Mesmerizing Labor
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
This reminds me of the pickup artist scene and digital persuasion behavioral engineering: trying to sell some "revolutionary", "secret" form of human manipulation. The equivalent of a Love Potion No. 9.
I guess we're talking about a time of greater ignorance when the supernatural and "spirituality" were taken for-granted.
Nowadays, it seems like NLP-ridiculous, psychobabble, fortuneteller magic. Certainly, charismatic cult leaders exist and appear to project an ability to influence people.
Anecdotally and qualitatively, there does seems to be a phenomenon where respected, older, attractive men of higher relative status are able to influence groups of younger women. It may be the exploitation of competitive human nature to seek the approval and favor of the desired object. I've seen it in social and work situations.
Examples:
- A pleasant chat with most of an NCAA D1/D2 womens' sports team.
- Leading a tour of mostly ladies.
- Work meetings or groups where, again, it's mostly ladies and/or younger people. When facilitating, I shut my trap except to ask questions, coax the more junior members and shy ones to speak-up if they have something. If only the competitive talkers take all the space, the others maybe biased to those views, resent not having a voice, or give-up on participation.
- Being the only dude in a given situation.
I wouldn't call it "mesmerism," maybe "crush compliance" or "competitive social behavior."
NLP is a valid therapeutic technique. It's just hard as hell to do right, and is prone to generating poor outcomes when applied unethically against people unaware of the practice. The point of it as a therapeutic technique has always been as a tool of self-discovery and patient empowerment. All the woo around it tends to come from the business lit that pop culture has spawned around it, and the fact that for the purposes pop-culture leans on it for, the "problem" to cure is less a deep seated memory distortion that requires excavation and remediation, but "get frigging going and stop being a pansy looking for a magic solution".
NLP is not C for people. NLP is the recognition that people overtime architect their own systems of mentation, and dometimes the parts we long ago automated come back to bite us in the ass; and maintenance is needed to update it.
That was how NLP came into existence.
> Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a pseudoscientific approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, United States, in the 1970s.
> In the early 1980s, NLP was advertised as an important advance in psychotherapy and counseling, and attracted some interest in counseling research and clinical psychology.
> However, as controlled trials failed to show any benefit from NLP and its advocates made increasingly dubious claims, scientific interest in NLP faded.[62][63]
> Numerous literature reviews and meta-analyses have failed to show evidence for NLP's assumptions or effectiveness as a therapeutic method.[Note 2] While some NLP practitioners have argued that the lack of empirical support is due to insufficient research which tests NLP,[Note 3] the consensus scientific opinion is that NLP is pseudoscience[Note 4][Note 5] and that attempts to dismiss the research findings based on these arguments "[constitute]s an admission that NLP does not have an evidence base and that NLP practitioners are seeking a post-hoc credibility."[80][81]
> Surveys in the academic community have shown NLP to be widely discredited among scientists.[Note 6] Among the reasons for considering NLP a pseudoscience are that evidence in favor of it is limited to anecdotes and personal testimony,[22][85] that it is not informed by scientific understanding of neuroscience and linguistics,[22][86] and that the name "neuro-linguistic programming" uses jargon words to impress readers and obfuscate ideas, whereas NLP itself does not relate any phenomena to neural structures and has nothing in common with linguistics or programming.[13][87][88][70][Note 7] In fact, in education, NLP has been used as a key example of pseudoscience.[76][77][78]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming#S...
Benjamin Franklin was on the committee that proved that the purported mechanism of Mesmerism was invalid. There is no "mesmeric fluid." But no one doubted the efficacy of the treatments.
> The occult wasn’t necessarily progressive.
(which we knew, right? I could go full Godwin here...)
yet the title of Poyen’s book was
> Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England
whose first word is, y'know, Progress.
I mean, surely we've all seen this by now:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Progress
Interesting word, "progress".
For example, those people of Godwin you alluded to were staunchly progressive in the early 20th century conception of the term. They had a belief in a higher form of human society powered by industrial technology and (ideological approved) science. Their idea of progress was unquestionably modernist, although reprehensible and dressed up with the trappings of reaction.
They saw the further right conservatives as stuffy and backwards, hence why they ended up purging them.
Even in the USA, the 1920s progressives sought to promote eugenics and ban the liquor, which they succeeded in doing.