The Confidence Game......2

 There’s a likely apocryphal story about the French poet Jacques Prevert. One day he was walking past a blind man who held up a sign “Blind man without a pension”. He stopped to chat. How was it going? Were people helpful? “Not great”, the man replied.

Could I borrow your sign?” Prevert asked. The blind man nodded.

The poet took the sign, flipped it over and wrote a message.

The next day, he again walked past the blind man, “How is it going now?” he asked. “Incredible,” the man replied. “I’ve never received so much money in my life.”

On the sign, Prevert had written: “Spring is coming, but I won’t see it.”

Give us a compelling story, and we open up. Scepticism gives way to belief. The same approach that makes a blind man’s cup overflow with donations can make us more receptive to almost any persuasive message, for good or for ill.

When we step into a magic show, we come in actively wanting to be fooled. We  want deception to cover our eyes and make our world a tiny bit more fantastical, more awesome than it was before. And the magician, in many ways, uses the exact same approaches as the confidence man - only without the destruction of the con’s end game. “Magic is a kind of a conscious, willing con,” says Michael Shermer, a science historian and writer. “You’re not being foolish to fall for it. If you don’t fall for it, the magician is doing something wrong.” 

At their root, magic tricks and confidence games share the same fundamental principle: a manipulation of our beliefs. Magic operates at the most basic level of visual perception, manipulating how we see and experience reality. It changes for an instant what we think possible, quite literally taking advantage of our eyes’ and brains’ foibles to create an alternative version of the world. A con does the same thing, but can go much deeper. Long cons, the kind that take weeks, months or even years to unfold, manipulate reality at a higher level, playing with our most basic beliefs about humanity and the world.

The real confidence game feeds on the desire for magic, exploiting our endless taste for an existence that is more extraordinary and somehow more meaningful.

When we fall for a con, we aren’t actively seeking deception - or at least we don’t think we are. As long as the desire for magic, for a reality that is somehow greater than our everyday existence remains, the confidence game will thrive.

Extracted from The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova