Keith Raniere is an extraordinary hypnotist
By a former close associate of Keith Raniere:
How do you think he gets seemingly normal women, some successful, some wealthy, to do outrageous things? Degrading things. Acts in their previous life they would have considered abominable?
This is how. Once you work closely with Keith, with any alone time, you are totally screwed. He is implanting hypnotic suggestions and hypnotic triggers in every one-on-one conversation.
If you are like Allison Mack and have been working with him alone for a period of one or two years or more, you lose all control over your life and you can’t possibly understand what is happening to you. Allison Mack and many others have lost all control of their subconscious minds, and practically their free will.
Beware.
Hypnosis is where Keith Raniere has put 99% of his intellectual capacity and efforts. This is real.
Executive Success Programs, DOS, and all it’s offshoots are his playground for experimentation and perfecting his technique. He doesn’t care if those business are successful. Obviously. He never did. That’s why they all fail outright or are hopelessly in the red. What Keith Raniere cares about is making the communities created by his “movements” his laboratories for hypnosis.
That is what drives him and that alone.
And you will find thousands of pages about pacing (subtle mimicking of someone else’s body language to gain their confidence) and leading (gestures and language tricks to communicate and persuade).
Raniere studied hypnotism, and was ecstatic on discovering Nancy Salzman with NLP training, at an exploitable low-point in her life (just divorced with two children).
NLP is vastly over-hyped, but hypnotism, in the general sense of circumventing the higher brain functions of critical thinking, is under-appreciated. Google “Ericksonian hypnosis” for some eye-opening stuff.
And in a 5 or 16 day “Intensive,” with 14 hour days in a cramped room, with minimal food provided, pretty much anyone will have some moments of weakness where they drop their guard and absorb what is presented by the well-drilled and confident trainer, carefully chosen and groomed to be appealing.
Don’t be too critical of the victims, the training is focused at the emotional and instinctive level, not the rational level. Even the most intelligent and educated still have emotions and instincts, which precede and override the rational.
If Grace Park went through Ethos, she had hundreds of hours of conditioning that Raniere is the smartest man in history, and to accept all of Raniere’s memes. And every single lesson ended with “Thank you Vanguard. Thank you Prefect.”
So she was in awe of actually speaking with him, and easily fell in line.
The formula for Keith being able to manipulate: Brainwashing + dealing with people who have very little sense of self going in + many are already morally ambiguous or are turned that way + some people who are actually quite stupid in life + the dumb belief that they are the special chosen ones to do something good = a ESPIAN. I don’t buy that it’s hypnosis and brainwashing alone otherwise no one would have left. And people very close to Keith left. When you add these elements together though, you get a blind follower who is too stupid to see the outside data and do anything about it.
Corection: He is a BRAINWASHER.
Hypnosis is a tool that is used in legitimate therapy sessions.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-hypnosis-and-brainwashing
In the first answer to the question posed on this website, you can see how man of the items listed apply to NXIVM et al (hint: all of them).