“The method is similar to posthypnotic suggestion. But I’ve. heard that a man can’t be hypnotized and made to do something he finds morally unacceptable. In other words, if he isn’t a killer by nature, he can’t be made to kill while under hypnosis.”
“That’s not true,” Salsbury said. “Anyone can be made to do anything under hypnosis. The inner mind can be manipulated so easily. . . For example, if I hypnotized you and told you to kill your wife, you wouldn’t obey me.”
“Of course I wouldn’t!” Dawson said indignantly.
“You love your wife.”
“I certainly do!”
“You have no reason to kill her.”
“None whatsoever.”
Judging by Dawson’s emphatic denials, Salsbury thought the man’s subconscious must be brimming with repressed hostility toward his God-fearing, church-loving wife. He didn’t dare say as much. Dawson would have denied it-and might have tossed him out of the office. “However, if I hypnotized you and told you that your wife was having an affair with your best friend and that she was plotting to kill you in order to inherit your estate, you would believe me and-”
“I would not. Julia would be incapable of such a thing.”
Salsbury nodded patiently. “Your conscious mind would reject my story. It can reason. But after I’d hypnotized you, I’d be speaking to your subconscious-which can’t distinguish between lies and truth.”
“Ah. I see.”
“Your subconscious won’t act on a direct order to kill because a direct order doesn’t establish a motivational equation. But it will believe my warning that she intends to kill you. And so believing, it will construct a new behavioral set based on the lies-and it will program your conscious mind for murder. Picture the equation, Leonard. On the left of the equals sign there is anxiety generated by the ‘knowledge’ that your wife intends to do away with you. On the right side, to balance the equation, to banish the anxiety, you need the death of your wife. If your subconscious was convinced that she was going to kill you in your sleep tonight, it would cause you to murder her before you ever went to bed.”
“Why wouldn’t I just go to the police?”
Smiling, more sure of himself than he had been when he entered the office, Salsbury said, “The hypnotist could guard against that by telling your subconscious that your wife would make it look like an accident, that she was so clever the police would never prove anything against her.”
Raising one hand, Dawson waved at the air as if he were shooing away flies. “This is all very interesting,” he said in a slightly bored tone of voice. “But it seems academic to me.”
Ogden’s self-confidence was fragile. He began to tremble again. “Academic?”
“Subliminal advertising has been outlawed. There was quite a to-do at the time.”
“Oh, yes,” Salsbury said, relieved. “There were hundreds of newspaper and magazine editorials. Newsday called it the most alarming invention since the atomic bomb. The Saturday Review said that the subconscious mind was the most delicate apparatus in the universe and that it must never be sullied or twisted to boost the sales of popcorn or anything else.
“In the late 1950s, when the experiments with the tachistoscope were publicized, nearly everyone agreed that subliminal advertising was an invasion of privacy. Congressman James Wright of Texas sponsored a bill to outlaw any device, film, photograph, or recording ‘designed to advertise a product or indoctrinate the public by means of making an impression on the subconscious mind. Other congressmen and senators drafted legislation to deal with the menace, but none of the bills got out of committee. No law was passed restricting or forbidding subliminal advertising.”
Dawson raised his eyebrows. “Do politicians use it?”
“Most of them don’t understand the potential. And the advertising agencies would just as soon keep them ignorant. Every major agency in the U.S. has a staff of media and behavioral scientists to develop subliminals for magazine and television ads. Virtually every consumer item produced by Futurex and its subsidiaries is sold with subliminal advertising.”
“I don’t believe it,” Dawson said. “I would know about it.”
“Not unless you wanted to know and made an effort to learn. Thirty years ago, when you were starting out, this sort of thing didn’t exist. By the time it came into use, you were no longer closely tied to the sales end of your businesses. You were more concerned with stock issues, mergers-wheeling and dealing. In a conglomerate of this size, the president can’t possibly pass approval on every ad for every product of every subsidiary.”