Born in London in 1928 of Jewish heritage, I grew up during the Second World War and knew that members of my extended family were murdered in the Holocaust. The puzzlement at how this could happen affected me from my earliest years.

How could an otherwise civilized society like Germany become so completely immersed in what appeared to be a madman leading a nation in a trance? This was no ordinary madness; trains ran on time, children went to school, the opera performed—the veneer of patriotic normalcy was everywhere and yet the people fought to the death for the beast from the pit.

Hitler might have enveloped the entire world had he and his minions not been conquered by force—and recall that beating him was very difficult even with the combined efforts of the most powerful countries in the world. How could the German people ignore or allow the atrocities taking place directly in front of them? 

That puzzle was resolved for me with jaw-dropping clarity when, in the early 1940s, I saw a stage hypnotist induce people to do crazy and irrational things on an individual level, much as Hitler’s Germany had accomplished on a national level, albeit with much more evil consequences.

(As I would later discover, the oft-repeated notion that people cannot be hypnotized to think and act against their own conscience is utterly untrue.) 

Always a seeking young man, my interest was profoundly sparked by that stage demonstration. I thought, “Why can’t this power be used to make people behave in rational instead of irrational ways?”

"I discovered that life itself exerted hypnotic influences, and that hypnotic pressures were the principal cause of almost all the world’s sufferings. "

It was many years before I discovered that life itself exerted hypnotic influences, and that hypnotic pressures were the principal cause of almost all the world’s sufferings.

The answer, then, did not lie in fighting hypnosis with more hypnosis—adding additional layers of conditioning on top of what was already there, but in finding a way to become progressively dehypnotized and less susceptible to the hypnotic effects of one’s formative years.

Countless others have studied this problem, including many profound figures in the history of religion. One of the most useful studies is Battle for the Mind, by William Sargant, first published in 1957.

In addition to describing techniques of religious conversion, prisoner interrogation, political indoctrination, psychotherapy, and the effect of severe stress situations like combat, Sargant emphasized how suggestible people become when caught up in states of anger, fear, or exultation—and how they can be manipulated once such states are begun and sustained.

There just had to be some kind of counter-hypnotic system, I pondered as a young man, perhaps what religious people called faith, or listening to one’s conscience, necessitating no other lawgiver. Something common to all humanity just had to be the guiding light and the “lamp unto our feet.”

However, this being so, how did we get lost and how might we be found again? It didn’t take me long to realize that there were powerful religious and political forces that never wanted us to find that kind of freedom from the power they have held for thousands of years.

Most puzzling was that entangled people tended to be loyal to their corrupters. Like dope addicts with their pushers, most people held fast to their systems, stubbornly defending what they thought of as themselves, which was in reality a childhood conditioning programmed into them practically from birth.