I get a lot of e-mail spam, and I work in the firearms accessory business, so when I saw a message from a car dealer I read it as “Full Auto Inventory Clearence”.
“Hmm. Someone must have a lot of machineguns…”
Actually it read; “Fall Auto Inventory Clearence” but my pre conditioning made me read it wrong.
That’s just a tiny example of pre conditioning determining someone’s perception. It happens all the time to most of us, in some way or another.
We played a trick on my brother years ago. We wired up a whistling sky rocket firework and clamped it under his work bench. When he came in, we told him we suspected something was wrong with his bench lamp. When he turned on his bench power and all hell broke lose, he was scrambling in a panic, amongst the fire, the smoke and noise, to turn off his bench lamp. We had pre conditioned him to respond in a completely useless (and funny – to us) manner.
Yeah, funny funny hah hah, but this sort of thing is done to us in politics and social engineering, and we do it to ourselves.
When my kids were little I’d tell them “This little piggy…” while grabbing their toes.
When the last little piggy went ‘wee, wee, wee all the way home” I’d tickle them and finish by squeezing their noses and going “Beep!”
I thought nothing of it until my 23 year old son, standing next to me, put both hands over his nose immediately when a relative started “This little piggy” with her child.
We both laughed. Then he asked me how else I had programmed him as a child. I told him not to worry, because only I knew the phrase that unlocked his subconscious conditioning and it wasn’t one he was likely to hear in public.
Nearly all of us would be horrified to learn all the ways in which we’ve been programmed, or mesmerized, either intentionally or otherwise, which is why we’ll go to great lengths to avoid the subject. We may literally fight to the death (and millions have) to protect our “puppet master”.
And how likely is my son ever to hear the phrase “Afghanistan Banana Stand” unless it is me saying it to him?