Pseudoprofundity Recipes for faking profundity—aspiring gurus take note

Pseudoprofundity

Recipes for faking profundity—aspiring gurus take note.

Published on June 22, 2011 by Stephen Law, Ph.D. in Believing Bull.

Around the globe, audiences sit at the feet of marketing experts, life-style consultants, mystics, cult-leaders and other "gurus" waiting for the next deep and profound insight. People 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.


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.

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:

Death comes to us all
We all want to be loved
Money is used to buy things

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 "How true that is".

Now that you have warmed up, let's move on to a different technique - the use of jargon. A few big, not fully understood words can easily enhance the illusion of profundity. All that's required is a little imagination.

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't talk about people being happy or sad, but about people having "positive or negative attitudinal orientations". That sounds far more impressive and scientific-sounding, doesn't it?

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 "positive attitudinal orientations have high transferability".

Also, whether you are a business guru, cult-leader or a mystic, it always helps to talk of "energies" and "balances". 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't buy into your advice, they will really be missing out. For example, publish an article entitled "Harnessing positive attitudinal energies within the retail environment", and Lo! another modern business guru is born.

Finally, if someone does get up the courage to ask exactly what a "positive attitudinal energy" 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't quite understand what it is. So they will be eager to hear more.

Unfortunately, some cult-leaders, business gurus, mystics, life-style consultants, therapists - and even some philosophers - 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'm sure you will be rather less impressed the next time some self-styled "guru" suggests that your attitudinal energies need balancing.

Another secret of pseudo-profundity is to pick two words that have opposite or incompatible meanings, and combine them cryptically, like so:

Sanity is just another kind of madness
Life is a often a form of death
The ordinary is extraordinary

Try it for yourself. You'll soon start sounding deep. In George Orwell's novel Nineteen-Eighty Four, the three slogans of the Party are all examples of this sort of pseudo-profundity:

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

A particularly useful feature of these remarks is that they make your audience do all the work for you. "Freedom is a kind of slavery" for example, is interpretable in all sorts of ways that probably won't even have occurred to you. Just sit back, adopt a sage-like expression, and let your audience figure out what you mean.

None of this is to say that such cryptic remarks can't be profound, of course. But given the ease with which they are generated, it's wise not to be too easily impressed.