The trick is the way they get the participant to push a stranger off the roof of a building to save themselves. Or they stand in front of a bullet to protect somebody they don’t even know. The bits before, where they’re seemingly being implanted with information or they’re passing things on the street that they don’t see but apparently informs a decision they will make later on, that’s all horse shit.

And you don’t want to know that.

You could watch a video of a patient on a psychiatrist’s couch. The shrink is talking in a slow monotone. And he’s dropping in phrases like nothing important and choose not to fear. It could highlight words like choice, jump and rope. But just because you see it, does not make it true. This would never happen.

Of course, you have seen a hundred mind readers tell you that mind reading is not real, that it cannot be done, then they go on to seemingly read people’s minds.

You say you want the truth, but the truth is often boring. The truth is usually painful.

If you were married to your wife for thirty years and she told you the truth about a dalliance that occurred ten years into your marriage that she immediately regretted and it never happened again and she made sure that she loved you even more for the next two decades, how does that truth make anything better? You don’t want that.

You don’t want to know why a couple with two innocent boys jump off a bridge together. You don’t want to know why a successful and compassionate doctor throws everything away. Because what would that say about you? What would it say about the state of this world?

And you think you want justice. Of course. You want what is right. You want 255 people to be accounted for. You want their families to have closure, to understand that their brothers and mothers were victims. That they were murdered. They did not kill themselves.

They would never do that.

You were right.

Take Bundy. You think people wanted him in a cell each day, talking himself up, getting books written about him and for him? No. They wanted to be outside, in a mob, selling T-shirts and trinkets and chanting at the exact time they knew the executioner was going to plunge a lever or press a button that would send electricity coursing through another human’s body until it ceased to work.

They cheered.

They rejoiced in the death of another person.

The murders were solved and the culprit was caught. But that wasn’t what they wanted. Knowing how it was done, knowing the truth, it was never enough.

You want to know how to get people to pack it all in and kill themselves, become another member of The People of Choice? You think that will settle the curiosity?

Try this.