HERE'S AN EXPERIMENT. Read the following words to someone, asking him or her to pay attention to the words, because there will be a quiz. Do not allow note taking.

Now ask the person if they heard the following words: Artichoke? Pillow? Sleep? The word "Sleep" was not on the list, but many people will "remember" that it is there because of the related words. Our minds can be creative without our knowledge, and this certainly has its advantages. One great advantage is in the way we process visual information. Your retina (the movie screen in your eye) has a limited resolution (the rods and cones can only be packed so densely), but your brain effectively fills in the blanks. Close-ups of comic books or paintings by Lichtenstein or Seurat reveal patterns of dots, but at a normal viewing distance we perceive these as solid colors.

There are people who would say that this is a bad thing. They say they don't want any information to enter their brains without them knowing about it. That's like when a child clamps hands over his or her ears and makes noise to drown out the parent's voice. It's like the person who dies of thirst because the store was out of his or her favorite brand of spring water. You might not like all the information in the world, but you shouldn't eliminate it before you decide whether you like it or not. Why would we treat subliminal messages any differently?

Pine Tree State Mind Control is an organization of psychological engineers that seeks to build a healthy society based on enjoyment of life and the many consumer goods it has to offer. Why, just think of how many of the world's problems would be solved if people could just relax and watch television after a hard day at work. Instead we have crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy, strange philosophies, and cults. Imagine the money the US would have saved if Saddam Hussein was a couch potato! He could have been renting movies instead of building weapons of mass destruction.

Both psychologists and the courts have seen that subliminal messages won't create dispositions where they don't exist. That is, despite the hoopla surrounding some heavy metal bands, children won't worship Satan or kill their parents unless that kind of behavior was acceptable to them already. Pine Tree State Mind Control, by contrast, only wants you to work hard at your job and then enjoy yourself at home. We find that that's pretty acceptable to most folks.