When I look honestly and impartially at the growing global conflict between extreme left and extreme right I see very smart and well educated people on both sides.
Regardless which side you might empathize with more, it can be difficult to reconcile how some of these people have gone the other direction.
It’s easy to assume they’re just not as smart as you thought, or not as well informed as you thought…. but allow me to show you a completely different perspective.
Consider for a moment, that no matter how smart or how well educated we are, we’re all just as easily fooled by magic tricks as everyone else.
Think about that a second: Your political views, religious upbringing, morality, education, financial status, work experience… none of these matter at all!
WHY IS THAT?
We owe a great debt of gratitude to modern day magicians who openly call themselves “Illusionists”, because they’re being honest about what they do, at least as much as they can without ruining it.
I was fascinated with magic as a child and have loosely investigated it my entire life. Watching the TV Show “Penn & Teller Fool Us” I would say I know how about 2/3 of the illusions work, and I don’t want to know any more than that because knowing ruins the fun.
It has become clear to me that we humans are ALL born with blind-spots that we do not even know we have… and even knowing about them is often not curative.
Until we fully understand these inherit shortcomings and can recognize them in ourselves, we are incapable of processing reality and we remain vulnerable to manipulations that we can not even detect.
And let’s be clear: I’m not talking just optical illusions, misdirection and slight of hand… these vulnerabilities go much, much deeper than that.
Some characteristics of human nature are so natural and innate that they require considerable self-awareness and intentional practice to overcome.
We were designed to quickly process a surface view of the world around us and to make rash generalizations so that we could react instantly, or even intuit what might happen next. We will jump to false conclusions based on very little information because it’s better to be wrong and safe, than accurate and dead.
Science students start to realize early on that much of what’s actually true is counter-intuitive… that what we think we see is not the real story.
Recent advances in the study of human perception show that what we think we’re seeing and the way we store that information is not factual and the declaration “I know what I saw!” is just not reliable. Our legal systems have learned the hard way that witness testimony can be the least reliable evidence and no longer trust testimony without corroborating evidence.
Humans are very poor observers unless highly trained.
You’ve probably heard the old adage that “The simplest solution is best” or something very much like that. That’s a common paraphrasing of Occam’s Razor, but it’s not at all what Occam said, or meant.
Occam’s Razor
Occam means that when you have gathered all the information you can, then the best theory is the one with the least number of guesses. This is the most elegant solution and is very different from the simplest answer.
The simplest answer is to look at the horizon and conclude the Earth is flat. A simple experiment can prove that the world is not flat, but first you have to be willing to DO the experiment if you want the truth. Once you have the facts, it’s an unavoidable conclusion that the Earth must be a spheroid.
Please stop calling it ’round’. A pizza is both flat and round and the Earth is neither.
We only see what our ancestors needed to see to survive in the wild. It didn’t matter if the Earth was flat or not, it only mattered whether there was something dangerous hiding nearby…. so that’s all we are likely to see.
Another of our blind-spots is that we tend to believe that what we perceive is all there is. If we didn’t see how the trick worked, it must be real magic! There’s just no other possible explanation!
Start by accepting that we are all just as gullible as everyone else.
Not because you’re dumb or uneducated, but because you’re human and humans are just not good at everything. We ALL have a lot of blind-spots… MANY more than any of us realizes. If you can entertain that possibility, you’re ready to begin overcoming them.
So there are two paths, depending upon your current beliefs:
If you believe illusionists that everything they do is non-mystical, that there’s nothing supernatural going on… then you don’t need to learn how every trick works… just the mechanisms (human weaknesses in perception and processing) that they’re taking advantage of.
If you don’t believe magic is all illusions, you may have to start learning how it’s all done for yourself, as I did. The good news is, that even though illusionists don’t usually share this knowledge openly, it’s not all top secret either. Starting in magic shops; from the simplest card and coin tricks up to the most expensive and elaborate illusions in the world, and in hundreds if not thousands of books. The knowledge is out there if you really want the truth enough to do the work. But be warned: knowing the tricks will take all the magic out of it for you! And you don’t have to do any of that. It’s not about how each trick is done, it’s about why the tricks work on everyone. THAT’s the real trick.
~ Ian F. Hood