Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2012, during the economic crisis in Spain. The Antena 3 report it refers to had aired a few weeks earlier.
Being able to say that the worse things go for people, the better your business will do is a luxury for any entrepreneur. A few weeks ago, Equipo de Investigación, the investigative programme on the Spanish TV channel Antena 3, showed “the business of hidden power“: a tour of tarot and psychic services, healers who claim to cure what doctors cannot, and everything to do with selling amulets or objects with supposed healing properties.
I imagine that at some point in the small hours you’ve turned on the TV and seen a programme where a TV psychic predicts the future or advises someone on a decision. You’ll have asked yourself the obvious question: “Does anyone actually believe this? Does anyone call?” The numbers answer that: Spaniards alone spend thousands of millions of euros a year on this kind of product and service, so yes, a lot of people call and a lot of people believe.
Several interviews caught my attention. One was with Europe’s biggest exporter of these products, who openly said he doesn’t believe in what he sells, but since there is demand for it, that’s what he does.
On one side there are the psychics, professionals registered as self-employed. On the other there are the healers, who are not registered and have no obligation to report to the tax authorities, because legally they don’t charge. They ask for a donation, so a healer can earn €12,000 a month in donations without having to file an income tax return.
Are tarot and psychic services a fraud? The big question
On the one hand, you could call it fraud for the simple reason that nobody can predict the future, and in fact you don’t need to be a psychic to work as a TV psychic. All you need is a bit of psychology to keep your language as ambiguous as possible and give the customer what they need. So far, you could say it’s clearly a fraud.
On the other hand, besides taking a good chunk of money for each call, these fraudsters sometimes become the last door of hope. Let me explain. When someone has lost their job, a family member has fallen ill and the crisis has hit the whole family, that person knows things look pretty grim. They need someone on the other end of the line to tell them everything will be all right in time, that the situation will improve sooner or later. That is what a person in those circumstances needs and wants to hear. Seen this way, you could say they also do a kind of social work.
The same goes for healers. When the doctor has said no and science has said no, the person finally turns to a healer who says yes, and thanks to faith, suggestion or whatever we want to call it, the person feels better. The healer hasn’t cured anything, but the mind has believed it was being cured, and so it was (even though the illness hasn’t gone away).
Scented candles, amulets, figures of saints and more
These products probably enjoy wider acceptance among the public. Who hasn’t carried some object that once brought them luck in an exam? How many figures of saints are there in Spanish homes? How many St. Patricks ride along in Spanish cars? The truth is that Spaniards also spend hundreds of millions of euros on amulets.
With the crisis, more people believe they suffer from the “evil eye”, and that’s where another lucrative business comes in: spiritual healing or cleansing. Spells to win back your ex, or spiritual cleansing of a shop so that a business’s sales improve. Spaniards spend those thousands of millions of euros on all of this, even knowing it is probably an outright fraud. A fraud that, the moment you believe in it, motivates you and can turn that faith into fact.
Back in 2010 we wrote about esoteric advisers, and now they are also becoming financial advisers, at least in the United States. As I said then, although I don’t support this kind of business because I consider it a deception, the truth is that it is a way for some people to earn a living, since you can start a business like this from your own home.
Further reading
Featured image: Nosferattus, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
