2013-05 Dennis Deliberations.... Editorial and Comment

 "The psychic business is a multi-billion-dollar industry today, in what can only be called, The Golden Age of the Con". -- Mentalist and Psychic Investigator Mark Edward. 

So the billion dollar psychic industry is fraudulent? Sounds pretty close to every industry gone big: could be military, tech, diamonds, government, academia, religion, education, insurance, finance… Greed, fraud, and deceit are rampant and infectious. Maybe I am just on an ethics kick when it come to magicians, but I am in the company of Houdini, Randi, Himber and others. 

Since I do a fair amount of psychic and mental magic-no need to lug the big stuff for that- I still get people who refuse to accept it as entertainment. They insist in believing in special mystical powers. That just bothers me.    I have mentioned several times here about knowing “Dr.” David Hoy. He had been a Baptist Fundamentalist Evangelist and gave it all up to become a stage psychic. I knew David during his ministry years because he used to do Gospel magic in his sermons. Following his rejection of the  pulpit, he was a smash hit on the Night Club Circuit and the Playboy Clubs. His book, The Bold and Subtle Miracles of Dr. Faust,  gave us mentalism classics and techniques such as “The Tossed out deck” and “Hurling the headlines”.  There seems something eerie and accurate about his stage name! 

Recall in classic literature the Faust legend: Faust ,in the classic German legend, is a highly successful scholar but one who was dissatisfied with his life who therefore makes a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. The Faust legend has been the basis for many artistic works. Faust and the term “Faustian” imply a situation in which an ambitious person surrenders moral integrity in order to achieve power and success. That was Hoy!  He gave up his Christian faith and Baptist morals for fame.  

Hoy, in his later years did an enormously successful call in radio segment. When I was on WBT Radio in Charlotte, we carried his show as a feature during our mid-day program.  When I was filling in on the radio, I did the two-way bits with him. He would take callers and do cold readings and then give his address if anyone wanted advice on special personal issues.  I once asked him off the air what led to him giving up his Christian ministry and becoming a Psychic. He said, “Someday. I will tell you the whole story”  That day  never came. Hoy, who was massively obese, died of a heart attack , in 1981, long before his time. His story would make a great movie. Still within me is an anger over the evil that gripped him and took him to an early death.    

I know that any mentalist can enhance his revenue with stock market and love advice. It just galls me to know anyone would do that. I am all for baffling and mind-numbing magic. I just never want anyone to think that it is “real”. My students in high classes often ask me, “Is that David Blaine guy, for real?”  As P.T, Barnum is reported to have said, “There is a sucker born every minute”. 

DETECTING  FRAUDULENT PSYCHICS  

1. SHOW ME a psychic who isn't using his or her alleged paranormal talents to improve the financial health of others, and I'll show you a fraud. 
2. SHOW ME a psychic who isn't on the payroll of some police force or detective agency and being paid BIG BUCKS for their services, and I'll show you a fraud. 
3. SHOW ME a psychic who isn't making incredible breakthroughs in cures for all the world's major diseases (by divining all such future cures) and I'll show you a fraud. 
4. SHOW ME a psychic who isn't foreseeing all the major natural and man-made disasters of the world, and thereby saving countless millions of lives, and I'll show you a fraud. 
5. SHOW ME a psychic who doesn't have a stock portfolio that would put Warren Buffett's to shame, and I'll show you a fraud. 
6. SHOW ME a psychic who makes his or her living almost exclusively from doing readings, preying on the bereaved, selling books, hawking their nonsense on websites, and appearing regularly on Coast to Coast AM and other such squalid media outlets, and I'll show you a fraud. 
7. SHOW ME a psychic who has not been snapped up by the CIA or some other country's information agency, and I'll show you a fraud. 
8. SHOW ME a psychic who bluffs his or her way through life in order to avoid plain honest work, and I'll show you a fraud. 
9. SHOW ME a psychic who studiously avoids the many large cash-awards that are available to anyone who can scientifically validate their paranormal abilities, and I'll show you a fraud. 
10. SHOW ME a psychic who resorts to cold reading, lame parlor tricks, psychological game-playing, sleazy showmanship, and a heartless praying on the gullible religious and superstitious, and I'll show you a fraud. 

By Dennis Phillips  May 2013