Perhaps first mischievously whispered in your ear by a pedantic boy fresh out of Sunday school, the omnipotence paradox is the old canard that has perplexed many a devout monotheist: Can God create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it? The question can drive a pious teenager to neurotic madness. Both answers, yes and no, undermine the absolute omnipotence of the deity. God either, yes, can create a rock he cannot lift, or no, cannot create a rock he can lift. Either way, God has a weakness. Omnipotent beings cannot have weaknesses!
Since the Middle Ages, theologians and philosophers have toiled with the omnipotence paradox. Most refutations chalk the skull teaser up to some sort of semantic sophistry—the question makes grammatical sense but the concept is illogical. It’s like asking, Can God create a square triangle? Sure? But once God did, it would probably no longer fit our definitions of square and triangle. All of these words—square, circle, rock, omnipotence—are merely human concepts for describing the universe, not things in themselves. Here is a case where religion and science actually reach an accord: Reality is more complex than human language reflects.
If only you could go back and tell that bratty kid at Sunday school his impish riddle was a semantic trap.
SEE ALSO: NOBLE LIE; NOT EVEN WRONG; PASCAL’S WAGER; SHIP OF THESEUS; SOPHISTS
IRRESISTIBLE FORCE PARADOX |
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? |
LIAR’S PARADOX |
Everything I say is false! |
SOCRATIC PARADOX |
I know that I know nothing! |
ANGEL DENSITY PROBLEM |
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? |
HOMER SIMPSON’S BURRITO PARADOX |
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it? |
It is a startling paradox—one might almost say a paranormal occurrence—how much magicians detest charlatans and quacks. HARRY HOUDINI occupied his final years denouncing spiritualists. Penn & Teller had an eight-season TV series devoted to refuting pseudoscience. The MythBusters duo were renowned special effects illusionists before becoming debunkers. Dorothy Dietrich, sometimes called the First Lady of Magic, has offered rewards to dubious psychics who can contact the dead. And the biggest anti-shyster of them all, The Amazing Randi, fought relentlessly against psychics, faith healers, and new age hucksters of all varieties. He even promised one million dollars to anyone who could prove their psychic abilities. No one ever won the money, but many tried.
James Randi was already pretty amazing before becoming America’s greatest debunker. A master escapologist and storyteller, Randi was a regular on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where in one live appearance he remained submerged in a swimming pool for 104 minutes, breaking Houdini’s record of 93 minutes. Alice Cooper hired him to play the role of executioner on his Billion Dollar Babies tour, and he even played himself on an episode of Happy Days (titled “The Magic Show”). For his investigations into spoon-bending hack Uri Geller, he was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant.
Despite his acclaim as an illusionist (he preferred the epithet conjuror), Randi despised those who implied something psychic or paranormal at work with magic. “It’s okay to fool people,” he once said. “As long as you’re doing that to teach them a lesson.”107 When he launched the Paranormal Challenge in 1964, a $1,000 reward was offered to any parapsychologist who could perform a supernatural act under scientific testing scenarios. The amount climbed through the years, and hit $1 million in 1996. More than a thousand people applied, but of course no one was ever able to speak to their dead relatives, read anyone’s mind, remotely view objects, or locate buried groundwater through dowsing.
“Professional Debunker” may not sound like an illustrious gig, but it was noble work through the 1970s, a decade rife with faith healers, ufologists, cryptozoologists, and mystical mountebanks of all stripes. Randi fought the bad magic with good magic, using the tools of deception to expose deception. “Magicians are the most honest people in the world,” he was fond of saying. “They tell ya they’re going to fool ya, and they do.”
SEE ALSO: BARNUM EFFECT; HOUDINI, HARRY; HUMBUGGERY; HYPNOSIS; MECHANICAL TURK
Operation Mindfuck was a ritual of Discordianism, a satiric religion of the ‘60s and ‘70s devoted to anarchic pranks and absurdist conspiracy theories. In a memo sent to the members of the faux-cult, the writer Robert Anton Wilson explained that Operation Mindfuck intended to “attribute all national calamities, assassinations, or conspiracies” to the Illuminati and their ilk. The theory was that Mind-fuck would create “so many alternative paranoias” that the public, shuddering at the utter incoherence of the nutjobs, would abandon any belief in irrational plots. It didn’t exactly work out that way.
The Mindfucking commenced with jamming the press with stories, letters, and ads with conspiracies galore. “We accused everybody of being in the Illuminati,” Wilson later recalled. “Nixon, Johnson, William Buckley Jr., ourselves, Martian invaders, all the conspiracy buffs, everybody.” Mindfuckers swamped the underground press of the left and right but also found their way into mainstream magazines, like TeenSet (sort of the Sassy of the ‘60s), where Jane Fonda, Ringo Starr, Bob Hope, and a cabal of notables were outed as part of “the most sinister, evil, subversive conspiracy in the world.” At Playboy, where Wilson was an editor, a letter to the Advisor column (appearing after a question about blue balls) drew connections between international banking, James Bond’s Spectre cabal, and JFK’s assassination.
Relishing the impish chaos of Operation Mindfuck, Wilson began blurring the line between cranky satire and sincere paranoia. “We did not regard this as a hoax or prank in the ordinary sense,” he later wrote. “We still considered it guerrilla ontology.” Whatever guerrilla ontology is, he decided to turn his meta-conspiracy racket into a novel, “delicately balancing between ‘proving’ the case for multiple conspiracies and undermining the ‘proof.’” Thus was born the science fiction opus The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), a druggy, paranoid trek through conspiracies that has a mindfuckingly large cultish following to this day.
SEE ALSO: CHURCH OF SUBGENIUS; SLENDERMAN
All members of the Order of the Occult Hand belong to an unlikely profession: journalism.
The secret society began by accident, in 1965, when Joseph Flanders, a reporter at a now-defunct newspaper, the Charlotte News, used this majestic sentence in a fairly routine story:
It was as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard.108
Over drinks, his colleagues gushed admiration at the stately prose. After a few more quaffs, as bibulous journalists do, the group decided to form a secret society to honor the sly diction. Members of the shadowy order vowed to insert the phrase “as if an occult hand” into print as often as possible. They apparently didn’t drink enough to forget their pact, because as the cabal members took jobs at other newspapers, their clandestine diaspora spread around the country. That telltale phrase, “as if an occult hand,” began to appear in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere.
Perhaps influenced by this journalistic plot, pop social science writer Malcolm Gladwell devised a similar scheme in the late ‘80s. While a reporter at the Washington Post, he and a colleague held a contest to see how many times they could get the phrase “raises new and troubling questions” into the newspaper. After several successes, they updated the challenge to another shopworn phrase: “perverse and often baffling.”109
SEE ALSO: INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM; MECHANICAL TURK; NAKED CAME THE STRANGER
Derived from sexual arousal, these spasms of carnal exuberance are rumored to be, on occasion, faked. One survey estimated that 48 percent of women and 11 percent of men have, shockingly, misinformed their partner by simulating a moment of ecstatic glee.110
SEE ALSO: DONKEY PUNCH; PORNOGRAPHY; REALDOLL
As deployed by media pundits, the Overton Window refers to the proposed range of ideas that the public will accept as reasonable topics of government policy. The handy term was posthumously named after Joseph P. Overton, a think tank wonk who studied how ideas move from fringe to mainstream.
In recent years, previously verboten policy ideas from both the left and right have moved “into the window,” including universal basic income, Brexit, a ban on Muslims in the United States, and universal health care. For the past century or so, the so-called mainstream media has played a critical role in regulating what enters and leaves public discourse, but because of the advance of social media, the Overton Window is now in constant flux. Plenty of issues once considered outside the window—from decriminalized marijuana to building a border wall between the United States and Mexico—have moved inside the political mainstream.
Though seemingly a neutral political concept, the term is most often invoked by the alt-right, who use it to describe the furtive nudge of radical nationalism into the mainstream. The concept likely gained traction within that cohort after Glenn Beck’s 2010 novel, The Overtown Window, which involved a populist overthrow of the government. In the foreword, Beck refers to his potboiler as a faction, or a fiction based upon facts. Factions now seem firmly affixed within the jambs of the Overton Window.
SEE ALSO: CONFIRMATION BIAS; FILTER BUBBLE; WOOZLE EFFECT
107 The quote is from An Honest Liar, a stupendous 2014 documentary on Randi.
108 It seems improbable that this is not a veiled reference to the Mechanical Turk, a device in which an occult hand reaches down and moves pawns across a giant chessboard.
109 Gladwell’s yarn was first told on a Moth performance and then rebroadcast on a February 2008 episode of This American Life. When asked later by Slate about the veracity of the story, Gladwell’s response, well, raised new and troubling questions. “No one fact checks Moth stories, or expects them to stand up to skeptical scrutiny,” he said. And while based on real events, his story “is not supposed to be ‘true,’ in the sense that a story in the New York Times is supposed to be ‘true.’ “
110 The stat comes from 2004’s “The American Sex Survey,” in which ABC News randomly called 1,501 Americans, which must have been quite the call to get at dinner.