Do You Believe In Magic?

A magician sits across from you at a small table and shuffles a deck of cards between his hands. He stares straight into your eyes and tells you that you must find a card within his deck and visualize it. He flips over the deck, spreads the cards out and turns his back toward you. You have just a moment to find a card and your eyes lock on the ten of clubs before the magician asks you if you’re done and sweeps the cards back up and places them off to the side. Next, he looks back at you and tells you to repeat your card over and over in your head. He even prompts you, “Ten of clubs, ten of clubs, ten of clubs...”

As you sit there stunned and bemused, even cursing at him, he grins and lights a cigarette. Then, he tells you that there never was a ten of clubs in the deck to begin with. As you arch your brow at him and insist that he’s wrong, he shrugs and spreads the cards out again for you to look. You scan the deck and, alas, cannot find the card that you set your eyes on moments before. Shaking your head in disbelief and giving the deck another look, you are startled as the magician suddenly starts choking. You look up quickly to see him peering quizzically at his cigarette, which has turned into a rolled up playing card: ten of clubs.

Now, as flabbergasted as this magician has made you, as speechless as you may be, you will not for a moment believe he actually performed any real magic. All you can do now is wonder how he managed to read your mind and then pull a specific card from the deck and light it on fire. Or was it that he planted the specific card in your mind? Then how did he make it disappear? Oh the questions you will ask yourself! But you will never ask whether he really performed magic or not. That’s just out of the question. As real and as stunning as his trick was, you always know that it was just a trick.

 So my question is why don’t we apply the same skepticism to other claims of incredible ability?

We trust in gods, astrology, fortune telling, homeopathy, natural medicine, chiropractic, superstition, prayer, Republicans, The Secret or what have you, but we never seem to need more than a few anecdotes and perhaps a voice of authority to believe. Meanwhile, the magician, who can get results just as real (if not more) than any new age trend, is dismissed as nothing more than a clever trickster. At least with a magician, you can see things happen right before your eyes.

Perhaps it is the upfront nature of illusion that makes it easy to dismiss. Every other scam has the benefit of mental marination over time. They are more subtle, never promising fireworks they know they cannot supply but rather eventual reward that your mind provides for itself anyways. These are the real tricks because they rely on your brain’s own ability to pat itself on the back for believing them. Time and the confirmation bias will obfuscate any subconscious doubt that you might have until you swear by something that, suspiciously, cannot be proven in any other way than by personal testimony of the people who believe in it in the first place.

The lesson here is to never let a magician shuffle his own cards. Had you reached out and scattered the cards about, you would have seen that they displayed two different sides and that the deck was stacked. It wasn’t even a standard Bicycle deck, as the top card was only placed there to make you think it was. Ahh, the things you learn when you ask the hard questions. The magician is in his own element as long as you let him handle his own cards. Don’t let him.

I’ve seen a magician’s act come unraveled as soon as he stepped out of his element. Confronted by a theoretical physicist, Deepak Chopra crumbled like a stale muffin when trying to use complicated jargon that usually fools a layman, but not a professional in the field Chopra only tries to riff off of. James Randi, a magician, uses his own knowledge of illusion to shine light on the fraudulent claims of all new age gimmickry. His foundation and many others offer a large fortune to any psychic who can prove they are accurate, but nobody has been able to claim the prizes in the decades these challenges have existed for. Derren Brown, whose trick I described above, has a show in the UK where he debunks the fantastic claims made by supernatural con artists by demonstrating that he can do the same work while admitting it is fake. Sometimes it takes one to know one, so don’t be surprised if you can’t tell when you’re being fooled.