Until recently, I dismissed the idea that the IMT practiced hypnosis on me. It may have been bad, but it wasn’t that bad. Until, that is, I read Jon Atack’s book Opening Minds in which he discusses what hypnosis is.
Contrary to popular belief, hypnotic states are not induced only under special circumstances. The truth is that we all have different and special states of awareness in normal life. While reading a book, we typically separate ourselves from the world around us, and so it can be startling when someone comes into the room, because we have become ‘lost’ in the text. Films can be thoroughly engaging emotionally. In a horror film, the audience will gasp at the startling moment, although we all know that the event is only happening on the screen and was contrived by actors and employs special effects. This participation in a false reality – a shared dream – is an important aspect of hypnotic or altered states.
…if we believe anyone without questioning and testing their ideas, we are to some extent hypnotized. Nothing to do with Svengali, swinging watches or even feeling very sleepy. Indeed, most hypnosis takes place while the subject seems wide awake…In psychological terms, outward directed perception – or exteroception – has been closed down, apart from communication from the hypnotist who then directs interoception: the inward directed perception.
…Robert Jay Lifton lists the extremes of hypnotic conditions in his thought reform model, where ideas are adopted from an authority that is in conflict with personal experience. As we have seen, he called this ‘ideology over experience’ or ‘doctrine over person’.
In Scientology, I was told that all psychiatrists are part on age-old, universe-wide conspiracy to control humanity (and indeed, every living thing in the universe). As a teenager, I had a friend who was a psychiatrist. I met up with her every few weeks – largely giving her relief from the needy people with whom she spent her overly long days. She was as opposed to drug treatments as Scientology was. She was a kindly and humanitarian person. She was not part of any conspiracy to destroy humanity, or any living thing. I managed to retain my good opinion of her and still belong to a cult that was fervently opposed to psychiatry.
This is an accurate description of my own mindset in the IMT. My fanatical Trotskyist faith can be appropriately described as a form of hypnosis, in which I believed things that were contradicted by personal experience. For example, in the IMT we were indoctrinated to feel contempt for ‘bourgeois academics’, and yet in my three years as an undergraduate, I interacted with academics and found them thoughtful and interesting, I read academic texts and found them intellectually stimulating, I took new ideas seriously rather than abruptly dismissing them, and I sought to engage with the great thinkers of past and present. Before I left, I came across academics who presented a different account of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath that made me question Trotskyism. Before too long, I had left the organisation completely. I allowed myself to be led by evidence, not by an emotional attachment to the cult, when I now realised had a false doctrine. I am sure I jeopardised an essay or two by trying dogmatically to prove Trotskyism correct, but I tried my best to keep that side of myself under control and treat ideas seriously rather than caricaturing them to prove a point. In the end I resolved the cognitive dissonance by deciding that I love truth and knowledge and wisdom more than I loved the cult. I wanted to be able to read what I wanted, and view it with scrutiny rather than doe-eyed reverence. I wanted to think as I pleased, without being lectured or slandered as ‘petty-bourgeois’ for daring to challenge a sacred point of unfalsifiable doctrine. It turned out I had more in common with the bourgeois academics I was supposed to hate than my bigoted and ignorant peers in the sect, whose understanding of history and politics came entirely from what they had read in an IMT article or a book by Alan Woods.
Atack goes on to explain hypnosis:
A hypnotic state relaxes…boundary perception, allowing an outsider to direct the imagination of the subject and make the products of their imagining seem utterly real.
…Perhaps the first obvious altered state is hallucination. If attention is fixed – by staring, chanting or singing a word or phrase, marching in step or playing or dancing to the same beat – perception can change.
This passage brought to mind many examples of when myself and my comrades, at national conferences and the like, would stand up and sing the Internationale and Bandiera Rossa with our clenched fists raised in the air, or when we would conduct ‘interventions’ at political demonstrations and shout inane slogans like so many angry and menacing robots, hawking our papers to all and sundry without a care in the world. When I think about it, wandering through those crowds of people in central London with such self-important regard as a young revolutionary, it would not be far-fetched to say that I was in a trance-like state. Here I was, doing my bit for the revolution, the endorphins buzzing, the adrenaline pumping, determined to sell as many papers as possible and outdo all my comrades in the accounting for who sold the most. Who knows? If there had been violence, I could have been arrested or been shot, and died heroically for the revolution. What utter nonsense. But it goes to show the power of hypnosis.
Atack goes on to explain other types of hypnotic states, like alterations of time, in which people are led to believe that they are older or younger than they really are, or even that they are reincarnations of someone else from a past life:
Age progression is just as possible as age regression. Here, people will really believe that they are predicting future events. Age progression is also involved in visualization, a common practice among athletes, who believe that by imagining a positive future outcome they can create it (the practice also fires the neurons responsible for the desired action, so this may well be useful.)
In the IMT, we were assured of a glorious future in which our sect would become a mass party and lead the revolution to victory. We were indispensable to the future of humanity, and we alone would bring about a better world. Our tiny sect, of a few thousand members worldwide and a few hundred in Britain, would prevail over our many enemies. We alone, out of the entire left, would do it. There would be crises, wars and revolutions, but only our organisation would lead the working-class through it all to attain the socialist paradise. ‘Perspectives’ documents, voted through at national conference every year, painted this picture and reinforced it again and again, as well as IMT articles and talks at branch meetings and national conferences. On the flipside, we were told that every revolution in history that failed could have succeeded if only our sect had been in charge. If there had been a ‘Bolshevik organisation’ in Germany in 1918, what a difference it could have made! If only there had been the right leaders, like Lenin and Trotsky, with the ‘correct ideas’! A counterfactual history was created in which every revolution but the Russian Revolution was a ‘revolution betrayed’ because of the weakness of the left and the treachery of the bourgeoisie and the social democrats. By contrast, in 1917, Lenin and Trotsky were able to lead a revolutionary party that had been built over many decades to power. That meant that any one of us could be the next Lenin or Trotsky in a revolutionary situation. The effect this had on our behaviour is predictable. Imagining ourselves to be reincarnations of the 20th-century Bolsheviks, we talked in an affected, Cominternist jargon, we carried ourselves as if our tiny sect was of world-historical importance, our minds were consumed with visions of the future revolution. Filled with delusions of grandeur, we were lifted from the humdrum reality into the kingdom of ethereal bliss that comes with blind certainty in an unfalsifiable doctrine. We lived from day to day in a trance, burning with this delusive dream of a better world born in fire and revolt. This state of hypnosis was reinforced at every gathering of comrades, in which we hypnotised each other with our infectious enthusiasm and fanatical belief. Such a state of mind was also useful for recruiting contacts, who also needed to be hypnotised into belief. Our sectarianism only heightened the hypnotic state, for it enabled us to better block out the outside world, in the belief that no one mattered outside our small circle. Only we had the truth. Those outside our ranks would never know the full benefit of being one of the saved, one of the chosen, one of the elect, one of the vanguard. We were cut off from the outside world, our perceptions channelled through the twisted reality constructed for us by our fellow comrades. A whole new mental, spiritual and emotional world presented itself to us, ready-made, and we had to readily assimilate ourselves to it, or be thrust out into the cold as an unworthy renegade.
How the mind is abused by cults!