What do you think of the UK hypnotist and "magician" Darren Brown and his shows featuring psychological suggestion and manipulation as magic?
I have watched some of his stage magic and I liked it, most of the time it involves a trick of perspective, such as reminding everyone they gave him a card with details of themselves on it and then he'll recall at random from about five hundred a single person and they will be amazed he was able to memorise them all, well, that's not magic, memorising a single card, misdirecting everyone to believe the opposite is a nice trick though.
However, he's convinced/hypnotised someone into performing a mocked up assassination of Stephen Fry, convinced another he had committed murder and caused him to experience the guilt and engage in a confession believing he would then be arrested for the crime, convinced to push someone in the belief he was pushing them off a building to his death, performed a trick in which he had someone phone a random restaurant employee and have them leave the restaurant with what they believed at the time was some random woman's baby in a pushchair, carried out pavlovian compliance experiments on air and challenged in his books, not just the existence of God (he's a prominent athiest) but also the existence of a/the self and a/the human nature.
I'm inclined to think its less and less entertainment and more and more a sort of cruelty for amusement that the guy engages in but he's paid handsomely for doing so.
I have watched some of his stage magic and I liked it, most of the time it involves a trick of perspective, such as reminding everyone they gave him a card with details of themselves on it and then he'll recall at random from about five hundred a single person and they will be amazed he was able to memorise them all, well, that's not magic, memorising a single card, misdirecting everyone to believe the opposite is a nice trick though.
However, he's convinced/hypnotised someone into performing a mocked up assassination of Stephen Fry, convinced another he had committed murder and caused him to experience the guilt and engage in a confession believing he would then be arrested for the crime, convinced to push someone in the belief he was pushing them off a building to his death, performed a trick in which he had someone phone a random restaurant employee and have them leave the restaurant with what they believed at the time was some random woman's baby in a pushchair, carried out pavlovian compliance experiments on air and challenged in his books, not just the existence of God (he's a prominent athiest) but also the existence of a/the self and a/the human nature.
I'm inclined to think its less and less entertainment and more and more a sort of cruelty for amusement that the guy engages in but he's paid handsomely for doing so.
