It does not matter how high we set the bar of ‘average’, you and I will always believe that we are above it: we are naturally inclined to think that we know better. Everybody is so inclined, which means necessarily that someone must be wrong. I am sure it is not you; all I am saying is, it just might be.
Illusory Superiority is one of many biases we have. The list is long and potentially endless. We instinctively trust a person and we act on our instinct because we know we are a good judge of character, but what we don’t know is that we trust that person because he happens to have hair the same colour and cut as a cousin we are close to. Our trust has nothing to do with our supposed observation skills; in fact, probably we are no better than average at judging character.
We believe that our memories are reliable, and that the woman we saw this morning was driving a red car, but the person we saw this morning was not in a car, he was on a green bicycle, and yes, he was a man, not a woman, in his sixties, not his forties. It seems implausible, I know: most of the time you have no reason to doubt your memories, and you go on believing that they are at least vaguely reliable. Quite often they are not, as professionals who have to probe into strangers’9 memories (police officers, for example) know only too well. We believe we know what is going on in our mind, but we don’t. We believe we know what is going on in the world. Try again.
Our biases are not ‘mistakes’: they are the way we approach the world. The Illusory Superiority bias might get us into trouble, but it also fills us with ideas, enthusiasm and ambition: you need to think you are a little better than average, in order to even contemplate, say, writing a book. We can almost train a bias out of ourselves in a specific field (for example, it is part of a writer’s training to learn that when an editor suggests a correction, the editor is right more often than not), but in other areas of life our unaltered biases will cause us to flounder.
Just in case you were wondering, this has everything to do with fairies. Remember what we said about vastness and accommodation? When you feel a sense of vastness, you try to accommodate it, to reduce it somehow to a scale you can understand. Sometimes we have experiences so unusual that we cannot explain them in any way. They bring home to us how vast and weird is the world. We cannot live with that. We rush to accommodate the strange new things within our lives, by interpreting them through our biases, both psychological and cultural. Because we have heard stories about fairies, we decide that the odd experience we had was an encounter with a fairy. Or, because we have heard stories about the effect of drugs, we decide it was only a hallucination. Our Illusory Superiority bias conspires to convince us that our interpretation is the only sensible one.
Accommodation is a tricky process. In your zeal to accommodate, you might end up converting to a specific credo, telling audiences at UFO conferences that you have been abducted by aliens. Or, and this is every bit as undesirable, you might decide that nothing truly extraordinary ever happens to anybody.
We can be certain that people’s experiences of encountering fairies are real. Not necessarily in the way that a watch is real, or the excellent plate of trofie con crema di gorgonzola that you had for lunch is real. But then again, a lot of meaningful things are not like a watch or like pasta: love, to name but one.
This is why we trained ourselves to accept the mystery before venturing into Faerie: we had to learn to hold on and not rush to judgement. Faerie has its perils, and overly neat interpretations are one of them. Interpretations feel safe when they are not. This is often true in Faerie: the safest-looking things – fruit, gifts, dances – are very dangerous indeed.
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The girl lived in the village of Grange, in County Sligo, a place beautiful and wild, in the shadow of Benbulben. One night the Good People took her from a field. There had been no warning that fairies were up to mischief, so it was by a stroke of luck that when they came, the girl was not alone. A villager tried to hold on to her, but the Good People managed to snatch the girl anyway, replacing her with a broomstick.
The police constable was called, and was told what had happened. He found himself in something of a predicament. On the one hand he was a local, and he knew that the Good People got up to this sort of thing. On the other hand, he was a police constable, and there were procedures to follow.
He decided to hedge his bets: he would keep one foot in the traditional camp, the other in the bureaucratic. He did a round of the houses, searching for the girl, and as he did so, he asked the villagers to burn all the ragweed they could find in the field from which the girl had been stolen, for the ragweed had magic powers. While the ragweed burned, he would chant a spell.
The villagers set to work, for the girl was well known, and well loved. First they picked the ragweed, then they burned it. The night sky was lit with an orange glow, as the fire burned and the constable chanted the spell, tirelessly, without ever stopping, not even for a sip of ale.
When morning came, it found the villagers exhausted and barely able to stand – and the constable’s throat dry and parched.
But the girl had returned.
They found her in the same field where the villagers had gathered. She told how a fairy had carried her away on horseback to a faraway river. The fairy had then whispered in her ear the names of certain people in the village.
They were the names of people who were going to die soon.
This story was told to W. B. Yeats, and recounted by the poet in his collection of poems and mythic tales entitled The Celtic Twilight. He explains that the girl had been kidnapped three years before he heard of her story. ‘It is better doubtless,’ Yeats comments, ‘to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial’s sake truth and unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candle to guide our steps.’10
Let’s dive into much unreason, then, and see whether we can find some little truth.
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Those who strongly disapprove of fairies often invoke cognitive biases, the defects of memory, and other psychological quirks to explain away the encounters that certain individuals have with them. For example, it is exactly because human memory is not reliable that we cannot trust a man when he says that he vividly remembers hearing fairies in the woods. He can honestly believe that, and still be wrong. The US Air Force decided that Joe Simonton had neither lied nor exchanged groceries with extraterrestrials: he must have mistaken a vivid dream for reality. As for the pancakes, he must have baked them himself, possibly in a somnambulist state. It is, perhaps, a slightly convoluted explanation, but less so than an alien barbecue set up by Italians from outer space.
But, just for a moment, just as a game, put yourself in the shoes of Joe Simonton, a man who, as far as he is concerned, received a gift of dodgy-tasting pancakes from aliens. Or in the shoes of the nameless lad who danced with the fairies in Somerset. How do they live, how do they get on with their everyday lives, after having received convincing proof (for them) that aliens visit our planet and fairies dance with mortals? What is it like to have such a certainty, in a world where such certainty is regarded as at best eccentric, at worst as a symptom of a serious mental issue?
Even if you have not been lucky enough to meet a fairy or similar being, there are people like you, people who are mentally sound, who have had such encounters. There are citizens of the twenty-first-century world – people with jobs not unlike yours and living in houses not unlike yours – whose experience of the world includes fairies. You may have neighbours who live next door to Faerie; which means that you too have fairy neighbours. The Fairy Census is proof enough of that.