Imagine a small, dark cell. There’s a light bulb swinging overhead. One man is seated at a table under the light bulb. Two men are standing over the seated man, and a few more sit in the shadows along the wall, watching the proceedings.
“Who else was involved in planning the robbery?” asks one of the standing men.
“It was me…” stammers the man at the table. “Well, we had talked about it the night before…”
The other standing man leans in. “Who is this ‘we’?”
The seated man looks up into the light and blinks over and over. “It was just me. Bjørn… I…”
“Bjørn was also involved in planning the robbery?”
Suddenly, one of the men sitting in the shadows coughs. He makes a show of crossing his legs in an unusual way. The parts of his legs beneath the knee form a clear letter X.
The man under the light bulb straightens up. “Nobody else was involved. I acted alone. My goal was to support the revolution.”
In 1951, a man named Palle Hardrup robbed a bank in Copenhagen. The robbery wasn’t his first, but it was the first one that went bad, and Hardrup killed two people. Soon after, he was arrested and interrogated.
During the interrogations, it became clear Hardrup might have been acting under the direction of somebody else.
That somebody else turned out to be Bjørn Nielsen, a self-taught hypnotist.
Over the next 10 years, the story slowly unfolded across Danish courthouses, prisons, and hospitals. Eventually, it even made it to the European Court of Human Rights.
The question was who was responsible for the robbery and the murders. Hardrup, who had confessed to the the crimes… Nielsen, who dozens of witnesses claimed had hypnotized Hardrup over the course of two years, and who still seemed to have total control over his hypno-puppet, each time the symbol X appeared in some way… or Hardrup and Nielsen both.
What do you think? I’ll tell you what Dan Kennedy thinks:
Dan thinks if you want to get rich, then be the wizard… and beware other wizards.
What Dan is saying is we all crave to give up responsibility in our lives. It’s a dangerous thing to allow yourself to do… but there is lots of money to be made in providing that service to other people.
And that’s what I think those Copenhagen hypnosis murders illustrate.
Human beings are extremely programmable.
We also have individual agency.
And if you ask me, those are two magnetic poles that cannot be reduced down to one.
This is something you might want to keep in mind… if you too have decided to get rich, the way I’ve finally done recently, for the first time in my life.
And in case you want to get educated about persuasion, marketing, and copywriting to help you in your quest to get rich… you might like my daily email newsletter.