Aesthetic Realism is a cult

  Who they are, how they operate • Written by former members

What is Aesthetic Realism?

Aesthetic Realism is a philosophy founded by Eli Siegel in 1941. Its main teaching is that we should all learn to like the world properly, and when we do all social ills will disappear -- no more racism, greed, poverty, or homosexuality. (They don't see gayness as a sin so much as they think it's a kind of mania resulting from one's contempt for the world.) Not liking the world enough is called contempt which Aesthetic Realism believes leads to unhappiness and even insanity. But it's not the group's beliefs which make them a cult, it's how they manipulate the minds of their members, which we'll see presently.

Siegel attracted many devoted followers in his home of New York City, whom he taught right up until his suicide in 1978. Before his death his students established the Aesthetic Realism Foundation to promote his teachings, and they've continued that mission ever since.

As with most cults, the main goal is to get the whole world to adopt the group's beliefs, and that starts with recruiting as many people as possible. A person typically gets involved in AR by first being invited to an art or drama presentation or exhibit at AR's Terrain Gallery in SoHo. From there the student will be encouraged to take Aesthetic Realism classes. After that the recruit will be strongly encouraged to have "consultations", a kind of therapy with three AR "consultants" vs. one student, and I use the term "vs." intentionally. The consultations are ostensibly to help the student learn more about Aesthetic Realism and to live their life better, but the real goal is to get the student to more strongly adopt the group's beliefs. Consultants ask probing critical questions that have only one right answer, and if students give the wrong answers they're worked on until they give the right ones. The whole process is designed to break down the self-identity of the student so that s/he will be willing to accept the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel as the One Truth and the greatest gift the world has ever known. Students who show promise can train to become consultants themselves.

Mind Control

By the time a student has gone through several consultations, the group has a fairly good grip on the inductee's mind, and can start to direct the student's life. They might start out with pushing the student toward a certain line of work, then directing them to whom they should marry (always within the group, of course), then whether they should have children, and then even having them cut off relations with friends and family who won't join the group.

People without cult experience have a hard time understanding how people can give up their autonomy so easily, and often think cult members must be stupid for not seeing what's going on, and for not leaving. But it's not about any lack of intelligence, it's about mind control. The key is that the inductee is drawn in gradually and slowly, step by step. No one would buy the opening pitch if it were something like, "Hi, come join our group and devote your life to it, let us decide how you should live your life, and cut off relations with friends and family who won't buy into into the group's teachings." Instead, the opening pitch is something like, "Hey, come to this drama presentation. It's really interesting." From there the inductee is moved deeper and deeper into the group, one step at a time. Each step is easy for the student to accept because it's not that large a change from the previous one. But by the end, of course, the change is massive. And once the student is "in", it's very hard for them to leave, because people tend to resist change, whether they're cult members or not. How easy is it for anyone to give up a deeply held belief? Pretty hard. The person would have to admit that they had been wrong, and who wants to believe they were wrong about something? Especially if they've been involved with it for many years! So given the choice between admitting they made a big mistake and wasted a good chunk of their life, or continuing their membership which requires no such uncomfortable realization, it's pretty clear why many people have a hard time leaving cults.

There's another, more insidious reason people are reluctant to leave. As another former member says, "One reason people stay in AR is that after breaking up their family relationships, with spouses, parents or siblings, there is little to go back to once the light comes on." Ouch.

But how does a person get involved in the first place? First, they may be attracted to the philosophy because it promises it has the secret to personal and worldwide happiness. Who wouldn't want that? As one former member said, "Many of us who got drawn in were idealists who really did want to help the world, which made us more susceptible to the message that promoting AR was the best way to do so. The AR people played on a noble aspect of our character, not a weak one." If the pitch is given by someone very charismatic, such as Siegel, then so much the better. Recruiters will also act especially happy so the recruit will be impressed with the effect the group has on people. If someone is depressed and then they encounter some people who say they have the answer to happiness and do appear happy themselves, that can be a powerful motivator. (Not all people who join cults were depressed at the time, but if they were, they were especially vulnerable.) Finally, there's the practice that cult psychologists call "love bombing", which is showing the recruit lots of attention and praise. Who doesn't like attention? As one former AR member said, "They flatter you to death and tell you that you're so wonderful, and you have all these qualities that others have never seen."

One former member wrote in to describe his step-by-step process of getting sucked in. "I believed in the possibility of there being a singular technique to achieve personal happiness. For me, there was something very appealing about a philosophy that promised to unify one's life in a way that imitated art. The other reason [I got involved] is that I knew two very sweet 'students' of AR -- sweet when they saw a possible recruit. They acted pretty balanced and normal and kept the Eli Siegel idolatry at a low volume, in the beginning." He goes on to explain how his involvement started with going to presentations, leading to classes, then leading to the fated consultations. (read his story)

Once an inductee begins consultations the mind control really starts. Consultants use a standard mind control trick to get a student to adopt a certain position. Simply telling a student what he should think isn't so successful. After all, the student might disagree, even if he doesn't say so. But if they can get the student to think he's the one who came up with the position, then he'll be much more deeply attached to it. So the consultants don't tell a student what to think. Instead they ask him how he feels about something. If the student gives the "wrong" answer then they ask him some leading questions to steer him to the "correct" answer. By having the subject voice the position himself the subject is more strongly committed to that position. It's insidious, and it works. Sometimes it's as simple as just asking yes/no questions. When the student answers, he's now got a certain ownership of that answer. Here's an example from a consultation posted elsewhere on this site, of getting the subject to agree that homosexuality is caused by contempt, which is Aesthetic Realism's position on the subject.

Consultant: So why do you think, Mr. Carson, you always felt so badly about the homosexual feelings you had, had the shame, and you want so much to change them? Not to have them any more? If you just had them in your mind certainly society didn't know about them. I don't think you told anybody. And yet it made you feel very not good. Dirty. I remember having these feelings myself, for years. So why do you think that something in yourself was so against that, so ashamed of it?

Student: Because, I felt that, um, I knew it was wrong inside.

Consultant: But what do you think that comes from, the feeling that it's wrong inside?

Student: Well, the part of me, the conscience, that wants to do what's right and what's just.

Consultant: So do you think that what's right and what's just has to do with respect and contempt?

Student: Yes.

Consultant: And do you think that when a person feels he hasn't done something right, it comes from -- and this is made conscious through the study of Aesthetic Realism -- but that it's because a person has been unjust to another person or the world?

Student: Right.

Another great example of the tactic of getting the subject to voice a position in order to believe it more deeply is found in the inquest of a student supposedly cured of his gayness, who was found to actually still be engaging in gay sex. In fact, when the subject says that he doesn't know the answer, the inquisitors thunder at him that he has to come up with it himself, they're not going to give it to him. They even use this tactic about the tactic, asking him:

Main Interrogator: ....Which do you think would take better care of Aesthetic Realism: if you came to a decision about something, or if you were told what to do?

Subject: If I came to a decision.

Scary stuff.

Incidentally, this particular cult's teachings have a built-in way of reinforcing compliance. The foundation of AR is that contempt is the root of all evil. Everyone inside has bought into that idea. So if anyone ever questions what's going on, she's simply accused of having contempt for AR or Eli Siegel. And since everyone believes that contempt must be purged, he's convinced that she must have been wrong to question. AR can thus shut down dissent faster than some other cults, just by using the group's teachings themselves. It's pretty insidious.

The group's status

      Aesthetic Realism is dying, because the members who leave aren't being replaced. Previously, a substantial source of new members were the children of existing members. I was born into the group because my parents were members, and my mother was born into it because her parents were members. And as you might suspect, those who get in at a young age are generally more committed than those who start later in life.

      So what happened? Well, in a stunning blunder, in the 70's AR started discouraging its members from having kids. Children would demand time that could be better spent promoting Aesthetic Realism, after all. But this was short-sighted, because it meant a significant reduction in the most committed kinds of members the group could have, those who came to it out of the cradle. And this means that the group's demographic has been getting ever older and older....

      It's likely that most AR members are over 50 years old, and perhaps even over 60 years old. That presents a big recruitment problem: Older people are harder to recruit because they're more set in their ways and are more resistant to joining up with something. They also may lack energy to promote AR as energetically as a younger person would. But the group can't easily recruit younger people, because what younger person wants to hang out with a bunch of people old enough to be their parents or grandparents? So AR is basically aging itself out of existence.

     In its heyday in the 70's and early 80's, AR likely had several hundred students formally studying. Today that's shrunk to at most 103 people -- 35 consultants, 41 consultants-in-training, and 27 regular students, possibly fewer. I give AR another ten years, fifteen at tops, and then it's probably all over. But in the meantime, small as AR is becoming, they're still hurting people. I still get mail from people who lost a loved one to AR and haven't been able to talk to them in years. So as long as AR operates the way it does, I'll be here to let people know about that.

     Another interesting thing is that the group has never made it out of New York City, partially because the AR leadership is wary of anything they can't completely control directly. This is an amazing contradiction -- on the one hand the AR devotees have believed for decades that AR should be known and practiced worldwide, and that it's only a matter of time before that happens, but on the other hand they intentionally won't let it expand out of New York. So how is AR going to be a worldwide phenomenon if it never grows beyond SoHo?

     After my family moved to Texas (over AR's objections) when I was 5, my mother started an AR study group there. You'd think the AR people would be thrilled that mom was introducing AR to Texas. You'd think they would have aided and abetted her any way they could, providing her with materials, advice, encouragement, etc. But instead they didn't even talk to her. They weren't happy with her project, because they couldn't keep tight a control over it from New York. And when another student left the group but tried to teach AR on his own, the AR people put this worried notice on their website warning people against freelancers who weren't "authorized" to teach Aesthetic Realism. "Please note that the only persons authorized to teach Aesthetic Realism are those working under the auspices of and with the consent of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, Inc., a not-for-profit educational foundation. Any others presenting themselves as Aesthetic Realism teachers or consultants are not authorized to do so, are misrepresenting themselves, and may be 'teaching' something grossly different from and entirely out of keeping with what Aesthetic Realism truly is." Incredible.

More about Aesthetic Realism's beliefs

Before delving into this, let's be clear about something: It's not AR's beliefs that make it a cult. It's the fact that its members are subjected to mind control. There is nothing especially crazy about the group's teachings (except for the idea that homosexuality is a psychological problem). Siegel actually had a lot to say that was especially insightful and valuable. Unfortunately his followers have taken the group to a scary extreme.

AR's two main teachings are that all problems (personal and societal) stem from one's contempt for the world , and that all beauty comes from the contrast of opposites. Understanding and appreciating this contrast is seen as a key to unlocking one's love for the world, which is supposedly what will purge contempt and end "loneliness, depression, boredom, learning difficulties, pain in marriage", racism &emdash; and of course, homosexuality. And check out this bold claim: "[W]hen the United Nations studies Aesthetic Realism (it can begin today) there will not be war." Don't underestimate the significance they ascribe to contempt: they consider it to be "the single greatest sin a person can have". (everything in this paragraph from their NY Times ad)

Here's AR in its own words, the "Four Statements of Aesthetic Realism":

The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.

1. Every person is always trying to put together opposites in himself.
2. Every person in order to respect himself has to see the world as beautiful or good or acceptable.
3. There is a disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.
4. All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves

The Aesthetic Realism Foundation website has an expanded definition of aesthetic realism.

Religiously the group is non-denominational but a large number of its members and leaders are Jewish, perhaps the majority of them, with names like Siegel, Koppelman, Blaustein, Shapiro, Fishman, Rosen, Weiner, Weiss, Reiss Kimmelman, Kestenbaum, Bernstein, and my birth surname, Freedman. The Jewish involvement in the group is so strong that Jewish Times did a story on the controversy surrounding AR. The group is also officially nonpartisan but their politics are far left, being highly critical of greed and profit in capitalist economics -- with which I happen to sympathize, but not to the extent that the AR people take it. Eli Siegel was actually a self-proclaimed socialist, in the real meaning of the word (not the imaginary meaning where any effort by Obama to increase government services is called socialism by the right wing). AR even published a book in the 1970's based on Siegel's lectures called "Goodbye Profit System" predicting the fall of the free market system. (How's that working out?) Here's part of AR's summary of that book:

Eli Siegel showed in a series of lectures what no other economist saw, and what is true now and for all time: A way of economics based on contempt for man&emdash;though it went on for many centuries&emdash;no longer works.....Eli Siegel's knowledge of history was unsurpassed, and he was humanity's greatest friend.

Siegel's role

Many people have asked about whether Siegel promoted AR as the universal answer to everything and saw himself as deserving extraordinary praise, or whether his students just took his work and got carried away with it. The answer is the former: Siegel believed in the supremacy of AR and in his deserving a high status for having come up with it, and he wanted his students to promote these things. One former student related to me how Siegel said, "You're supposed to be out there making me famous."

Siegel also wasn't the kind, gentle soul that his followers describe him as. Former students say he had a temper and could be particularly mean. Heck, in my lesson with him when I was two years old, he thought it would be a good idea to get all the adults in the room to taunt me to make me cry. Another former member writes in, "There were many classes and lessons in which Siegel literally yelled at people. I vividly remember him screaming at people with spit flying out of his mouth. I guess that's where 'spitting angry' comes from. That would often happen when he spoke about the press and others he saw as slighting him -- he would become so enraged as he spoke about it; he was wild with fury." Yet his current followers say he's actually the kindest person ever to live. I'm not sure who the kindest person ever to live was, but I do know that Siegel didn't come close.

Others who had no involvement at all with Aesthetic Realism at all have been critical of Siegel. Harold Norse wrote in his memoirs:

I recall only two others: Kenneth Bowdoin, an experimental southern poet, and Eli Siegel, who founded a school of writing called Aesthetic Realism, which among other bizarre claims, professed to "cure" homosexuality. Thinking of Siegel, a man in his fifties whom I had known from the WPA Writers' Project as a mirthless, self-important intellectual, made me wonder who would discover a cure for heterosexuality. He enjoyed, if that is the correct word for a grim-faced maven whose long nose sniffed disdainfully at everything, a minor notoriety for a poem called "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana", which in the 1920s or 1930s won a prize in Nation. Based on long Whitmanesque lines, it was actually about the weather. But Williams was right to include him; the poem defied existing norms with a flat, bland insouciance that mocked conventional taste.

Cult aspects

So if it's not the teachings that make it a cult, what does? It's cult aspects like these:

• They exhibit fanatical devotion to their founder/leader.
• They believe that they have the one true answer to universal happiness if only people would listen.
• Their ultimate purpose is to recruit new believers, and members are pressured to recruit family and friends.
• They believe they are being persecuted or censored by the rest of the world. (Well, I guess I'm persecuting them, but I'm hardly the whole world.)
• Members lives are controlled to a frightening degree, right down to whom they must marry (always within the group, of course).

These and other aspects are explained in more detail on the page cult aspects of Aesthetic Realism.

Aesthetic Realism and the cure for homosexuality

     One of the more controversial aspects of Aesthetic Realism was its depiction of homosexuality as a mental problem, the result of not liking the world. And they had the cure! Just study AR and you'll learn to like the world and then you won't be homosexual any more. (Of course it wasn't a very successful cure, with large numbers of the "cured" deciding later that they really were gay after all.) The gay cure was a big part of the group's message in its heyday in the 1970's and 1980's, but in recent years they have tried to hide that fact, realizing that such a message isn't very popular in today's more tolerant society. We have a separate page covering the Aesthetic Realism homosexuality cure.

Aesthetic Realism and the cure for racism

     Since the cure for homosexuality was a bust, they've moved on to having a cure for racism. Well, they call it the "answer" to racism, how racism can end. And you'll never guess how this cure is achieved. Yes, it's teaching people about Aesthetic Realism, so they'll learn to like the world, and then they won't be racist any more. They have a book out about this now. Me, I don't think it's quite that easy. I don't think racist people are sitting around thinking, "You know, I really hate being racist. If there were only some book I could buy that could teach me how to not have these feelings, then by golly I'd buy it!"

     I'm all for ending racism as much as the next person, but I'm skeptical that AR holds the magic key in that regard.

Aesthetic Realism in the schools

     Cult members teaching your children! Realizing how important it is to introduce young minds to AR, many AR members have become public school teachers, where they talk up Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel in the classroom. An award-winning investigate reporter for the New York Post did a series of articles about this, which are quite a scandalous read. As I update this page in 2009, it appears that most or all of the AR teachers identified in the article are still teaching. I'm currently seeing what I can do about that....

What's on this site What is Aesthetic Realism? An explanation about both the AR philosophy and the group that promotes it. Cult aspects of Aesthetic Realism Fanatical devotion to the leader, cutting off relations with families who aren't also believers -- it's all here. Former members tell their stories A ton of former members explain what life inside the group was like -- and how they're glad they got out. This one is the longest, but most comprehensive. Very moving stuff. AR and Homosexuality The AR group used to try to "cure" people of being gay. They stopped that in 1990 because high-profile success cases kept deciding they were gay after all and leaving. AR has never said their gay-changing attempts were wrong. AR's founder killed himself AR's founder Eli Siegel killed himself, but the AR people have been trying to hide that fact. They can't hide any more, since enough former students have come forward to confirm the truth. Secret AR inquest We got our hands on a tape of a secret meeting inside the group. It's an inquest of an AR student who was supposedly "cured" of his gayness, only to be found still cruising for gay sex. The AR people are merciless with this guy! AR responds to this website The AR people have tried to rebut this website with their own site called Countering the Lies, whose title ought to win some kind of award for irony. Here we explain the story behind that site.

AR consultation What really happens in an Aesthetic Realism "consultation"? Now for the first time the public can see for themselves. A former member shared his tape with us. In the session the AR counselors tried to help the member not be gay, telling him that the basis of the cure was to express deep gratitude to AR and its founder. Thinking of leaving AR? If you're thinking of leaving the group, you're not alone. Let's face it: Most people who have ever studied AR have left -- and not come back. There's got to be a reason for that. Curious about what they figured out? Worried about the fallout if you do decide to leave? Here's everything you need to know. Media Reports The media reports on AR from time to time, and it's never favorable. Here's a list of articles, plus some help for journalists researching AR. And here are direct links to the landmark articles in the NY Post and Jewish Times. Aesthetic Realism glossary We explain the real meanings behind the loaded language that AR people use. My own AR experience I was born into the group, as was my mother, because her parents were members. This page explains my history in the group. On a separate page I have a transcript of my lesson with cult leader Eli Siegel. AR in their own words. Give 'em enough rope... • Actual AR internal meeting • Actual AR consultation • Actual AR lesson • Actual AR advertisment • Actual AR ad. #2 • Hyper-reaction to criticism Site News / Blog Here's some news and commentary that I add from time to time.