{"id":1069,"date":"2007-03-23T14:35:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-23T14:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2007\/03\/23\/pseudo-profundity\/"},"modified":"2007-03-23T14:35:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-23T14:35:00","slug":"pseudo-profundity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2007\/03\/23\/pseudo-profundity\/","title":{"rendered":"Pseudo-profundity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s something from a new book<\/a>. Thought it might interest those following the very odd comments (scroll to the end) on my posting an Anselm’s argument<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Around the globe, audiences sit at the feet of marketing experts, life-style consultants, mystics, cult-leaders and other \u201cgurus\u201d waiting for the next deep and profound insight. Audiences often pay a great deal of money to hear these words of wisdom. So how do these elevated individuals come by their penetrating insights? What is the secret of their profundity? Unfortunately, in some cases, the audience is duped by the dark arts of pseudo-profundity.<\/p>\n

The art of sounding profound is fairly easily mastered. You too can make deep- and meaningful-sounding pronouncements if you are prepared to follow a few simple rules.<\/p>\n

First, try stating the incredibly obvious. Only do it v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, with a sort of knowing nod. This works particularly well if your remark has something to do with one of the big themes of life, love, death and money. Here are some examples:<\/p>\n

Death comes to us all
We all want to be loved
Money is used to buy things<\/p>\n

Try it yourself. If you state the obvious with sufficient gravitas, following up with a pregnant pause, you may soon find others start to nod in agreement, perhaps muttering \u201cHow true that is\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now that you have warmed up, let\u2019s move on to a different technique \u2013 the use of jargon. A few big, not fully understood words can easily enhance the illusion of profundity. All that\u2019s required is a little imagination.<\/p>\n

To begin with, try making up some words that have similar meanings to certain familiar terms, but that differ from them in some subtle and never-fully-explained way. For example, don\u2019t talk about people being happy or sad, but about people having \u201cpositive or negative attitudinal orientations\u201d. That sounds far more impressive and scientific-sounding, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Now try translating some dull truisms into your newly invented language. For, example, the obvious fact that happy people tend to make other people happier can be expressed as \u201cpositive attitudinal orientations have high transferability\u201d.<\/p>\n

Also, whether you are a business guru, cult-leader or a mystic, it always helps to talk of \u201cenergies\u201d and \u201cbalances\u201d. This makes it sound as if you have discovered some deep mechanism or power that could potentially be harnessed and used by others. That will make it much easier to convince people that if they don\u2019t buy into your advice, they will really be missing out. For example, publish an article entitled \u201cHarnessing positive attitudinal energies within the retail environment\u201d, and Lo! another modern business guru is born.<\/p>\n

Finally, if someone does get up the courage to ask exactly what a \u201cpositive attitudinal energy\u201d is, you can always give a definition using other bits of your newly-invented jargon, leaving your questioner none the wiser. If all your jargon is defined using other jargon, no one will ever be able to figure out exactly what you mean (though your devotees may think they know). And the fact that buried within your pseudo-profundities are one or true truisms will give your audience the impression that you must really be on to something, even if they don\u2019t quite understand what it is. So they will be eager to hear more.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, some cult-leaders, business gurus, mystics, life-style consultants, therapists – and even some philosophers \u2013 make use of these techniques to generate the illusion that they possess deep and penetrating insights. Now you can see how easy it is to generate pseudo-profundities of your own, I\u2019m sure you will be rather less impressed the next time some self-styled \u201cguru\u201d suggests that your attitudinal energies need balancing.<\/p>\n

[TEXT BOX: Another secret of pseudo-profundity is to pick two words that have opposite or incompatible meanings, and combine them cryptically, like so:<\/p>\n

Sanity is just another kind of madness
Life is a often a form of death
The ordinary is extraordinary<\/p>\n

Try it for yourself. You\u2019ll soon start sounding deep. In George Orwell\u2019s novel Nineteen-Eighty Four, the three slogans of the Party are all examples of this sort of pseudo-profundity:<\/p>\n

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength<\/p>\n

A particularly useful feature of these remarks is that they make your audience do all the work for you. \u201cFreedom is a kind of slavery\u201d for example, is interpretable in all sorts of ways that probably won\u2019t even have occurred to you. Just sit back, adopt a sage-like expression, and let your audience figure out what you mean.<\/p>\n

None of this is to say that such cryptic remarks can\u2019t be profound, of course. But given the ease with which they are generated, it\u2019s wise not to be too easily impressed.END OF TEXT BOX]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s something from a new book. Thought it might interest those following the very odd comments (scroll to the end) on my posting an Anselm’s argument. Around the globe, audiences sit at the feet of marketing experts, life-style consultants, mystics, cult-leaders and other \u201cgurus\u201d waiting for the next deep and profound insight. Audiences often pay […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,54,142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-clarity","category-pseudo-profundity","category-thinking-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}