Yes, You (sex) Are Being (sex) Influenced: Part 1
Don't think so? Ever wondered why you think that?
I have an infection under the nail of my big toe. I’m sure you’re dying to hear all about it.
I’ll spare you the unpleasant details, but know that as I’m writing much of this essay, my foot is soaking in a basin filled with hot water, Epsom salts, and colloidal silver. I’ve tried a bunch of other things to heal it, but it has been surprisingly resistant to all of them, because I can’t actually make contact with the site of the infection.
I liken this to the human relationship with the subconscious. (Of course! Doesn’t everyone?)
It’s just below the surface of our consciousness — you know it’s there, and you can see the evidence of its health or disease — but unless you have the right tool, you can’t reach it to heal it.
The subconscious is what drives almost all of your behavior. As Bruce Lipton explains in his excellent book, The Biology of Belief, unless you are in a perfect state of presence — living completely and fully in the present moment — you are acting out of subconscious programming.
I don’t know about you, but on any given day, I can count on one hand the moments I live fully in the present. Actually, that’s on a good day.
(I’m going to use the term “subconscious” to describe the realm of ourselves that exists below conscious awareness. There’s a long-standing argument over whether “subconscious” or “unconscious” is a more legitimate term, but that’s for others to debate.)
Operating from subconscious programming is fine, much of the time, as long as what’s driving you is what you WANT to drive you. But most of us don’t really even think about what’s driving us. We just drive, believing that we are in total control of the car.
But really, it’s like there are two distinct keys to your car. There’s the key you own; that’s your “thinking mind,” the one that opens the car and starts the engine. Once the engine is humming, off you go down the road, thinking that you are headed toward your chosen destination, making chosen stops and chosen turns along the way.
Which you are… except for the “chosen” part.
Because there’s another key, one that you don’t own. You may not even know it exists. This other key controls the direction you want to go and how to get there. It’s made up of everything you believe in your life, and it was forged in the blessed fire of all of your experiences: pain and trauma; joy and relief; desires and fears; needs fulfilled and unfulfilled; successes and failures.
Your subconscious was also forged by the stories you were told — or told yourself —about everything you’ve ever experienced through your five senses. Some of these experiences you remember consciously, some you don’t, but all of them have shaped you. Taken in totality, they own that second key.
None of us wants to believe that there’s another key to our car. It’s my car, dammit, and I’m the only one driving it! Yes, you got it running and you have your hands on the wheel, but that doesn’t mean you are in total control.
How do you feel when you read that? Do you believe it’s true? Or do you think, I know my own mind. I’m not influenced by all that stuff.
Have you ever asked yourself, why do I believe that?
Let’s find out.
In the 1980s, I took a communications class at Stanford that rocked my world. The professor showed us slide after slide (yep, the 80s) of actual print ads that incorporated words and imagery — usually relating to either sex or death — on a subliminal level, to influence buyers. The most iconic example was the word “sex,” decipherable within the ice cubes in a glass of whiskey.
In trying to locate some of those classic images, I came across two opposing viewpoints. The first, exemplified by a 2014 article in Slate.com, argues that you can definitely find subliminal messaging (in this case, on sex) and offers up a steamy X-rated compilation of examples:
After curating this vigorous phantasmagoria, Slate.com then offers a mild “whether they were intentional or not is perhaps debatable,” which you might find, as I did, absolutely laughable.
The second viewpoint — an article titled “Of Sex and Ice Cubes: The Great Subliminal Advertising Scare,” by Marcia Appel — takes Slate’s tepid comment and dials it down even further, claiming that there’s no evidence that subliminal advertising works. In fact, according to Appel, it’s just the “greatest advertising myth of the 20th century.”
She says:
“Imagine: unethical advertisers could plant subliminal messages in consumers’ minds and trick them into purchasing products they didn’t want or need. This was the era of paranoia about UFOs, Communism and brainwashing, so it really caught the public imagination…and the attention of the government.”
Ha ha ha. Imagine that.
It sure did catch the attention of the feds. And what did the government do? In 1958, The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and members of Congress watched a “demonstration” of subliminal advertising, and agreed: it had no effect on them.
Laughable, yet again.
The result? Subliminal advertising was NOT ruled illegal in the United States. In a subsequent ruling in 1974, the agency issued a policy statement — not a law — on the use of "subliminal perception," chiding those who would consider using it, saying it was “against the public interest.”
Hmm. How can something that is ineffective be against the public interest?
Take a look at the article if you’re interested. Here’s what I enjoyed: Appel works for 4A, an organization founded in 1917 to “promote and advance the advertising industry.” Aw shucks, those poor, beleaguered ad agencies lining Madison Avenue. They sure do need advancement.
So who’s telling us subliminal advertising is a myth? Yep! The advertising industry! 4A did a survey of advertising practitioners, clients, and media specialists in 1994 which concluded, “Other research has provided evidence that subliminal advertising, even if it were used, would not be effective in producing outcomes desired by marketers.”
Not that they provided any of that “other research.”
They then went on to say that “subliminal advertising is not, in fact, used.” Well folks, there you have it! Case closed! (If you didn’t watch the above compilation from Slate.com, now might be a good time.)
All of this reminds me of the line from the movie The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist."
Perhaps that’s why many of us believe either a) subliminals are bogus, or b) we’re not affected by them. What better way to ensure their continued and profitable usage by those who understand just how effective they really are?
Let’s say for the sake of argument that subliminal influence isn’t real. Why then, did the CIA invest heavily, for decades, in researching its effectiveness, starting in 1949?
Innocuously and sweetly named, “Project Bluebird” was the first in a horrifying line of illegal, comprehensive, integrated CIA projects that tested all manner of mind control techniques, including subliminal influence.
Project Bluebird soon rolled into Project Artichoke, which then metastasized in 1953 into MK-Ultra: a broad, comprehensive program that experimented on (mostly) involuntary subjects, using psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and electroshock therapy, among other techniques.
Now the most infamous of the CIA initiatives, MK-Ultra caused untold mental and emotional damage. Untold, because it was invisible. In order to preserve its secrecy, the experiments on mind control techniques were carried out by 185 researchers spread out across 80 institutions, universities, and hospitals. Many of those involved had no idea their work was being initiated and harvested by the CIA.
The CIA, in turn, was really just picking up the ball that Germany was forced to drop after they lost World War II.
In 2007, author and history professor Alfred McCoy wrote “Science in Dachau’s Shadow,” an article that describes how the psychological and medical atrocities committed by the Nazis did not end with VE Day.
“The Nazi role in the CIA’s research was more than mere metaphor or analogue. Just as the U.S. space program later benefited from the work of Werner von Braun’s rocket scientists at Peenemunde and the Luftwaffe’s medical experiments at Dachau, so this CIA psychological effort continued the research of the Nazi doctors, both their specific scientific findings and innovative use of human subjects.” [emphasis mine] —Alfred McCoy
The CIA denied that MK-Ultra existed, as well as any illegal human psychology experimentation, until President Gerald Ford in 1975 ordered an investigation into the CIA and light finally began to seep into its covert actions. Most of the CIA’s records of the program had been destroyed two years prior, but enough files remained to provide clear evidence for its existence. According to the CIA, the program was shut down completely in the mid-1960s.
Right. Perhaps that particularly-named program was.
Doesn’t it seem a bit absurd that the U.S. government — or any government, for that matter — would not continue investing in understanding and influencing the human mind?
More recently, Britain established the “Nudge Unit” (officially called the Behavior Insights Team, or “BIT”) in 2010 to “apply behavioural science to public policy.” The American version of BIT is the OES (Office of Evaluation Services), created in 2015 and worded slightly differently: it “works across the federal government to help agencies build and use evidence.”
To be sure, the BIT and OES are not MK-Ultra. But they are companies/agencies that are using principles of human persuasion to craft strategies in public governance. Hmm… what’s the word for that? Wait, it’ll come…
BIT has since mushroomed into offices around the world, and has consulted with no less than 147 different organizations. Here are a few: the CDC, the World Bank, and the United Nations; governmental departments in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Singapore, Bhutan, and Japan; many organizations in the UK, including The Electoral Commission, dozens of local U.S. city governments; J.P. Morgan, Meta, and Sky (part of Comcast NBCUniversal).
Basically, a bunch of elite academics from the fields of psychology, human sciences, economics, and statistics, get together and figure out how to “nudge” us, to change our actions “for our own good.”
Oh, right! I remember that word now. Propaganda. Or as my children called it when they were young: pro-panga-danga.
Why, you may ask, would children know that word at an age young enough to mispronounce it? Good question.
Early on in their upbringing, we decided to get rid of our television, which is a longer essay for another day. But part of that process was explaining our reasoning to our kids, when they were old enough to notice that other people had them and we didn’t.
My husband Peter (who was a hypnotist by that time, recently certified) gently explained to them that the tv is a box that tells stories, and some of them are true, and some of them are false, and some are a mixture of both. And that the people who make up those stories really want you to believe them, so much so that you do things, like buy stuff you don’t really need.
To really drive the point home, he put a cardboard box on his head and talked through a hole he had cut out. (Did I ever mention he used to be an actor in NYC?)
Some might say he was an agent of propaganda in that moment, and I would have to agree. But that’s the role and heavy responsibility of being a parent — you shape the beliefs of other human beings in your care. That’s why it’s so important to be aware of what you say and how you say it; they are drinking all of it into their own subconscious.
Our three little ones laughed a lot at their dad, but they got the message: the tv is not to be trusted, because it is the source of a lot of pro-panga-danga.
Still looking for some scientific evidence? Here you go: based on his experiments on consumer behavior, Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman concluded that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious. Why? Because human beings are inherently emotional, and emotion drives almost all decision-making.
Whatever “4A” would like you to believe, the advertising industry has known this forever: of course subliminal influence exists. They know that the subconscious mind is infinitely more perceptive than the conscious mind; that’s why every ad is so carefully, meticulously crafted.
I’ve been in television commercials, a bunch of them. Nothing is left to chance. Every detail is selected and analyzed and controlled — down to the microscopic earrings I wear — to convey the desired message, to create the desired feeling in you, the consumer, so that you’ll make the “right” purchase.
So, let’s go back to the car analogy I presented at the start of this essay. Your rational mind is the first key (the one you own), and your subconscious mind is the second key (the one you don’t).
Since your second key is owned by everything that has shaped you, that means it’s also owned by everyone who has shaped you, every single person, whether you gave them permission or not. Your parents. Your first boyfriend, second-grade teacher, or pastor. Your best friends.
All of these well-meaning people hold the second key to your car — arguably, the most important key.
Here’s the kicker. It’s not just all those folks from your past who own the second key. At least you knew those people.
It’s also owned by corporations, the government, market research firms, designers, political consultants, and anyone else that advertises or otherwise creates “stuff” that you consume: all media, all art, all stories in all forms.
If you saw The Devil Wears Prada, you’ll remember the scene where the Anna Wintour-like character Miranda (Meryl Streep) schools Andi (Anne Hathaway) about the sweater she’s wearing. Andi thinks she’s not affected by high fashion, but Miranda disabuses her of that notion… and removes her kneecaps at the same time:
Sure, it’s just a sweater. But it’s emblematic of what NYU professor and propaganda expert
writes in the introduction to the 2005 reprint of Edward Bernays’s book Propaganda:“It is a sort of managerial aristocracy that quietly determines what we buy and how we vote and what we deem as good or bad.”
Bernays, whom I discuss more in depth in Part 2 of this essay, said this, among other horrifying things:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”
Is it an important element? A necessary one?
Or is manipulation, no matter how “conscious” and “intelligent,” antithetical to democracy itself?
Part 2 of this essay will be published next Sunday, December 11, 2022. Find out: will propaganda ruin us? Will you take back that second key to your car? Will Mary’s toenail heal?! Tune in (or subscribe) for the fascinating conclusion!
Fantastic. For me, failure to recognise the existence of the unconscious is the number one contributor (of a long list, including the state of the education system and other topics you have touched on) to the dire state we find ourselves in. I love that you can take on such heavy and serious matters and still inject some wit into the writing!
I'm noticing the word propaganda quite a lot recently—much more than I recall since my early childhood days.
I remember hearing 'that word' plenty concerning whatever the US media aired about North Vietnam...or perhaps something the Soviet Union...or even East Germany may have revealed. I can still hear my father saying something like, "everything they say is propaganda." Then a milk commercial would come on the TV, and we all laughed at how cool and healthy it seemed to wear one of those white mustaches...as the Marlboro man appeared next and gallantly rode his horse through the wild America we all thought existed. And I just watched as my mother and father reached for their next cigarette.
As always, Mary, I appreciate your courage in exposing complex topics...things far too many people want to bury inside their subconscious minds. And thanks for bringing the world, "pro-panga-danga"...