Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
pseudoscientific bamboozles, much less, passionately held selfdeceptions.
They tend not to be very good at it either. Scientists
are used to struggling with Nature, who may surrender her secrets
reluctantly but who fights fair. Often they are unprepared for
those unscrupulous practitioners of the 'paranormal' who play by
different rules. Magicians, on the other hand, are in the deception
business. They practise one of the many occupations - such as
acting, advertising, bureaucratic religion and politics - where what
a naive observer might misunderstand as lying is socially condoned
as in the service of a higher good. Many magicians pretend
they don't cheat, and hint at powers conferred by mystic sources
or, lately, by alien largesse. Some use their knowledge to expose
charlatans in and out of their ranks. A thief is set to catch a thief.
Few rise to this challenge as energetically as James 'The
Amazing' Randi, accurately self-described as an angry man. He is
angry not so much about the survival into our day of antediluvian
mysticism and superstition, but about how uncritical acceptance of
mysticism and superstition works to defraud, to humiliate, and
sometimes even to kill. Like all of us, he is imperfect: sometimes
Randi is intolerant and condescending, lacking in empathy for the
human frailties that underlie credulity. He is routinely paid for his
speeches and performances, but nothing compared to what he
could receive if he declared that his tricks derived from psychic
powers or divine or extraterrestrial influences. (Most professional
conjurors, worldwide, seem to believe in the reality of psychic
phenomena, according to polls of their views.) As a conjuror, he
has done much to expose remote viewers, 'telepaths', and faithhealers
who have bilked the public. He demonstrated the simple
deceptions and misdirections by which some psychic spoonbenders
had conned prominent theoretical physicists into deducing new
physical phenomena. He has received wide recognition among
scientists and is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation (socalled
'genius') Prize Fellowship. One critic castigated him for
being 'obsessed with reality'. I wish the same could be said of our
nation and our species.
Randi has done more than anyone else in recent times to expose
pretension and fraud in the lucrative business of faith-healing. He
sifts refuse. He reports gossip. He listens in on the stream of
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