Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole (19 page)

While it may indeed be difficult for those of us who have not been through such a process to appreciate exactly what it's like to be in the kind of psychological state it can produce, surely we have pretty good grounds for doubting that what is experienced is some sort of transcendent reality. Given what we know about human psychology, it's likely that people put through such an intense regime over an extended period of time will think they have become attuned to such a reality anyway, whether or not any such reality exists, and whether or not they have obtained any sort of genuine insight into it.

I don't wish to deny there is value in engaging in meditation, yoga, and so on. It may well be that those who engage in such practices gain some valuable insights into themselves and the human condition as a result. Certainly, there may be some positive psychological effects, such as a lasting sense of peace and contentment, from determinedly engaging in such activities over a long period of time, effects that will undoubtedly by magnified by the accompanying thought that what they are becoming attuned to is “God.”

But the claim that they have thereby become attuned to some sort of “sacred reality” is dubious, to say the least. Surely, given our understanding of human psychology, by far the best explanation of what people experience after having engaged in religious practice with dedication over long periods of time is not that they have become attuned to some sort of ineffable transcendence, but that they have succeeded in altering their own psychology by fairly well-understood mechanisms common to both the religious and nonreligious spheres, and that they have then mistakenly interpreted this alteration as their becoming attuned to such a reality.
¹³

CONCLUSION

As we have seen, “I
Just Know!
” isn't
always
an unreasonable thing to say. But sometimes it is. Indeed, sometimes it's a foolish thing to say.

Consider these two examples: “Sometimes I see images and I just know something terrible has happened to them” (psychic Margaret Solis quoted in “The Scots Psychic Helping Hollywood Stars—and Hunting Down Murder Victims,”
Daily Record
, September 14, 2010), and “How do I know when God is talking to me? I just know” (Internet comment).
¹⁴

Suppose these individuals claiming to “just know” can't provide any sort of publicly available evidence or rational argument to back up what they claim they know. We have seen that, if reliabilism is true, then the fact that they don't have any such evidence or argument does not rule out the
possibility
that they “just know.” However, given what we, and presumably they, know about the unreliability of such psychic and religious experiences generally, surely it's not reasonable for either us, or them, to take such seemingly revelatory experiences at face value. It's not reasonable for them to insist they “just know.”

S

If you want to achieve the status of a guru, it helps to have some natural charisma and presentational skills. Sincerity and empathy, or at least the ability to fake them, can be useful. Props also help. Try wearing a loincloth, a fez, or, in a business setting, a particularly brash waistcoat. But even without the aid of such natural talents or paraphernalia, anyone can produce deep- and meaningful-sounding pronouncements if they are prepared to follow a few simple recipes.

STATE THE OBVIOUS

To begin with, try pointing out the
blindingly obvious.
Only do it i-n-c-r-e-d-i-b-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y and with an air of superior wisdom. The technique works best if your pronouncements focus on one of life's big themes, such as love, money, and death. So, for example:

We were all children once.

Money can't buy you love.

Death is unavoidable.

State the obvious in a sufficiently earnest way, perhaps following up with a pregnant pause, and you may find others begin to nod in agreement, perhaps murmuring, “Yes, how very true that is.”

CONTRADICT YOURSELF

A second technique is to select words with opposite or incompatible meanings and cryptically combine them in what appears to be a straightforward
contradiction.
Here are a few examples:

Sanity is just another kind of madness.

Life is often a form of death.

The ordinary is extraordinary.

Such sentences are interpretable in all sorts of ways and can easily appear profound. In George Orwell's novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, two of the three slogans of the Party have this character:

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.

If you're an aspiring guru, why not produce your own contradictory remarks? The great beauty of such comments is that they make your audience do the work for you. Their meaning is not for you, the guru, to say—it's for your followers to figure out. Just sit back, adopt a sage-like expression, and let them do the intellectual labor.

The thought that contradiction is a mark of profundity sometimes crops up in a religious context. Nonbelievers will suppose contradictions within a religious doctrine reveal that it contains falsehoods. The faithful are likely to take the same contradictions as a mark of profundity. Contradictions have other advantages too. A series of simple, unambiguous claims is easy to refute; not so a series of such cryptic remarks. So, if you're planning to start your own religion and want to say things that will appear profound and also be invulnerable to criticism, try making a series of contradictory pronouncements. Assert, but then deny. For example, say that your particular god is—and yet, he is not. Your god is everything, and yet nothing. He is one, and yet he is many. He is good. But then again he isn't.

None of this is to say that such seemingly contradictory remarks can't convey something genuinely profound. They can certainly be thought provoking (I bet you can find even
some
sort of truth in all of Orwell's poisonous examples). But, given the formulaic way contradictions can be used to generate
Pseudoprofundity
, it's wise not to be too easily impressed.

DEEPITIES

Another recipe for generating
Pseudoprofundity
, identified by philosopher Daniel Dennett,
¹
is the
deepity.
A deepity involves saying something with two meanings—one trivially true, the other profound sounding but false or nonsensical. Dennett illustrates this with the expression “Love is just a word.”

On one reading, this sentence is about the
word
“love” (but
notice that, if the sentence is about the word, then it really ought to appear in quotation marks). The word
love
is indeed just a word, as are the words
steel
and
concrete.
So, on this reading, the sentence is trivially true. On the other reading, the sentence is not about the word
love
but
love itself
—that which the word
love
refers to. Love is often defined as a feeling or emotion. Love may even, arguably, be an illusion. But the one thing it definitely isn't is a word. So on this second reading, “Love is just a word” is obviously false.

Deepities trade on the ambiguities between such readings. It's the ambiguity that generates the “Oh, wow!” response, that makes people gasp, “Golly, yes, actually love
is
just a word, isn't it?!” as if they have suddenly been struck by something terribly profound.

TRITE-NALOGIES

Here's a particularly effective way of generating
Pseudoprofundity.
First, take some fairly trite observation about the human condition, such as:

• life is often surprising
  
• people often feel there's something missing from their lives
  
• we should appreciate things while we can
  
• we should make the most of the opportunities we get.
  

Then,
wrap your chosen trite observation in an analogy.
I call the result a
trite-nalogy.
“Life is like a …” provides one popular template. Here are a few examples I quickly found on the Internet:

My momma always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get. (Forrest Gump)

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still. (Lou Erickson)

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us. (Thomas L. Holdcroft)

Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once. (Lillian Dickson)

The result can often be terribly deep sounding.

Sermons and homilies sometimes involve trite-nalogies. Alan Bennett produced a hilarious spoof in his sketch “The Sermon” (which Bennett delivered while wearing a dog collar):

Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us looking for the key. And I wonder how many of you here tonight have wasted years of your lives looking behind the kitchen dressers of this life for that key. I know I have. Others think they've found the key, don't they? They roll back the lid of the sardine tin of life. They reveal the sardines, the riches of life, therein, and they get them out, and they enjoy them. But, you know, there's always a little bit in the corner you can't get out. I wonder is there a little bit in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine!

Author Douglas Adams, no doubt irritated by such “Life is like a …” pseudoprofundities, produced his own surreal version:

Life … is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

Parables, too, are sometimes trite-nalogies. Take this example:

The young man was at the end of his rope. Seeing no way out, he dropped to his knees in prayer. “Lord, I can't go on,” he said. “I have too heavy a cross to bear.” The Lord replied, “My son, if you can't bear its weight, just place your cross inside this room. Then open another door and pick any cross you wish.” The man was filled with relief. “Thank you, Lord,” he sighed, and did as he was told. As he looked around the room he saw many different crosses; some so large the tops were not visible. Then he spotted a tiny cross leaning against a far wall. “I'd like that one, Lord,” he whispered. And the Lord replied, “My son, that's the cross you brought in.”
²

Take the important but obvious truth that we often overestimate our own woes and fail to realize how serious are the problems of others, draw an analogy with carrying heavy crosses, and
voilà
—you're profound! In this example, the
Pseudoprofundity
also serves to distract the listener's attention from more troubling questions, such as: Why does God insist on loading people with such horrendous burdens in the first place?

USE JARGON

Whether you're a business guru, lifestyle consultant, or mystic, introducing some jargon can further enhance the illusion of profundity. Here is a common trick. Make up some words that appear to have meanings similar to those of certain well-known terms but that differ in some never fully explained way. For example, don't talk about people being sad or happy; talk about them having “negative or positive attitudinal orientations.”

Next, translate some truisms into your new vocabulary. Take the trite observation that happy people tend to make other people feel happier. That can be recast as “positive attitudinal orientations have high transferability.”

It also helps to adopt the vocabulary of “forces,” “energies,” and “balances.” The use of these words will suggest that you have discovered some deep power that can be harnessed and utilized by others. That will make it much easier to persuade them that they may seriously miss out if they don't sign up for one of your seminars.

So, if you're a marketing guru, try running seminars on “Harnessing Positive Attitudinal Energies within the Retail Environment.” If some smart aleck is brave enough to put up his hand at one of your seminars and ask
exactly
what a “positive attitudinal energy” is, just define it using other bits of your jargon. That way, you'll never have to explain what any of your gibberish means. Yet the several truisms around which all your jargon has been wrapped will generate the illusion that you must really be on to
something
, even if your listeners cannot fully grasp what it is. So you'll leave them anxious to hear more.

Adding some scientific jargon or references can be particularly useful in lending your ramblings further fake authority and gravitas. Many purveyors of
Pseudoprofundity
have learned the insight expressed by the great nineteenth-century scientist James Clerk Maxwell that such “is the respect paid to science that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recalls some well-known scientific phrase.”
³

References to quantum mechanics are particularly popular among peddlers of pseudoscientific claptrap. Quantum mechanics is widely supposed to make weird claims, and hardly anyone understands it, so if you start spouting references to it in support of your own bizarre teachings, people will assume you must be very clever and probably won't realize that you are, in fact, just bullshitting. So perhaps, if you're feeling ambitious, put on another seminar titled “Positive Attitudinal Energies and Quantum Mechanics.”

POSTMODERN PSEUDOPROFUNDITY

Sadly, some corners of academia are dominated by intellectuals whose writing amounts to little more than
Pseudoprofundity.
Strip away the academic jargon and pseudoscientific references from their impressive-sounding pronouncements, and you'll find there's precious little left.

Those thinkers often referred to as “postmodern” include more than their fair share of such jargon-fueled wafflers. So easy is it, in fact, to produce convincing-looking postmodern gobbledygook that a wag called Andrew Bulhak constructed a computer program that will write your own “postmodern” essay, complete with references. For the
Postmodern Essay Generator
, go to
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
.

I just did and received an essay that begins:

The primary theme of Cameron's model of neostructural Marxism is the common ground between society and culture. Sontag's analysis of Debordist situation states that society has objective value. However, Marx promotes the use of Marxist socialism to analyse class. Debordist situation holds that the goal of the observer is deconstruction. Therefore, the subject is interpolated into a neostructural Marxism that includes art as a paradox. Several materialisms concerning semanticist subdialectic theory may be found.

This may be nonsense, but it makes scarcely less sense than the real thing. Possibly more. Consider this example from the French intellectual Félix Guattari: