Mesmerizing Labor
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Mesmerizing Labor
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Re: Mesmerizing Labor
#2"In France, nervous patients were considered the most susceptible to being mesmerized."
Re: Mesmerizing Labor
#3Mesmerizing the slaves? No wonder they came up with zombie folklore.
Re: Mesmerizing Labor
#4> Gleason went solo into the clairvoyant business.
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."
Re: Mesmerizing Labor
#5German only, but still a fun listen: "Friedrich Anton Mesmer und der Animalische Magnetismus" https://www.geschichte.fm/podcast/zs237/
Re: Mesmerizing Labor
#6Mesmerism is super interesting. Describing it as "just a placebo effect" or "just in the mind" misses the point, because most treatments don't get these kinds of effects. There was a theater to Mesmerism that is still poorly understood. I would consider it closest to something like Landmark or Est -- almost certainly going to be more effective than the majority of psychotherapies.
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.
Re: Mesmerizing Labor
#7> Gleason went solo into the clairvoyant business. 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, psych…
Point of order:
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.
Re: Mesmerizing Labor
#8> Gleason went solo into the clairvoyant business. 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, psych…
Point of order: 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 t…
That sounds like a true scottsman argument. Naturally any therapy is hard to perform perfectly to get the full placebo effect and a single blind experiment is almost as hopeless as double blind.
Re: Mesmerizing Labor
#9> Gleason went solo into the clairvoyant business. 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, psych…
Yeah, feels like positive social reinforcement to me. If an attractive person expects me to behave a certain way, I'll do it because I want to be with them / be like them.
Re: Mesmerizing Labor
#10It's funny to me that the popout quote is,
> 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".