Exorcising Demons*

This post is prompted by a series of video clips on utube featuring illusionist Darren Brown. Chris Bradely at deeply blasphemous blog, brought them to my attention. The whole series is well worth watching but for this post I'm going to concentrate on the section on the laying on of hands because of that particular mixture of "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship", as Darren Brown rightly calls it. This interests me because it is what I was exposed to growing up in the Pentecostal Church. This video is part 1 of 2 video clips on "Instant Conversion"

Part 2 can be found here. One thing I found interesting about Part 2, is in the beginning where Darren Brown, talks about people that got up & left the session because they were uncomfortable. I know full well that horrible, uncomfortable, wanting to get up & run out feeling, that people often get in pentecostal settings, but I never was quite sure what it was. My Mother explained to me when I was a kid that people that had uncomfortable feelings at these meetings were being convicted by the Holy Spirit or worse yet, possessed by demons that were reacting in fear to the Holy Spirit. Now I see it for what it was. It's a self preservation instinct.

Here is a video clip showing some scenes from an old documentary about Marjoe Gortner, a famous child evangelist, wherein he exposes the tricks of the evangelist trade.
This video clip brought back so many unpleasant memories from my childhood, as I was exposed to quite a few of these types of evangelistic meetings. In the beginning of the video Marjoe is explaining to the camera crew that is filming the documentary how they need to behave as not to expose the true purpose of filming.

To continue on the same theme... I am currently reading a book called "Influence: Science and Practice" by Robert B. Cialdini.** This book is about the psychology of compliance. He discusses six psychological principles that influence our tendency to comply with requests, they are, reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, & scarcity. He talks about "compliance practitioners" for example, cult leaders, advertisers, & T.V. executives, to name a few, who use these principles because of their ability to: quote"produce a distinct kind of automatic, mindless, compliance from people, that is a willingness to say yes without thinking first."

I'm on chapter 4 titled, Social Proof.
Here is a quote from that chapter:
"The principle of social proof states that one important mean that people use to decide what to believe or how to act in a situation is to look at what other people are believing or doing there."
And also:
"Social proof is most influential under two conditions. The first is uncertainty, the second condition is similarity."


Since, I am knee deep in politics at the moment. I'm wondering how these principles(or as chapter 1 is titled, "Weapons of Influence") might be used to influence our votes? For example, are we being manipulated by politicians & others with a vested interest in our votes, perhaps by playing on our uncertainties, for one thing?

*I got this album cover titled, "Crying Demons" off Triniman's Blog from a post about bad album covers, here. It's really humorous.
**Warning: Read this book & you will probabaly never see some things quite the same way again.