By Michael, on July 24th, 2012 
When I was young, this novel was all the rage. It was about a man that was preprogrammed in a concentration camp in Korea by Russian Intelligence. He was brain washed in the terminology of the day. He was then released back into the United States at the end of the Korean War.
He became a quiet respectable citizen for 20 years. Then at a critical point, his handler phoned him and set off a sequence of suggestions that enabled him to become a very dangerous person capable of killing someone that the Russian Intelligence wanted killed.
Hanoi Hilton had a similar thing going on with captured pilots.
The Manchurian Candidate even became a movie. I write from memory here. It has been a long time.
My problem is the potential for abuse. In today's world the ethics and morales built into the general public no longer exist. They are there but they have changed drastically since hypnotism was discovered. It used to be something that violated your morales and ethics would bring you out of a trance.
Nudity was once against everything many people believed in. Today you can see female anatomy on television. It is usually cable but it is there.
What else has changed?
Well, today we have people spending long hours in front of a monitor screen. It is controlled by a computer. Specifically our people spend hours in front of computer games.
Our subconscious minds are capable of picking up post hypnotic messages far faster than our conscious mind is capable of doing. 1/6th of a second is way too fast for our minds. But subconsciously we easily pick up on these messages.
Ever had a hunger in a movie theater? Chances are someone is playing with your mind as you watch the screen. It might be BUY POPCORN. THIRSTY. HOT DOG DELICIOUS. It was supposedly removed and made illegal years ago. I maintain it was never passed into law.
Suppose for argument's sake, someone put a different message on the monitor. Say something like REMOVE CLOTHING. GET NAKED.
Now there is a bell curve here. Only a few people would respond. Or would they after two hours of seeing that message on the screen behind their conscious minds? Or could it even be a message to kill someone. Perhaps a message given a game addict . . .
Someone that routinely kills people on the screen in a game made for computers is just as likely to program someone to kill in real life in a minority of cases. Maybe it has all ready happened.
