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0:29

H-E-L-P. Hello!

0:38

My name's David Wrong. Some of

0:40

this is past present future. We

0:42

have reached the final episode in

0:44

a series on the history of

0:46

Bad Ideas though we are also

0:48

now putting out the first while

0:51

bonus episodes for pp of plus

0:53

subscribers will tell you more about

0:55

that at the end. Today I'm

0:57

welcoming back the writer and broadcaster

0:59

Helen Louis to discuss a pretty

1:01

weird bad idea Mesmerism or is

1:03

it was sometimes called animal Magnetism.

1:06

A very fashionable I do at the end of

1:08

the eighteenth century. A pretty bad

1:10

idea. But. One that had all

1:12

sorts of interesting consequences. Not all

1:14

of them, but some of them.

1:16

Maybe. Good. How

1:24

we should worry? Start with the man

1:26

himself. Mesmer isms one of those movements,

1:28

one of those ideas that takes it's

1:30

name from the person came up with

1:32

it. He was an interesting figure in

1:34

his own right and extremely famous. For

1:36

a to tell us a bit about

1:38

who he was, he was friends mesmer,

1:40

German I think. Friends and en masse

1:42

me at born in Germany, moved quite quickly

1:45

to Austria so he was quite associate with

1:47

Austria throughout his life and Ita they wrote

1:49

em and descriptions of his physical appearance. Okay

1:51

because I think when you talk about these

1:53

people like this like faith either type people's

1:56

what they looked like in their effect is

1:58

quite interesting. but what we do. about him

2:00

is that he started out studying astronomy. He wrote

2:02

a PhD thesis which he seems to

2:04

have largely nicked from someone else, but

2:06

he became convinced that all illnesses

2:09

really were caused by the fact that fluid was, you

2:11

know, there was a magnetic fluid running through the body and

2:13

he could run magnets over people, primarily

2:15

over the bit of them that hurt and

2:18

cure it. I want to

2:20

put that in the context of the fact that if you

2:22

think about the period in which he's working, there were mysterious

2:24

invisible forces. You know, we're talking about a time in which,

2:26

you know, oxygen was discovered in

2:28

the air, for example, or, you know, a little

2:31

bit after this, Mary Curie and Pierre Curie

2:33

and Röntgen discovered x-rays, discovered

2:35

radiation, you know, these invisible forces.

2:38

Newton had discovered gravity, this invisible force.

2:40

So you have a population

2:42

who are quite primed to the idea that someone at

2:44

some point might discover a mysterious invisible force and it

2:46

will turn out to be real, which I think now

2:48

would be much more suspicious of. So Franz

2:50

Antle Mesmer turns up with his magnets. You

2:53

know, and I guess it sort of speaks to that theory of the humours that

2:55

was very prevalent throughout medicine all the way

2:57

through the middle ages into the race. Or the

2:59

idea that, you know, dysfunction with the

3:01

body is caused by some sort of imbalance. And

3:04

so he runs his magnets over people and lo

3:06

and behold, you know, not only do they often

3:08

report that they're cured, but I think this is

3:11

key, they often start sort of spasming and spitting

3:13

and this goes on for any and they get

3:15

any sort of ecstatic trance-like states. There's clearly something

3:17

that's also quite watchable about it, right,

3:19

which is often, I think, a very interesting thing.

3:21

Oh, look, you're expressing your symptoms in a way

3:23

that's incredibly compelling to watch. That's

3:25

intriguing. That's something we should probably note. And as you

3:28

say, we don't talk about the humours much anymore, but

3:30

the idea that to cure the body, you have to

3:32

get it back in balance. That idea has never gone

3:34

away. It was also

3:36

the age of what was sometimes called vitalism.

3:39

So this is the 18th century and then

3:41

into the early 19th century, galvanism,

3:44

so electricity, one of these extraordinary magical

3:46

forces. And people started to wonder whether

3:48

they could inject it into things that

3:51

weren't animate and give them life. So

3:53

that's Frankenstein and his monster. All

3:55

this is going on and it all fits

3:57

into that weird category scene with hindsight where...

4:00

It's science or it's presenting as

4:02

a kind of science in its

4:04

age, but we see a

4:06

lot of it as pseudoscience. And

4:09

this was true even then, I think. People were

4:11

really torn on this question. So some of it

4:13

seemed to work, like you said, and some of

4:15

it, certainly as it was presented

4:17

by Mesma, was dressed up in the language

4:20

of science and medicine, and

4:22

this can be shown empirically. And

4:25

at the same time, what you describe

4:27

sounds like a cult. We

4:30

might think of it as a cult. And

4:32

also it's pseudo-religion, right? So some of this

4:34

was taking the bad stuff out of people's

4:36

bodies, waving magnets over them over

4:38

the bit that's malfunctioning, a bit

4:41

of foaming and frothing at the mouth, a

4:43

bit of twitching. That sounds like an exorcism.

4:46

So it's in this weird category that

4:48

both is a kind of science and

4:50

a kind of religion. Right.

4:53

And the reason I wanted to nominate it is because out

4:55

of this very bad idea comes some very good ideas

4:57

and some very interesting ideas, which we'll come to

4:59

in a bit. But you're right. One of the

5:01

another of the big tales, apart from people's cures

5:03

being very spectacular and showy, is the

5:05

idea that only a specific person can do them.

5:08

Right. If someone gives you antibiotics, it

5:10

doesn't matter who that is, it's the antibiotics that do stuff. If,

5:12

however, your cure is entirely dependent on this one

5:14

guy being able to do it, that's another thing

5:17

that should probably set up a little, like set

5:19

me alarm bells in your head. And

5:21

sure enough, you know, Mesmer gave up the magnets and

5:23

he decided it was actually him. He

5:25

could do it. And then he started running his hands like

5:28

above people, more like in a sort of raky kind of

5:30

fashion. And then he decided that this was

5:32

quite an inefficient way. So they then graduated to the

5:34

idea that you would sit around a big

5:36

bathtub type thing with electric rods in it.

5:38

And he would kind of run his, you

5:40

know, woo over that, over the bathtub like

5:42

that. And then you could touch

5:44

the kind of rod to the bit of your body that

5:46

hurt. And then that was

5:49

much, I was sort of like in a kind of,

5:51

you know, McDonald's franchise model in that he'd managed to

5:53

be much more efficiently conveying his personal charismatic spirit to

5:55

all of these, these people. And of course, you

5:57

know, when you think about something like that, I'm sure that

6:00

pure peer pressure acted on people. We

6:02

know from the Ash's conformity experiment

6:04

that humans are incredibly susceptible to wanting to not

6:06

feel left out. So if the other seven people

6:08

who are all connected to the bathtub start

6:10

shrieking and fitting, almost all of us

6:13

would go, oh, no, I do, I do,

6:15

I feel it, I feel it within myself. Just

6:17

kind of out of social embarrassment, if nothing else. A

6:20

lot of this was him performing his

6:22

magic on women, which is another tell

6:24

you might say of a certain kind

6:26

of culty behaviour in a certain sort

6:29

of way in which something seems like

6:31

it's exploiting the people on whom it's

6:33

meant to be working. Was

6:36

he one of them? Was he a sort of, was

6:39

he that kind of quote unquote charismatic

6:42

manipulator of women? I

6:44

don't know that I haven't found any obvious stuff about him,

6:46

you know, he was using this as a kind of

6:48

pickup line, which is another thing that you might expect.

6:51

But I think he tapped into something that's definitely

6:54

a constant through medicine, which is a duality,

6:56

which is the fact that women, for example,

6:58

have more autoimmune illnesses than men. We

7:01

still don't have really any clue what menopause

7:03

is and what symptoms are linked to it.

7:05

You know, women really report their health problems

7:07

being dismissed. All almost all medical research, medical

7:10

trials is done on men. The

7:12

male body is the kind of medical body. And I

7:14

think it's often seen as being a more stable body

7:16

because it's not susceptible to kind of these wild

7:19

hormonal variations over the course of a month. So

7:21

you have a situation in both, you have a

7:23

lot of women who have things that medically are

7:26

kind of unexplained to them. And that is true.

7:28

And also we know that women are more susceptible

7:30

to social contagions. They seem to be more socially

7:32

bedded in. I mean, I'm talking averages here, but

7:34

the other side of the male loneliness problem

7:36

is a female overconnection problem and

7:39

a kind of over investment in

7:41

those social relations. So when

7:43

you look at what used to be called

7:45

mass hysteria, they predominantly happen in

7:47

women. Very, very few of them

7:49

are primarily spread among men. So, yeah, that

7:51

the gender dimension of it is really impressive, as is

7:54

the fact that he's a man. Like, I'm just not

7:56

sure that a female Mesmer, I can't

7:58

think of that many of those characters through history.

8:00

who've been like that. Quite often there are these

8:02

kind of holy fools if you see what I

8:04

mean. Lots of these guys who then trained in

8:06

the Mesmeric method would have these young women that

8:08

they produced on command who would, you know, they put

8:10

needles in the neck and they'd faint. And

8:12

quite notoriously, you know, Chaco at the Paris

8:15

Pity-sur-Pietro hospital, he had, you know, population of

8:17

female hysterics, and he would, you know, there's

8:19

a very famous painting of him bringing one

8:21

of them out and she sort of swoons

8:23

and everybody around her is a male medical

8:25

student. So there was a definite feeling

8:27

about the fact that, you know, women had these strange

8:29

unstable bodies and they were susceptible to these maladies of

8:32

the mind and it was a point of rational men

8:34

to understand what the hell was kind of going

8:36

on with, you know, and the dark continent as

8:39

Freud called female sexuality. And presumably

8:41

one of the other things that Mesmer had going

8:43

for him is that this was an age in

8:45

which these poorly or not understood at all female

8:48

complaints were ignored by most people. And

8:50

here's a man who's coming along and

8:52

he's taking it seriously and he's not

8:54

just taking it seriously, but

8:56

he's taking it seriously not as

8:59

mysterious. So Mesmer's not framing it as

9:01

hysteria. Mesmer's not saying to these people,

9:03

you're hysterical. He's saying to them there

9:06

is a scientific explanation for this and

9:08

I've got a method which is as serious

9:11

as any method out there that might treat

9:13

you if you were a man. So there's

9:15

something valid. I mean, there's something deeply validating

9:17

actually about whatever you think about the guy

9:20

himself, about being taken seriously. That

9:22

must be part of what's going on here.

9:24

I think it's something that really medicine still

9:27

struggles with, with psychological illnesses

9:29

or, you know, illnesses that are

9:31

modulated through psychology because patients need

9:33

a way of understanding them that doesn't feel demeaning,

9:35

that doesn't feel like it's all in your head.

9:38

You know, you could snap out of this if

9:40

you wanted to, but does acknowledge that the brain's

9:42

effect on the body is incredibly

9:44

powerful. So you have reports for people,

9:46

when people get hypnotized, which is really

9:48

a derivation of Mesmerism, and they are

9:50

asked to imagine being strangled, that you

9:53

can see that the skin does actually

9:55

flush. I think that's fascinating

9:58

to me. Oh, there's a brilliant Atal Gawande. the New

10:00

Yorker article about itching and persistent

10:02

itching. And people will just itch and

10:04

itch and itch and itch. And one of the reasons

10:07

they think that is, is because of prior seption, which

10:09

is our mental map of our body, gets

10:11

out of line with where your body actually

10:13

is. And that mismatch kind of torments you. And

10:16

that's, again, that's the kind of stuff that we

10:18

still, you know, we're kind of creeping towards understanding

10:20

it more and more, but when people, as you

10:22

say, you know, when, when people feel incredibly anxious

10:25

or whatever it might be. And

10:27

irritable bowel syndrome is an interesting example of that

10:29

because much more prevalent in women and about 80%

10:31

of it is functional, as in there is

10:33

no physical cause. And people will

10:36

report, for example, that their symptoms get better at the weekend.

10:39

Now that is not something that you would expect

10:41

to happen if it was an allergy to food

10:43

or an intolerance. Instead, what it is realistically is

10:45

a manifestation of stress and anxiety. And that is

10:48

causing an, you know, an objectively really

10:50

unpleasant physical reaction that no one would

10:52

choose to have. So it's not, you

10:55

know, it's not demeaning or diminishing to say that that is

10:57

an illness that is now they use the word functional

10:59

instead of kind of psychological because people find it

11:01

less stigmatizing. But it is, you know, that is

11:03

an illness that is all about something that's got,

11:06

you know, a disjunction between your gut and your

11:08

brain. But people feel like I

11:10

want a physical illness because that means it's

11:12

real and people will take me seriously. At

11:15

the time that Mesma was doing this, there were lots of

11:17

attempts to work out whether it worked. A

11:19

lot of skeptics, a lot of cynics who

11:21

could see some of the social

11:24

underlying forces at work here, but also scientists

11:26

taking it seriously. But there are sort of

11:28

two versions of that question. Does it work?

11:30

So one is, is it happening

11:33

in the way he says it's happening?

11:35

Are these magnets or this force that's

11:37

called animal magnetism? Is

11:39

this having the effect that he's claiming it's having?

11:41

And the other more basic question is, are they

11:43

feeling better? Right. Is, you know, is, is something

11:45

happening in the room? Is this all fake? You

11:48

know, are these women actually, and it

11:50

will come on to hypnosis in a bit with hypnotism.

11:52

People often, you know, it's the person who seems

11:55

to be hypnotized actually in on the con here.

11:57

But that second question, not. is

12:00

animal magnetism as described by the

12:02

magnetists, the scientific force they claim

12:05

it is. But when

12:07

these people come out of the room, are

12:09

they feeling better? On that

12:11

second question, even in the early 19th century, right,

12:13

people were starting to think the answer to the

12:15

first might be, no, it doesn't work. And the

12:17

answer to the second might still be, yes, it

12:19

does work. I mean, that's part of the weirdness

12:21

of the discovery of these things

12:23

and the attempt to apply the scientific method

12:25

to things that are on one level fraudulent.

12:28

What do you meant to then think if people do feel

12:30

better? Yeah. And one of the really weird

12:32

things about the placebo effect is that it works even

12:34

if you know you're being given a placebo. And I

12:37

think it's something that, you know, we should really think about

12:39

when we're talking about modern medicine. But you know, like when you

12:42

think about structuring the NHS, there is

12:44

a version of the NHS that is optimized for

12:46

peak efficiency, you know, we get people in and

12:48

through the system, they you know, the GP appointments

12:50

are eight minutes, you know, we can all those

12:52

kind of stuff. And it ignores the side of

12:54

medicine, which is fundamentally, you want somebody to listen

12:56

to your problems, acknowledge that you feel appalling, and

12:58

work with you to reframe what your life

13:00

looks like, you know, live often in this

13:02

case with a chronic condition living with that condition. And

13:05

I think that's the same impulse that makes

13:08

people, for example, want to do tarot or

13:10

fortune telling. It's a way of ruminating over

13:12

your problems, reframing them, you know, maybe trying

13:14

to kind of understand the story of your

13:16

life and what's happening to you. So

13:19

this is why I nominated mesmerism is

13:21

a bad idea, because out of mesmerism,

13:23

we get the concept of the, you

13:25

know, randomized control trial, the gold standard

13:27

of, of modern medical and scientific research.

13:29

So mesmer tips up in France, he

13:32

kind of basically gets drummed out of Vienna, he

13:34

tries to cure a blind pianist. And that one,

13:36

I'm afraid, you know, dealing with sort of like

13:38

middle aged ladies with anxiety disorders was kind of

13:40

his speed, but dealing with actual physical blindness,

13:42

as you might imagine, stumped him. And

13:44

he, he tips up in France, and

13:47

the Queen is Marianne to win it.

13:49

She's Austrian. So she's quite interested in

13:51

him. Louis, the 16th century, he's had

13:53

a whole suite of medical problems, which we

13:55

can go into later. But they basically

13:58

asked for commissions to look into this. phenomenon.

14:00

Mesmer refuses to engage with it, one of

14:02

his disciples engages with it, and they do

14:04

a double blind trial, which is the trial

14:07

where neither the person who is receiving the treatment or the

14:09

person who's delivering the treatment knows whether they're in

14:11

the control group or the real delivery of

14:13

the treatment. And so they have a

14:15

woman who, you know, the Mesmerist is standing behind the

14:17

door and she starts sort of

14:20

falling about and fitting. He hasn't actually started

14:22

yet or isn't doing it. And then they

14:24

give someone some of this magnetised water, for

14:26

example, and when they're told it's the magnetised

14:28

water, they start having the fits

14:31

when they're given magnetised water, but just like

14:33

have a bit of water to recover, and it

14:35

is the magnetised water, they think, thank you, how

14:37

refreshing. And there's kind of people

14:39

who are involved in that are fascinating. So Lao Wasee,

14:41

who is now seen as the father of modern chemistry

14:43

is involved, Monsieur Guillotine, who bless him

14:46

wanted to make, you know, execution less painful.

14:48

He was, you know, he was a scientist

14:50

now, unfortunately remembered, is

14:52

a kind of, you know, ushering in the monstrosity

14:54

of the guillotine. And Benjamin Franklin, who

14:57

had spent time as the American ambassador to

14:59

France, you know, so you have these kind

15:01

of luminaries of the 18th century grappling towards

15:03

what we would now think of as the

15:05

scientific method in a debunking Mesmerism is part

15:07

of the formation of modern science. One

15:10

thing that my father used to say, and

15:12

it's always stayed with me because I never

15:14

completely understood it is as a

15:16

piece of sort of life advice, it's very important

15:19

to be able to tell a difference, he would

15:21

say between a mountebank and a charleston. And I

15:23

always think that sounds really important. What is the

15:25

difference between a mountebank and a charleston? I think

15:28

it's that I had to look it up again,

15:30

I think it's that a mountebank is

15:32

like a person selling snake oil. So the

15:34

classic mountebank would be someone sort of going

15:37

around fairs in the United States

15:39

with some tonic that would cure everything from

15:41

blindness to hair loss to depression. And

15:44

the assumption I think there is that the person

15:46

who's selling the snake oil knows it's snake oil,

15:48

and it's a sales man, usually a man. And

15:51

so the point of being a mountebank is that you are

15:53

a fraud, you're a self knowing fraud, and you might be

15:55

good at it. Whereas the charleston is

15:57

someone who has a kind of pretend knowledge of

16:00

and a pretend scientific knowledge.

16:02

So is claiming a knowledge that

16:05

they don't have or is claiming that

16:07

something meets a standard that it doesn't

16:09

meet. But it could be not particularly

16:12

self-knowing. In fact, I think it could

16:14

be that the charlatan may be a

16:16

sort of pretentious person. Pretentious

16:19

people often don't know that they're pretentious. That's one

16:21

of the things that makes them quite hard to

16:23

take sometimes. Maybe mountain banks are more

16:25

appealing than charlatans because with a mountain bank, mountain banks

16:27

are kind of fun. You know, snake horse snailsmen, you're

16:30

going to have a good time. With charlatans,

16:32

you're going to have to listen to

16:34

their endless pretentious theories about how the

16:36

world works, which they may well believe.

16:39

Now maybe I've got that distinction wrong, but

16:41

if I'm roughly right, do you think a mountain

16:45

banker or charlatan, because it's important not

16:47

least because there is that question about

16:49

how much the person performing

16:52

these things needs to believe in

16:54

them. On the other hand, how much

16:56

you think actually that the show is what

16:58

matters, in which case you want the person

17:00

to be quite self-conscious about how the

17:02

show works. I think it's a

17:05

really fascinating question. I always think about the same

17:07

about Rasputin, who

17:09

turned up at the Russian court with this kind of

17:11

huge beard and he never bathed and he had

17:13

this kind of weird sex cult around him and

17:15

his incredibly piercing eyes that you can still see

17:17

in the photographs. And the savage,

17:19

Alexei, had hemophilia, which is a blood

17:22

clotting disorder, and his life was

17:24

really miserable. He was the only heir four daughters

17:26

before him. His mother had been told she couldn't

17:28

have any more children after him.

17:31

And the whole hope of Russia rested on this

17:33

poor, sick kid. And into

17:35

that situation, you inject this holy man,

17:37

this healer, this kind of wild presence.

17:40

And I think I genuinely do not know

17:42

whether or not, because Rasputin did,

17:44

by all accounts, seem to make Alexei

17:47

feel better. And you don't know whether or

17:49

not that's just reframing the problem and everybody

17:51

around him feels better. His

17:53

mother seemed to feel better about the

17:56

outlook. People claim to hope in those

17:58

situations. know.

18:00

And I also think, but the thing

18:02

is, feedback is very powerful, isn't it?

18:04

If you are constantly going round, apparently

18:07

curing people, even if you started

18:09

off with doubt, surely by the end, you

18:11

would end up believing it. They have a thing

18:13

in screenwriting, I'm saying, you know, every villain is the

18:15

hero in a different story. So you have to try

18:17

and understand what the villain thinks they're doing. Very few

18:19

people are sort of mustache twirling like I just

18:21

want to, you know, make people unhappy. They

18:24

tell themselves lies to do things that they

18:26

want to do anyway. And so

18:28

I think probably most of these people fall more into

18:30

the charlatan camp,

18:33

because I think you would, if you had all these people

18:35

who were fainting round and you think, well, I am doing,

18:37

clearly I don't understand it, but I am doing something. I

18:41

think the mountain bank example of

18:43

the snake oil salesman moves from town to

18:45

town because the assumption is you've got to

18:47

keep ahead of the people in the previous

18:49

town who know it doesn't work. You know,

18:51

like you move to the next town faster

18:53

than the news that it hasn't cured their

18:55

boldness can follow you. What's interesting

18:57

about Mesmer is he described, he's drummed out

18:59

of Vienna and he goes to Paris. I

19:01

mean, he goes to the place where he's

19:03

going to be in a way subject to

19:05

more scrutiny, including some of these early scientific

19:07

trials. He doesn't sound like he's kind of

19:09

moving from town to town to get away from

19:11

the bad news. The news followed

19:14

him. That's why they wanted to test this

19:16

stuff. And, you know, he moves from

19:18

Vienna to the world, you know, of

19:20

Benjamin Franklin. So that to me

19:22

doesn't sound like the classic mountain bank, but also,

19:25

I'm sure you're right. You believe your own

19:27

publicity. And then so it's

19:30

complicated because there's also a little part of

19:32

you that knows that believing your own publicity

19:34

is quite useful for you. There's a

19:36

sort of cynical part. I think you get this in

19:39

politicians a lot. As it were,

19:41

they know if you can fake sincerity, you've got it

19:43

made. And so there's a part of their brain that

19:45

they shut down where the doubt might come in. You

19:48

get it classically with 19th

19:50

century preachers and clergymen

19:52

who thought I better not read

19:54

Darwin because if I read Darwin,

19:56

my sermon is going to sound a bit wobbly.

19:58

So I'll just not

20:00

read it. I will keep myself

20:02

in my hermetically sealed bubble

20:05

of faith because then the faith will

20:07

be genuine. I also think it's

20:09

fascinating but it's complicated and I suspect with Mesmer

20:11

it was pretty complicated too but he's not, I

20:13

don't think, a classic man to think. That

20:16

reminds me of the fact that there's a book called On

20:18

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Fower that everybody I know has

20:20

read, it says, oh this book is incredible, by the end

20:23

of it you won't want to eat meat, you'll be a vegetarian. And

20:26

it's been hovering on the edge of my consciousness with me going,

20:28

but I don't want to be a vegetarian. I

20:30

don't want to have the doubts about what it is that

20:32

I'm doing even though I, you know, when I was singing

20:34

interviews for Difficult Women, my book on feminism, I did an

20:37

interview with my boss and he said, you know, there's all

20:39

these people in this book who believed in eugenics, which

20:41

I know you talked about earlier on this part, and they

20:43

believed in all these really bad ideas. And what

20:45

bad ideas, you know, what ideas that is completely

20:47

commonplace now do you think in a hundred years

20:49

people will think, you know, like slavery? How does

20:51

everyone go along with this? And I said, I

20:54

think, I fear it might be eating animals. It

20:56

might be you ate pigs and octopuses and they

20:58

can open jars, you know, and like solve puzzles.

21:00

And so I think there is a bit of your

21:03

brain that, yeah, that does shut out unwelcome thoughts

21:05

like that, you know, and it comes up a

21:07

lot in the history of psychological disorders as well.

21:10

That when people get them, yes, it's

21:12

really debilitating to have one of these

21:15

functional disorders, but there are what psychologists

21:17

sometimes call secondary gains. So,

21:19

you know, if you are trapped in an unbearable

21:21

marriage, an unbearable job, or, you

21:23

know, suddenly having the kind of, you can't, you know, you

21:25

can't go out, you know, you just your body reacts to

21:27

it or whatever it might be, is a way

21:29

of your body just sort of

21:31

physically rejecting the situation that you're

21:33

in. There's a really brilliant LRB

21:35

article by Hilary Mantel called Some Girls Want

21:37

Out, which is about the history of female

21:40

saints and all the mad stuff they used

21:42

to do. There was, you know, they're obviously starving themselves,

21:44

which put them into these kind of trance-like states.

21:47

But for so many of them, it was about not

21:49

becoming women in a society that was incredibly misogynistic

21:51

and had ideas about what women had to

21:53

do, primarily getting married. I

21:55

think that phrase, some girls want out is a

21:57

really powerful one because it expresses to you why

22:00

people might end up with physical

22:02

conditions that do something for them,

22:05

even if it's at an enormous cost. And those

22:07

two ideas are quite hard to keep in your

22:09

head at the same time. They're not faking it,

22:11

but it is giving them something.

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23:19

hesitate to make this political analogy, but

23:21

I think there is something in it.

23:23

I'm not comparing this politician to a

23:25

self-lacerating female saint, but I

23:27

always thought a classic example of that, keeping

23:30

the bubble hermetically sealed, because that's the

23:32

only way to maintain your sincerity, was

23:34

Tony Blair before the Iraq war, where

23:37

there is some evidence he deliberately

23:39

didn't read some of the stuff

23:41

about the details of what things

23:44

might happen in Iraq, the complexity

23:46

of an Iraqi society. He stuck

23:48

to the more faith-based accounts of

23:50

the outcome of the war, because

23:53

he knew he had to sell it. And then when

23:55

it went wrong, he went from

23:57

studio to studio on what he called his

23:59

masochism struggle. So it was self-lacerating

24:01

in a way in which what

24:03

he offered his public was a kind of

24:06

willingness to take the physical

24:08

pain of this because as

24:10

he said in every one of those interviews, I

24:12

was sincere. The thing you have to believe about

24:14

me is that I really believed

24:16

that this would work. And

24:19

Dick Cheney called him the preacher on the tank. It

24:21

was a kind of Victorian preacher

24:23

version of how you keep the

24:26

faith, which is there's some masochism

24:28

involved, there are some deliberate blind

24:30

spots involved because the thing that

24:32

you most value is your personal

24:35

sincerity. It's really complicated actually, even

24:37

in politics. Well, that's one of the things that

24:39

comes up a lot about whether or not, what is the

24:41

role of faith in politics? And one of the challenges

24:43

that is made to politicians who have a very

24:45

strong faith. So it happened with Kate Forbes

24:48

recently in the SNP in Scotland. It happened

24:50

with Tim Ferrand as leader of the Lib

24:52

Dems. I think Tony Blair is another example.

24:54

And if you have somebody who either thinks that they

24:56

have a direct channel to God and is directing them

24:59

in what to do, or they

25:01

have a faith that in order to change

25:03

their minds on something would also involve them

25:05

junking their entire life, family,

25:08

community, all of those things. If

25:10

changing your mind comes at that high a cost

25:12

of just rejecting everything about who you are,

25:14

that makes it quite difficult for you to be

25:16

a politician or maybe makes it harder for people

25:18

to trust that you are going to look at

25:20

all the evidence and come to a decision based

25:22

on it rather than following your church, essentially. I

25:24

don't think that's an unfair criticism. I think that

25:26

probably, I think the coda silt of that is

25:28

probably that we all don't change our minds as

25:31

easily as we should when confronted with new evidence,

25:33

right? When it compromises our community or our identity.

25:35

Most of us are, and I'm definitely

25:37

included myself in this, resistant to absorbing new information

25:39

that would result in you having to do something

25:41

that is uncomfortable or is going to ostracise you

25:43

from people around you. With Mesmer

25:45

and Mesmerism itself, one

25:48

of the fascinating things about it, and I

25:50

think this pattern is repeated throughout the history

25:52

of this kind of medicine,

25:55

it was accused of being

25:57

a kind of fermenter.

26:00

of hysteria. The people who are very

26:02

suspicious of it were particularly suspicious of

26:04

it and a lot of this is

26:06

on broadly misogynist lines, hysteria as a

26:08

female complaint or malady, and

26:10

here's this so-called doctor actually

26:13

encouraging his female patients to

26:15

become more hysterical and

26:17

that's the way that he's controlling them.

26:19

And that's, for many people, that's what's

26:21

fraudulent about it. It's artificially engineered hysteria.

26:24

And then around that accusation you get

26:26

another wave of hysteria, which is, my

26:28

God, what if this could be sort

26:30

of spread more widely, more socially? And then

26:32

you get people starting to say, maybe

26:35

this is happening in our politics too. So

26:38

the language of animal magnetism is then

26:40

applied to leading politicians. I think Coleridge

26:42

said of Pitt, he's the great

26:44

animal magnetist of the age because

26:47

he's kind of hypnotized the population

26:49

with his security measures and his

26:51

repressive politics. And then on the

26:53

other side, people saw the French

26:55

Revolution as a form of animal

26:57

magnetism because its leaders were clearly

26:59

having this kind of hypnotic effect

27:02

or generating kind of hysterical response

27:05

in the wider populations. So there's this

27:07

sort of double hysteria at work. The

27:09

fear is these people are engendering hysteria

27:11

and that creates a kind of panic

27:14

or hysteria, which is what

27:17

if you did that across a whole society and we're

27:19

all at the mercy of Pitt,

27:21

the mesmerist, Donton, Robespierre, the

27:23

mesmerist, Napoleon, the mesmerist. And

27:26

that is not just a late 18th,

27:28

early 19th century thing. I mean, that

27:31

is 21st century politics has that and

27:33

the 21st century medicine has that in

27:36

it too. The thought that here's this

27:38

bogus medicine, it's creating these hysterical effects

27:40

in the people it's meant to be

27:43

helping. Oh my God, let's get hysterical

27:45

about that. It's the end of civilization.

27:48

Yeah. I mean, I've been writing this book

27:50

about genius and so much about genius is

27:52

about people self mythologizing and people around them

27:54

mythologizing them because they see them as representing

27:56

some tendency that they want to kind of

27:58

champion in that society. And it's

28:01

kind of genius really is when you kind of get

28:03

a collision between narcissism and actual talent. You

28:05

know, if someone's talented but not, you know, willing to

28:07

be centre stage, then they probably don't get a killed

28:09

as a genius. If someone is a narcissist but without

28:12

talent, again, you know, but you have to have both

28:14

bits of equation. If someone says, I'm amazing, I'm brilliant, I'm

28:17

the spirit of the age, and they're actually quite

28:19

good at something, that is very powerful. But

28:21

you're right, it always creates this equal and opposite reaction, which is

28:23

people who are outside of it or their opponents

28:25

are very suspicious of it because they also know

28:28

the power of it. And

28:30

that's why I think you're right that the time that this

28:32

is happening is really fascinating because as soon as the French

28:34

Revolution happens, everywhere across Europe is

28:36

terrified. You know, people like Edmund Burke are writing

28:38

about this, again, it would come out that idea

28:40

of contagion. Would it happen there? Could it happen

28:43

here? You know, and the American Revolution has only

28:45

just happened before that. So people are like, oh,

28:47

maybe this is what happens now. Maybe all monarchies

28:49

are going to fall. Maybe this is the new

28:51

reality and the new normal. And

28:54

I can see why people were really worried

28:56

about that this was a revolutionary medical idea

28:58

that might also carry with it revolutionary

29:00

social ideas too. And you get the

29:02

same sort of anxieties, which is,

29:04

is it worse if, say,

29:07

the politician that you think is manipulating

29:09

public opinion knows that he,

29:11

and it would have then been a he,

29:14

knows that he is manipulating public opinion? Is

29:16

that worse? It's like the Rasputin question. Is

29:18

it worse if they believe it

29:21

or they don't believe it? So do

29:23

you want your manipulative politicians to at

29:25

least be self-aware enough to know that

29:28

what they're trying to do is hypnotize

29:30

the population? Or is the real terror

29:32

when the French people fall under the

29:34

sway of a mesmeric charlatan who

29:37

believes that what he is doing is social

29:39

justice? And that's when you get chaos, because

29:41

one of the questions is always, is do

29:44

these people know when to stop? And I

29:46

think there's sometimes a hope that the cynical

29:48

mountebank manipulator politician has some sort

29:51

of self-interested understanding of when

29:53

to get the hell out of dodge. Right.

29:56

And I would put Boris Johnson probably

29:58

in your mountebank. I

30:00

feel that he had a stick and

30:02

he developed. The stick very early and it

30:04

was bumbling and posh and I need to be

30:06

saved. And in in when you read any. It's

30:08

clear Watson's book about number Ten. During the current

30:11

virus he spends all his time they make. It

30:13

was what she calls a puppy Gates by slacking

30:15

on. I think about the top of the stairs.

30:17

Have a total painful than them. They basically

30:19

one of those to keep him in the Downing

30:21

Street bit in isolation and he sort of treated

30:23

like a toddler. And he found this way

30:25

to both sort of wang on about Cicero but also

30:28

act like he needed become a nanny to and baby

30:30

and people needed to take care of him all the

30:32

time. And I think that was fairly. Openly

30:34

cynical, And in a way.

30:36

I think it was the I are in I think. Those people

30:38

just pivot to the next thing I need to see them.

30:41

And on ice I wrote a piece that was

30:43

about extreme of Files which is about people who

30:45

are attracted to really stream ways of nice. So

30:47

they go from being you know across a communist

30:49

to being the ultimate near corn. Or they go

30:51

from. Being an islamist now being

30:53

an intimate. Nc radicalisation, activist, and the

30:56

common thread throughout all of it is that

30:58

it's all about me, my personal journey, and

31:00

I'm embodying whatever thing I'm in and I

31:02

believe incredibly strongly while. I believe it in

31:04

any doesn't surprise me. For example, the iron

31:06

hirsi Ali's ended up coming to religion in

31:08

after having been a big. Advocate for secularism

31:10

and a big critics of Islam. You know,

31:13

I think there's a fundamental need to belong

31:15

that religion captures a lot of and. Political

31:17

and social movement capture lot of and when they

31:19

the taken away. From people they probably that

31:22

for different one robin. Living with and to

31:24

if you've heard of is hop in your life. And.

31:26

Pretty black teenage student trotskyite ultimately I

31:28

call him and his journey in his

31:30

own mind was self described as a

31:33

journey On It was a journey of

31:35

faith or I think the other interesting

31:37

person who's don't the coming from his

31:39

in the jump from the been stresses

31:41

Adamec coming for the bit of a

31:43

Rasputin Five to him. I actually think

31:45

he probably is a genius with some

31:47

kind on your description. He has some

31:50

extraordinary gifts and insights. That. Almost

31:52

no one else has. He also clearly

31:54

for some offices I'm at work. But.

31:57

There's also real. Belief.

32:00

I'm a, I've stopped now, but I was

32:02

for a while an avid reader of his sub

32:04

stack. JG Incredibly

32:07

long sub stacks. Long, long,

32:09

long pieces about Bismarck. But he and

32:11

Johnson were an interesting study in what

32:14

happens if you pair these two types

32:16

up. And I don't

32:19

think Dominic Cummings did know when to stop.

32:21

He had to be drummed out of town.

32:23

He didn't leave of his own accord. And

32:25

he's, he's still around. And, and he still

32:27

I think has a belief

32:29

that the big game has

32:32

yet to be played. JG Yeah, I mean,

32:34

I, I interviewed him for my series about

32:36

WhatsApp and Westminster. And you know, I did

32:38

like him, he's genuinely, I think if you, I

32:41

know that, I know, I know the criticisms

32:43

of that government. I made many criticisms of that government and

32:45

the way that he treated people. But you're right, there is

32:47

a kind of, like a Rousseauian

32:49

kind of untaveness to him, right, in that he just

32:51

has no social skills whatsoever. And he doesn't care what

32:53

people, I mean, he does care what people think of

32:55

him. I think the way I would express it is

32:57

he doesn't care whether or not people think he's an

32:59

evil genius, or a brilliant genius, as long as

33:02

I think he's a genius, which is quite unusual.

33:04

He doesn't want to be liked, he just wants people

33:06

to think he's brilliant and

33:08

insightful. And you know, I

33:10

can see that that would take him to dance in very

33:12

bad paths. And my kind of criticism of him is summed

33:14

up as basically, if you're so smart, why didn't

33:17

you think it was a bad idea to fall out with your boss's wife?

33:19

Right, just that fundamental, he does, he

33:21

has these brilliant ideas about power, but

33:24

he doesn't understand the Mesmeric bit, I

33:26

think, personally, or he doesn't have it

33:28

personally, him himself, in the sense of he

33:30

can't lie to people and tell them what they want

33:33

to hear. And that's something that I think comes up

33:35

in all of these, when you think of Mesmer dealing

33:37

with these people, you know, who were coming

33:39

to him with their complaints, he must have had

33:41

to listen to a lot of people moan, essentially,

33:43

about their personal lives and problems. And

33:45

there is a big part, and I think Tony Blair would have

33:47

done that, right? Tony Blair would have made you feel you were

33:49

the most special person in the world, he was totally invested in

33:51

listening to your problems, he would have made eye contact, he would

33:54

have remembered your name, he would have sent you a thank you

33:56

card afterwards. And that level of

33:58

personal charisma is very different. from the

34:00

brilliance I'm talking about. And I think I too

34:02

also see in Dominic Cummings, in that he's

34:04

prepared to think the unthinkable. He thinks the only way

34:06

to get Brexit does is to force it is to

34:09

prorogue Parliament. And I know that's breaking democratic norms. I

34:11

don't care. I really want Brexit done. Or

34:13

the argument that I had with him, which was about, you know, why

34:15

did you put Boris Johnson in number 10 when you by your

34:17

own admission thought he was, you know, deeply sub

34:19

par, it was the only way to get Brexit done.

34:22

He's just very attuned to the idea that if

34:24

he wants stuff, he doesn't really care what rules

34:26

he breaks. And that is a very modern idea

34:28

of genius, right as disruptor. That's why he really

34:31

loves Sam Altman. I mean, you know, I didn't

34:33

quite understand quite why he likes Bismarck to the

34:35

same extent, because I think Bismarck was quite a rule

34:37

follower. But you know what I mean, that's very modern

34:39

idea of brilliance, which is about rules of

34:41

a little people, and the special people need

34:43

to be allowed to disrupt. And maybe they shouldn't

34:46

be made to pay all their taxes, or they

34:48

should be allowed to, you know, break the copyright

34:50

of all books to change their large language models.

34:52

That's the only way we get progress done. You

34:54

know, you don't make an omelette without breaking a

34:56

few eggs. I think he thinks he's unlike all

34:58

of the historians who studied Bismarck. He's the person

35:00

who spotted that deep down Bismarck was a rule

35:02

breaker. I've met him once. Quite

35:04

a long lunch. Me and Helen Thompson

35:07

were trying to persuade him to come on

35:09

the podcast we previously did. We had a

35:11

long lunch with him in the pub. He

35:13

was mesmerizing. I mean, I

35:15

think if I'd come back from the meeting, that's the

35:17

word I would have used, which is interesting, because mesmerizing,

35:20

it has positive connotations. He

35:22

was fantastically indiscreet. I mean,

35:24

just jaw-droppingly indiscreet. He'd never met us before.

35:27

He didn't know who we were. And then

35:29

the result of this lunch

35:31

was a sort of deal that he said, I will

35:33

come on your podcast if you will invite me to

35:35

Cambridge and allow me to redesign the physics curriculum. Is

35:39

that within your gift? That's very exciting. No,

35:42

it turned out that wasn't within my

35:44

gift. So that deal never happened.

35:47

But yeah, it was one of

35:49

the more memorable two hours of

35:51

my life. I want to ask

35:53

you about another contemporary analogy

35:56

for mesmerism, which touches on some of the

35:58

things that we've talked about here. social

36:00

contagion, the hysteria around it,

36:02

but also the desire of

36:05

people who are experiencing what

36:07

to the outside looks like contagion, to

36:10

medicalize it, to really want to validate

36:12

it in medical terms. So there

36:14

are lots of versions, I think, of this

36:16

phenomenon, particularly in the age of social media,

36:18

where you do get these contagions, you

36:21

get from the outside a kind

36:23

of establishment hysteria about young people

36:25

being taken into behaviors

36:27

that are clearly somehow fraudulent,

36:30

and the desire of people on the inside of

36:32

those behaviors to have them

36:35

validated. And that creates space both

36:37

for Madi Banks and Charlatans, but

36:39

also actually for a new understanding

36:42

of what's going on here medically,

36:44

I think. Yeah, I think so. I

36:46

mean, the Freudian way of describing that was a conversion

36:48

disorder, which was the idea that some kind

36:50

of trauma that you've been through or problem,

36:53

often a sexual problem, manifested itself as

36:55

an illness. And psychiatrists don't use

36:57

that terminology anymore, but they do talk about

37:00

lots of things that have that echo

37:02

to them. So one that I wrote about in

37:04

2021 was that as a pandemic and

37:06

lockdowns were still on, people still learning

37:08

through screens, you got this outbreak, essentially,

37:10

of teenage girls who were doing what

37:13

looked like Tourette's type ticks. But

37:15

the things that they were saying in German, in

37:17

Germany, they were saying, Dubis Haaslic

37:19

and Clegendahai, meaning flying sharks, which

37:22

were the ticks of this very

37:24

popular German YouTube Tourette's influencer. In

37:27

English-speaking countries, they were often saying

37:29

beans. And one of the psychiatrists

37:31

even called those children Eevees, because they

37:34

were all doing the ticks of a

37:36

influencer called Eevee Meg. And she made

37:38

content that was saying, you know, like, I feel very weird about

37:40

the fact that people are doing my ticks.

37:43

And one of these patients was on St.

37:45

Helena, which is an island in the middle

37:48

of absolutely nowhere in the ocean, you know,

37:50

and I talked to Andreas Hartmann, who's a

37:52

psychiatrist, actually at Pity St-Pietre, the French hospital

37:54

that was involved in the kind of study

37:56

of hysteria. And He said, you know, it's a remote

37:58

island, but it's accessible to... Tick Tock,

38:00

a new tube, and Instagram. And

38:02

the thing was that people will get at the time. I

38:05

rater people were very cross about the idea that

38:07

you would say there was any kind of psychological

38:09

component. They say said turrets is a real illness

38:11

the too long it's been stigmatized and in it

38:13

seamlessly. Don't know. Was just here to spread

38:16

awareness on these influences said. You know I

38:18

won't be held back by any Karen with

38:20

an opinion on an eye doctor Robert Barthelemy

38:22

he studies would have called must psychogenic illnesses

38:24

clue to once Co mass hysteria and he

38:26

said it'll Peter I'm. Like. A scene

38:28

is it becomes obvious isn't there's no up

38:30

physical cause it'll peter at and sure enough

38:32

you don't hear a lot about it anymore

38:34

because that cycle went through. But the first

38:36

one of those it spreads through the internet

38:38

was probably in Le Roy in America these

38:40

girls and it started in the cheerleading. Squad

38:43

which I have to say is another

38:45

thing they often happens and it's a

38:47

high status cheerleader. Started kind of again.

38:49

very light mesmerism. Started having the fooling

38:51

around and fainting spit. Seen a

38:53

to get usually eating all

38:55

these incredible vocalizations. And

38:57

people are Erin Brockovich. As in the one

38:59

pay by Julia Roberts in The Phelps. Turned up to

39:01

see was a kind of some kind of

39:03

chemical spell in his had something terrible happened

39:05

and and sure enough again it was They

39:08

when they will present disease Perfect black girls

39:10

that and perfect lives Until this insisting. Swept

39:12

through them. And that wasn't true at all. One

39:14

of them than mother. A just recovered from a brain

39:16

tumor non them how to read difficult homeless. And

39:19

it's just seem to be again. it was

39:21

a way that of expressing very real distress

39:23

had ended up happening physically and they kind

39:25

of had caught it off each other. I'm

39:27

and it kind of. Country's population but

39:29

it also affected other people. In

39:31

the in the community scene in it was a

39:34

nurse and that was the first time that ever.

39:36

Something. Like what you sow with mesmerism in

39:38

the bath tub had spread through the internet and

39:41

that's was really. Interesting to me is that it

39:43

you know mesmer had only. even with his boss top

39:45

he was only able to do kind of a dozen

39:47

people at a time. now if you

39:49

have these very influential influences they can

39:52

reach thousands of people are any one

39:54

time and say you are beginning to

39:56

now see effects like that the things

39:58

that were talking about that

40:00

can just spread like absolute wildfire, because they

40:02

don't require that one-to-one human connection that we

40:04

always thought, you know, they still require a

40:06

charismatic human at the center of them, but

40:09

that charismatic human can be at the center

40:11

of a screen. And the thing

40:13

about those influences is they're making content all the

40:15

time. They encourage these really strong parasocial relationships

40:17

where you feel like they're your friends, you know,

40:19

they're telling you about their struggles at school, or

40:21

that, you know, this is me going out in the

40:23

day. People feel like this is somebody that they know,

40:26

and that is the conditions it turns out to be

40:28

able to spread mesmeric type

40:30

behaviors. And do you have

40:32

any sense of what creates the ebb

40:35

and flow of this? I mean, so when you studied this,

40:37

the scientists said, this will peter out.

40:40

And it did peter out. Presumably it

40:42

didn't peter out because the people who

40:45

were behaving in this way listened to

40:47

the scientists and said, oh, you're right,

40:49

actually, this isn't real. We're kind of

40:51

caught up in a social contagion. But

40:53

presumably something broke through that

40:56

changed their behavior. Do you

40:58

know what it was? Well, the conditions changed for a start. So

41:00

one of the things, when they began to realize that

41:02

this wasn't people with Tourette's that have been latent who

41:05

are now coming forward, you know, perhaps they

41:07

were tick prone in some way, but this

41:09

had been activated, but these were essentially functional

41:11

ticks. So the treatment for Tourette's is very

41:13

strong drugs, essentially, so anti-psychotic drugs, really. So

41:15

you wouldn't give them to somebody unless you

41:17

were absolutely sure that there was a physical

41:20

mechanism creating the tick. And

41:22

in any case, a lot of the advice about ticks is that,

41:24

you know, try and ignore them and try and not

41:26

focus on living their life around them. And that will

41:28

actually help them kind of fade into the background slightly.

41:31

But so what happened is the conditions changed in the

41:33

sense that when it was realized that

41:35

there was a kind of functional aspect to this, a

41:37

psychological aspect to this, the advice became

41:39

stop your children consuming this tick content.

41:41

Stop them thinking about ticks. Stop them, for God's

41:43

sake, don't let them start their own YouTube channel

41:46

talking about living with ticks because that

41:48

will just, that will fix their identity as a

41:50

person who has ticks. And they will never be

41:53

able to move on from that. And it

41:55

will never, you know, it will not be able to go

41:57

away. And that was tough, you know, there was both kind

41:59

of pushback from. kids who would find community,

42:01

you know, they'd found a sense of identity. For

42:03

the first time, maybe people wanted to listen to them.

42:05

You know, they were able to express their kind of

42:07

anxieties about school. I mean, I find it almost kind

42:10

of comically apt at a time when

42:12

we were so worried about cancel culture, quote unquote,

42:14

or people being ostracized for things that they said

42:16

that suddenly you had this way that you could

42:18

say terrible things. You know, and

42:20

coprolalia is which is saying swell is is generally I

42:22

think in about 10 percent of Tourette's patients, but seem

42:24

to be unusually high in this population

42:26

and you thought, well, you know what? If you are

42:28

a teenage girl who's terribly worried about what you can

42:31

say, you know, this allows

42:33

you to vocalize something within yourself.

42:35

So, yeah, the conditions changed in the sense

42:37

that people went back to in-person schooling, you know,

42:39

they weren't spending all their time on the Internet.

42:42

And also the other crucial part of it was that

42:44

the doctors and the Tourette's community is quite

42:46

tight knit, came together and talked about it and

42:49

said, what we think is happening here is

42:51

functional. And so our treatment, you know, and

42:53

at that point when, you know, if someone

42:55

had turned up and sort of said to people, this mesmerism

42:57

is all bollocks. Quite a lot

42:59

of them at that. Some of them would have become

43:01

diehard, you know, would have just rejected it and said,

43:03

well, this is the typical, you know, scientific establishment, you

43:06

know, doesn't understand things. And some of

43:08

them would have that point kind of packed up and gone home

43:10

because they they wouldn't have got the same thing from it that they

43:13

were getting before. And just as

43:15

in the late 18th century, it's completely

43:17

possible to imagine that if you were

43:19

a respectable middle aged woman,

43:21

you might spend quite a lot of your days wanting

43:24

to froth at the mouth and

43:26

scream obscenities and tell the world that this

43:28

society is absolute shit and mesmerism allows you

43:30

to do that in exactly the same way

43:32

as you described that if you're in a

43:34

slightly cancelled culture, lockdown-y world

43:38

and you're a teenage girl living a

43:40

perfect cheerleader life, there must be a

43:42

part of you that is literally screaming

43:44

on the inside. Well, you

43:47

know, a sort of medicalised excuse to

43:49

scream on the outside is a godsend.

43:51

Right. And also, I mean, I think it was the same

43:53

thing when people go to evangelical churches and they speak in

43:55

tongues. And I think that must

43:57

be if you are living in a very buttoned up community. this

44:00

is your one chance to just really roll around on

44:02

the floor and like really let rip. Or, you

44:04

know, I've talked to people who say

44:06

that that's kind of how they approach going to football matches, right?

44:08

It's the one bit by

44:10

day, a mild-mannered accountant, you

44:12

know, by evening, you're going

44:15

to the Spurs match and screaming like the

44:17

referee's a wanker with 20,000 other people. It's

44:19

very liberating to like lose yourself and let

44:21

go of your kind of propriety

44:24

in that way. So I think these are

44:26

pretty deep human needs. Again, the

44:28

reason why it's a bad idea is because, you

44:30

know, it does encourage people to pray

44:33

on others. If it comes back to your

44:35

Charlotte and Mountbank question, if it does allow

44:37

people who are just overtly there to fleece people

44:39

out of money. And, you know, I think about

44:41

psychics in this way, you know, the

44:44

kind of promise that you're going to be able to talk to

44:46

your dead child. Do they believe

44:48

it or not? I think if they don't believe it, then that's

44:50

seriously grim. And every so often they out one of

44:52

them for having an earpiece or something. And at that

44:55

point, that's pretty despicable. If someone's

44:57

lost their child and you're offering them the hope of

44:59

reconnecting with them, just in order so that you can fill

45:01

a leisure centre, you know, on a Monday

45:03

night. That's awful, really. But I'm

45:06

sure that most of them do do believe

45:08

it really, they do believe they're helping people.

45:10

One last contemporary connection, you

45:12

touched on it earlier. So one

45:15

of the ways the story goes

45:17

is mesmerism itself. And

45:20

particularly animal magnetism, people don't talk about

45:22

animal magnetism anymore. They did through the

45:25

19th century, but not into the 20th

45:27

century. But mesmerism, and then

45:29

the word Mesmeric mesmerising kind of

45:31

moves into the language to capture

45:33

something that might have very attractive

45:36

features, a mesmerising person might be

45:39

exactly who you want to hang out with. But

45:42

the other way it goes is

45:44

towards hypnosis. So mesmerism, the animal

45:46

magnetism fades away, the magnets disappear,

45:49

but hypnosis becomes something

45:51

which also occupies this

45:53

space, which is

45:55

a pretty broad spectrum, including clearly

45:58

mountain banks at one end. I

46:00

mean, I think some people who claim to

46:02

be hypnotists, you wouldn't trust them. An

46:05

inch. With your watch, yeah.

46:07

With your watch, all the way to

46:09

very serious and

46:11

respectable medical practitioners doing real

46:14

good. And doing real

46:16

good maybe for the reasons that

46:18

they say it works, and maybe for

46:20

incidental reasons, but which are embraced as

46:22

part of this. Do you

46:25

see hypnosis as an extension of mesmerism?

46:27

For both those reasons, actually both because it

46:29

allows for the sharks to prey on people,

46:32

but also there's something really valuable happening here.

46:34

Yeah, and that's the second good idea that

46:36

kind of comes out of this bad idea.

46:38

So there's this very skeptical surgeon called James

46:41

Beard, who watches these demonstrations and he notices

46:43

that although he thinks it's very shady what's going on, the

46:45

trance states do seem to be something

46:48

that is genuine. And he started

46:50

out that if you focus on one object for a

46:52

really long time, you can put yourself into a trance

46:54

state. And to come back to what we're saying at the

46:56

beginning, that's not dependent on a particularly charismatic individual

46:58

being around. That is something that does seem to

47:00

be a kind of almost universal thing to do.

47:02

And from that you get the idea of hypnotism

47:05

and hypnotic states. And that is still used.

47:07

We still have hypnobirthing,

47:09

for example, for people who want to

47:12

do natural childbirth because they're crazy. But

47:14

good for them. If it works for you,

47:16

and like even Princess Catherine, or now the

47:18

Princess of Wales, she now is, that was

47:20

something that she talked about using as

47:22

a way of just controlling your emotions

47:24

and all of that kind of stuff. Navy

47:27

SEALs use circular breathing patterns to try

47:29

and calm yourself, to deal with the

47:31

fact that you're getting spikes of adrenaline. There's

47:33

quite a load of brilliant stuff in Generation Kill about

47:36

the fact that the soldiers who are invading

47:38

Iraq are obsessed with the idea that when

47:40

you become anxious, you might accidentally wet yourself

47:42

in battle and they're terrified that this will happen.

47:45

And so all of these things that we now

47:47

much more understand the connection between the body and

47:49

the brain. And they aren't quite useful. You have

47:51

gut directed hypnosis as a treatment for irritable bowel

47:53

syndrome. And it does seem to be trials look

47:55

like that is a really hopeful that is something

47:58

you will get NHS consultants will recommend that you

48:00

you do. So out of mesmerism,

48:02

which was pooey, you get stuff that

48:04

is actually genuinely interesting and survives to

48:06

this day, because the fundamental insight that

48:08

you can affect your body through your

48:11

brain was a sound one. It's just

48:13

that the bit about the magnets and

48:15

the fluids inside you, luckily, we'd later prove

48:17

that that bit wasn't true. And what's so

48:19

interesting about that is that the

48:22

good idea that came out of the bad idea did

48:24

come out of taking the bad idea seriously as a

48:27

kind of science and interrogating it and

48:29

not just rejecting, not saying clearly this

48:31

guy is a creep and

48:33

some of the stuff that's going on

48:35

with these women is not fit for

48:37

polite society. It's rather something is happening

48:39

here. And clearly with

48:42

hypnosis, I'm conflicted on

48:44

this. On the one hand, I've been to hypnosis

48:46

stage shows and I just haven't believed in it.

48:49

And it's partly for that reason, because I don't

48:51

want to single out, say, Paul McKenna. But you

48:53

know what I mean? It depends on

48:56

me, the King hypnotist doing it for this

48:58

to work in the way it does. And

49:00

that I'm sure you're right, one should always

49:02

be suspicious of that. This only works when

49:04

I do it. On the other hand, for

49:06

insomnia, the app that I have on my

49:08

phone, that allows me to do a bit

49:10

of hypno to help with my breathing at

49:12

three in the morning is invaluable. I mean,

49:14

it's invaluable. And this is the same. It's

49:16

a single, I don't know, spectrum is the right

49:18

word for it. But it's a single space that

49:21

in which these two things have

49:23

a place. Yeah, I fell asleep last night to

49:25

one of those kind of hypnosis apps. And I

49:27

woke up at 3am with my AirPods still in

49:29

going, what's happening? Where am I? But you're

49:31

right. And that stuff is quite well

49:33

scientifically supported that insomnia is often caused

49:35

by, you know, cognitive, and a

49:37

bit inability to detach from the worries of the day.

49:39

And actually, if you read sort of boot,

49:41

you're how you're thinking about things that can be really

49:44

helpful in helping you to go to sleep. So there

49:46

is an insight that and when I write about things

49:48

like social contagions, or functional illnesses,

49:50

the thing I kind of keep wanting to stress

49:52

all the time is something is

49:55

happening, people have real distress.

49:58

But the history of medicine shows that

50:00

we give different names to that

50:02

at different times. And we wouldn't

50:04

diagnose anything as hysteria anymore, but

50:06

there are symptoms that still look

50:08

like that. And we just put

50:10

a different label on them, depending on what the age

50:12

is, and we attribute them to different causes. But we

50:15

don't, look at anti-depression drugs, right? For some people, they

50:17

work incredibly well. And for some people, they make them

50:19

suicidal. We don't really understand what it is yet that

50:21

we're doing when we're doing stuff to the mind. And

50:23

a lot of it is kind of, luckily,

50:25

thanks to the scientific method, feeling our way through

50:28

about what seems to work and what doesn't without

50:30

necessarily deeply understanding the mechanisms underneath it. So

50:32

of all the bad ideas you've had in

50:34

this series, I think this is one that's

50:36

more of an edge case than a kind

50:38

of flat out, just everything about this was

50:40

bad and we should be confined to the

50:42

dustbin of history, because it did

50:45

lead us to really interesting places.

50:47

Without this phenomenon happening, we

50:50

wouldn't be in the place that we are now, which is,

50:52

and it has helped in a lot of different ways. That's

50:55

why I'm quite glad that, so if

50:57

Mesmer lives on, he lives on in the word, not

51:00

mesmerism, which people hardly ever talk about, but the

51:02

word mesmerizing. Orwell gave his name to a word

51:04

that on the whole, when people use it, they're

51:07

not happy, Kafka, they're not happy, but

51:09

mesmerizing is a great word and it's

51:11

quite ambivalent. It's quite attractively ambivalent. If

51:13

a person is mesmerizing, bit

51:15

dodgy, if an experience is mesmerizing on the

51:18

whole quite good, and then the question is,

51:20

can you have the mesmerizing experience without there

51:22

being some mesmerizing people involved? It hasn't changed,

51:24

right? And I think it's about, you're

51:27

right, it encapsulates the ambivalence that we have

51:29

about charisma and whether it's

51:31

in medicine or in politics, the idea that

51:33

charismatic people are powerful and that

51:35

power itself is always a double-edged sword. We

51:41

really hope you've enjoyed this series on

51:43

the history of bad ideas. We've really

51:45

enjoyed making them. And the first of

51:47

our bonus episodes for PPF Plus subscribers

51:49

is now available. It's a

51:51

conversation between me and the

51:53

technology writer and journalist, John Norton, about what

51:56

I picked as my bad idea. I've talked

51:58

about it a bit on the- this

52:00

podcast before, email. Here's

52:03

a taster. I

52:10

remember hearing someone say the thing that

52:12

should have been built into email early on

52:14

is a tiny cost for the sender.

52:16

I mean, even if it was a

52:18

financial cost, it could be a very,

52:20

very small cost, but we know from

52:22

all sorts of other experiments that if

52:24

there's a tiny financial monetary implication in

52:26

an action, it changes people's motivation. Whereas the

52:29

trouble with this one is the cost

52:31

is all in time, some other little

52:33

barrier in the way that you have

52:35

to get over in order to

52:37

signal to the recipient that the person at the

52:40

other end has had himself or herself

52:42

or themselves to make a choice about

52:44

whether this was worth sending because it's

52:47

the absence of any confident that that process

52:49

has been gone through on the other side,

52:52

which for me is the profound

52:54

frustration of this technology. The

52:57

other great vice of email

52:59

is the CC and BCC

53:02

functions because they create the

53:04

possibility of one, an

53:06

audience, which changes the dynamic

53:08

to the massive displacement

53:10

of responsibility. So everyone who works in

53:12

a big organization knows that one of

53:14

the things email has enabled is when

53:16

there's a complicated and naughty question involving

53:18

quite a large group of people, the

53:20

temptation to create a vast email chain

53:22

so everyone can contribute, but actually what

53:24

it does, and I don't think this

53:26

is complicated group psychology, is it disperses

53:29

responsibility so that no one actually feels

53:31

they own this problem anymore. And I

53:33

feel about email like people who spent

53:35

their 20s to their 60s living

53:38

in the old GDR, which is, it's

53:40

my whole life you've just described. So

53:42

maybe something better is coming, maybe machine

53:44

learning is going to make this finally

53:46

efficient. Maybe we've just got to get

53:48

through, as you said, this mess and we'll find the

53:50

right ways to use it. But the

53:53

whole of my working life, I feel has

53:55

been overshadowed by some of these

53:57

miseries that I've been think

54:00

it's engendered. If

54:04

you would like to hear the

54:06

whole conversation do please subscribe to

54:09

PPF Plus. Just go to ppfideas.com.

54:11

You'll get this bonus episode, the

54:13

next one that's coming soon on

54:16

VAR, Video Assistant Referring, but

54:18

trust me it's not just a conversation

54:20

about football, it's a conversation about whether

54:22

people can handle the truth. And

54:25

all of that is ad-free listening. Coming

54:29

up next time on Thursday I'm resuming

54:31

my series on the great political fictions

54:33

that we started earlier this year before

54:36

we got sidetracked by freedom and bad

54:38

ideas and I'm picking up

54:40

the story with my favourite novel of

54:42

all, George Eliot's Middlemarch.

54:45

This has been Past, Present, Future brought

54:48

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