First, of all, when someone says "I let myself be" they ARE owning it. She didn't even say "SYLVIA brainwashed me," now did she?
It is the height of arrogance to say, "I am smart, being a skeptic, and you are stupid and lazy for having believed in psychics." Anyway it's wrong too.
Much more accurate to describe a believer as uninformed and gullible. Uninformed and gullible, at least in the U.S., because they see it in friends and family and plastered all over the media all their lives.
There are talk show hosts and various media all promoting psychics and mediums; if they aren't promoting them, they certainly seem to encourage their audience to keep an open mind toward them. We live in a society where the status quo is to believe in some form of spiritual world inhabited by spirits, with ancestors and messiahs and prophets who could commune with that world more or less. We live in a world where people in respected professions (medicine, science) are openly supportive of belief in psychics and psychic phenonmena. Gary Schwartz publishes "scientific" books supporting mediums like John Edward. Psychic healer Caroline Myss has a doctor who co-writes some of her books. And on and on.
It seems to me that anyone who manages to overcome all of this to see it from an entirely skeptical perspective is the exception, not the rule. That makes people who believe somewhat closer to the status quo, which doesn't make them stupid or lazy, it makes them average.
In all my life, I don't know of anyone, outside this forum, who didn't believe in something paranormal. Even if it was astrology, or some vague belief in karma or an afterlife, or belief in intelligent design and a creator.
It's true when people are dealing with a crisis or even just a tough transition in their lives, that tends to be when they turn to psychics. There are others who just go for entertainment, like having their fortune told. Most of us are raised to be SOMEWHAT skeptical of psychics, but hardly any of us inhabit a world that teaches us to be totally skeptical of psychics, and when we experience a crisis, that little bit of maybe may encourage us to seek them out.
And then there is the fact that some psychics are cons, but some are just deluded. How many of us had a friend who read Tarot cards and genuinely believed something paranormal was going on? Or maybe we had what just had to be a psychic dream? So how common is it going to be for us to extrapolate from that that SOME psychics are real? And maybe we hope we can tell from the sincerity of their writing, or by watching how they present themselves on TV, or by how many fans they have, or the fact that a seemingly kind-hearted talk show host or physician is advocating for them?
Of course we feel stupid when we find out the ONE we believed in was a con artist. For all of the above reasons, we probably shouldn't, but we still do. No one likes to feel duped. Maybe we even then begin to question all of them. But that has nothing to do with being inherently stupid or lazy.
