Skepticblog

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Skepticblog call to arms for an all out assault on the media is receiving renewed impetus. My last post encouraged some good ideas. If you haven’t read it and are as fed up as I am, please read it and take heart. Our situation is nowhere near hopeless. There are ways to get involved that can make a difference. One at a time, in whatever ways we can, we will eventually reach a saturation point when the tide will turn. The world wants change and new directions. Let’s give it to them and face the fact that we can’t sit around crying in our beer waiting  for the very media that brings us yet another episode of “Dancing with the Stars” to wake up and smell “The Skeptologists.” 

My experience this week was one more reminder of how being in league with magic of any sort can be a hard double-edged sword to swallow. As a teacher of a adult magic class with a dozen intelligent students, I’m constantly amazed with how easy it is to slip seamlessly from trusted teacher where I am “telling it like it is;” explaining the modus operandi or techniques of how to use misdirection, verbal deception and all the other methods of the magician and then quickly morph into a complete charlatan by stretching the truth to its utmost limits. It’s left entirely to me to decide when and if that switch takes place. As a magician I’m actually paid to lie. As a teacher? Well, …I’m paid to tell the truth. Or in the case of a magic class, what truth or secrets I may choose to divulge and in what time and place. This leaves an awful lot of elbowroom to take full advantage of unwary first time students whose malleable minds haven’t yet been awakened to the reality that everything I do in that environment is likely to be an illusion of some sort. To new students, there’s no clear dividing line between these two  roles.  Once again life becomes complicated when I tread this sometimes schizophrenic path. Which way shall I go? Do I really want to give away all of whatever mystery I may have? Fortunately, when I spoke with Randi on the Chupacabra Cruise about this conundrum, he understood my plight and my reluctance to give up a persona that took so many years to cobble together. All magic is an ego trip. What mighty and awesome power I wield! Not really. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a politician or a televangelist…

The job of teaching magic and the revealing of magical secrets gets even more problematic when, after performing some seeming miracle, I burst the bubble of belief and reveal the sometimes disturbingly banal secret. Most of the time I’m met with a chorus of desperate remorse that usually characterizes the moment of enlightenment that happens between enchantment and the realization that what has been experienced is some simple down to earth trick of optics, psychology or clever artifice. No wonder science gets such a bad rap.

I’ve grown used to hearing the moaning mantra of,  “…ohhhhhhhh, …that’s all it is?  Once in a while I’m charmed by the reflective lilt of a classic “….ah ha!” Or even just a semi-religiously drawn out “…ahhhhhhhhhhhhh” for my trouble. All of these verbal reactions act as an instant eraser to the wonderment I have just moments before staged. It has come to the point where I’m now forced to take time out to make sure beginning magic students are reminded from the very start that after five weeks in my class, the world as they see it now may never be seen the same way again. This has become imperative after one student told me confidentually at the end of one class session that I had, “…ruined all magic for him.” Initially I felt rather bad for the poor fellow, but then it dawned on me that this wasn’t really meant as an insult but instead a backhanded compliment. I had indeed imparted a profound effect not just on this person’s perception of the entertainment value of a simple card trick but had transformed his entire way of seeing the world. When you understand the basic concepts of conjuring, it opens up  whole new horizons. The truth is not always pretty or what we may want to hear. But there it is, warts and all. When people sign up for a magic class, they pay their ticket and they are warned they will be taking their chances by buying into a new way of thinking and possibly seeing  for the first time in their lives that things are seldom what they think they are.

For some this world view can involve a jarring re-evaluation of core beliefs. Magic is much more than a mere bag of tricks for me. It has become a way of life and it often becomes a new way of life for many of my students. Sure, they may pick up a few clever tricks here and there, but if I have been effective in my teaching, they are released back into the world as changed individuals who no longer settle for what’s presented to them on the surface in other more mundane areas of day to day existence such as shopping for a used car, falling for consumer bait and switch cons or not being able to focus clearly on what the right hand is doing when someone is waving a left hand full of random shiny things at them.  

This is analogous to what the skeptical movement should also be about if we really believe in what we are doing. We are not just providing an entertaining diversion like a once a week television sitcom, we should be teaching people to look at what the other hand is doing.

So NBC, CBS and ABC, …are you looking at it?  What?  Too subversive for ya? If you aren’t interested, you have dropped the ball. If you are not a part of the solution, you are once again a part of the problem.

In the real world that exists outside the walls of the magic class or skeptical environment, we are bombarded with hidden hands pulling strings, operating complex schemes and generally running a gigantic illusion show, the only difference is that the stars of that three-ring-circus are not in top hats or pulling bunnies out of them, they are wearing Armani suits and carrying briefcases. Lately these briefcases have been observed carrying away trainloads of cash. It’s doubtful in a country where a large percentage of the population believes that we owe our human existence to a talking snake in a tree that these citizens might also know exactly how many zeros are in a trillion dollars. Hey, I had to look it up myself just to make sure – there’s 12 of ‘em. It’s no magic secret. The info’s out there. Unfortunately, that kind of number think or its profundity seems way beyond Joe the Plumber. Isn’t it just about as incomprehensible (or unimportant) as how The East Indian Rope Trick is done for most people? Are we willing to erase some of that wonderment in the face of the mess we are all in?  We are wading through deep doo doo when “America’s Next Top Model” and “90210” is the best we can do in primetime.

Fortunately in the confines of a magic class students are forced to accept the facts. They learn that there is illusion and disillusion.  What is happening is just a trick. As Hitchcock used to remind his daughter when she was a child, “…It’s just a movie.”  There’s a safety in finding out a simple solution to something that seems initially so baffling. Usually any sensation of disappointment in learning the secret behind any supposed miracle passes rapidly with the next miracle that comes along. We can’t wait for the next miracle in real life. We are running on empty. Klaatu isn’t coming folks. 

Then there are those students who hold out some inward hope that I’m really just pretending to be a trickster. I have seen expressions of disbelief on some students faces as if they are thinking along the lines of what can happen in the more rarefied atmosphere of the seance room. They seem to say, “Well, …most of that was a lot of tricks, …but that one thing he did had to be real.”  So it goes with the real world. In these circumstances where what is presented is so inexpicable or more importantly; the viewer’s need to believe is so strong, we can uncover an even deeper level of human nature that may be the hardest hurdle of all to clear.

As in the case of Carlos Alvarez and his masquerade as an all knowing psychic who offered “crystals from Atlantis” to his gullible audiences in Australia:

“Even after it was all revealed on the Australian Sixty Minutes TV show, a week after the Opera House appearance, many continued to believe in “Carlos” and his uninspired messages. (Randi personal correspondence)

“For Alvarez, the creation of the character “Carlos” was a performance/experiment to see how far he could take his creation, but his purpose was not to make people look foolish. He hoped to liberate them from a false belief. However, the result of the performance seemed to demonstrate how easy it is to create a cult from scratch and how, even when the truth is revealed to them, some still refuse to accept it.”

Impossible you say? Perhaps. In these cases where we face minds so far lost they may seem irretrievable, the up-side is that if we take the time and effort to do the best we can to at the very least make them aware of an alternative solution, maybe that’s all we can expect to accomplish. Maybe that seed of a thought will take root and the next time they think they see a UFO, they might remember it could be something else. Then again, some people are just plain nut cases. Institutions are full of them.

We face a daunting challenge. Taking our cause to the masses has got to be far more exciting than fourteen seasons of “Bonanza” doesn’t it? Tell me that just one solid season of “The Skeptologists” wouldn’t be worth a dozen episodes of watching Hoss Cartright tie up his horse on the Ponderosa porch?

So get up off your couch, go to your cell phone or computer and tell them like Howard Beale in “Network:”

“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any anymore!”

What else is going on in your life? The times are on our side right now. It may not last long and this time the stakes are higher than ever before. Now is the time to act. In lieu of getting “The Skeptologists” deal picked up by someone willing to break the sick media pattern we have been lulled into, consistently remind the public of the “other hand” strategy as often and in as many situations as you can possibly manage. Eventually the chickens will come home to roost.

P.S. Thanks Naomi for the great pictures!