The Marketplace

A revelation has to live somewhere once it has been received, and the place Human Design came to live was not a church or a university but a market: the loose, sprawling, commercial culture of Western self-improvement that had been building for two decades when the founder began to teach, and that was ready, by the late 1980s, to absorb one more system of the self. The founder did not invent the way Human Design would be sold, certified, licensed, and consumed. He inherited a set of forms already worked out by the movements that came before him, and the institutional shape of his system, examined in detail in the chapters on its later life, makes more sense set against that inheritance.

The culture in question went by several names. The Human Potential Movement of the 1960s, centered at retreat institutes such as Esalen in California, had married psychology to Eastern practice and proposed that ordinary people could be trained toward higher functioning. Out of it, in the 1970s, grew the large-group awareness trainings, of which the best known was est, founded by Werner Erhard, which put paying participants through intensive seminars promising transformation and built a graduated ladder of further, paid programs.¹ By the 1980s these strands had merged in the public mind into what was loosely called the New Age: a marketplace of channeled teachings, crystals, astrology, past-life work, alternative healing, and prophecy, with its own publishers, its own fairs and bookstores, and its own celebrities. The movement reached a symbolic peak in August 1987, the same year as the eight days in the ruin, when tens of thousands of people gathered at sites around the world for the event called the Harmonic Convergence, an episode that marked how large and how organized the spiritual marketplace had become.²

Several features of that marketplace became features of Human Design, and they were features of the market before they were features of the system. The first is certification. The New Age economy had learned to reproduce itself by training and credentialing practitioners, who paid to be taught, paid to be certified, and then earned by teaching and certifying others, a structure that turned a body of knowledge into a self-extending source of revenue. Human Design adopted this structure wholesale, building a graded sequence of courses and a licensed school empowered to certify analysts and teachers, the apparatus described in the chapters on the institutions.³ The second is the recorded teacher. The spiritual marketplace ran on the sale of the master’s words, on tape, on video, in transcribed lectures, and it sustained the authority of a single source by controlling and selling access to that source’s recorded output. The founder’s archive of recorded teaching, held after his death by a family corporation that licenses its use, is a direct instance of that form.⁴ The third is intellectual property. As spiritual teachings became products, their originators and heirs increasingly treated them as property to be trademarked, copyrighted, and defended, and disputes over the ownership of a method or a name became a recurring feature of the field. The ownership claims that run through the second half of this book, and the legal tests they eventually met, are the Human Design instance of a contest the wider marketplace had been having for years.⁵

This inheritance cuts against one of the system’s own claims about itself, and the tension is worth naming precisely because the book elsewhere declines to adjudicate the system’s content. Human Design presents itself as a break from belief, a science of differentiation offered for experiment rather than faith, something categorically unlike the New Age culture around it. The founder was often scornful of that culture and positioned his teaching against it.⁶ Yet the commercial and institutional forms the system took, the certification ladder, the controlled archive, the licensed monopoly, the defended trademark, are precisely the forms of the marketplace it disowned. The distinction the system drew was at the level of content and attitude; at the level of structure there was no distinction at all. It was sold the way such things were sold.

The point is not an accusation. Every teaching that survives must find a way to support its teachers and reproduce itself, and the founder, who by his own account received the knowledge in poverty and tried for months to be rid of it, did not have the luxury of inventing a new economy for it from nothing. He used the one that existed. But a documentary life has to record that the institutional history of Human Design, the part of the story that the closing chapters follow into courtrooms and trademark registries, is not a departure from the system’s spiritual origins into some later corruption. The commercial forms were there from the surrounding culture at the start, woven in before the first analyst was certified. The marketplace did not capture Human Design. Human Design was born into it, and grew up in its shape.