In every side-show tent most of the audience are taken in by the illusionist: either marvelling at the magic, or strenuously looking for “how it’s done”. The elephant disappears; the rabbit comes out of the hat. How extraordinary, wonderful, impossible. And it’s precisely because it is so obviously impossible that we look so hard for the trick, we know that what we see can’t really be happening. If the illusionist is good you won’t even be looking near the right place to see the sleight of hand – it’s already happened.
When you come into the world, you find yourself in one or another side-show tent, depending on geography, time, surroundings, parents. The side-show is the world presented to you by society, by the media, politics, corporations, the powerful and so-on – wherever they got their own beliefs from. The illusions are not so obvious because they are familiar, they are what you are expecting to see. If an elephant can be made to disappear, how much easier to win an argument, to convince people of how it is and what they should do. We are fooled into believing that life is just about jobs, markets, rulers, priests, science, progress, ambition, success, being rich, famous, or rebelling against the injustice of those who are; that you should really be thinking about it as a ‘financial asset’, or a game of monopoly to be played and, above all, to be a winner.
If the illusion is one that you are susceptible to, or want to believe, you won’t even be looking for a trick: after all, no elephants are disappearing (actually, come to think of it they are!). The protagonists appear to be presenting the different, reasonable views, and arguing fiercely with each other about which are the right rules or what the rules should be, or what is right, and what is wrong. As we puzzle confusedly over those questions, we forget to ask ourselves why we are even playing the game, and are fooled by the superficial magic.
Yet even in the illusionist’s audience a few are not taken in, not asking where the trick is, and not interested in playing the game. They leave the tent and find a world of sun, sky and trees and what is real.
Adrian West