"If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to have a very loose relationship with this thing you call 'I' or 'me.'"

"Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central!... Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence! You got a problem with that?"

Said Werner Erhard, a character from the 1970s, who's got a big NYT article about his new training sessions, "Creating Class Leaders," which sounds a lot like his old sessions, which were called EST, except that he doesn't curse at the audience and keep them from going to the bathroom.

“I am committed to the opposite of that idea [that 'there are no second acts in American lives'],” Mr. Erhard said a few weeks after the leadership class in Toronto. “I don’t think there’s a person who walked out of that room who isn’t a second act.” To say nothing of their instructor, who, at age 80, may be more of a third or fourth act.

There was a time, boys and girls — the Me Decade, Tom Wolfe called it — when Mom and Dad wore mood rings, attended encounter groups and in general engaged in a tireless amount of navel gazing... Aspiring “ESTies” flocked to hotel ballrooms across the country for combative training sessions during which they forwent meal and bathroom breaks to take responsibility for their lives and “get it” by discovering there was nothing to get. Diana Ross, Joe Namath, Yoko Ono, Jerry Rubin and several hundred thousand other seekers got it...

Sitting in front of a bank of computers in his hotel room, he read excerpts from the 1,000-page textbook he is working on, such as: “As linguistic abstractions, leader and leadership create leader and leadership as realms of possibility in which, when you are being a leader, all possible ways of being are available to you.” Briefly, the course, which owes ideological debts to the Forum and to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger... Students master principles like integrity and authenticity....

I added the internal links. The "no second acts" line comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald. As the NYT puts it: "Pound another nail into the coffin for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that there are no second acts in American lives." But Fitzgerald shouldn't be pegged down as believing that. My link goes to an NPR interview with the vice president of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, Kirk Curnutt:

CURNUTT: [The line] shows up in an essay called "My Lost City," which is a beautiful sort of testament to New York and was actually very popular in the aftermath of 9/11. The line he says here is: I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days. Clearly he's sort of saying, well, I once believed this but I've been proved wrong. And I think that's what really gets most of us who are Fitzgerald fans is that line is always quoted as saying, well, how naive was Fitzgerald to have said there are no second acts in American lives, when he himself was only a couple of years away from what many people consider the greatest second act in American literary history.... Of all the beautiful lines that I adore that F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote, this is the one I really hate. I wince when I hear it, partly because it's used as a way of saying how sort of naive and shortsighted he was. But also, because for those of us who really adore Fitzgerald, the problem with that is we don't like our man to be cynical. Fitzgerald was an optimist. For all that he went through in life and for sort of how low he was at the end of his life, he really did - like Jay Gatsby - believe in the green light. And he was trying to be optimistic to the core.

I added the link to "My Lost City." Now, onto that other link to that other great essay, Tom Wolfe's "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening." That article, like EST, broke big into the culture at the point in my life when, pre-law school, I worked analyzing magazines in a marketing research firm. I read and coded scores of magazines every month and engaged in the proto-blogging of blabbing with my co-coders about whatever struck us as interesting, which, of course, included EST and the concept of "The 'Me' Decade."

The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else....

By the mid-1960s this service, this luxury, had become available for one and all, i.e., the middle classes... They were encouraged to bare their own souls and to strip away one another’s defensive facades. Everyone was to face his own emotions squarely for the first time....