The Ambitious Card
The Travis Scott Satanic Ritual
Have you ever been to a magic show? I have!
I was in a David Copperfield performance. He did, in fact, appear a couple of feet in front of me seconds after vanishing from the stage. I even got a souvenir t-shirt from the staff. But I didn’t care about that.
What I enjoyed the most was the opening act. An amateur magician began “warming up” the crowd. He did the simplest, yet most famous card trick: The Ambitious Card.1
‘Where’s the King of Spades? That’s right, he’s on top again!’.
The premise of this close-up magic is straightforward. A random, often signed, card is placed in the middle of the deck… and magically jumps at the top every time.
What made this particular performance so intriguing was how he was guiding us through all of the steps, saying out loud what he was doing with his hands.
‘I’m palming three cards from the top… and switching the second with the third…’
Still, none of us could make sense of what was really going on. It was in front of us, it was happening right there and then, and yet we couldn’t see it. We couldn’t see it!
It’s so weird to look at something and not see it. But that’s the point of all magic — whether it’s tricks, show magic or more powerful forms of the art.
Because the performance IS the trick…
One Ahead
Darren Brown is another famous magician. His schtick is to “manipulate the individual and imprint thought patterns in their heads”.
He claims to be using NLP, hypnosis, and psychological trigger points.
And I have to let you know that… he’s full of shit. OK, well, 80% full of shit. I’ll tell you why.
Like the Ambitious Card trick, he outlines exactly what he’s doing. He explains how he’s able to easily hypnotize people, implanting anchors and doing other neurolinguistic manipulations.
What he doesn’t tell you is what I did just now; the performance IS the trick. And Darren Brown, like most magicians, never stops performing.
His explanations about his stunts are just that; explanations. Faulty ones, for that matter. They simply create a narrative, a made-up narrative, as a how-to that traps and tricks your judgement.
He admits, over and over again that he doesn’t possess supernatural or psychic powers. It’s all a matter of cold-reading, subliminal messages, and suggestions.
That’s also false. And because you’ve let your guard down, you have to accept his revelation. Your perception is limited in the context he enforced when he was “honest” with you. It’s a Magician’s Choice — he eliminates one choice so you can more easily pick the one he wants.
In reality, it’s all a misdirection stacked on top of and hiding the real mechanical manipulation behind his tricks.
In this infamous video, you’ll see the One Ahead principle of mentalism 2. If you dig deep enough, you’ll quickly realize that he’s employing similar techniques to most of his performances. Palm, Simulation, Steal, Ditch, Misdirection, Load, Switch, Outs, Magician’s Choice, Billet Reading, Pickpocketing, Good Ole Sleight of Hand.
I said that he’s only 80% full of BS. The remaining 20% are the real psychological tricks he’s using on you while you’re watching his performance.
My techniques are rooted in conjuring magic and hypnosis. All else is most likely misdirection and should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. I have never claimed to use NLP to achieve my ‘tricks’. On the contrary, I have written very critically about it in Tricks of the Mind. I reserve the same skepticism for subliminal messaging, as well as a lot of body-language reading and the like.’
This is a direct quote from Darren’s own blog post To Claim or Not to Claim.
He’s a performer. A magician. He admits it himself. 3
(Continue. I promise I’ll get to the point)
Step Right Up and See the Real Magic
The law of parsimony or Occam’s Razor is perhaps one of the most misused terms on the internet. Which is an impressive accomplishment.
The colloquial meaning is “The simplest explanation is usually the best one”.
The implications of this little statement are gigantic. It basically gives way to the notion that subtext, what’s under the veil, is merely an afterthought, and what’s in front of you must be reality.
But if you’ve read the above, you already know where I’m going with this. Tricks like the Ambitious Card and people like Darren Brown are perfect examples of looking but not seeing.
And this flaw in human perception is leveraged every time you watch an ad, read a marketing email or listen to a political speech. You aren’t always in command of your mind.
The following paragraph is the juice of this post, so make sure to read it a couple of times:
Language, images, performances can convey emotions that are opposite to the mundane logic they attempt (pretend) to communicate. That way, you can reasonably accept statements, ideas, and values you don’t actually agree with, simply because you were misdirected. That’s magic, the alchemical transformation of your emotions into logical structures, psychological intelligences, and egregores operating outside your control… with your permission.
“Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal. “
- Robert Heinlein
Why am I telling you all of this?
Getting Fooled
German idealism made the case that concepts like time and space are tools we use to perceive physical reality using our mind, and they’re innate to humans. What we look at isn’t what’s there.4
Take drawing for example. If you attempt to recreate what’s in front of you, unless you’ve done the necessary training, your visuospatial ability will fail you. Instead of breaking down reality in geometrical shapes, you’ll attempt to draw the lines as they are, which is impossible because they aren’t there.5
Your brain is constantly shaping reality, filling in spots, curving shapes, and bending lines. Creating reality through stories and narratives.
Dance with the Devil
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
Charles Baudelaire tapped into something very real. Most of the human foolishness comes from not seeing what’s in front of us for what it is. Whether it’s because of some bias or some innate inability to process the information in the correct way.
In the case of the Devil, the Satan, that which represents deceit and evil, I’d alter the quote just a tad:
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he's monstrous and ugly.
In reality, he’s slick and handsome, with a quick silvertongue.
Watching the latest Travis Scott shenanigans got me thinking of how we love a good story. A good performance. The kind of show that dramatizes evil in a Hollywood fashion.
It’s much easier and comforting to believe that the Devil has a hellish figure, horns, and sharp teeth. We rest in the illusion that we’ll be able to recognize the dangerous, demonic forces of our world.
We WANT to believe that Travis Scott is the Anti-Christ. And they’re giving us what we want. We just have to look. Look so we don’t see the suits, the corrupt governments, the billionaires playing games with the fate of the world. You know, the kind of people that do in fact influence your life.
It’s easier to pretend that the above video narrative is the monocausal explanation of evil. Because you can shut down your laptop and never hear a word about Travis Scott again. It’s easy.
But you can’t hide from real life, can you?
Human Nature is the Girardian Scapegoat
At the same time, we won’t find these vile, over-the-top traits in our character.
We look in the mirror and we see a perfectly normal person, albeit with some minor flaws… but they definitely cannot be compared to the monstrous evil lurking in the darkness! So, we must be good people.
We’ve set the bar so high for what we consider “not good”, that most brands of evil are now considered normality.
Everything that’s wrong with our system, the world, can be inserted into the abstract idea of human nature. We can perfectly rationalize our actions within this framework that often describes our relationship within and with the market, and not human nature, ie the axiomatic, innate characteristics of humans.
We’ve stacked the deck to hide our ugliness at the bottom. We rarely encounter it unless someone dresses it up in weird clothes and points at it.
A skillful magician to call upon the Ambitious Card. Voila! It’s at the top again.
But that’s a performance you don’t want to attend.
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Substack Upkeep
You can skip this part. But if you are here, let me know if the footnotes are too much. I don’t want to saturate these posts with links so some stuff that aren’t relevant I put at the bottom:
Daryl’s Ambitious Card is the best one I’ve seen.
There’s a third possibility, an Easter Egg if you like. Brown has in fact studied NLP. and hypnosis. Extensively. How many double layers this misdirection could possibly have?
I’m probably oversimplifying this so, for the sake of covering my ass, read this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/