Post Hypnosis Society

To all members of developed nations: Now that you are realizing that corporations are not citizens, but are sociopaths, your hypnosis that our society is designed to help you have a good life is eeking away.

As a counselor I have seen mid-level executives realize that they allowed themselves to be set up and bowled over by corporate downsizing. Their question: “What is all my corporate experience good for? I invested in a sort of ‘business model’ called being a good employee and now have no future resembling what I was expecting.” They are living in a “harvest and discard” world, where people are harvested and discarded. And there were still more people experiencing this through outsourcing and corporate flight into other lands. There was no fealty to the citizens that birthed and maintained these corporations; the numbers spoke louder than the employees.

As a family member, I recently visited a small town going through the deflating experience of adjusting to major industry leaving town. Now a family member’s boyfriend delivers pizza to people who are generally drunk, high, or on meth. Civilizations are as fragile as the neural networks we call brains.

So why is it that, when politicians serve the most highly capitalized families and organizations in the world, you say they made a mistake? When Pelosi said impeachment of U.S. president Bush was off the table, it meant a lot of taboo information would be off the table. No mistake there.

Perhaps it is that you do not know how to cross the line into a post hypnosis society. Giving up comfortable illusions seems to leave you without good choices. Is it a choice between being a hardened cynic versus becoming a terrorist? Is it between shutting down your senses versus enduring the sharp edge of fear and anger for too many hours a day? Is it that you could no longer laugh or dance, or that your laughter would be stuck on the “derisive” setting?

You must ask and discuss these questions, because waking up is hard to do. And because as the economy dwindles for more of your population, the corruption will continue to become more obvious.

You need support for this. Talk about the line between your socially-sanctioned illusions and the realities of power. That is very different from debating over who the good and bad guys are.

As a therapist, I think this is much like the grounding and focusing that people do when they are able to talk about taboo issues, or discover how their emotional pain is part of a larger pattern that they can understand and address.

I believe you can find answers through awareness. And you can effectively respond to people whose attitudes are shaped by Fox News with understanding of what moves people through ignorance and hate.

Here’s an experiment for you. When you talk to someone about the problems of society, try moving back and forth between comfort and discomfort. When one of you touches on the horrors, what does it feel like to say, “Damn, evolution takes one hell of a long time, don’t it?” When someone talks about Iraq, what is it like to say, “It’s hard to imagine that things have improved, but before civilization as we know it, 20% of a typical generation was lost to inter-tribal violence?”

And when someone parrots convenient “truths,” like a politician’s “mistake,” how does it feel to say, “Mistake? Follow the motives and the money. What mistake?”

When someone glorifies the market economy, as though it was an eternal principle that you can rely on for improving society, ask them why corporate interests use machine guns, machetes, and baseball bats when the government is not strong or representative enough to protect people?

Let’s give this a name. How about “the post hypnosis interweave.” In psychotherapy, there is something like this called fractionated abreaction. It is a way of helping someone deal with traumatic memories without short-circuiting.

In a previous article, I gave attention to evolutionary psychology, and it is relevant here. Maybe much of your fears of the truth come down to your psychological vulnerabilities. Not only do you fear short-circuiting, but you fear losing membership in the club. At the same time, you avert your eyes from evidence that suggests that you give power to evil.

Things like the post hypnosis interweave may help you maintain a steady gaze at world events, and to prolong your conversations and explorations long enough that you may become more articulate and more of a leader in whatever ways you were born to carry the torch.

So how might you do a post hypnosis interweave with your people? Oh, and if the “you” in this article doesn’t refer to you, then who?

Desired Reading

The Craft of Power, by Ralph Gun Hoy Siu.

This is not your pop-business or pop-anything book. It is a scholarly work that has global political reach, as well as personal impact. Part of the beauty of this work it how systematic it is in providing a well-rounded picture of power dynamics that transcend the century in which they play out.

People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, by Howard Zinn.

At times it takes a strong stomach, but this highly researched work is remarkable. It will peel your eyelids back so far, you’ll dust off your shoes.

Media Control, Second Edition: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Open Media Series), by Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky is a highly-published and leading intellectual that many in the United States of Amnesia (as he calls it) haven’t heard of. His works emphasize control of and bias in the media.

Video: The Power of Nightmares

This amazing documentary, aired through the British Public Broadcasting Service, and the recipient of a number of awards, is like taking the red pill (in the movie The Matrix). It provides plenty of interviews and documentation to show that the global terrorism network is a myth made by many of the same people that created the previous global terrorism myth (when it was chalked up to the Soviet Union instead of Al Qaeda). It shows how American neoconservatives and Islamic fundamentalists fed into each other to produce wild distortions of the facts and widespread fear, false criminal charges, and civil rights abuses. One of my favorites was the myth of the dirty bomb. Despite what most Americans think, the dirty bomb is not an effective weapon, even according to our own government’s research!