by John Young
http://www.westernvoices.com/audio/john_young/hypnosis.mp3
"The theater’s a form of hypnosis. So are movies and TV. When you enter a movie theater you know that all you’re going to see is 24 shadows per second flashed on a screen to give an illusion of moving people and objects. Yet despite this knowledge you laugh when the 24 shadows per second tell jokes and cry when the shadows show actors faking death. You know they are an illusion yet you enter the illusion and become a part of it and while the illusion is taking place you are not aware that it is an illusion. This is hypnosis. It is trance. It’s also a form of temporary insanity. But it’s also a powerful force for cultural reinforcement and for this reason the culture promotes movies and censors them for its own benefit." — Max Pirsig
Welcome to Western Voices. I’m John Young with European Americans United.
I have never watched much television. Even as a child I saw little TV and, in retrospect, I am glad for my father’s strict rules regarding what he called "the idiot box." As an adult, I see even less. Primarily, I have always thought of television as a waste of time that draws people into a fantasy world and separates them from real life. The time of our lives is finite, so every minute spent doing one thing is a minute we can’t spend somewhere else. That time can’t be spent on increasing our skills, bettering our health, building real-world bonds with real-world people, or improving our world.
I won’t deny that entertainment, in and of itself, can have a certain value. But when television becomes such a central aspect of our lives that it not only consumes over 30 hours per week of the average man’s time; but it also occupies a central physical location in our homes as though our lives are arranged around it, it has transcended entertainment to become nearly an object of religious devotion. The TV is the family altar. After all, there are more televisions in this country than people. One in four children under the age of two years has a TV in his or her bedroom. That’s right — 25% of toddlers under age TWO have a TV in the bedroom. That’s in spite of the fact that the American Council for Pediatrics recommends that children under age 6 see no television whatsoever.
And there is a reason for that recommendation. Television poses danger to both body and mind.
Television is a well-studied risk factor for obesity. Obesity not only increases the risks of many other illnesses and reduces health overall; but carries large social costs as well. Given that fully a quarter of children under age two have TVs in their bedrooms, too many parents must be really out to lunch; because the Center for Screentime Awareness reports that:
"In a study of preschoolers (ages 1-4), a child’s risk of being overweight increased by six percent for every hour of television watched per day. If that child had a TV in his or her bedroom, the odds of being overweight jumped an additional thirty-one percent for every hour watched. Preschool children with TVs in their bedroom watched an additional 4.8 hours of TV or videos every week."
Basically, putting a TV in your kid’s bedroom is just begging for him to have weight problems that will plague him throughout life.
But that’s not all. My father was right — TV really DOES rot your brain.
We are living in an era where far too many children seem to require prescription drugs in order to pay attention in school. Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are being diagnosed at an ungodly rate; especially among young boys. While I have no doubt that a certain amount of this is due to a cultural intolerance generally within our educational system pertaining to natural male behaviors; there can also be no doubt that the diagnosis is real in many cases.
Of course, this occurred too quickly to be blamed on genetics. The causation must therefore be environmental, and a major environmental shift in the past few decades has been the degree to which children are exposed to television, and the young ages at which they are exposed. Medical science has caught on to this fact. According to the Center for Screentime Awareness:
"Research now indicates that for every hour of television children watch each day, their risk of developing attention-related problems later increases by ten percent. For example, if a child watches three hours of television each day, the child would be thirty percent more likely to develop attention deficit disorder."
In fact, the devastating and often irreversible and permanent effects that TV has on our children have become sufficiently recognized that Children’s Hospital in Boston has organized a Center on Media and Child Health in order to deal with the issue.
Naturally, you aren’t going to be seeing many public service announcements on TV telling you that it is dangerous.
Frankly, it is more than dangerous. Putting a child, especially a toddler, in front of a television — knowing what I have just told you — is nothing short of child abuse; and putting a TV in a kid’s room is an academic and physiological disaster just waiting to happen.
But what about adults?
The fact that TV watching for adults positively correlates to poor physical fitness and obesity is well-known. But what may not be well-known is that watching TV diminishes the restorative powers of sleep. It is obviously something that, even for adults, is best consumed in small doses if at all.
But even worse than the enormous loss of human development engendered by creating a nation of couch potatoes … is the fact that television is used as a mechanism for social control that CREATES rather than reflects social realities.
Let me say this again. Television content is specifically used to create rather than reflect social phenomena. It does this through a combination of its formal features and the specific content.
Earlier this year, the Inter-American Development Bank performed a study to ascertain the effect of Brazilian novelas on divorce; and concluded that, in fact, watching these novelas increased the divorce rate among susceptible populations. The authors concluded by stating that:
"Our findings have potentially important policy implications … and confirm previous research … which suggest that media programs have the potential of targeting specific groups at low cost and may be employed as a public policy tool."
Most importantly, that study demonstrated that, on a society-wide scale, the values and ideas put forth in the novelas could — and DID — increase the rate of divorce in an overwhelmingly Catholic country.
No, studies of this sort won’t let me say that if any particular man or woman sits around watching Desperate Housewives; that person specifically will seek divorce. But I can absolutely tell you that, on a society-wide scale, such programming can and will affect macroscopic trends in such important arenas. And if it can affect something as important and personal as marriage — it can affect ANYTHING. And, once again, those people who create and disseminate the content KNOW THIS.
While I can’t definitively state that if you put Mrs. Jones in front of the tube and make her watch Program X, she will divorce her husband; the content and values portrayed in television have an overall effect that is significant enough for it to be used as a tool of social control. In essence, to put it a finer point on it: mass brainwashing.
Television is a tool used for mass brainwashing. Granted, for some people, only a light rinse is required. Nevertheless, when combined with the environment in our workplaces and educational institutions; it is a crucial foundation for mass social control.
So — how is it so powerful?
The answer is: hypnosis.
Hypnosis can be defined as a state in which selective attention is established, along with bypass of the critical factor. So … critical factor bypass combined with selective attention. This state is established using various techniques, but the most obvious one to observe is continual re-engagement of the orienting response.
You can see this by watching for changes in angle of perspective or scene. In an average TV show, this occurs every three to six seconds. And every time it happens, your attention is re-focused and your ability to subject the messages in the prior scene to critical analysis is bypassed. These scene changes and different perspectives on the same scene glide so smoothly that a person watching TV doesn’t even consciously realize they are happening.
It is a well-known fact among advertising gurus that TV viewers are most often in a state of trance that bypasses their critical factor and makes them more suggestible than they would otherwise be. See, for example, chapter 7 in the book entitled Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer, in which techniques of immersion — and deepening that hypnotic immersion — are discussed generally.
In addition, TV shows employ many other techniques to make the messages they deliver to their hypnotized audiences more powerful.
The most subtle technique is that of implicit values. That is, the values of the characters are implicit and thus never questioned — and therefore never emerge strongly enough to shake the viewer out of his trance long enough for him to question them. They are simply accepted.
A less subtle, but no less powerful technique is the engagement of emotion. Emotion is a powerful technique used in hypnotherapy, and the linking of positive emotions such as self-confidence or social acceptance to desired behaviors is commonplace.
In addition, studies of TV watchers demonstrate that, while watching, their mind activates the same neurons as if they were, themselves, performing the exact same physical actions as those they are observing. This effect is so profound it can even enhance muscle tone. This provides reinforcement and a practiced neural pathway for desired behaviors.
So the man who is watching a TV hero kiss a woman of another race, is also, in his mind, firing all of the neurons as if he were personally kissing that woman. And that is being associated with positive emotions.
This is another powerful hypnotic technique used in formal hypnotherapy. The subject is often asked to imagine watching himself performing some action on a TV screen. This way, he is in the first-person and third-person at the same time. This idea, of putting himself in the shoes of the hero and imagining performing the behavior in the first person, is a powerful aspect of Ericksonian hypnosis. And the added feedback that TV provides of activating emotional channels and reinforcing neural pathways for observed behaviors makes it even more powerful.
So, for a typical barely-conscious American sitting in front of the tube, the overall hypnotic effect can be quite powerful. Certainly, as the Inter-American Bank study demonstrated, it is powerful enough to establish social trends on a macroscopic level.
Okay — I can already hear what some of my listeners who are at least somewhat familiar with hypnosis are saying. They are saying that it is common knowledge that you can’t use hypnosis to cause someone to do something they don’t want to do or is contrary to their value system.
That’s true. But it also is NOT true. Let me explain.
As someone trained in hypnotherapy, I am familiar with the fact that the success record for, for example, getting someone to stop smoking in a single session is far from 100%. And it is absolutely true that, in a single session, I would never be able to change someone’s political views from Demopublican to Republicrat or do something seriously contrary to their existing values — like divorce her husband.
BUT, if you give me someone for 35 hours a week, as much time as the average adult spends in trance in front of the tube, I can first change their underlying values; and THAT will give rise to a change in behavior.
Think about this a minute.
When you go see a hypnotherapist to help stop smoking, lose weight or alleviate test anxiety; you are seeing him once, two or three times for only an hour or less. The cost is high enough, and the therapist’s other obligations are such, that spending 35 hours a week in trance would be prohibitive in the extreme. What he can do is fairly limited in that respect.
But with the television, 35 hours a week, for a total of 1,820 hours per year — year after year — quite profound changes can be made in someone’s underlying value system.
So, you are right that given just a one hour session with someone, I can’t make her divorce her husband. But give me 1,820 hours with her for five years — just like she has with the TV — and I can most assuredly make it happen.
The TV didn’t assault us all at once with a radical new value system. It went progressively. It went from the Mary Tyler Moore show to Love Boat to Sex and the City. You progress from Father Knows Best to Home Improvement to Everybody Loves Raymond.
Over time, the values have gone from committed wives to hedonistic sex; from responsible fathers to laughable buffoons; from obedient children to consumer-driven and vapid teens.
When you look carefully at people at work, or the behavior of teens, you can clearly see the value systems of television at work.
Now, let me ask you: how many of the finite hours of your life have you spent in a hypnotic state while people you do not know have infused their own values into your mind? How much of your value system is the result of your own critical examination and conscious adoption — and how much is the result of uncritical acceptance of the implicit and explicit values of TV characters.
Without an outside frame of reference composed of a society that hasn’t been exposed to television — how in the world would you know which of your values are truly your own?
And, let me ask you one more question. How do you know that you can trust the handful of people who control all TV content? Do you trust them enough to let them hypnotize you (and your kids) for 35 hours a week?
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So … now that I’ve given you something to think about; I’d like you to make sure that none of your kids have a TV in their rooms. That’s a start.
And, really, the idea that so many of our people actually PAY cable companies for the dubious privilege of being indoctrinated with undesirable values, is pretty sick. So you should really stop subscribing to pay television. Don’t allow our enemies to profit from hurting us.
Think hard about what you’d like our society to look like. Is it the society that TV will manifest? Doubtful.
Check out the Center for Screentime Awareness. Get their materials, and disseminate them to teachers and other parents. Start a trend away from TV. Every kid who grows up without a TV in the bedroom will be a better and more capable adult. Every person who cancels cable TV takes money away from the forces of dissolution who desire our destruction. Every minute taken away from mindless entertainment becomes available for gaining skills and building real social bonds in the real world so that our families and communities can be strengthened.
Make sure that your thoughts, are your own.
This has been John Young with European Americans United. Thank you for joining me again today.
References:
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http://www.screentime.org/index.php?option=com_fireboard&func=view&catid=10&id=106&Itemid=12
http://www.whitedot.org/issue/iss_story.asp?slug=ADHD%20Toddlers
http://idbdocs.iadb.org/wsdocs/getdocument.aspx?docnum=1856109
http://kidsworldlc.com/pdfs/A%20Case%20Study%20on%20Peer%20Pressure.pdf
http://books.google.com/books?id=qOWCKXglVLwC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&dq=tv+hypnosis&source=bl&ots=s99HH6Mx32&sig=4ajyXWh9XbopWOm7CYCncQHGNN8&hl=en&ei=R-KrSvqhF9PflAeDhajnBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6#v=onepage&q=tv%20hypnosis&f=false
http://www.hypnosis101.com/wordpress/hypnosis/ericksonian-hypnosis/habits-tasks/