hypnolibertarian

A famous hypnotist, Milton Erickson, said, “All good inductions are based on confusion.”  Confusion is caused when something we don’t expect happens, or when something we do expect happens in a way to overload our normal conscious processing.

Confusion is  a very uncomfortable state for almost all of us.  Confusion in trance depends on the automatic and natural tendency to escape the confused state, even into trance.  Many commercials and political ads depend on confusion to get their message across.

An example is the recent Obama ad against McCain, attacking him on energy.  It starts with one of those pictures of McCain that shows him under stress.  It then lists the various mechanisms of alternative energy that it claims McCain has voted against.  As it does, the sound speeds up and the names flash faster and faster on the screen.  It becomes harder and harder to keep track, to read the words and hear what is said, especially as they both speed up more and more.  As a result, unless you read very quickly, and in fact even if you do, you become confused.  The squeal of the fast voice is annoying and incomprehensible.

Suddenly it all stops, and everything returns to normal.  We grab onto what follows like a life raft, as it tells us how McCain gives huge tax breaks to Big Oil — and we are so very, very ready to believe it because it gives us relief from the confusion.

None of this is clear from the ad —  it is just one more negative campaign ad.  But because it acts on our dislike of confusion and a knowledge of how to induce confusion, it is much more effective than a plain text ad claiming that McCain is a nasty fellow with respect to energy.

Watch for other ads that use confusion, fast images, uncomfortable sounds.  They are not rare at all.

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