Against their will

Another month, another rambling post I'm afraid. I was looking forward to the meet in London last month but I managed to catch the dreaded man-flu and couldn't make it.

This post is about something on which I feel I have been misquoted, which is my answer to the question that is often asked of hypnotists, namely this:

"Can a person be hypnotised to do things against their will?"

If you ask a stage hypnotist the answer will almost certainly be "No, of course not. Hypnosis is only suggestion and the subject can say no at any time."

It's a useful answer that I believe is true for most people. I think it is also a nice safety net in that it is arguably self-fulfilling if you suggest it to a subject before the formal part of the hypnosis begins. If you subsequently bring a subject up on stage or approach them in the street and hypnotise them for the sake of the experience of hypnosis they will probably be quite happy with the idea of being unable to speak, or being stuck to the floor, or such gimmicks. If you tell the same subject to strip off all their clothes or give you all their money the chances are they will refuse. In my experience at least the subject will come to their sense and say something along the lines of "Eh what? No!"

However, as this is a question about the very nature of people and how they act I don't think there can be a definitive answer to this question and the more you look at it it's easy to see it as a grey area. People are by their very nature varied and to say that people are incapable of acting in any particular way would not be very reflective of the real world. If you look for long enough there are people who would indeed rip their clothes off if the hypnotist asked them to, or likewise be trusting enough to hand over their wallet.

Making accurate generalised rules about what it is possible to influence people to do through hypnosis is, I think, analogous to making generalised rules about what it is possible for people to believe, and what some people will believe never ceases to amaze me.

In any case I think this question, like the acting dilemma, is intrinsically flawed. To me at least it conjures up images of a hypnotist clicking his fingers and the subject being forced by some sinister outside energy to dance and cluck like a chicken. They don't want to do it, but hypnosis forces them to do it, against their will not to.

To me I the flaw is that the question presupposes the assertions that free will is something that is firstly definitive, and secondly that it is a fixed point in space, neither of which I think are true.

I think that "free will" is a bit of an idealistic concept, to my mind idolised by those who like to believe the myth that all of their decisions are rational. I personally see behavioural decisions as being some kind of tug-of-war between a whole mish-mash of different and often contradicting internal arguments, some rational and some irrational.

So imagine, when someone is offered a bar of chocolate various thoughts bounce around inside their head such as "I'm hungry", "mmmm chocolate tastes nice!" and the perhaps more rational "but it's nearly dinner time". I believe that the final decision is a product of the balance between these factors. The individual wants to eat the chocolate bar, but they also don't want to lessen their enjoyment of their dinner by already having eaten. On some level they are willing to do either course of action, but in practice they have to choose one or the other.

Hypnosis does certainly have the power to cause people to act in a way that they normally wouldn't because, as I understand it, it influences the above decision process and can make less rational courses of action seem more attractive. A useful hypnotic principle to remember is that people do things because they want to do things, and because doing so will make the feel good. People will not do what they don't want to do; things that will make them feel bad. What I am saying here is that whilst a hypnotist can influence what somebody chooses to do, they can only choose from the menu of things that someone is willing to do.

Sometimes of course hypnosis will provide an extremely shy or repressed individual the excuse to vent something that they have always wanted to do. I think it is a common mistake of hypnotists to claim to have created it, rather than simply releasing it.

On a darker note I know of at least one hypnotist who insists that it is possible to hypnotise someone to make them do anything, even something horrific like killing their own child. My answer to this extremely distasteful proposition is the same as above, hypnosis will not make someone go against their will.

The only way it would theoretically be possible would be to arrive at the outcome through a circuitous means, such as giving the subject a gun and convincing them that it isn't loaded, or that it's only a toy like a water pistol. In such a case it isn't hypnosis as such that has caused the harm, rather it's a case of deliberate deception and violation of trust.

Consider this scenario. The same subject comes to the hypnotist and asks to borrow some sugar so they can make sweets for their child. The hypnotist, without using any hypnosis, gives them lethal poison in the form of a white powder and tells them that it's sugar. Same principle, same effect, and probably easier to achieve too.

The subject is most definitely not willing to shoot their child or feed that child poison, nor are they willing to be hypnotised by or to accept food from someone they know to be a murderous psychopath. Their mistake is misplacing their trust, and I'm glad that most people have enough intuition to recognise the warning signs before anything like the above could happen.

"Come into my bunker. Could you switch the light on please? It's the red button on the wall there. Thanks... Haha! Fooled you! That button doesn't turn on the light, it starts World War III! You pressed it, so it's all your fault!"

To anyone who read my last post (the one in which, by the way, I advised caution anybody wanting to take part in hypnosis online to be careful when putting themselves in the hands of an anonymous stranger) and came to the conclusion that what I'm telling people is that hypnosis is harmless so go nuts I say this. I will say it again, hypnosis in itself is harmless but as with any activity involving trust the laws of common sense apply when choosing who to do it with.

To those who think hypnosis is a way for people to take over the minds of others, in true Svengali style, I say this: Where are all the brainwashed hypno-slaves? Surely whoever could do such a thing would have taken over the world by now?

The truth is that in practice during a trance the vast majority of people do seem to maintain the ability to become suspicious of what's going on or to snap out of it if they start hearing things they aren't happy with. Of course that's not true for everybody, but with people no form of behaviour is universal.

Of course, incessant suggestion over longer periods of time will influence people and start to change their world view. I can think of two names for this form of legalised brainwashing and these are "Advertising" and "Religion". Note the lack of mind control rays; fiction has a monopoly on those.