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"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."
- Robert Heinlein

Analogue Treatment  
  Hypnotic drug treatment that normalizes behavior in humans.  

I'm immune to analogue treatment. I didn't know it for sure till I was ten, but I think I was born that way. From seven on, I remember the other kids talking about their Guardians, and me pretending I had one, too. You know how kids are — anything to be part of the gang.

"But for a long time, years, I wasn't certain whether everyone else was pretending like me, or whether I really was the only one without an invisible Guardian to talk to. I was pretty sure the kids were lying when they said they could see theirs, but whether they were there at all or not was another question...

"When I was ten, I stole some- thing... Funny, I was halfway out before it struck me that I'd just proved I had no Guardian.

"I had sense enough, thank God, to burn that book after I'd finished reading it. If I hadn't, I don't suppose I would have lived to grow up."

"Should think not" Wolfert said, his eyes fixed on Falk, alert, wary. "One man without any control could turn the whole applecart over. But I thought immunity was theoretically impossible."

"I've thought about that a good deal. According to classic psychology, it is. I'm not unusually resistant to hypnotic drugs; I go under all right. But the censor mechanism just doesn't respond. I've had the notion that I may be a mutation, developed in response to the analogue treatment as an anti-survival factor. But I don't know. As far as I've ever been able to find out, there are no more like me."

Technovelgy from Ticket to Anywhere, by Damon Knight.
Published by Galaxy Magazine in 1952
Additional resources -

This treatment has been applied to everyone:

"There are fewer and fewer people who have to be put away in madhouses — not because of any improvement in therapy, but because the analogue techniques are getting better and better. The guy who would have been hopelessly insane fifty years ago now has a little man inside his head, controlling him, making him act normal. On the outside, he is normal; inside, he's a raving mad- man. Worse still, the guy who would have been just a little bit cracked, fifty years ago — and gotten treatment for it — is now just as mad as the first guy. It doesn't matter any more. We could all be maniacs and the world would go on just as before."

Wolfert grimaced wryly. "Well? It's a peaceful world, anyhow."

"Sure," said Falk. "No war or possibility of war, no murders, no theft, no crime at all. That's because every one of them has a policeman inside his skull.

Compare to the control helmet from Easy Money (1938) by Edmond Hamilton, the Methuen Treatment from The Exalted (1940) by L. Sprague de Camp and CAN-D from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) by Philip K. Dick.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Ticket to Anywhere
  More Ideas and Technology by Damon Knight
  Tech news articles related to Ticket to Anywhere
  Tech news articles related to works by Damon Knight

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