The Long Island Medium, Theresa Caputo, is coming to Saskatchewan, and while it would warm my heart to see her two appearances in the province greeted by nothing more than the ghosts she claims she can talk to, I know that won’t be the case. There will be full rooms attending to see if maybe, just maybe, a dead loved one has come to tell them a vague platitude.
What she does is something called cold reading, which is a trick to get people to fill in the blanks that she doesn’t know, and convince them that she knows the dead even though she really doesn’t. The method itself should make people question the validity of someone claiming to be a medium, as though there are ghosts that really want to get a message through to their loved ones but can only communicate it through vague riddles and mentioning that the letter T might be important to someone, somewhere. It is inherently ridiculous, and something that people should immediately notice is a scam, but they don’t, and thus mediums like this are able to make large stacks of money by assuming someone in the crowd knew someone who had a common name like Tom, Tim or Tammy.
I loathe mediums like this for a simple reason, they exploit the grieving. If you spend a hundred dollars a piece to see a woman asking if someone is associated to a letter of the alphabet, you’re going because you want to believe she actually talks to the dead. She doesn’t, she talks to you and draws out your history through vague feelings and pronouncements, but that doesn’t matter, if you’re spending the money, you believe, on some level, that it’s real.
There is nobody who has lost a loved one who doesn’t want one last conversation. The idea that the dead can talk to people means that the dead aren’t gone, that on some level those people we care about still exist. We miss the people we care about and want them to exist in some form, and we wish that they would be able to talk to us again and, when we inevitably go, we will be able to meet them in person.
Charlatans exploit this desire. They know what people want – the people they have lost in their lives back again – and use trickery to convince them they can speak with those loved ones again, and charge for the privilege. They know people are more than willing to fill in the blanks for them because they’re excited by the mere idea that their beloved parents, spouses or even children are still alive and trying to communicate with them in some way. One can question why the dead are so eager to talk but unwilling to say their full name, but people who want to believe don’t care about the minor details.
There is the inevitable argument that this is just light entertainment, but that’s not the case. Magicians are light entertainment, they are using various tricks for the pure purpose of delighting the crowd – there’s as much psychology going on in a magic act as there is in a medium act, but the magician on stage isn’t exploiting anyone’s grief. If you’re being tricked by a magician, their primary goal is to give you the joy of being tricked in a fun way, and the experience of puzzling out how they pulled it off, rather than pretending their act involves the ghost of your grandfather. A hypnotist is light entertainment, you can believe that people are under their spell or are just using it as an excuse to do something embarrassing with an out clause, but it’s generally in the service of fun above all. A medium doing a cold reading is not entertainment in any way, because their entire act is based upon exploiting people in pain.
I don’t blame people for wanting to believe, I know I would very much like to believe that the people who I care about and have lost are somehow still around in another form somewhere, and that’s fine. Of course, I would also like to believe those people are wise enough to avoid an irritating woman from Long Island who wants to pester people about being connected to common household objects. But the thing is that my wish for the continued existence of my loved ones is no excuse for believing something that is quite clearly a psychological trick to separate the grieving from their money. Grieving is difficult enough without people of ill repute trying to build a living off of the pain of others, not providing them with any help but just duping them into telling them what they want to hear.
There are plenty of things in this world that we want to believe, and many of them are things we know aren’t true. That doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to let people exploit these beliefs for the sake of building a fortune or creating a television show. I personally believe that if the dead are out there, floating around and able to talk to people of their choosing, they would have the good sense to recognize these so-called mediums for what they are and avoid them.
