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Allen Branson
The man sitting across the table from you is known for trickery. He is a
stage magician. You know he employs trickery, so he tells you he is going to do
a card trick in which he can't possibly manipulate the cards. In this trick, you
will do all of the card handling. He won't touch the cards at all. He instructs you to cut the deck into four piles. You do so. He then tells
you that you are going to randomize the order of the cards by shuffling them
around and moving cards from one pile to another. Pointing to a pile of cards,
he instructs you to take the top three cards and place them at the bottom of
that pile. Then, take the next three cards and place them, one each, on top of
the three piles remaining on the table. You repeat the procedure with all four
piles of cards. The cards should now be very well mixed. The man then begins his patter in earnest. He asks you to confirm the fact
that he has not touched the cards. You agree. In no way could he have
manipulated how you would cut the cards or handle them. Again, you agree. With a
smile, he asks you to turn over the top card from each pile. You are amazed. The
four aces sit at the top of each of the four piles of cards. For a moment, your
mind might actually entertain the possibility that real magic has been
performed, though you "know" you've been duped. The fact is, this trick can be taught in a couple of minutes to any child
capable of understanding the instructions. It requires no fine motor skills for
clever card handling since the performer does not even handle the deck. The only
thing required is setting up the deck before the trick is performed and being
able to do a little sales patter in which you get the audience to agree to a
statement that is blatantly false. Take a moment and see if you can identify the lie that makes the trick
believable. Everything the magician says is true with one exception. The trick
is based completely on a facet of human psychology that most people--stage
magicians, salesmen and politicians aside--don't understand. When a person is
given a number of facts that are demonstrably true, they will tend to group all
statements in that group together, agreeing to everything said, including an
embedded lie. 1. The magician asked you to agree that he did not touch the cards during the
trick: True In fact, the only thing he did was manipulate you while creating the illusion
in your mind that you were making free choices. If you don't see the
manipulation yet, read through the description of the trick again. The magician
did not allow you to choose how the cards would be shuffled once they were cut
into four piles. Instead, he guided you through a pre-programmed series of
moves--three cards to the bottom then three cards on top of the remaining
piles--designed to move the four aces to the top of the four piles from their
pre-placed position at the top of the deck! If you want to understand the
mechanics of the trick, grab a deck of cards and try it. Just put the four aces
at the top of the deck then simply follow the trick as outlined above. Once you understand how the trick is done, you'll realize it is a very cheap
bit of manipulation. If you found your mind reeling at the description of the
trick, you'll probably feel a bit of a fool at how easily you could be duped.
The trick really is a child's game and a very old one, at that. Yet, people are
still fooled by it. It works with more than just cards. The phrase, "stacking the deck"
means using a variation of this kind of trick to predetermine the outcome of any
situation by placing what is to be chosen in a particular position then guiding
the chooser through a predefined set of movements that forces that particular
choice while giving the illusion of free choice. There are a number of other
methods used to force a selection in stage magic. Many card tricks rely on
forced selection, but the magician can't use the same force twice in his act. As
he changes methods, he informs you that each new method is an assurance that he
is not engaging in any sort of trickery. Maybe he fooled you on the last one, so
this time he won't even touch the cards. Next time, perhaps he'll use the force
called Magician's Choice. He'll give you three choices and ask you to pick one
at random. You, of course, have no choice but to pick exactly what you are
forced to pick. How can that be? It's easy. Given three choices, A, B and C, suppose I want
you to pick B. I ask you to pick one at random. If you happen to pick B, the
force is done. If you pick A, I set A aside and ask you to pick from B and C. If
you pick C, I declare that you've left your choice, B, on the table. Again, a
cheap trick that most people will fall for if done with the requisite
theatricality. Forced choice and sleight-of-hand are not only the prevue of
stage magicians, though. Take a look at how it is done in real life. The most enduring form of the forced choice in the U.S. and western Europe is
the electoral process. This is such an obvious forced choice that it can, rather
paradoxically, remain undetected even after it is pointed out. The key is the
emotional involvement of the electors, which just happens to be the key to stage
magic, too. Once you've convinced someone they are making a free choice, they
will provide the evidence of the freedom of their choice for you. If human
beings didn't possess this peculiar bit of psychology, stage magic wouldn't
work. It wouldn't matter what the magician said. The forced choice would be seen
for precisely what it is: forced. Instead, a little salesmanship on the part of
the performer convinces the audience of what is to come before the trick is
performed. The audience then dutifully sees exactly what they were told to see
and the magician is free to manipulate events to his favor. Here is another example of the techniques of stage magic at work. On the
morning of September 11, 2001, you awoke to reports that the unthinkable had
happened--a massive terrorist attack had occurred on U.S. soil. As the day
unfolds, you learn the following facts. Four planes had been hijacked to be used
as veritable flying bombs against high profile targets. Two of those planes, in
front of thousands of witnesses and several video cameras, fly into the twin
towers of the World Trade Center. Later that morning, those towers collapse,
leaving not even a bit of the structures left standing. In the Pennsylvania
countryside, another of the hijacked planes crashes following an apparent heroic
effort by the passengers to regain control of the aircraft from its hijackers.
Also, something crashes into the Pentagon, causing massive damage, a huge fire
ball and loss of life. Eventually, it is announced that the damage at the Pentagon was caused by the
fourth hijacked plane. This makes perfect sense to you. Four planes are
hijacked, three are clearly accounted for, and something crashed into the
Pentagon. The only logical choice is that the fourth plane crashed into the
Pentagon. What doesn't occur to you is that you have been duped once again by
another variation of the forced choice. Just like with the card trick, you don't
think of the obvious, that the deck has been stacked and movements manipulated
to force this particular choice. Subsequent revelations about the inconsistencies in the official story of the
event only further the illusion. A magician might turn your mind away from
thoughts of the cheap manipulation he has performed by giving you a false choice
of explanations for what you have witnessed. He only needs to give you one of
the possible explanations, letting you provide the other in the privacy of your
own mind. He tells you it must have been "magic." While you know it
isn't true, his suggestion has clouded your thinking by introducing noise into
your thought process. After all, if you were sufficiently impressed by the
trick, that very thought likely went through your head. The same thing is done
in the official story of the events of the day of 911. A false choice is set up
by suggesting that the alternative to the official story is something
preposterous, like holograms of planes flying into the twin towers, or rogue
elements of the U.S. government committing this atrocity. And here we see that a subtle variation of the trick, also used in stage
magic, has been employed to divert your attention. You have been given two
possible scenarios that contradict the official story. One of them is blatantly
silly, one is not. Yet, as any stage magician, salesman or professional
politician knows, your mind will group the statements together and dismiss the
second with the first. In other words, the truth about the trick has been told
openly, but in such a way that you will reject the truth, sending you down any
number of dead-end blind alleys searching for the secret of how it was done. Take a moment again to review what you were told and what you actually saw
with your own eyes. If you want to see how the trick is done, do not accept
anything the magician tells you at face value. He is a liar. His job is to give
you as much truth and openness as possible, for the purpose of proving to you
that he is not manipulating events in any way, so that the critical lie that
makes the trick work will go undetected by the average observer. In the case of
911, you were flooded with demonstrable facts that were horrifying, engaging
your emotions to a high degree. Remember, the key to all trickery is the
emotional involvement of the audience in supporting the lie. Each fact presented
made the ensuing lies all the more believable. Two planes really did crash into the twin towers. A plane really did crash
into the Pennsylvania countryside. Something really did crash into the Pentagon.
All of this is a matter of record, so everything that comes after, your mind
will tell you, is a matter of record, too. But it isn't. In fact, the
evidence strongly suggests that a commercial aircraft could not have crashed
into the Pentagon. There was, for example, no wreckage found at the scene
that could have come from such a craft. For the craft to have hit the building
as low as it did, its engines would have had to scrape the ground, yet the lawn
in front of the Pentagon was left unmarked. The hole left in the Pentagon was
barely as wide as the fuselage of such a craft. Assuming that the fuselage
managed to fully penetrate the building and disintegrate, creating a hole that
size, one is still left to account for the wings and engines. The official story
would have the folding back and penetrating the building along with the
fuselage. But there is simply no room for them to have made it through the hole. In the case of the twin towers, the claim has been made that they
collapsed--as did the building 7, later--due to a loss of structural integrity
caused by massive fire and a weakening of supports from the shock caused by the
impact of the planes. This was accepted as a reasonable explanation, despite the
fact that the buildings were designed to withstand such a shock and no steel
reinforced building has ever collapsed due to fire, before or since. Also, as
any publicly available video of the collapse of the towers will show you, the
tops of the towers leaned to one side as they began to fall, yet still managed
to right themselves and fall into the footprint of the building. This would be
impossible without a controlled demolition of the buildings. You have also been asked to believe that each and every safeguard against
such an event put in place by the U.S. military failed simultaneously on that
fateful day, despite the fact that those safeguards had been called to action
over 60 times in the preceding 12 months and worked perfectly each and every
time. In the words of our stage magician, "it was magic!" Of course, in the case of stage magic, the lies are told for our amusement.
No harm done, maybe even a lesson learned. In the case of a deception like 911,
the stakes are a bit higher. The art of deception is as old as mankind. Strike
that. It is far older. It is as old as the universe itself. Deception is a key
survival strategy for nearly everything that has ever been alive. How curious,
then, that we - the one species we believe capable of rational thought on the
planet - remain almost completely ignorant of the various means of deception.
What's even more curious is the fact that many remain steadfast in their belief
that such deception is rare when the evidence contradicting that belief can be
seen in even the most cursory investigation of nature. Chameleons change color to blend into their surroundings. Some species of
moths and butterflies have markings that are so close to the bark of the trees
on which they perch that you can look right at them and not notice they are
there. Carnivorous plants will mimic the smell of rotting flesh in order to
attract the flies they like to eat. The list goes on and on, from one link in
the food chain to the next. Why do we insist that this behavior ends with
mankind? The key, once again, is emotional involvement in a lie we have been told.
Since the time we were children, it has been drummed into our heads. Everyone is
the same inside. It's a lovely democratic sentiment, but it is a sentiment that
is contradicted by evidence. Just like in stage magic, we are directed away from
seeing the truth through clever means of misdirection. The belief of what we are
to see is planted in our heads before we ever see it. If we begin to suspect the
truth, noise is injected into our thought process and true statements are mixed
with false to use our psychology against us. The simple fact is, all who look human are not human in the way we normally
understand humanity. A small but very destructive minority of those who look
human lack some of the most basic of human characteristics - empathy and
conscience. These creatures use deception and misdirection to prey on human
beings. If humans begin to suspect that all is not right with them, they will
put a preprogrammed set of movements into play that are designed to steer you
away from the truth. And, just like in the trick, everything they do is
mechanical. Yet, as long as people remain unaware of their methods, their
actions continue to befuddle and even amaze. Another real world example of how this kind of trickery is performed. As you
read this, the chances are pretty good that a soldier for the IDF (Israel
Defense Forces) is either using a Palestinian mother as a human shield while he
terrorizes innocent people in their homes, ostensibly to search for terrorists,
or is shooting a small Palestinian child in the back for the egregious crime of
throwing rocks at an Israeli checkpoint in anger. If this were any other country, you would be outraged. But this is not any
country. This country was set up with immunity from criticism before it even
existed. Do you see the correlation to stage magic again? The audience is told
what they will see BEFORE they see it, preparing them to look for clues that
validate what they were told and ignore what doesn't fit. In the case of Israel,
the audience was told that they are God's chosen people who have suffered
endlessly and now deserve to have this little plot of land to call home and live
in peace. What the audience misses is the fact that a large portion of the Jews who
have made Israel their home are the descendents of converts to Judaism rather
than descendents of the founders of that religion, and that they appear to be
lead by some of the aforementioned almost-human predators, a.k.a., psychopaths.
Even the slightest hint of criticism of Israel is met with cries of
anti-Semitism, another bit of manipulation in which the only choice given is to
wholeheartedly support everything Israel does or side with the Nazis. It's
another bit of forced choice that is as cheap as any described here...and it is
remarkably effective. The fact is, most Jews are caring, compassionate people who really do want to
live their lives in peace. Because nearly everyone has had at least a Jewish
friend or two and has observed this for themselves, charges of anti-Semitism can
carry weight in their minds. Jews are not monsters, so how could these people
claim they are doing anything but defending themselves against a relentless
Palestinian terrorist mob that threatens their very existence? Let's look at the
statements in the same way we looked at the card trick. 1. Most Jews are caring and compassionate: True No one deserves a home at the expense of others. The Palestinians were living
peacefully in the region for thousands of years before the U.N. created the
state of Israel. Even after that event, Palestinians were gracious to their new
neighbors. It was not until the leaders of Israel saw fit to demolish
Palestinian homes and drive a people from a land that had been theirs for
thousands of years that things turned ugly. Put yourself in their position for a
moment and tell me you wouldn't be just a little pissed off. You may think I've given three examples of trickery in the real world -
voting, 911 and the assumed irreproachability of Israel. In fact, I've only
given one. The best tricks have multiple levels. One deception follows another
until the audience is completely lost in the trickery with no hope of unraveling
the secrets. The same is true, here. There are more levels to this particular
trick, far more than we could talk about now. The rabbit hole is deep with a lot
of branching tunnels that lead nowhere. It is possible to unravel this trick, however. The key, as always, is to
avoid taking any of what the magician says at face value. To see how the trick
is done requires a little study and a willingness to accept that you have been
tricked at all. Maintain your emotional attachment to supporting the lie and you
will only fall further under the spell of the magician. Learn to open your eyes
and you will suddenly see what has been going on right under you nose,
undetected. One day, the trick will seem cheap and obvious and you will wonder
how you didn't see it all along. If that day comes for you, the day your study has paid off and you can see
the trickery of the magician, you will have a future. www.signs-of-the-times.org/articles/show/136216-The+Art+of+Deception
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