the timboucher experience

Tony Robbins has huge teeth. While a colorful statement, the core factual content is indisputable for any happy soul who has encountered him in person. The man’s a Goliath. And like any fortuitous confluence of native talent and marketing genius, the philosophy he hawks is of similarly gargantuan proportions. That you can make yourself happy, lucky, loving – or whatever you want – pretty much all of the time. He walks across flaming coals to prove that you can too.

Tony Robbins came to my high school (neighboring high school, actually) and put on an enormous stage show, wherein he spun a huge wheel (the Rota Fortuna, Wheel of Fortune, in esoteric-Tarot symbolism) and awarded prizes to whatever portion of the auditorium was cheerly with the most fervor. More factual statements. The grand prize was a gleaming motorcycle which some random kid won. I’ve heard rumors that the kid didn’t actually get the motorcycle in the end, but I can’t substantiate that.

Tony Robbins, however, is *not* a charlatan. Or at least not according to the editors of my high school newspaper and the principal who made me remove that word from an otherwise quite livid editorial on the event which I had written for the school newspaper. And understandably so, on account of libel & slander laws which restrict freedom of speech as to prevent non-factual defamation of a man’s character – never mind the widespread community and business support upon whose back Robbins had been paraded into our midst in the first place.

Robbins performance, as I recall through the midst of over ten years lapsed, was a near all day mandatory assembly for the two upper schools in my district. In it, Robbins moved about the stage with the force and energy typical to his persona, while teachers and community leaders swayed and cheered in what I would describe as near-religious ecstasy, a zeal which was in turn imitated and amplified by the assembled mass of students. Or most of them anyway. A small band of ne’er-do-wells, skaters, druggies, artists, musicians and myself occupied the far back of house-right. When the wheel spun, we had been instructed by Robbins, everyone was to stand up and scream. And remember kids, this is being filmed, was the implicit warning. Not only was attendance mandatory, but so was enthusiasm. We’d each been required to sign a release form before attending which said we authorized Robbins’ company to use our likenesses for corporate purposes.

So we turned to passive resistance, the only course left to the desperate and powerless. We wouldn’t cheer, we wouldn’t jump to our feet and feign enthusiasm, no matter how much we were chided by lunch aides and gym teachers posted to guard and prod our section. We refused to participate. By that time, I’d stopped participating in the ritual of the Catholic Mass, even though my father still made me attend every week. I would stand when you were supposed to stand and sit when you were supposed to sit, but I wouldn’t kneel. I wouldn’t mouth the words, I wouldn’t take the sacrament. Not if I didn’t mean it; a strong statement in a highly religious family. If I wouldn’t kneel before a church I didn’t believe in, there’s certainly no way in hell I would bow before a mere man – no matter how large his physique or teachings – simply because I was told to.

The intervening years have seen me through a deep exploration into the nature of human experience, what it means to be happy, to be righteous and to live a good life. Some people call it spirituality. Robbins comes out a 1970’s philosophical and psychological tradition known as the Human Potential Movement. Proponents of this movement sought the complete and perfect human, individuated in the Jungian sense, self-actualized according to Maslow’s pyramid. The idea was that each human being could become something simply amazing. In many respects, this is a throwback to the Renaissance ideal of the universal man, the polymath, the courtly jack-of-all-trades whose genius applied systematically, transcending everything that he touched. Leonardo Da Vinci (currently celebrated in an exhibit at Baltimore’s Maryland Science Center) is the quintessential example of such a figure: a true artist whose skill and intellect towered over that of the thronging masses.

In that regard, I’ve actually come through the years to a very similar philosophical stance as that put forth by Robbins: that happiness is a choice. Not, necessarily, that we can (or should desire to) always perfectly control our emotions, but that we have, first and foremost, Free Will which we can apply as conscious beings to situations we find ourselves in. And that we can make choices and exhibit behaviors which will create conditions favorable to only our own happiness, but to the harmony of those around us and with our environment. The Good Life. An ancient Greek philosopher named Epictetus said that we couldn’t control anything outside of the sphere of our moral purpose. What he meant was that you might not be able to stop the police from coming and locking you up, or you might not be able to stop an enemy from chopping your legs off. But the one thing that could never be taken away from you is how you respond to situations. Freedom of inner choice. Bob Marley might have called it emancipating yourself from mental slavery.

As I’ve grown more involved professionally with the business and craft of the stage, I’ve even come to appreciate Robbins methods. His skill in simple dramatic character revelations, his technical mastery of a crowd, and his ability to cunningly surf a tidal wave of human energy is certainly impressive. Apart from the post-hippy offshoots of 1970’s America, we could easily draw Robbins into a proud tradition our nation has always relished: that of the itinerant preacher and performer. We could find his historical equivalent many times over in the religious revival, the morally-uplifting Chatauquas, the traveling tent shows and even the small time circuses. The realm, in other words, of the charlatan.

It’s a self-consistent world, that of the charlatan. So far, I’ve managed to trace its roots back at least to the 1200’s in medieval Europe. Bands of traveling minstrels, jongleurs, jugglers and troupes of actors – it is said – when they ran out of other material would resort to putting on medicine shows to fill their purses with villagers’ coin. Closely related, the term “mountebank” comes from the Italian for someone who jumps up on a bench in the market place or village square to draw a crowd, put on a show, and sell his wares – however intangible they may be. Complete with quack doctors and miracle curative elixirs, their shows foreshadowed a social and cultural phenomenon which would criss-cross our developing nation in touring circuits some six hundred years later.

If I’d had these facts before me during high school, I would have written a much more compelling persuasive essay. I would have been able to show, historically, what a charlatan is and precisely how Robbins fits into this great historical theatrical tradition. But I suspect my principal and editors still would have qualms over the whole thing, for the word charlatan suggests fraudulent behavior, false claims, and a swindling of rubes out of their money. Such things I would have had a harder time backing up with facts. Was Robbins duping people with his claims? We he saying things he knew to be patently false in order to sell a product? There would be no way to back accusations like that up rhetorically, without investigating the nature of happiness. I’ve done that, and have experimental evidence in the laboratory of my own life to back up his claims: happiness really is a choice. And not always an easy one, but following such a diversion would lead us surely into another essay…

Maybe a better question to follow, then, would be: is the charlatan always a liar? I would have to answer a resounding no. As science shows again and again, sometimes the placebo is just as effective as the cure. Sometimes moreso. Sometimes laughter really is the best medicine. Does that make the clown a liar? The comedian or comic actor? Certain parts of medieval Europe thought so. Legal codes in various municipalities provided for the immediate arrest, branding and expulsion of all manner of bards, minstrels, actors, charlatans, mountebanks, vagabonds, rogues and other itinerant performers. The tips of their noses would be cut, or their cheeks sliced to indicate their social status as outlaws wherever they roamed with their tricks, shows, and small amusements in tow. They operated outside of the feudal manor system of labor, owed no allegiance to land or lord and in many cases could be outright murdered with no legal repercussions – not unlike the indigent homeless person or the street-walking prostitute of today. Likewise, the whore might fake orgasm without diminishing the animal pleasure of the john. And the stage actor might be simply playing a written part, but the substance and depth of experience and emotion which go into animating it bring the character fully to life for the audience. And that doesn’t make them liars, necessarily, it makes them showmen. Shaman. One who uses ritualized performance to transcend ordinary reality, invoking unseen beings and bringing down extraordinary dimensions of possible experience into a realm accessible to audience and participants alike.

This imbues the charlatan, the mountebank, the huckster, the quack doctor, with a kind of numinous almost mystic quality – presiding, like any good trickster, exactly at the cross-roads of Reality and Imagination. That a precise boundary-line between the two can never be drawn is exactly, I think, where Hope springs from. As humans, maybe our strength comes from this: that we can dream up anything we want and make it so. How “real” our dreams become depends entirely on how skilled we are as performers, as artists. Can we convince ourselves of the substance of our chosen realities? Can we challenge, entertain and inspire others to do the same in the process? If so, maybe we can transcend the shadowy stigma which has followed the charlatan down through the centuries. Or maybe what is needed is simply acceptance, not transcendence. Maybe the playground of Reality is good enough. Maybe the way we move through it, how we sing, dance, play or act is ultimately what matters. Maybe the charlatans are right.

• Use Your Illusion!
• To return to office after living as a hermit on Mount Dongshan
• Mimes, Puppets & The Actor as Holy Vessel
• Anti-Conspiracy Theory
• The Seven Types of Charlatans