In what now seems like a former lifetime, I once dabbled in both stage and table magic. I learned the standards: card tricks, vanishes, and so forth. I also designed a few tricks of my own, with appreciable success.
While I was no superstar, generally, it seems that my act worked pretty well. So here’s what I learned about why magic works. That is, why is it that, even though people know you don’t have any magical powers, they’re still entertained by your prestidigitation?
- People are generally inclined not to investigate. Sure, they may have an idea or two, but they’re quickly distracted by other things. If people relentlessly investigated each of the tricks I did, they’d have figured out every one of them.
- People like to be told what to believe and to believe what they are told. “Surely not!”, you may object. “People are proud and don’t want anybody telling them what to believe.” Yes, that’s a common belief about people, but it’s generally not true. This kind of independence is how people like to think about themselves–not how most of them really are.
Here’s one example of how it works in magic. The magician tells the volunteer, “OK, I’ll riffle slowly through this deck of cards and your job is to say ‘Stop!’ whenever you like. Wherever you say ‘stop’, I’ll cut the deck in that spot and the top card will be yours.” The volunteer yells “Stop”, the riffling stops, and the deck is cut right where it stopped. The volunteer is told to pick up the card to which the deck was cut, and that this is “his card’. He’s told to remember that card and then to hide it back into the deck wherever he likes. After this, the magician finds his card in the deck and reveals it, to the volunteer’s great amazement.
The volunteer thinks that the trick happened sometime between when he placed the card back in the deck and when the magician located his card. The truth of the matter is, however, that the trick happened back when the deck was first cut. By sleight of hand, the magician, while cutting the deck, placed his own known card on the top, unknown to the volunteer. Therefore, as soon as the deck was cut, the trick was over, but the volunteer believes at that point that the trick was yet to come. He likes the idea that he was the one who got to choose where the deck was to be cut. (This didn’t matter in the least.) He also likes the idea that he got to hide his card anywhere he liked in the deck. (This choice was completely irrelevant as the identity of the card in question was already known to the magician.)
Thus can we see that the volunteer is quite willing to be told what to believe, and to believe what he is told. Even if he is a particularly curious person, it is very unlikely that he will ever investigate what may have happened before he picked up “his card” from the top of the freshly-cut deck; he wants to believe it was “his card”.
Having established these trends through my own experience and experimentation, it’s now easy to see why ours is such a dysfunctional nation and why it is so ill-equipped for seizing back control from the cartels that run it.
Jack
