Or, Your “Big Claim Probably Isn’t That Big”
Every so often I come across a massive claim and I file it under the “Mystic From The Orient” principle I came up with back when I was first learning copywriting. You can read it in full in that article from 2016, (how time flies,) but the general gist is this:
“The Mystic From The Orient” is a narrative device used by magicians to obscure what they’re really doing, which is often a simple trick. In Victorian Britain, where what’s now called street magic and was then called parlour magic took off, the flourishing of the Empire, rampant spiritualism and superstition, as well as the rise of what they called Scientific Thinking but really was anything but, all merged together to create a perfect storm of storytelling devices. Magicians, (the card-shuffling, coin-manipulating kind, that is,) used those devices to obscure what were simple tricks.
They tell you to pick a card, you “put it back in the deck” which they don’t touch, and they give you a story about how as a boy, they went and learned the secrets of magic from a mystic from the Orient, and now you can read a person’s mind and make that reality. They then, having told you all that story, reveal the card is right under your nose. Wow!
There’s one thing you need to understand…
This “Trick” Works Because Of Fundamental Human Psychology
Back in the day, a Harvard professor named Skinner was involved in one of those Operation Paperclip type affairs where unknown benefactors were interested in training pigeons to deliver bombs to the Soviets. That’s the cover story, at least. We’ll give Skinner’s experiment a bit more of a deep study when I resume the dark psychology series of posts, but for now; Skinner trained pigeons with Operant Conditioning; he gave them food when they pressed a button.
Except the interesting thing is that the pigeons didn’t only press the button.
They did a bunch of other stuff before and after pressing the button. They’d spin around three times or walk in a certain direction. In simplistic terms; they developed superstitions about how the food got there, and completed ritual behaviours in order to get more food.
My point here is that we’re all superstitious pigeons, deep down as part of our biology: humans are problem-solving machines operating on limited data. That makes us very susceptible to social engineering by what I’ll call narrative magic.
An Example In The Wild
Recently, I’ve been doing a deep-dive into stress, sleep and related topics as part of a wider experiment to sort out my health. As part of that, I got into mobility and flexibility, and have started my on-off practice of meditation and other related exercises again but with better clarity of what I’m trying to achieve.
As such, I’ve been reading a lot of material on yoga. Here’s something I was reading today:
Now, this is in a “scientifically accurate” yoga book. It’s one of the ones where there’s a foreword by a guy with a Ph.D. in Something Scientific from Somewhere Important. It contains the footnotes and scientific journals and endnotes etc.
And honestly, there seems to be some pretty good information contained within it – and yoga, meditation and pranayama breathing exercises do have scientific backing to an extent. Enough that the gullible fall into the Mystic From The Orient trap and don’t see them for what they are; culturally-encoded relaxation and visualisation techniques.
Here though, we have a yogi master that teaches deep relaxation to a dog and taught an illiterate boy photographic memory and eleven languages while he was asleep.
It’s very easy to get emotionally charged about this one way or the other; True Believer and/or “It’s all a Scam!”
Instead though, sometimes you’ve got to appreciate the magician’s trick and understand you can learn a lot from the story.