Shift in perspective
15 August, 2024
I was about to write something nice today, but my day was ruined, so I'm gonna write something not so nice. Although, if you take my advice, then this will be a nice post for you!
I was watching an online lecture from a very well know and distinguished mentalist.
He had this effect where he was constantly proclaiming to the participant, "Did you feel that I influenced you?" and "I influenced you to do this." and then that, and so on. Not in a nice way, hey where are in this together, but in a, I'm starter than, you attitude.
That pissed me off. Big time.
First of all, many mentalists keep constantly saying to the participants that they are influencing them, and then they don't do jack shit. Like WTF. You're just standing there and saying a sentence or two, without any actual meaningful words, and you keep going on and on how that's somehow influencing people. How fucking stupid and lazy is that. How arrogant.
If somebody would say to me that by just merely looking into my eyes they made me do something. That they are so well versed in mind to mind communication that they took away my ability to think by myself. I would punch them in the face.
I've been guilty of this in the past. I have said numerous times in a serious manner that "I knew you would do that." When literally everyone of us knows that saying something like that, and trying to make the audience actually believe it's true, simply just makes us charlatans.
I will not do such thing anymore. Thanks to this one moron opening my eyes. I will go trough all my scripts and try to fix this.
I don't think that we as magicians / mentalists consider the fact that nobody wants to be influenced, nobody want's to have their thoughts stolen.
This is especially bad when we knowingly pretend to have these powers. Why do we do this? I think it's simply because it's strokes our ego. The revenge of the nerds. See, hah, I got you now bitch!
I think we need to shift our perspective.
Instead of "influencing" the participants, literally pretending to take away their free will, you could try to send them a thought and be excited that they were able to receive it, "we did this together". Instead of stealing people's thoughts, you could, again, ask them to project that thought to you, and then be cheerful and happy for them that they managed to do it.
Some people have already been doing this for a long time. I guess they are the smart ones.
Quite a simple concept, right?
And to those who go out of their way to convince their audiences that what they do is real, shove you thumb tip writer into your ass, you fucking liar on a power trip.
- Max Arcanie