Politics & Power Quote by Theodore Sturgeon

Sturgeon’s joke lands with the clean snap of a sci-fi short story: one odd detail, one surgical reversal, and suddenly the entire authority structure looks flimsy. He sets up a confessional premise - “I had a very serious problem” - which primes you for trauma, vulnerability, maybe even a moral lesson. Instead, the “problem” is that a credentialed expert can’t make his parlor magic work on him. The punchline isn’t that Sturgeon is mentally strong; it’s that the hypnotist’s prestige collapses on contact with a noncompliant subject.

The choice of credentials is doing heavy lifting. “Later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis” is the kind of institutional frosting meant to guarantee legitimacy after the fact. Sturgeon weaponizes it retroactively: if even the future top dog can’t deliver the basic function of the job, what exactly are we buying when we buy titles? The subtext is classic mid-century skepticism about technocratic expertise - not a rejection of science, but a suspicion of professionalized certainty, especially when it borders the theatrical.

As a writer who lived on the edge of genre respectability, Sturgeon also sounds like he’s defending imagination against manipulation. Hypnosis, in the cultural weather of his era, sat between medicine and stage act, between therapy and control. His line implies a small, satisfying autonomy: the mind that invents worlds won’t easily surrender its narrative voice to someone else’s script.