Recently I have been conducting a highly scientific experiment on the power of suggestion. I have been repeating a phrase over and over, not repetitively but just when I can find a way to squeeze it in, to two children that a good friend of mine is related to. Let’s call them Fuzz and Rona (not their real names)
What I say is not what is important, what I am trying to do is to create a couple of echo chambers in the shape of people, to get them to throw aside any rational thought and simply blurt out my statement as if it is a truth. Even if they just drop it into a conversation, or better yet if they were to use it in a statement that started with “did you know?”, it will prove, to my satisfaction at least, that this is what people do.
I recently had a conversation where I recanted the story of Chiggers, a guy I once knew, a legend of the squadron bar. He stripped naked and got up on the bar pool table to perform the dance of the flaming arseholes, I’ll not go into any further details, old army buddies will likely know this one, some may even remember Chiggers I hope. Now when I told the story I remembered a time before that I had told it, and interestingly one of the people I told it to actually told it back to me a couple of years later as if they were the witness present. This was a wow moment for me as I realised what they had done was take a good story and make it their own, but there was no intention to lie, their memory had made it their property. I think this happens more than we know.
If we can assimilate stories into our own narrative, if that is in fact a phenomenon of will, then do we have an inner desire to make our lives more interesting if they are in fact vanilla? Is this part of the fantasists mechanism? And if so, then can we, or others, plant a story or a truth (a social truth) into someone’s head just by repeating it enough? I figure that is what I am doing to these children, planting a harmless notion into their minds to see if it can be a truth not rationally considered (because any rational consideration would of course lead them to know it was not a truth).
We can use three very prominent western social truths, factoids implanted into young impressionable minds, never challenged, oft repeated and rarely challenged, truths that cannot be true, to illustrate this. They are, the ten commandments, Noah’s arc, and Jonah and the whale. The ten commandments are nonsense, one of them is a thought crime ffs. It would have been impossible for Noah to house two of each animal on a ship to escape the world wide flood as there is just too many of them and they are too spread out geographically, aborigines DNA veers off from Africans by about 50,000 years, and not a single kangaroo bone has been found between the middle east and Australia. Jonah would have died of asphyxiation simple as, there is no oxygen in a whale’s stomach. So these are easily called bullshit, but they are not alone, we could cite oxygen production from trees (most of the worlds oxygen comes from bacteria on the sea), or we might say magnetism (law of attraction) also has no measurable qualities (like those killed in the Tsunami willed it on themselves?). Okay, I’m now going to reveal the statement I have been seeding them with…
“Chinese people do not feel pain the way we do”
This is an absurd thing to say, possibly insensitive, and most importantly it is incorrect. I heard it in a film, one of the characters says it jokingly after a scrap in the movie Payback with Mel Gibson. Like I say, it is not something that I hope they hold on to in adulthood, and I will correct it if that starts to happen. When I say it the other folks present correct it by telling them I am messing about and to not take me seriously, it will be interesting to see if that has any impact. This isn’t a real scientific thing I’m up to, it’s just a bit of fun to prove a theory really.
I’ve done this sort of thing before on certain types of folks I know but a little bit differently. I use the over praising method to bring out jealousy and bitterness in people that have obvious fragile egos. By suggesting to Y that X is doing a fantastic job, or is a very impressive person, I can make Y react with an immediate put down of X. This is fascinating, I do not believe that people who do this know that they are doing it, but I do have an opinion as to why they do it. Some folks feel bitter that other folks do well, maybe we all do this to some extent? I know I do this, but I reserve it for the praise people get that I think is silly. I watched on TV as the audience clapped in congratulations over an audience member who had won over £6M on the national lottery, and that is fucking ridiculous since winning the lottery is not an achievement, it is a happenstance.
I know a couple that will not allow anyone to be praised in their presence, unless they are the ones doing it. It appears to hurt them deeply to hear something out of their control that does not fluff their egos and focus on them. I figure they want to take credit for the things that people around them do, and it’s all part of a power driven need to be praised and recognised as the locus of all actions in their wheelhouse. This is a fragility, it is the weak ego acting to protect itself. Like a person given to making shit up just to impress, it is the desire to have attention focussed on the self rather than the subject. There are folks that cannot even order off the menu because they are too important to themselves to have decisions made for them, even by the chef.
I think this may not work, but only because I am not an expert at it. In other circumstances I think it has worked, is this not what adverts do, what news media does, what governments are up to? Propaganda, advertising, marketing, communications strategy, these are types of suggestion, not statements of measurable things. Sometimes nefarious (by foreign governments), and sometimes just to get you to buy something you don’t need or be unappreciative of something you have so as to replace it with something that is not any better.
The truth is that most toilet paper is as good as any other, all toothpaste cleans your teeth, no car will make you more fun, Taylor Swift is a fad not a serious musical artist, no painting is really priceless it’s just an object that rich people use to avoid taxation, and having an iPhone in the 2020’s just lets other people know you care more about product identification than product usability or value. But that’s just my opinion…
So with there being so much of this truth seeding already going on, why wouldn’t I have a go at it too? Remember the most important advice in this piece, I am not to be taken seriously!
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