Suggestions Daily Info Blog

One commonly begets the other. Many emotional experiences, as is well known, have no clear source in the external conditions: they seem to be fully or partly imaginary. The fear of the dark, for instance, has no sufficient foundation, as a rule, for its existence in civilized conditions of life, as it had in the prehistoric days, when the darkness of the night concealed wild beasts and other dangerous enemies of man. Contempt and love are often inspired by persons and objects that are no more despicable or adorable, as the case may be, than other similar individuals and things. The emotion of love, particularly, is so permeated with products of imagination that it consists largely in creating illusions about the object of affection. Propaganda is known to arouse people to frenzy and worship, yet it attains its ends not so much through the study or selection of facts as through utilizing the technique of suggestion and auto-suggestion. And the study of crowd and mob behavior shows beyond the cavil of doubt that emotion spreads by suggestion, as it were contagiously. This suggestive or infectious character of emotion can be exemplified by the panic arising in a theatre on fire, by the vicious mood of a lynching mob, or by the mass worship of a popular hero. Unless it be through the effect of suggestive transmission, how can we explain, for example, the following occurrence I have come across in the newpapers?