Conservative Republicans will not believe Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity have hypnotized them.  Liberal Democrats will not believe Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann have hypnotized them.  Nonetheless, that is exactly what has happened.

Do you remember that wonderful concept known as shock and awe?  That’s exactly the way hypnosis works!  It creates a state of confusion and overwhelms our critical discernment.  Both political parties simply use keywords to achieve this.  They make us believe they’re talking about something important, but they’re really distracting us from paying attention to the issues that are truly important to our wellbeing.

Conservative favorites are abortion, family values, and socialist.  Liberal favorites are fairness, gay rights, and racism.  Each of these words or phrases is anchored in the depths of our psyches by years of careful and intentional repetition and conditioning.  When they are used, our subconscious delivers up exactly what our original feeling was about such words, much as we regain the same feeling we had way back when listening to a favorite old song.

Many of us turn on the television every night and hear at least an hour of dutiful redelivery of these words; just to be sure we keep the feel-good trance going.  But, while we’ve been asleep (and I don’t mean literal sleep), distracted by the trance inducing words, the Masters of the Universe have been allowed to steal the values in our homes, our life’s savings, and the very American freedoms that most of us hold dear.

The producers of “How to Control a Girl’s Mind” say it is “for comedy purposes only. Do not take them seriously.  Do not try this at home.”  Unfortunately, the hypnotic methodology is all too true as a metaphor for how we’ve lost so much of the American Dream.  In this metaphor, the cell phone represents our valuables lifted from our pockets and our lost rights while we were distracted by the inconsequential:

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Here’s another video that shows just how easily a trained hypnotist can open your mind to any suggestion they wish.  In politics, they make you feel that the less consequential issues they are discussing are important, while they proceed to rob us of our life’s

savings and make us slaves to debt.  This is nothing new, but it is part and parcel to how the American people have given up being Middle Class in the past 3 decades.

The hypnotist here is using the so-called “staircase technique” to put her patient into a trance.  Since none of us believes we’re being hypnotized when we watch television, television’s talking heads simply put us into a trance by using a large number of distracters and keywords as substitutes for the stairs into the trance.  Once we’re there in the cozy place (psychologically), watching our favorite talking head, they can make us believe whatever they like.

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So what’s the antidote?  How do we protect ourselves?  First of all we have to come out of the trance at least one time, and see it for what it is.  Many of us will want to stay in the cozy place (psychologically), because we don’t want to give up our cherished notions about abortion, for example, regardless of which side of the debate we find ourselves.

It does not matter that making abortion illegal once again would save zero babies.  We readily allow the talking heads to talk about the issue ad nauseum rather than face the fact that the debate is meaningless.  While they’re talking about that, they are not talking about how the Middle Class is being destroyed by Wall Street investment bankers, which is much more significant to the happiness and well-being of the American people.

Surprisingly, coming out of the trance is easy.  In this final 1-minute video, the hypnotist shows us how to come up out of the trance by counting from one to five.  When she reaches five, we are out of the hypnotic state, and have recovered our critical faculties, allowing us to tell whether what we are hearing on our favorite politically charged and slanted television show is really of importance to us.  Or, are we being mislead into making decisions that are against our real self-interest?

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Skip Conover is an international businessman, author and artist.  Follow him on Twitter @Skip_Conover

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