still control almost all the money. i'd say we're doing pretty well with the peanuts we have to work with. because again as mao said, the people and the people alone are the makers of world history. it just sometimes takes a little longer than we would wish. keep in mind that the earth has existed for billions of years and spirit is eternal." -Nwrfred


I've been reading this post since it was 5 pages long and I can say with confidence that anyone who has read all this and does not get a sick pit in thier stomach when they think of Zendik's wrongs, has not been able to remove all the zendik brainwashing from thier mind or has had a life experience which has not enabled them to understand the dignity they and others *should* be alloted in life.

I am not trying to argue here, I am trying to work away at the core of truth. Who would'nt agree that preserving human dignity is important. When a community service agency violates a persons dignity in a way that is not absolutely necessary, the individual or someone representing them can call a human rights committee and if it is not resolved it can be brought into court. The Agency can lose thier license. So what makes Zendik judgement proof? The fact that they live in the middle of the woods and aren't a public organization?
Does'nt make it right.
Peace.

 

The bottom line here is that the zendiks have the right to believe and do as they want, so long as they act within the law. Many people have leveled serious allegations against the zendiks but, failed to back the accusations up with even one specific incident. I think making these kinds of vague accusations is irresponsible and completely unfair, especially if they turn out to be untrue. I feel like that guy on the old dragnet series who always says, “just the facts”

We need to take the emotion out of this and get at “just the facts”. Vague, wild, accusations do nothing to support your arguments against the zendiks. To simply throw around wild statements like the zendiks are committing crimes against humanity, are child molesters, are a cult, you work like a slave etc. is a very weak way of debating and is not likely to sway people. I am also concerned that those who have made such accusations against the zendiks get frustrated when others don’t take those vague accusations at face value. When you imply that anyone who either disagrees with you or wants more information about these charges as blind or is “brain washed” by the zendiks is not fair. I would take it a step further and say that you are acting the same as you accuse the zendiks of acting.

If you have a complaint against the zendiks then lets get it out into the light of day not cloaked into vague statements and innuendoes.

 

Take a few minuites and read the posts on this very forum, especially those by Red Lentil, which are painfully specific, and although he tends to ramble, FNTW also cites very specific issues, heck even old Greenhornet has brought up a few points.

If that doesn't convince you, Dalamar, then don't take anybody's word for it, go to West Virginia, throw youself into Zendik and get some stories of your own. That might wake you up a bit, and hey, the baby goats are cute and the food's healthy.

 

I found an interesting comentary by Lawerence Siskind who spent a few years at Zendik around 1997. It can be read at http://www.talkingleaves.org/w01cult.htm Siskind writes: "Although I loved how people within our group related to each other, I couldn't stand how the group related to the society at large," which sums up his general view. An interesting perspective, certainly worth reading.

 

oh and by the way, i am NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT going to zendik.. i just sent that email out of curiosity, to clearify

 

Thanks, Greenhornet, for posting that essay by Lawrence. I would agree with his ambivalent perspective, since while I was at the Farm, I felt a strong degree of loyalty and respect toward the community members on the level of personal relationships, but I was appalled by the overall philosophy that commanded me to view the world outside the Farm as “enemy territory,” as Lawrence puts it. The “Us vs. Them” attitude was sickening because it meant that the Zendiks would routinely scoff at any effort by a non-Zendik to change the world for the better, or even understand it...the Zendiks might learn a lot about, say, politics from reading, say, Noam Chomsky, but as a group they’ve basically given up on finding anything of value in the non-Zendik world (that is, the real world). So if Chomsky showed up at the Farm, they’d probably tell him to put his writing, teaching, and activism away and search for his “genius potential” in some other line of work (perhaps in milking goats, or weeding in the garden). And along the same lines, if I suggested to the group that Chomsky’s new book is insightful and worth reading, they’d see my interest in Chomsky as a symptom that I wasn’t with the overall Zendik program...they’d probably counsel me to abandon my craving for corrupt Deathkultur comforts, whether it’s Chomsky books, video games, Twinkies, or heroin.

This turn away from the real world is, to say the least, a big problem, because (a) it blows to smithereens their supposed philosophical commitment to holism (or rather, they believe that “everything’s connected” in a limited hippy-dippy, New Age sense, but haven’t taken a moment to theorize how they can disconnect from the world more or less completely and still have any real effect on it...or how they can call themselves “political” in any meaningful sense of the word); (b) it’s maddeningly anti-intellectual, misanthropic, and cynical...no different, really, than the Christian fundamentalist who believes that there’s no point in reading or thinking about anything except the Good Book; (c) it means that the Zendiks often go about their projects in a rather half-assed way, since they’ve given up on learning anything from outsiders; (d) if you want to stay on the Zendiks’ good side while you’re living there, you have to keep this sort of objection to yourself. As Lawrence says, the Zendiks are committed to “truth” and “honesty,” supposedly, but there are certain truths that you can never utter, for fear of getting pushed out the door; (e) there’s a sort of metaphorical equivalence at work in the Zendiks’ analysis of the world which is appallingly simple-minded...according to Zendik thinking, everything outside the Farm is evil and corrupt to the same degree. The fat kid wearing an Old Navy T-shirt is just as much a manifestation of Deathkultur depravity as the war in Iraq: it’s all the same basic problem of the world going to hell in a hand basket. And since they conceive “the problem” as being everywhere and everything, they imagine no solution to it except disconnecting from this Deathkultur totally; (f) the flipside of this logic of “everything ‘out there’ is bad, to the same degree” would naturally be “everything here at the Farm is good, to the same degree”...and so the Zendiks delude themselves into believing that no matter what they’re doing, it’s miraculously radical, revolutionary, unprecedented, etc. (You can get a taste of this logic of equivalence by reading the text by Arol on the Zendik website, where she seems to be taking aim at every problem in human history...slavery, greed, war, pornography, pollution, etc., it's all part of the same system...yeah, so we're fighting all that stuff by being Zendiks...); (g) For these reasons, they won’t take any critique of the Farm’s philosophy, lifestyle, or general way of doing things seriously, but rather assume that the critic must have some messed up personal reasons for offering it in the first place. E.g., if you were to say that the Zendiks’ bizarro beliefs on contraceptives are worth reconsidering, they’d attack you personally, argue that you’re lashing out at the Farm because you’re mad at your fellow Zendiks, or not getting laid enough, or too steeped in Deathkultur modes of thinking to see that the Zendik way is correct, or whatever. Hence, we get a completely closed and static system (despite the Zendiks’ claim that they’re always evolving, getting better, learning from their mistakes), an immediate preemption of any suggestion that things could be done differently, or better.

I remember, by the way, a moment when Lawrence rather bravely told a group of Zendiks that Wulf’s novel Blackhawk was, to put it kindly, not exactly a literary masterpiece. And the Zendiks sort of shook their heads and replied, “poor Lawrence...little does he know how his sense of aesthetics has been warped by Deathkultur values...maybe someday he’ll evolve to the point where he can see that this is the greatest novel ever written...”

Didn’t mean to gab about the Zendiks for so long...but I’m trying to balance what I suggested in an earlier post (i.e., the Zendiks are generally great people whom I have fond memories of, and consider my friends, even if I haven’t seen these friends in eight years) with a critique of how the Zendiks tend to think about the world that they’re supposedly trying to save.

 

They sound more and more like a cult to me everytime I read about them or discuss them with someone.

 

First off let me say that I hope I in no way offended you. I simply hoped some people would share more of their experiences.

Anyway, I still have heard nothing from the zendiks at all. None of my e-mails were answered.

What I think has been established is that:

1) They live by a strict philosophy and if you are not a true believer, you will not enjoy your stay there.

2) They have a hierarchy. I believe this is proved by the stories relayed here and the fact that they only list a few members on their web site. There are no pictures of other members. There is nothing wrong with that per say, but not most peoples cup of tea.

3) I think they have some weird ideas about this living therapy as they call it. I just read the thing about being shocked. If true that should be reported to the police as an assault. But, besides that incident (if true) the living therapy is a bit out there. I.e. using hazing methods and things like that.

4) As far as the social interactions go, not much was presented that goes beyond mere accuations so, I have no opinion on that. BTW I did click on your link but, nowhere in the article does the author mention the zendiks so, he could have been talking about any place. With that said, if the article is true (and about the zendiks). They have a very weird culture there.

With all that said, if everything above is true, the zendiks are a strange bunch but, that does not mean they are evil or a cult. They just live life differently than we do but, that does not make them bad. They certainly are not for me or for most people out there. However, for the few that find peace there that’s fine.

 

According to the dictionary I have a cult is 1. a system of religious worship 2.(a)Obsessive and faddish devotion to a principle or person (b) a group of persons sharing such devotion. Just because the only cults we hear about are the ones that have commited mass suicide or have had deadly outcomes with our government doesn't mean that there aren't other cults out there.

 

Dalamar: No offense taken. However, I'm certain the Siskind article is about the Zendiks because I knew Lawerence when he was at Zendik & he lived there for about two years (he left after I did).

Zendik is a cult but not evil in the sense that they're going to kill people or drink koolaide (they wouldn't drink the stuff in any case, laced with poison or not because it isn't organic).

I think it's hard for all people including myself to grasp and accept the grayness of reality: someone dosn't have to be totally evil to be far from perfect and be a big let down for those of us who want a new, more benevelent way of life to emerge and really save the planet.

 

I have no doubt that the article is about the zendiks. I was just pointing out that it is a shame he did not I identify the group.

It does appear that they strayed far from there original philosophy which must be upsetting for people who have been there for a long time.

I have been involved with organizations that started out good, but later, strayed far from their vision. So, I can definitely share your frustration on that note.

Anyway, It is too bad really, because the zendiks do have some good points. But by shutting themselves off from the world does not really help themselves, our society, or our planet. They could become advocates for change but, you can’t change anything hiding in the woods.

I can understand their arguments about organic food ( I don’t agree with it ) but, I understand it. I probably could not stomach most of what they eat. Food does not have to taste bad to be good for you and the environment. What kind of food do they eat? I know someone posted a standard zendik menu somewhere here but, now I can’t find it.

I understand wanting to live by a different social structure then we do but, do they really make people set up “dates” via 3 rd parties?

The concept of this living therapy sounds good but, the way it is implemented does not. For instance, public confessions could be ok, if handled right. The goal being that people can be themselves and still be accepted. The person should be praised for honestly sharing there thoughts and feelings and not attacked.

I think this hierarchy they have established is not good. If they want to have a hierarchy I guess I could understand that (though I don’t agree with it). But, if the people on the bottom have little or no rights, well we all know another term for that! What are people who first come to the farm “allowed” to do. What, if any rights do they have? How many hours are they required to work?

 

Does anybody know what Lawrence's Zendik name was? I get the feeling that I might have known him.

My Zendik name was Kira. I was interviewed in issue #47 of the Zendik magazine (don't know why I haven't mentioned that already).

I've posted this URL a couple of times before, but http://www.ex-cult.org is an excellent resource for those who would like to learn about what "cults" are and how they can hurt people. Mass suicide is not a defining characteristic of the cultic environment-- intense and complex psychological manipulation is. Jim Jones' People's Temple was a "cult" long before they moved to Guyana, became intensely militaristic, and murdered a US senator who visited their community on a fact-finding mission. Jim Jones told his people that they would all be captured and punished by the American government, a fate worse than death for those committed to the political ideology of the People's Temple. Nobody would have drank the Kool-aid if they hadn't first been convinced that there was no other option.

 

Red Lentil says that the defining characteristic of cults is not murderous nuttiness a la Jonestown (which I would agree with), but she implies that we can define a cult as a group that is structured in such a way that the potential for such murderous nuttiness necessarily arises. That is, she seems to want to say, “the Zendiks are not ‘dangerous’ in the Jonestown sense, but who knows, maybe someday they’ll reach that crazy extreme.” Against this implication I would say that we can only judge people based on what they do, not on what they might do at some point in the future...there’s a difference between claiming that it’s possible (or not impossible) that the Zendiks will do X, vs. claiming that it’s likely that the Zendiks will do X.

I think it’s fair and responsible to warn people that Zendik Farm is indeed a cult (that it’s not just about milking goats and taking time to do your art or music, but rather, involves some intense indoctrination in the Zendik way of thinking and acting)...and I further agree that it’s useful to think about the Farm in terms of what we know about other cults. But I’d respectfully disagree with the implication that because they think in cultish ways, they’re capable of anything, capable of making the leap from benign hippie farm to dangerous Manson Family behavior. It’s been pointed out a number of times on this message board that the great majority of people who arrive at the Farm soon leave, and this has been true throughout their thirty-year history...and so, to put it in a somewhat funny way, it seems like the Farm is definitely a cult, but not a very successful or convincing one, since clearly, most people think, sooner or later, “this ain’t for me, these people don’t know what they’re talking about, I don’t want to live like this,” etc.

On the other hand, it’s hardly an argument in the Farm’s favor to point out that they’re not likely to become murderous maniacs like the Mansons or the Jonestown folks, not likely to ask you to kill anybody...