Reversing the field -- or: Who is your hypnotist?

Writing a book -- yes, another book that no-one will read -- has kept me away from current events, and from this blog. Sorry. When my brain spends the morning in 1967, it's tough to haul it back into the present day for the after-lunch writing session. My brain used to have that kind of suppleness. Nowadays, the transition seems to require a night's rest.

But...

But I just read this. And then I found myself half-agreeing -- actually, more than half -- with this. 

In a time of global peril, I see my party turning into a hyper-woke hideosity determined to repel the electorate. Increasingly, I consider "my team" an alien presence. At the same time, the other party has turned into a conclave of reason-free conspiracy-crazed neo-Nazis who must be resisted at every turn. 

Absolutely everyone, left and right, espouses ideas and ideals that they once would have found abhorrent. Everything has changed, and not for the better. EveryONE has changed. But nobody will admit that change that they have changed. 

We're all in a trance. 

I speak literally. Earlier this morning, I wrote a riff about George Estabrooks, who -- many decades ago -- was the head of the psychology department at Colgate University. In 1943, he wrote a strange and influential book called Hypnotism, which was revised and reprinted a number of times. Esty (as he was known) was the wild man of his science, if what he wrote about can even be called science. He could also be a monster. 

That said: In 1943, he had some astute things to say about the world situation. The apocalypse of his time bears a too-close-for-comfort resemblance to the apocalypse of our time. Below the asterisks, you'll find a section of the piece I wrote this morning. These words may not appear in the final book, but I want them to show up somewhere.

*  *  *

The ’43 version of Esty’s magnum opus contains a chapter on Hitler as a master hypnotist. A few of these thoughts deserve repetition here, given the current fascist revival.

Both the hypnotist and the demagogue (says Estabrooks) can “reverse his field” within seconds:

With hypnotism we can have the subject weeping at one moment, laughing a minute later and very angry in five minutes more.

So Hitler can whip up in his people an almost fanatical hatred for the Russians over five years, then suddenly change his tactics completely. Over night he shifts his ground. The Russians are splendid people. It is really the Poles who are the great menace – and his people accept this as the hypnotized subject does any hypnotic suggestion, which is exactly what it is.

Then, overnight, it is again the Russians.

Any of this sound familiar?

The “party of balanced budgets” keeps running up obscene deficits and then denies having done so. When Covid came, the advocates of frugality embraced massive handouts. The voters who cheered an absurd war in Iraq have convinced themselves that it was all someone else’s idea. After the Ukraine invasion, a demagogue who damned the NATO alliance pretended to be Putin’s foe. Libertarians-turned-Nazis suddenly realized that socialized medicine may have value in the whites-only “utopia” of their dreams. Former fans of Richard Dawkins have embraced Traditionalism, a kind of theocracy. One-time Objectivists have turned to the Dark Enlightenment – a scheme to supplant reason with unreason, liberal capitalism with monarchy.

So, too, with those who take the left road to fascism. The free speech fundamentalists of the ACLU have become censors. Former advocates of science have embraced chic hogwash about gender – hogwash which arose from the postmodernism of Michel Foucault, who hated science. Liberals who once encouraged creativity have turned the arts into exercises in didacticism so repellent that even Madame Mao would have vomited. The alleged heirs of the Civil Rights movement now embrace segregation. Feminists now strain to make sentences without the word “female.” The children of the flower children scream “Conform or die!”  

If you want to know what Estabrooks meant by reversing the field, consider this: Rightwingers have become the ones sharing links to videos featuring Noam Chomsky, particularly those videos in which Chomsky kicks the pomos. And when Chomsky came out against deplatforming, lefties damned him as “regressive.” Yes: Noam fucking Chomsky.

The astonishment lies not not the fact that these 180-degree shifts occur so often but in the fact that those who shift refuse to admit that they’ve shifted. That is to say: They refuse to admit that they no longer think for themselves. The horse turns right; the horse turns left. The horse does not hold the reins, yet he believes that he chooses the path.

Estabrooks:

We wish to emphasize the fact that this astounding control is just as much hypnotic as that ever exercised in any laboratory. It depends on direct prestige suggestion registering on a brain highly sensitized by emotion. That is about as good a description of hypnosis as we can have.