“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”
I am writing this from a plane on its way to our nation’s capital, New York city! Raise your hand if you knew it wasn’t actually our capital. Ok put your hand down. You’ve now been humiliated twice. You really think I’m going to write a whole issue last week where I’m humbled and not turn the spotlight on you? Grow up. I am writing this from a plane. You know that already. What you may not know is I just learned something new. They say you learn something new every day and I got mine out of the way real early today. I learned that we have not seen the end of “emotional support”. There is a man, as I write this, two rows in front of me and on the other side of the plane who has, I’m not kidding, an emotional support seat. That’s right, he left the seat beside him open for emotional support. I didn’t hear the whole conversation, but he may just straight up be a genius, or a conman. Honestly, what’s the difference between a genius and a conman? Maybe we should discuss that today.
I really thought I’d seen it all and we had moved beyond the emotional support items phase, but I guess I was wrong. Honestly, this is truly unbelievable. It’s unbelievable, in part, because it isn’t true. I made it up. Why? To prove a point. What is one of the main philosophies we preach around here at the Daily Dispatch? Curiosity. Gold star for anyone who immediately doubted my story. Last week we said three of the main things we try to emphasize here are curiosity, intellectual honesty, and above all, integrity. Was I honest? No. Was I integritous? No. Is “integritous” a word? I’m not looking it up so we will never know. Is it ok to be dishonest if it leads to someone making a change that causes them to be more aware of trickery? That is a bit of a gray area isn’t it? A little pain now to avoid more later. This is what we are going to discuss today. Where is the line between honesty, foolery, and entertainment? How do these things work together? Let’s dig in.
When I was young, I used to spend a week during the summers at “Camp GG and Papadoc”. Essentially, this was just spending a week at my grandparents’ house, but presentation is everything. We would have t-shirts that said, “Camp GG and Papadoc 2002” and go on all sorts of adventures together. A staple of camp was a trip to Dollywood, our nation’s capital. Sure there were roller coasters at Dollywood, but there are roller coasters everywhere these days. There were little musical acts and skits and sights to see, but the real event, my favorite thing each summer, was tucked away near the back of the park around the train station, a magic show and a magic shop. I looked forward to it each and every time. I remember seeing a trick one year where the magician had just concluded a trick, taken a sip of his drink, and asked a member of the crowd for a dollar bill. After promising to return it, someone gave him a dollar. He then crumbled it up, let go, and stepped back. The wadded-up dollar bill remained floating right in front of him. Not only did it float there, but he was able to make it move up and down without touching it. I was absolutely amazed. I turned to my wise, omniscient grandfather and asked how he did it. With a look of amazement that mirrored my own, he said, “I don’t know.” I was hooked. I went to the magic shop and immediately spent my grandparents hard earned money on a little magic kit.
Fast forward a few years and I have mostly abandoned prop magic, yet still love card tricks. I had a buddy named Chris. Every Friday morning for months during eighth grade, we would get to school early, show a magic trick we had learned, and then try to figure out how the other person did theirs. That was one of the main draws for me. Anyone who knows me well knows I was absolutely drawn to the performance side of magic, but what made it an obsession was trying to solve how tricks were done without being taught. Beyond that, I loved performing tricks, to the best of my ability, and watching others try to work it out in their minds.
It seems to me there has been a lost art of pondering and doing the hard work of wondering. That thought is well trodden in other issues and, let’s be honest, played out. I know a lot of your Bingo cards had the phrase, “Immediate gratification” on them. I will not be giving that to you. You know our patience and attention spans and sense of wondering and considering have diminished. However, as a strong supporter of magic and puzzles and silly little stories that aren’t true but only exist to entertain and cause you to say, “Really?”, I recognize these can go too far. Two of my magician heroes are Houdini and The Amazing Randi. Not only were they great, in their own right, but they held themselves to a standard and stood for what they believed in. Because there is a line after all. Sure Houdini can be wrapped in a straight jacket and suspended in mid-air tied by his feet upside down one moment and safely escaped to land the next, but he would never claim to be actually magic. He wanted you to try and figure it out.
The Amazing Randi was the same way. He modeled his career much like that of Houdini’s. However, his career shifted from that of a professional deceiver to that of a truth teller. I will recap, but his life is well chronicled in the documentary “The Honest Liar” where this issue steals its title from. During the time The Amazing Randi was at the height of his career, the rise of fake spiritual healers in the mainstream began. Before elaborating, I think we all felt it, right? When you read the sentences about Houdini and Randi, there was an underlying feeling of wonder and excitement, however mild. When you read the sentence about fake spiritual healers, that underlying feeling changes to disgust or anger or putting up your guard. There is a line. Randi attended the “service” of a very famous spiritual healer at the time. Eventually learning the healer, who was selling out large auditoriums, had his wife reading the prayer cards people had filled out earlier and radioing the information into an earpiece he wore. He wasn’t hearing from the spirit, he was simply being read facts about people’s lives, putting on a performance, and having people leave believing they were healed. Many of these people would stop taking their medication. They would cancel appointments. They would go on being sick. Even after The Amazing Randi went on Johnny Carson and played the radio frequency of the fake healer’s wife radioing him information, it didn’t completely shut him down. In fact, he spent much of his career selling “healing” holy water and running other harmful scams. People want to believe in something. I am not calling you to live a life of pure skepticism. My faith is a huge part of who I am and faith is confidence in things not seen. However, what I do desire is more people who try to solve, who ask why, who think beyond the initial information. I want more performers and entertainers, yet I want less deception with ill-intent.
A lie that causes wonder, entertainment, and winks at the audience saying “you’re in on it” verses a lie that harms. Can you deceive honestly? I believe so.
We see similar harmful liars all over social media now. Where there is less focus on the spiritual, the subject matter has turned to getting rich quick. If my performance is good enough, I can post a few fake graphs, drop a couple buzzwords on my TikTok video, and eventually sell you a course to get rich quick doing dropshipping or affiliate marketing without ever having found any success in it myself. The lie and the performance is all to get you to buy a course filled with nothing but filler garbage. Abracadabra. As an inspiration of mine, Ben Cake, says, “Everything sounds better in front of a rented Lamborghini.” I am not as Amazing as Randi. He was a performer through and through, but I am a better writer. So, read these words: investigate. Think for yourself. Find joy in solving the solvable and take pride in your intellect enough to believe you won’t be fooled if you look beyond the surface. We all want to believe in something. We all probably should believe in something. I caution you against living an unexamined life though.
There is a reason carrying a ladder and wearing an orange vest gets people unquestioned access to many places. Sometimes the eyes will do the work of the brain.
The stewardess just told me to put my tray table up because we are beginning our final descent. Does she know who I am? This is the Daily Dispatch we’re talking about! Freedom of speech and all that good stuff. What is she going to do if I keep writing? Put me in sky jail? I’d like to see her try. Ok, she’s coming back and looks serious. Bye.
