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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
I think we're lucky that James Randi is tugging at the curtain.
But it would be as dangerous to rely on him to expose all the
quacks, humbugs and bunkum in the world as it would be to
believe those same charlatans. If we don't want to get taken, we
need to do this job for ourselves.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we've been
bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the
bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth.
The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to
acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you
give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So
the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.
Seances occur only in darkened rooms, where the ghostly
visitors can be seen dimly at best. If we turn up the lights a little,
so we have a chance to see what's going on, the spirits vanish.
They're shy, we're told, and some of us believe it. In twentiethcentury
parapsychology laboratories, there is the 'observer effect':
those described as gifted psychics find that their powers diminish
markedly whenever sceptics arrive, and disappear altogether in
the presence of a conjuror as skilled as James Randi. What they
need is darkness and gullibility.
A little girl who had been a co-conspirator in a famous
nineteenth-century flimflam - spirit-rapping, in which ghosts
answer questions by loud thumping - grew up and confessed it was
an imposture. She was cracking the joint in her big toe. She
demonstrated how it was done. But the public apology was largely
ignored and, when acknowledged, denounced. Spirit-rapping was
too reassuring to be abandoned merely on the say-so of a
self-confessed rapper, even if she started the whole business in the
first place. The story began to circulate that the confession was
coerced out of her by fanatical rationalists.
As I described earlier, British hoaxers confessed to having
made 'crop circles', geometrical figures generated in grain fields.
It wasn't alien artists working in wheat as their medium, but two
blokes with a board, a rope and a taste for whimsy. Even when
they demonstrated how they did it, though, believers were
unimpressed. Maybe some of the crop circles are hoaxes, they
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