We Only Deceive Ourselves

SYLVIA BROWNE HAS MADE quite a good living for herself as self proclaimed psychic. Many books, many lectures and public demonstrations of her alleged talent, television shows, and last but not least, a lucrative business charging people seven to eight hundred dollars per half hour for a psychic reading on the telephone.

She is surely a millionaire many times over, and she is also a convicted felon, as of twenty years ago, for financial crimes.  She's been married five times, and her first husband claims she confided to him that she merely pretends to have phychic gifts, and that anyone gullible enough to trust her deserves to be swindled. Beware of what people say about their ex spouses.

Most recently she has come under fire for having told a woman, nine years ago, on the montel williams show, that her daughter, who was just the other day rescued from ten years of captivity, was dead. Her troubles have stemmed mostly from telling people that their missing loved ones were dead, only to have them turn up later, or, from telling people that their missing loved ones were alive, only to have them turn up dead.

A lot of people make a lot of money giving psychic demonstrations; we are a culture, we are a species, inclined to prefer credulity to skepticism. Tell people what they want to hear, they tend to believe it. To one degree or other, advertising always works.

Whenever purported psychics are offered the opportunity to subject their claims to intense scientific analysis, they tend to defer. Sylvia Browne has even turned down an offer of one million dollars by a man named Randi who heads an organization devoted to skeptical analysis of claims of the supernatural.

The jury is still out on whether human beings possess supernatural powers, what those powers are, and what the term "supernatural" actually means. If a person can predict the future accurately, or read minds, then those talents must be natural, rather than artificial, or beyond natural.  All that is is part of the natural universe, correct? The term "supernatural", ultimately, is no more meaningful than the term "empty space" or the term "unknowable".

The day may come when we understand precisely what people can, and cannot do. Until then, we are at the mercy of those who take advantage of our ignorance; but only so long as we permit it. As Goethe said, "we are never deceived, we only deceive ourselves".