A Humble Proposal:

by Hugh M. Lewis

Hyper-suggestibility is a basic dimension of the human condition. It is perhaps one of the few clearly definable components of human nature. It is an inherent consequence of our anthropological world-openness and is a product of both our evolution and our cultural development.

It is the result of complex sets of multi-determined, interrelated factors, and results in a range of highly varied and idiosyncratic reaction patterns. But all instances of hyper-suggestibility share a common condition in the unusual sensitivity and susceptibility to the temporary impairment, circumvention, suppression, suspension or subordination of normal mechanisms of conscious control by relatively minor external cues or unusual circumstances. This may result in the involuntary but voluntarily motivated expression that seems markedly disproportionate to the strength of the triggering stimuli. A person or group of people in a hyper-suggestive state become unusually susceptible and malleable to external influences of conditioning or suggestion or persuasive mechanisms of influence.

Hyper-suggestibility is usually regarded as involving a state of heightened excitability and nervousness, though the opposite effect may be an equal, though less readily apparent, response. A person or group could be induced into a state of extreme placidness or mood depression. All people are hyper-suggestible sometimes, in some manner, and to some extent. Common forms of hyper-suggestibility fall within our normal bounds, but the degree to which hyper-suggestibility may constitute a central or prominent part of our individual character, or the extent which which certain forms of hyper-suggestive response are sanctioned and culturally conditioned, may very widely between different people. Furthermore, some people may be more apt at forms of auto-suggestion or self-induction of such a hyper-suggestive state. People may be driven to extreme hyper-suggested states in a kind of internalized cybernetic loop that was originated by a very minor signal or condition.

Hyper-suggestibility suggests its opposite, or hypo-suggestibility that can be defined as the extreme resistance to suggestion or as a state of strong conscious self-control. But the relationship between hypo- and hyper-suggestibility may not be in actuality contraposed in any direct or simple way. Different people may be hyper-suggestive in some ways and hypo-suggestive in others. Hyper-suggestibility in some ritually defined occasions may be defined not only as normal, but as expected, behavior. Hyper-suggestibility in young children may be a normal and healthy component of their cultural acquisition and natural development, while a similar kind or level of hyper-suggestibility in adults may be construed as neurotically maladaptive. The consequence of extreme hyper-suggestibility is one of destructive violence and aggression. Long term patterns of social withdrawal, adaptive stress disorders, neurosis and psychosis may be the eventual outcome of extreme forms of acquired hyper-suggestibility.

Instances and states of extreme and unusual hyper-suggestiveness may be interesting because they may clearly mark the boundary between the normal and the abnormal, the structural and anti-structural, allowing us to separate patterns of deviance from what we may consider culturally normal. There are well documented social psychological and anthropological phenomena of social movements, trance ceremonies, crowd reactions precipitated by heat-waves, drunkenness, darkness, crowding, or relative anonymity. Donning a mask or costume may foster a state of hyper-suggestion in both wearer and audience.

Hyper-suggestibility as a basic component of human nature and cultural conditioning may underlie and help to interrelate and explain a broad range of diverse human phenomena, from panic and mass hysteria, to hypnosis, certain culture-specific syndromes, impulse control disorders, including violent physical abuse, sexual deviance, substance abuse, gambling human addiction, ritual process, trance, altered states of consciousness, authoritarianism, even neurotic disorders. The elucidation of human hyper-suggestibility may help clarify basic aspects of process of human learning and acquisition, reflex, conditioning, transformation and conversion.

As previously mentioned, different cultural orientations may vary greatly in the ways in which hyper-suggestibility is sanctioned, tolerated, manipulated, channeled, expressed or suppressed. Cultural orientations may provide the basic symbol schemata in the expression of hyper-suggestion, promoting its expression in some ways and inhibiting it in others.

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It is proposed that there is a basic, panhuman range of hyper-suggestibility along which individuals, and by extension, cultures, vary greatly. There may be a corresponding continuum of symbolic dependency, perhaps related to frame-dependency along which humans and cultural orientations may vary. This relationship implies that people who are more hyper-suggestive may exhibit a greater likelihood of symbolic dependency and orientation towards cognitive conformity or conformity of belief and behavior than others.

People may have differential organic or biological predispositions, whether hormonal, bio-chemical, emotional or even genetic, toward hyper-suggestibility, which renders the likelihood of their acquisition of greater hyper-suggestibility greater. Early acquisition of hyper-suggestibility may be more fundamental to a person's character than later, secondary acquisition. People more psychologically prone to hyper-suggestion may suffer internalized conflicts or unresolved tensions in their psychosocial integration and character development. Acquisition of hyper-suggestibility may involve a form of "stress-induction" which deteriorates or breaks down a person's normal capacity for resistance. Long-term, repeated, or severe forms of stress agents may precipitate acquisition of hyper-suggestibility, even in those who are highly resistant or by constitution extremely hypo-suggestive. Extreme and unusual forms of acquired hyper-suggestibility must be regarded as a form of human disease--one that may in many cases be irreversible. In this regard hyper-suggestibility may share other forms of mental illness the basic adaptive dysfunction of the mind and the brain in the mediation and integration of new experiences or signals. Thus the need to superimposed an internalized sense of order upon an external world which maybe wildly out of sync with the train of events.

On the other hand, and somewhat paradoxically, hyper-suggestive people may be more prone to external inducements or signals, and more dependent upon the structuration provided by externalized, disembodied symbolisms. Under certain social circumstances, hyper-suggestibility may prove to be a very adaptive response pattern. We may relate hyper-suggestibility to displaced libido that is a common characteristic of the sycophant and the fanatic. We may see extremely hyper-suggestive people as abnormally dependent people.

Hyper-suggestibility must be distinguished from normal powers of suggestion. All humans are suggestible, and more susceptible to suggestion sometimes than others. It would be worthwhile to research suggestion in order to define some sense of its normal boundaries. In this regard we must also emphasize the question of what constitutes conscious resistance to suggestion, and, even more basically, what constitutes "consciousness" as it relates to suggestion.

Hyper-suggestibility is to be seen as an acquired syndrome, a rather chronic, and often irreversible, condition. It is one that brings to the forefront the question of the relationship between mind and body. It is a condition in which the thresholds of conscious resistance to subtle stimuli are impaired or reduced to a level that can be considered significantly "below normal," leaving the question that the "normal level" under unusual circumstances, may itself be insufficient.

Hyper-suggestibility suggests an impaired and maladaptive relationship with the environment, one that can be expected to have destructive consequences, because it entails the lack of conscious direction and control. The impairment of the relationship with the environment, a defining characteristic of mental illness, is such that the normal mechanisms of information processing and decision-making are blocked and subconscious motivations enter into a direct relationship with environmental stimuli. It can be considered a kind of learning process that precludes normative control or preconditions conscious processing. It is a form of unconscious acquisition normally suppressed by the consciousness.

The impairment of normal adaptive processing occurs because ego-control no longer efficiently mediates the relationship between the mind and body, or between the person and the environment. The degree of hyper-suggestibility acquired by a person is a measure of that person's reduced ability to function in the world in a fully rational or conscious way. Children are good examples of how adaptation that precludes normal conscious control leads to relatively unstable relationships with an environment. The childlike and often childlike qualities of the culture of the mentally ill provides another example of the lack of conscious organization of both the environment and experience. Consciousness efficiently makes sense of the world, mapping experience onto the environment, and the environment onto experience--once conscious control is suspended this sense-making function is no longer capable of effectively coordinating between internal and external worlds, leading to a sense of discrepancy which can become destructive.

We can refer back to the acquisition cycle of the child in her/his effective life world, and understand how, especially with adults, this cycle becomes a degenerative cycle rather than one of growth.

Acquisition of hyper-suggestibility may involve an organic imprinting of basic response patterns rooted in certain psycho-physical reactions. Though basically beyond the individual's voluntary control, their occurrence and direction of expression may nevertheless have an important deliberative or consciously voluntaristic component which is an intrinsic part of the entire reaction pattern. The motivational component which may prime or propel a hyper-suggestive state may remain deeply unconscious or in control of conscious directives.

The hyper-suggested state frequently involves an altered state of consciousness in which the normal phenomenological flow of subjective experience is radically transformed. It may consist of discrete transitions of mood, affect, motivation, perception, cognition or normative evaluation. It may include hallucinations and trance induction.

People who experience a hyper-suggestive episode may experience a cathartic effect in the alleviation of internal stresses or tensions or in the temporary suspension of internal conflicts which may be the product of hyper-suggestibility in the first place. It may also commonly involve the experience of superhuman or supernatural empowerment, or release or liberation from constraints, or render the expression of aggression or feelings otherwise normally taboo or repressed.

There is an important "kindling" effect associated with recurrent and increasingly intense episodes of hyper-suggestibility. Repeated episodes of hyper-suggestibility lower the threshold of resistance and increase the likelihood and susceptibility to subsequent episodes.

There is also another important and related effect of a vicious cycle of social reinforcement of conditions that will tend to precipitate or aggravate the repeated occurrence of hyper-suggestibility.

There is a sense that the impulses of the subconscious acquire control of the mind, and undermine and predetermine the intentional structure of consciousness. With conscious control effectively short-circuited, consciousness is made the servant of subconscious motivations, which can then become symbolic expressed in the external world unmediated by consciousness. There is a direct connection established between the outside world and the underworld of the unconscious. In this relationship the external symbolisms become mapped in a very rudimentary way onto the subconscious motivational symbolism, while these same forces find themselves directly expressed in the external world. It becomes, in effect, a monstrous world of the id.

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Hyper-suggestibility is, in the final analysis, a "psycho-social" phenomenon, one that is extremely plastic to the constraints and conditioning of culture. Though it may be seen as just one of many symptoms for other kinds of disorder, it also constitutes its own distinctive class of human phenomena. It is an extreme consequence of the human integration of reality. It is important to understand that hyper-suggestibility is a basic component of human sociability and social relations, and to see how it both underlies process of social interaction and institutionalization, and is reinforced by these social patterns. Hyper-suggestion and its possibilities for symbolic expression and social disruption constrain the patterning of social relations and order in a society in certain fundamental ways.

To an extent unstudied, institutionalization of social reality depends in part upon the effectiveness and efficacy of a limited form of hyper-suggestibility and upon the control of its extreme versions of expressions. Hyper suggestibility can in symbolic forms become institutionalized as sanctioned social process, and other institutional forms can come to depend functionally upon the control of hyper-suggestion for the maintenance of power and order. To define this aspect of the basic functions of human institutionalization, we might say that it is to incorporate mechanisms for inducing acceptable states of hyper-suggestion, while also incorporating other mechanisms for the elimination or control of the possibility of extreme forms of hyper-suggestibility. Institutionalization relies upon hyper-suggestion to induce conformity and mass mobilization of human energy--it structures and orders social relations and realities by symbolic ritual processes which constrain and induce the patterns of hyper-suggestion. Similarly, societies must provide institutional means at various levels by which to prevent and channel the expression of more extreme forms of hyper-suggestion, and to eliminate or effectively remove from normal social life those individuals whose hyper-suggestibility becomes disruptive for normal life.

Hyper-suggestive states have an intrinsic symbolic component, which, from the standpoint of social structuration, provide an important mechanism for the expression of contradictions, asymmetries, tensions and conflicts which may otherwise remain latent, and potentially destabilizing, beneath the surface of normal social order. The social action of hyper-suggestive states of individuals and crowds always takes a form that is symbolically revealing of basic structural strains underlying normal social order.

In a similar way, it is important to see how mytho-magical-religious and ideological symbolisms and ritual processes serve to employ and deploy hyper-suggestion in the service of maintaining the moral and cognitive legitimacy and the motivational functioning of the status quo. Religion frequently provides an acceptable channel or outlet or therapeutic regime for the alleviation of the stresses underlying hyper-suggestion, in part by providing a ritual structure to hyper-suggestive processes.

It is even more important to understand the relationship between hyper-suggestibility and cultural economies that govern the culturally defined relations between human beings and their resources--the socio-cultural distribution of humans to resources and of resources to humans. Resources are culturally defined, and may include much more than the basic or material resources, but also include values, symbolisms, status, knowledge, etc. Such economies invite the likelihood of unevenness of reciprocal transactions, and of resulting institutional asymetries in the distributions of people to resources.

The relationship between these cultural economies and human hyper-suggestibility seems to be this. Hyper-suggestibility is used to reinforce social patterns and power relations based asymmetrical control over and distribution of resources, and can also become the key ingredient in episodes of normal social breakdown in which normal patterns of inequality are overturned. Institutionalized forms of control of hyper-suggestibility are used to regulate and alter cultural economies. Symbolic forms of expression of hyper-suggestion can themselves become highly valued resources in socio-cultural economies.

But the relationship between hyper-suggestion and cultural economies may yet be deeper than this, as symbolic stressors and agents of hyper-suggestibility may be centrally defined by and constrained by the relative availability and or deprivation of basic vital resources required by humans for survival. The symbolic forms these resources take can become the primary instigators of hyper-suggestive social processes--and these processes can be employed to regulate the distribution of these resources.

The media has come to play an important and specialized role in the mediation of these processes of hyper-suggestibility and resource control. The function of the media has come to be defined in terms of its cultivation and control of hyper-suggestibility in people. The effect of the media can co-vary in direct proportion to the incidence of hyper-suggestibility affecting a given population. To be effective in this way, media symbols must be perceived to be of "vital" interest in some deeply personal and important way, and they must be accompanied by the attendant associations to resources.

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The purpose of this proposal is to suggest a theory and a general methodology for the study of human hyper-suggestibility and its relationship to resource control. The lineaments of the theory have already been outlined above, except that more specific hypothesis might be entertained.

The study of hyper-suggestibility must ask and seek answers to a number of important questions--what is hyper-suggestibility? how does it function? what are its forms of expression and its consequences? What are the conditions for its development and acquisition? How is it institutionalized and how do institutional mechanism serve to direct and control it?

I propose that a basic functional relationship exists. It is a dynamically recursive relation that defines the foundation for the integration of human social reality. This function is based upon the maintenance of a relational boundary--a relatively stable conditional state of relations between human beings in a given context, in socioculturally defined relations to resources. In this kind of function, cultural economy is held to recursively define itself--cultural economy itself is part of the functioning of cultural economy. If we cannot draw a clear distinction between where personality begins and culture leaves off, but instead see these as dialectically defining a common continuum of human experience, then we can suggest that the integration of human reality, including the situated individual, the relations between individuals, between the individual and a group, and between groups, is symbolically mediated by institutionalized mechanisms of cultural economy. In other words cultural economy defines the boundary of integration of human social reality, by controlling the human distribution of culturally, symbolically defined resources, and, at the same time, defines itself in institutional form. This relation exists nowhere in a direct form, but is the ideal expression or net product of a whole series of interrelations, and co-occurs simultaneously upon many levels--that of the individual, of many individuals, and the group and many groups. This relation defines the functional and institutional integration of human reality in terms of culturally defined resources.

This basic function may be defined by means of a computer-based program that describes the dynamic recursion between culture and personality and cultural economy in the symbolic terms which encode this process. The relational sets and inputs into this program can be case specific, polythetic and varied.

Hyper-suggestibility is important to this function in two ways. First, hyper-suggestibility is a fundamental part of the boundary itself, in terms of thresholds, values and dynamic states in which people exist. Secondly, extreme examples of hyper-suggestibility serve to define the boundary of normality.

The first question concerns the definition of hyper-suggestibility itself. In this we can recognize certain precipitating conditions and basic, non-isomorphic discrepancies between intended consequences and actual consequences. We can recognize also certain possible effects in the process of hyper-suggestion, effects such as a delay between precipitating causes and its expression, a fuse, a trigger, kindling, priming, threshold, catalysis, displacement, symbolic substitution, distortion, latency, transformation, resonance amplification, chain reaction, a copy-cat effect of its social contagion, and an intrinsic vicariousness.

Also this question concerns how hyper-suggestibility is symbolically mediated, and in turn serves to mediate, in the psychosocial integration of human experience.

The second question becomes one of how anti-structure and deviance help to define and institutionally maintain the boundaries and normal processes of what Anthony Giddens has termed structuration, how do these phenomena express themselves. What is the "order of disorder," and what might be the consequences of the relationship between its expression and function?

We can seek how various institutions serve in different ways to maintain order or stability in social relations through the symbolic mediation of human hyper-suggestibility. In this regard we can look for some kind of semi-deterministic chain of relationships like the following: social complexity influences circumscription, circumscription influences stratification, stratification influences economic asymmetry, economic asymmetry influences deprivation, deprivation influences stress, stress influences a predisposition to hyper-suggestibility, hyper-suggestibility influences a predisposition to violence, violence influences the institution of mechanisms for its control, institutions in the control of violence influences social complexity. The chain closes upon itself, perhaps in more than one place.

In this regard we must consider the net outcome of exaggerated forms of hyper-suggestibility to be the perverse symbolic expression of destructive forms of violence and aggression. We must also take into account in our formula the possible relation between hyper-suggestibility and symbolic dependency, especially as this may underlie processes of identification and institutionalization in the psychosocial integration of human reality. Symbolic dependency may be a fundamental form of perceptual-cognitive neurosis that is linked to field dependency.