So The Wife has a friend at work who decided to spend her tax return money on seeing a medium to check up on her dead grandmother. Mrs. Likko has roughly as much intellectual contempt for the idea of séances as I do, and for all the same reasons, but she feels constrained by a desire to be a supportive friend to this woman, who after all is still mourning a lost loved one. So Mrs. Likko eschews overtly criticizing her friend’s decision to light her money on fire.
How much money? The group session with the medium is $150 a head, with ten attendees and strict rules about attendance and electronic recordation (which was not flat prohibited, to my surprise, but restricted only to one’s own readings). What was described was quite obviously a cold reading, followed by an invitation to each attendee to schedule private sessions which presumably cost more. The friend fell for it hook, line, and sinker, although grandma apparently didn’t actually show up.
Worse, the medium “friended” each of the attendees on Facebook, and they all friended her back, so now the medium has access to all sorts of personal information about them and no doubt will dress up the results of simple- to semi-advanced Facebook stalking as “communion with the departed,” telling the medium things that the subject had never told anyone else (other than that time she told the entire Internet about it just last week).
On the one hand, if people choose to spend their money on this stuff, they’re adults and should be free to do so even if I or my wife are convinced it’s a complete waste of time, money, and emotion.
But on the other hand, the law prosecutes vendors who purport to sell goods and services of a particular quality when in fact they are really selling crap. There’s a reason fraud is illegal.
For the time being, Mrs. Likko is offering only the most gentle of pushes away from this behavior, which the friend is probably too emotionally overwrought to understand or even hear right now. I can’t figure out if that’s the optimal course of action or not. I do know that you can’t save people from themselves, but it’s very dissatisfying to watch them insist on pursuing a course of action like this. Even secondhand.
People do all sorts of irrational nonsense for purely emotional comfort. Going to a medium is awfully innocuous compared to, say, invading Iraq.
I dropped a thousand bucks (might end up being a little more) on my dog yesterday. An old dog.
In what turned out to be a rather futile attempt to help her. Admittedly, I was…attached enough to reality…to turn down taking her to an animal hospital, since out of the laundry list of things that could cause her to run a fever that high with blood work that looked that bad — well, it boiled down to one thing which could be cured and a LOT of things that couldn’t.
So between the basic diagnostics, and leaving her overnight in the hopes it was simply a sudden and massive infection, well — I spent an awful lot. In vain, as it turned out. She died this morning (turns out it was, in fact, one of the nastier things. No idea what, but it involved blood in her lungs and intestines). I had hoped, because it came on so fast (she went from active and happy to listless and 106 fever in less than twelve hours) that it was an infection.
Turns out it was just a tipping point of some sort.
People will pay a lot for hope. And it helps knowing that I tried, even if I tried to stay realistic about it. It helps thinking at least trying make it..more comfortable. The vet said it did, but my dog had died and I suspect the vet would lie in a situation that like that.
I personally view mediums and psychics (well, except for Shawn Spencer from Pysch) with deep disdain — they use people’s hope and grief as weapons, as a tool to scam money.
But I can’t help but feel that for some people…they want to be fooled. And by paying money for that hope, false as it is, they feel better.
Still doesn’t make me dislike those scam artists any less.
Not all psychics use hope and grief as weapons.
Some just use raw sex appeal. Who wouldn’t pay a pretty penny to be shamelessly flirted with?
I’m so sorry about your dog. My dog was very very ill and we spent an astonishing amount of money to get her better. We were grief stricken at the thought of losing her. Our pets are our good companions and sources of love.
I don’t fault you the money to preserve that relationship if there was even a chance at keeping the dog alive. Nor do I fault you for realizing hope was gone and letting go. It’s not like you went to the doggy medium.
She had a good run. Adopted her…10 or 11 years ago, she was at least two then. She was active and happy up until twenty four hours or so before she suddenly got sick. (Looks like cancer, actually. Finally hit a state where it made her super anemic, which led to internal bleeding, fever, etc).
She was barking, begging for treats, rearranging the rugs to suit herself and generally healthy and happy up to the end. I could ask for a few more years, sure. But it could have been worse. 🙁
I didn’t have to make the call to have her put to sleep, she didn’t spend months declining….
But this is how you pay for pets, in the end. My poor beagle keeps looking around, trying to figure out where his partner in crime went.
My sympathies. Russ Saunders asked what makes us tear up; here’s my answer.
My sympathies on your loss as well.
See… this is where I think fraud and other such laws don’t have enough teeth.
If tiny print at the bottom of her website says, “For entertainment purposes only,” but throughout the reading she insists, “I AM REALLY SPEAKING TO YOUR DEAD RELATIVES BEYOND THE GRAVE,” she is at best being deliberately ambiguous. Tiny print shouldn’t outweigh loud vocalization or giant print.
You are not a psychic, lady. Psychics do not exist.
I feel like the issue here is not really fraud but the First Amendment in both the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses.
If you say psychics are subject to fraud, can you say the same thing about any claim which can’t be proven. You can not prove or disprove the existence of any deity. I am largely secular but the idea of suing a religion for fraud for their beliefs/preachings leaves me queasy. I am sure some Dawkin’s fans would root for it.
Also, people do weird things for comfort when they are under stress or emotional pain. If this gives her psychological aid and helping to move on, is it still unethical/immoral?
I think the fraud claim would have to be brought by the customer herself. If she gladly gave up her money regardless of what was real or not, there is no issue.
You do bring up a good point regarding provability and faith. Ironically, the acknowledgement that the performance is for entertainment only, which is what ultimately protects the medium from fraud, would be used against her to prove that she knew she was lying. But, yea, I’m not sure I have a response/solution to your challenge.
Your last question is one I struggle with. The answer is not at all obvious (to me at least) for reasons for you and Kazzy articulate.
But a church, this athesist totally gets. Weekly meditations on morality. Charitable and community activism. Fellowship and social opportunities. I can see spending good money on such things even if you think all the supernatural stuff is so much hokum.
Also, people do weird things for comfort when they are under stress or emotional pain. If this gives her psychological aid and helping to move on, is it still unethical/immoral?
Is it ethical for a physician to prescribe a placebo to a patient without informing the patient that it is, in fact, a placebo?
How about a legitimate drug where the published efficacy stats are such that if the patient improves, it’s a toss-up as to whether it’s due to the bio-chemical action of the drug or to the placebo effect?
The analogy to the placebo is an interesting one. I don’t know what the professional ethics dictate, but I feel like I’ve heard that this would violate them. Perhaps Russell could weigh in.
I think it matters whether the individual procuring the services believes them to be legitimate or not AND whether the “professional” knows them to be bunk. If the former believe but the professional knows otherwise, deception is at hand, which seems unequivocally unethical to me.
Then again… do mediums have professional ethics?
“The Ethics of a Charlatan” sounds like a good title for a blog post. The most charitable reading I can give to the medium himself is that he thinks he is selling emotional comfort, that his flim-flam act helps people through their grief. But the nature of what he does is such that he must know it is a lie.
Walking down the streets of Manhattan, I strolled passed a building with this sign:
“Please ring bell for psychic.”
If you need a door bell to know someone is there to see you, guess what? You’re not a psychic.
I nominate Rose, when she returns, to write that post.
50% of doctors prescribe placebos.
“The Ethics of a Charlatan” sounds like a good title for a novel.
“Tiny print shouldn’t outweigh loud vocalization or giant print.”
This is how we get lawsuits against Subway over their Foot Long Subs not actually being twelve inches long.
If their subs are *consistently* less than a foot, that’s clearly false advertising.
I expect some variation, so if I average the lengths of say 100 sandwiches, they should come out to around 12 inches.
Or is it your position that a “Footlong Sub” can be any length Subway wishes (and clearly we can assume they will consistently be giving us the most value they possibly can for the money?;-)
Or “vitaminwater” not having all that many actual vitamins?
don’t go there…:-)
But “footlong” seems to me to have a standard reasonably-measurable, commonly-agreed-upon meaning that “vitaminwater” did not (as I argued then, if I have a vitamin, and water, and I combine them, “vitaminwater” seems like a reasonable description of the result.)
Pshchics. Horoscopes. Palm readings. Fortune cookies. Stock-market analysis using animal spirits.
The never-ending search for the Oracle; the reading of omens, the search for portents.
I don’t put much stock in such things except:
1) entertainment value. Being entertained is good. We all enjoy it.
2) shifting view point. And this is where they actually might be of benefit; for our search for omens and portents often helps us consider things from a slightly different angle, and this is nearly always worth while. A highly qualified worth while, but still of benefit if it helps break the rigidity of our own thinking.
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors-
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road,
Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension.
People cling to their illusions, preferentially to truth. Grief is mostly a process of rootling through the ashes, finding the little things which survived the fire, putting them in our pockets, grieving not for the dead or what has been lost — but for ourselves.
And there will always be those who prey on such people, dispensing false hope, planting the dead seed in hopes it may grow again on the Last Day. From the same poem:
And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;