The Return of Houdini

On the Great Magician

The two articles below appeared in my inbox Wednesday morning, one below the other. I suggest you read them, in order.

Nobody is safe from the Nudgers

Politically Homeless - So Confused & Sad

The first is about the UK’s official Behavioral Insights Team “advising” the British government on the COVID pandemic in Britain. I rarely write about COVID, because it’s so far outside my wheelhouse, but I’m sympathetic to anyone who’s worried about it, on either side—those who are afraid of the virus and believe institutions are their best chance against debilitating or fatal illness, and those who believe the threat of the virus is overblown, and believe the vaccines and the institutional overreach that accompanies them are far more of a threat.

Personally, I’m not preoccupied over either; I think there are medical treatments like stem cell precursors coming down the pipe that, once widely available, will make repairing epithelial damage cost-effective, and I think the tide is turning with regards to institutional overreach.

The first article, though, encapsulates what makes me angry about the downstream social consequences of COVID we all see post-pandemic. But my anger isn’t on my own behalf; it’s for others. For the West in general, and for America in particular.

I’m not an academic psychologist, and I don’t play one on TV. What I am in terms of my IRL, non-literary skill set, however (you are what you do, not the other way around), does overlap with clinical techniques. Things I’m good at include stuff like hypnotism, mentalist techniques, and sleight-of-hand, as well as escapology, survival, biohacking, and a certain kind of physical toughness.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be Harry Houdini.

In addition to being the greatest magician and escape artist in history (not to mention the baddest Jew who ever lived), Houdini—born Erich Weisz—was a lifelong debunker of frauds and charlatans, like James Randi after him. He knew about spiritualism, and fraudulent psychics, and occultists who promised the grief-stricken bereaved the opportunity to speak with their loved ones—for a price. Houdini knew about behavioral science, too. The King of Cards discovered (or rediscovered) and used to great effect a substantial number of the techniques grubby little “nudgers” like David Halpern learn in graduate school and use to manipulate people today.

As someone whose professional interests include the use of neuroscience to deceive and manipulate, what makes my blood boil isn’t anything Halpern does to me, personally. I’m acutely aware of the nuances of psychological warfare, and I don’t put myself in positions where the Halperns of the world have power over me (and I’m well capable of hitting back when required). But I recognize I’m in the minority. Most people are like the woman who writes Bridget Phetasy in the second article.

Thanks for creating such a generous, kind place to voice my sadness. Right now I’m sitting in my art studio hyperventilating and crying about the state of the world. I really don’t feel like I have too many people to talk to and my husband and I don’t agree about politics. It’s creating a lot of tension. My mom is at a care facility with dementia and the isolation for her, and us from her is extremely difficult.

I was just at my Zoom church service and had to turn off my video and my microphone and just wept and cried because I feel like I don’t even connect with my church anymore.  My church is primarily left leaning. And I heard statements about Republicans today that made me cringe. Plus I feel that the emotional landscape of my church has become highly manipulative.  It’s funny because I am primarily a minority (Asian) Most of my church is white. And I feel like my voice is not going to be heard.

To be frank, I’m in the creative field and never say much about politics in my professional connections, and I’ve been conservative most of my life, I did give the Democrats/third-party consideration about a decade ago, at some point I voted for Ralph Nader.

Now I just feel stupid and that everything I think is discounted, that  whatever I say will be seen as some sort of bigotry. I guess I just think about issues from several angles and all the angles feel like they’re sharp points aimed at me and others right now. When I speak I feel like I’m coming from a place of extreme sadness and defensiveness and I don’t like that about myself.

In my experience, when you hit most people with some kind of behavioral science trick, it works exactly as advertised. They change their behavior. But they don’t know why they’re acting in a way that contradicts what their biology wants them to do, and it upsets them in a way that they don’t understand. They feel stupid and sad and internally conflicted, and it breaks my fucking heart.

I learned how esoterica like rapid-induction hypnosis and subliminal influence techniques worked competently enough to use them on strangers in the subway when I felt like it over a period of three decades spent on various brain-melting drugs, more or less as a hobby. It feels roughly equivalent to having learned how to reliably solve all of those bar puzzles made of horseshoes and steel rings connected with short lengths of chain with my eyes closed, while being shelled by an artillery battalion for thirty years. Now that I’m off the drugs myself, I unpack and reorder people’s brains more or less instinctively.

I want to be crystal clear about the results of getting into that weird little field of interest: I live a state of perpetual moral dilemma every time I go out in public (one that people like Halpern seem to have no awareness even exists) because I find it something of a challenge not to do magic tricks with people’s brains when I’m bored in line at the DMV. What brings me down to earth is letters like the one Phetasy published. The methods I use to bring myself up short when I find myself considering a career as a supervillain all involve the recognition that most people do not know how to do this stuff themselves and the awareness that running a professional-grade game on an unsuspecting person will put a look on their face like they’ve been shot in the solar plexus with a beanbag gun. Like the bottom dropped out of their world.

I’ve seen that look before. I don't want to see it again.

I'd like to clarify something else, too: I know it’s not that everyone else is stupid and I’m smart

¹

. It’s that normal people take at most a couple of survey courses in psychology while in college, whereas I did a long, deep dive into the weaponizable aspects of the field, in part because I thought it was cool and in part because both drug dependency and drug withdrawal lead to periods of unemployment. There are days where it's all you can do to read a few chapters of your favorite book about famous con men and practice card tricks in the mirror

²

.

As an empathetic human being who would never accept a job which entailed making people act against their nature but who knows how, it enrages me that people like this ghoul of a man Halpern are making people like the woman who wrote to Phetasy upset in a way she does not even know how to articulate. Professional “nudgers” (what a cute little euphemism for “university-trained specialists in emotional and psychological manipulation whose job it is to teach military torturers how to break people” that is) are not careful with people. They do not allow themselves to understand the second-and-third-order consequences of their actions

³

. In fact, they’re totally detached from those consequences—they think of their job as a bunch of nifty little techniques they learned to do in school that just tidy up all those undesirable impulses to think for oneself.

And it is those techniques that are reordering society. Dark patterns in web UX design, nudging and choice architecture, and outright propaganda are fucking everywhere. They’re so omnipresent in society that we’ve forgotten what it’s like not to be surrounded by them.

And much like psychotropic medication, they don’t work quite as advertised. Because while they change what you do, they don’t change how you feel. The range and quantity of behavioral science techniques that can be used before the human animal recognizes that it’s being manipulated is limited. That recognition leads to stress on a level that is essentially atmospheric—you inhale it with your tidal breath.

So I write this blog; this section in particular. I try to live in the headspace Houdini inhabited, and like Handcuff Harry, I don’t like smug, condescending bastards who use psychological trickery to prey on others. What I’m trying to teach in this section of The Wonderland Rules is the underlying skill set that leads to noticing manipulation techniques and ultimately the ability to resist them. I’m also trying to explain the ways of thinking I learned in Bohemias; those antique, “trad” ways of living that attempt to recreate they way how people used to behave before the electronic iron curtain of the Panopticon came down on the world.

That’s what Dance Class is about. It’s about other stuff, too, but it’s about that.

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1. That’s the trap three card monte tossers and boiler room scam artists alike fall into that allows them to justify treating people like things, and I don't aspire to psychopathy.

2. My dirty little secret is that I was a total fucking weirdo as a youth, and I never really stopped being weird. But I didn’t want to be

Delicious Tacos

, so I learned to make weird work for me.

3. I know this to be true—that they don’t allow themselves to know—because Halpern looks like he gets a restful eight hours of sleep every night. If he allowed himself to empathize with people like the woman who wrote that heartbreaking letter, knowing what he does about how her state of distress was achieved, he’d look like Thomas Jane in the last two minutes of The Mist every hour of every day until he put a gun in his mouth.