 What does a villain see in the mirror? When thinking about the nature of phony psychics, have I mentioned that redundant? I often can't quite help myself from speculating about their mindset. It's hard not to wonder about what's going on in the minds of fortune tellers, spoon vendors, talk to the dead mediums, or the endless glut of television psychic ambulance chasers who latch themselves on to any missing or dead body in desperate hopes of securing a few morbid moments of camera time. For those of us who believe that most if not all of these lowly character types are fakes and frauds, it's easy to imagine, if not insist, that such apparent moral outlaws can't possibly escape seeing themselves as villains and must recognize if not even embrace the role. But this is in fact unlikely, and the truth, like most human behavior, is more complicated. In order to think about this, we first need to distinguish between self-styled psychics who must by definition be deliberate self-aware frauds and those who might not always be so. If you're a spoon vendor, for example, you know you're doing sleight of hand. You have to manipulate the silverware and engage in other deliberate deceits from the magician's bag of tricks in order to pull off the illusion, and it's plainly impossible to deceive yourself into not knowing that you're doing such things. But while the majority of psychic types are probably engaging in some kind of deliberate deception, once you will eliminate the elements of physical manipulation or the obtaining of secret information by subterfuge for say use in a psychic reading, there remains a broad spectrum of behavior and thinking that makes it difficult to be certain about the inner workings of another person's mind, no matter what we may think of their behavior. While most storefront psychics are indeed ruthless con artists, ever at the ready to rob someone of their life savings in the guise of removing a curse or resolving a problem of the heart, there are also some psychics who genuinely believe they possess some kind of gift. And all psychic practitioners, even the most cynical of them, are helped along in this belief by the self-selecting group of believers who present them with a steady flow of positive and confirming feedback. Skeptics, after all, don't generally sign up to visit the neighborhood psychic on a steady basis, week in and week out, just to continually remind her that most of what she's done or said has been ineffectual and just plain wrong. When we catch a faith healer ripping the cash out of the mail and shredding the letters from supplicants without even troubling to read them, we may surmise a cynical and manipulative worldview. When that grief vampire, Sylvia Brown, insisted to Amanda Perry's mother that her daughter was dead, she let that woman go to her death with the tragic and hopeless certainty that her daughter was no longer alive, even though we now know that thankfully Amanda survived. Yet when called out in recent weeks for this horrendous and grotesque behavior, Brown could muster neither empathy nor apology and in fact her written statement read like the words of a sociopath with an attorney on retainer or in the words of CNN's Anderson Cooper, has she no shame? Here's my guess, probably not. When we listen to the likes of a talk to the dead medium like John Edward recite the same tiny set of repetitive techniques over and over again, guessing at letters or names or months of the year, we can certainly speculate that he's merely guessing and even that he knows it too. Why is it after all if you had the power to cross the void between life and death that the connection then gets reduced to a bad game of charades? Why is it that once you're dead you can still talk but you can't quite remember your name? But for all this apparent villainy, it's only in the movies that the villain gazes into his own eyes in the mirror and declares mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most villainous villain of all? Tis high, tis high, tis high! Because nobody looks in the mirror and ever sees a villain. John Edward's website calendar currently lists more than 70 public appearances in the next eight months in which he will fill 1,000 seat halls and larger with tickets selling for as much as $200 a pop. Try doing the math here yourself. Filled with satisfied customers who will stand to applaud his very presence the instant he mounts the stage, a heady 21st century blend of quasi-religious leader and TV celebrity. Those accolades tell him something and not just that there's a sucker born every minute as the spirit of P.T. Barnum might tell him if Mr. Edward elected to reach out to the afterlife and get in touch with a truly kindred spirit, they also tell him what he tells himself, that he's helping people, that he's doing good in the world and so it is quite possible, even perhaps likely, that he might well even admit to himself the occasional or more than occasional dalliance and deception all the while excusing it in the name of the greater good he tells himself he is providing. Now, make no mistake, this story has told to the self in service to the resolution of what would otherwise cause a disturbing and ongoing cognitive dissonance is a tissue of self-deception and a distortion of reality. Talk to the dead mediums claim to help people but in fact, do the opposite. They entrap people in their grief, encouraging victims to remain obsessed with death rather than help release them to move forward and return to embracing the future and life itself. Talk to the dead mediums are among the world's most vicious emotional predators who distort the purity of our memories and the genuine truths of relationships we've had with loved ones who have lived and eventually died. Only a monster would prey on the grief of a parent who has buried their own child but talk to the dead mediums do it all the time and find nothing more than raw personal riches and a brutally obtained high of what it feels like to play God. I recently saw the documentary film Kumare in which the filmmaker Vikram Dhandi, an American of Hindu descent, turns himself into a fake yogi supposedly from India, a smiling guru who utters inane platitudes and gains a small group of believing followers. Although intending all along to reveal his true self, did the filmmaker pause over the morality of allowing his followers to confess the most personal fears and needs and pains to him and on camera all in the service of his budding career as a filmmaker? He betrays himself as a sort of hero who's afraid to relieve his followers of their illusions but in fact, is he any less a villain than John Edward or Sylvia Brown when he avoids confessing the truth of his fraud? Perhaps because he's fallen in love with being a god and is terrified of the potentially harsh judgments of those he has preyed upon as followers? Of course the show must go on so eventually he does tell them the truth but other than a passing mention in the credits he never interviews those who are distraught by revelation and may feel forever damaged by his carelessness. But in fact, most of his followers forgive and even applaud him and why? Because cognitive dissonance is hardwired into us a magic trick of sorts that our brains play on us in order to make us feel right or at least to help prevent us from feeling too bad about being wrong and even doing wrong. Even the likes of O.J. Simpson whose scientific evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates murdered the mother of his children with his own gloved hands probably doesn't see a villain in his bathroom mirror. In fact, he might just see an unjustly maligned persecuted hero, albeit, thank goodness, one now wearing a prison uniform. So, what does a villain see when he looks in the mirror? A grand portrait painted by an artist named Cognitive Dissonance. This is Jamie Ian-Swiss and I am the honest liar.