Today, I am going to teach you all how to be magic. That is, how to seem like a wizard to those around you, with otherworldly abilities beyond the comprehension of the merely mortal.

But this has nothing to do with marked cards, sleight of hand, and doing uncomfortable things to doves in hats. Nor, as you might have guessed due to my strict materialism, does it involve eldritch incantations, magical formulae, bizarre alchemies, or dead people talking to dipshits on television.

Indeed, all that is needed for this technique is a certain amount of native wit (sorry, this isn’t Magic for Dummies) and a deep understanding of the subtler implications of Clarke’s Law.

Clarke’s Law, that is to say Arthur C. Clarke’s Law, is this :

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Seems obvious enough, once stated. It takes little imagination to imagine that our level of technology would seem like astounding wizardry to someone from the Middle Ages, just like the technology of some vastly advanced alien race might well seem like something out of Harry Potter to us.

But the law is actually far deeper than that. It need not be limited to being measured solely from the point of view of entire civilizations and from a fixed point in time, generally the present.

It is a fully relative measure, and works just as well between individuals as it does between civilizations. It is, in fact, an ample definition of the entire subjective experience of “magic” in human beings.

In fact, the law might be better restated as this :

All knowledge and technology is magic to those who do not understand it.

From this we can see that everyone has it within them to be magical to somebody.

Take our pets. To them, all humans above the age of three years old are wizards. They have no idea how we do most of what we do, or what any of it all means.

They don’t know how we produce food for them. They don’t understand what we are doing when we watch TV or vacuum the rug. And they certainly have no idea why we take them to the vet.

To them, it must seem like pure sadism.

So to our animals, we are all magical. Their world is one in which they are cared for by slow-moving giant wizards who do many things beyond their comprehension and who for some reason have decided that they want a pet around.

Taken from that point of view, it’s a wonder they ever trust us at all.

From our pets we go to our children. To children, all adults are wizards. Adults understand and know about things that the child is not merely ignorant of, but cannot understand how it is even knowable.

This is a vital clue as to the true nature of seeming magical. It is not enough to have knowledge others don’t. That might make you look smart, but it won’t make you seem magical. They understand fully well how you might know what you know.

From children, we then move on to adults, which you might think is where this particular bus would stop. After all, as adults we all understand how the world works, more or less, and within modern society we are all at roughly the same technology level, so there can be no wizards. Right?

Wrong. First, there is specialization. We passed the point where one person could know everything shortly after Gutenberg, and so nearly everyone has areas of specialized knowledge and understanding that can make them seem at least a little magical under the right circumstances.

This is especially true in any of the applied knowledge trades. Whether your specialty is medicine, carpentry, or air conditioning repair, there are times when you can be the wizard who is the only one who can fix the problems of people who would be helpless without you.

But there is another, more sensitive realm in which Clarke’s Law separates individuals into wizards and muggles, and that’s intelligence.

Just as sentience is a qualitative as well as quantitative degree above mere consciousness, there is a level of intelligence above which, to people of average intelligence, one appears to be able to do things they cannot imagine how anyone can do it.

This leads to those gifted with a high degree of intelligence to be viewed with both awe and suspicion by those of normal intelligence. It is as though we are aliens walking amongst them, which is why we often feel like one.

I have actually had someone say to me, “You can’t know that. Nobody is that smart.”

What can you say to that except “Nobody but me, I guess… ”

So as you can see, all you need in order to seem like a magician is to be a certain degree smarter than those around you. Then, as a child seems magical to a pet and an adult seems magical to a child, you will seem at least somewhat magical to the people around you.

One last observation on magic. Because no one of us can possibly understand how absolutely everything works, the modern human lives in a semi-magical world. We are constantly interacting with technologies whose functions we simply accept without wanting or needing to know how they really work.

It is only semi-magical, because we all understand that the knowledge of how these things work is out there if we cared to learn it and that there are competent wizards who understand it all so we don’t have to.

But it’s still magical because, in a very real sense, it operates on faith, subjectively speaking. You turn the key in the ignition of your car and have faith that it will start up, and when it doesn’t, you have to take it to a wizard who is versed in the magic of auto repair to fix it.

So if faith can be defined as “belief in things unseen and unknown”, then most of us operate on faith when we trust any technology at all that we could not fix ourselves if it broke down.

We live in an era of magic and wonder, and the fact that these wonders are normal and commonplace does not make them any less magical to most of us.

We have just forgotten how to see it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.