hypnolibertarian

My pet peeve right now is those commercial inserts that they flash on the screen.  You know the ones: you are watching an interesting program and suddenly Hugh Laurie as House pops up in the lower left hand corner, and you wonder what the heck he has to do with Steven Segal kicking the snot out of some villain.

It may have little to do with the storyline, but it has everything to do with making money for the TV stations.  Recall our conversation about how those who write commercials try to make them resemble TV shows, and otherwise to soften the transition from the TV show itself to the commercial.  Well, these inserts don’t have to soften the transition; there is no transition.  They may appear at any time during the program, obscuring what is happening below them and sliding the idea of watching their program into your subconscious.  When you reach the point of ignoring them, and just watching the show, you are doing just what they want; you are allowing these inserts to slide past your conscious mind into your unconscious mind.

So far, the TV stations have kept this powerful spot to themselves.  However, there is talk of allowing commercial companies to have some of that time; and not only that, but to coordinate the inserts with product placement in the show.  For example, the hero detective takes a drink of Coke as a normal product placement while a commercial for Coke plays underneath.  The rule of thumb in the industry is that product placement alone is not enough; it must be followed up with normal commercials.  Now that follow-up can happen right at the same time as the product placement.

Watch for those inserts.  Do they affect your viewing habits?  Do they make you more aware of new shows coming up?

There is a class of ads commonly called “nostalgia ads.”  These ads use happy images from the past, either the explicit past (the 70’s, for example) or the implicit past (childhood, school days, the teen years, etc.)  An example is the Target commercial I was just watching.  It has lots of images from a generic American past: a boy on a paper route, a dog playing with a boy, a family camping out, a family on a picnic.  All of these images are from a happier time, and are intended to evoke similar memories inside almost all of us.

Politicians and advertisers use regression for a variety of reasons, including trance induction.  If we are “take back” to that earlier time, we are more credulous and more suggestible.  Age regression is a part of the toolbox of the hypnotist, the politician, and the advertiser alike.

For some time I have spoken of specific things that affect our minds in one way or another.  Now I’d like to talk about some of the institutional constructs that fashion our thinking, and the reactions we have both as children and adults.  These institutions create the patterns, the norms that make up our society.  They are the most powerful hypnotic agents we have.  They take children and adults and produce crowds that think similarly.  They are not “robot makers,” but they determine the broad patterns of how almost all of us think.

First and foremost is our parents; however, I will cover that in a future post.  A close second is our schools.  The school system is the best mechanism for indoctrination that we have.  From before first grade, in kindergarten, the school system takes up the primary part of your children’s day, teaching them, babysitting them, and (where I come in) indoctrinating them.  In general, indoctrination is nothing complex; it comes of simple repetition of a concept to minds who are not in a position to protest.  Children do not just learn to read and write.  They learn about the food pyramid, and that drugs are bad, and that Carol has two mommies, and that everyone is equal, and that it is dangerous to stick out from the mass.  Some of these things are taught purposely, and some are simply part of the context in which the kids spend their time.

Some of this is quite deliberate.  The people in the education establishment (which has some relationship to the federal government, but is not totally controlled by them) decides that a certain “lesson” needs to be taught.  This may be that homosexual sex is not a sin and that gay people are victims of prejudice, to the kinds of food they should eat, to what is important in life.  These are decisions that affect us for our entire lives, and don’t think that the corporations don’t know it.  They offer “educational material” and free handouts and lots of things that come to the schools, which they will use because it is easy.  Does anyone else remember films by Archer Daniels Midlands when you were in school about how important corn was, and how it can be turned into ethanol?  I do.  And now we are making ethanol while prices rise on food from the lack of corn and it takes more energy to create a gallon of ethanol from corn than it delivers in a car.  Corn farmers are delighted, especial the big ones (ADM).  No one else should be.

All this because ADM plans for the future and inculcated the idea of ethanol 30 years ago or more.  The schools are the place to mold the minds of children.  Children are turning in their parents for drug possession.  I’m not saying drug possession is good, but it shows the power of the schools, to indoctrinate them to turn in their own parents (although the home situation of most drug taking families may have something to do with it as well).

Think back to your school days.  What messages were given to you that you now question?  Did you believe them then?  Which ones do you not question?  Are you sure they are right, or are you conditioned to accept them?

Here we move into the realm of true subconscious conditioning, which the
true mavens of Madison Avenue foist upon on to sell cars, makeup, drills,
toilet paper, and Presidents. This is making connections, not obviously as
we saw before, but deep in the mind, totally bypassing conscious awareness.
These techniques are very commonly used now, and are very effective.

The first choice is what to connect with what. For sales, there is one
obvious answer for almost anything: sex. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, and more
sex. Sex sells. Sex sells better than anything else, to both men and women.
Whether this is Freudian or evil or whatever, it is true, and all of Madison
Avenue knows it. Connect a product (or a person) to sex and you’re almost
home. Obama has the advantage here by a lot; however, the nomination of
Palin as VP for the Republicans may have been motivated by many more things
than her record — like her legs.

The mechanism for the connection is usually very subtle: something is the
same, a marker, a footprint, between a sexual image and an image of the
product. Sometimes this is a logo. Sometimes it is an emphasized word louder
than the others by a specific percentage (have you noticed how commercials
are always louder than the shows on TV?) Sometimes it is a shape that can
appear in many places, like the Target circles. Sometimes it is a word with
the same typeface: smart, sexy, vibrant, white, anything. If this is
concealed in a “funny” commercial (for example, that gum with the blonde
spokesperson) then the subconscious not only gets sexual connections, but
good feelings as well. This is why so many commercials are comical.

This kind of communication with the subconscious is almost impossible to
catch in all cases, and is endemic. The ad men know much more about
conditioning large bodies of people than the government (which may be scary
in and of itself). We are all victims of this programming. Next time you see
a commercial that you like, watch for markers between the sexual parts of
the commercial and the product. Some will be clear and obvious. Some will be
very subtle. How many can you see?