Hypnotic, this modern world

IT is a strange world we live in. To me nothing is stranger than the immense part played in our everyday lives by the power of suggestion. The very highly organized industries of advertising and salesmanship are typical instances of this. For example, two large rival chemical combines are selling rival brands of aspirin. Their products are almost identical—they have to conform to the minimum chemical standards prescribed by law. Yet all day long we see advertised all round us "Buy XYZ Aspirin—there is no better", and next time we buy aspirin, chances are we insist on XYZ brand, because it is easy to ask for, and we cannot remember any other brand at the moment.

Given this power of suggestion on the human mind at all hours of the waking day, it is horrifying to me how seldom the power is consciously used for good, and how our newspaper editors, film makers and others catering for public entertainment seem almost to rejoice in spotlighting the uglier aspects of lifPublish Poste. "I have supped full with horrors", says Hamlet, and the modern man would merely have to alter this to "I have breakfasted full with horrors", after reading his daily morning newspaper. Floods, earthquakes, air crashes, murders, divorces and suicides are certain of their place in the headlines; while a new advance in public health, or the opening of a new playing-field which will give pleasure to thousands is lucky if it qualifies for two inches at the bottom of the page. How often we are shown the photo of a man who has recently fallen dead in the street from heart attack; how seldom the photo of a man who got over a heart attack ten years ago, and now enjoys his Saturday game of golf like anyone else! I have long maintained, in public and in private, that particularly in the health sphere—a subject in which most people are personally interested—this concentration on disaster does an untold amount of unseen harm. I regard heart disease, cancer, and fear of insanity as the three great killers of the world to-day. All three are complaints the mere whisper of which may make a man die mentally twenty-five years before he dies physically. No other complaints induce that paralyzing fear of the future which, as every doctor knows, is itself enough to prevent any cure or possibility of arresting the disease if it in fact has got a hold on a patient. Even in tuberculosis it can be clearly demonstrated to the patient whether or not he has the disease; and even cripples, and the blind or deaf learn to adjust themselves to their disabilities, for they know they are going to live.

Do you remember that old story of the Traveller and the Plague? On his way one day the Traveller met a mysterious, cloaked figure hurrying along in the opposite direction, and stopped to ask him who he was. "I am the Plague," came the reply, "going along to the town you've just passed to kill 100,000 people there. At least I myself shall only kill 200. Fear will do the rest for me. Good morning." So when the ordinary man reads about death, disease, and disasters day after day in his newspapers; when his local cinema runs film after film about life in a lunatic asylum or the activities of paranoiac gunmen; when, as recently in the U.S.A., he couldn't drive his car to the next town without seeing huge hoardings along the roads shouting at him to beware of cancer (which he would never otherwise have given a thought to)—how can we doubt that a vast amount of unnecessary and easily preventable sickness is caused by the power of a wrong idea to establish itself inside the human mind? And how can we doubt the desperate need in this modern world for a technique which can help to expel such ideas once they become established? Hypnotism is such a technique.

Hypnotic, this modern world