The Mystic From The Orient

The Mystic From The Orient

This article is an interesting tangent along the lines of the mythical writing article I posted earlier on in the week.

I used to be involved in a now-defunct paranormal phenomena forum when I was a teenager. It was great. Back before the internet became all about Facebook and cat pictures, and the answers to whatever questions you had weren’t an immediate Google search away, there were lots of forums like the one I was on which dealt with answers to tricky questions.

The beauty of these forums was that the answers were often crazier than the questions. Back in the day, the internet was the sole province of nerds, anti-socials and other assorted weirdos. A lot of these people liked to experiment with various things – even when said experiments ran contrary to every scientific fact you could muster.

I learned how to lucid dream on forums. I learned about astral projection. I spoke with crazy people and liars, but also with military generals and billionaires. I was a pretty annoying teenager – if I wanted to know something, I’d just ask. I must have annoyed the hell out of a lot of people back in the day with my persistent questioning. But I learned a lot of weird things.

I also learned a lot about psychology.

The internet runs a lot differently now, and that’s because your real identity is largely your internet one. Back in earlier internet days, you could be a different person and voice unpopular opinions and if you ever got in trouble, you could disappear from a profile and never return. The first thing this showed me was that people are very different when they aren’t being watched. For a marketer, this is a sign that intentions and words are often very different.

Secondly, I learned that creating an “in-group” is the most powerful thing you can do. I remember reading a book at school about a psychological experiment where a teacher decided to create a nazi-brownshirt-style group in his class. Predictably (but not at the time,) the experiment was shut down after the group psychology took a turn for the fascist and the kids started beating each other. The fact is though, if you create an “us versus them” mentality, you get a lifetime of dedicated customers, because their animal-brains do the work for you.

Occult Knowledge

Thirdly, and to bring us round to the title of the topic, people put a premium on knowledge that’s difficult to attain. This is an extension of basic psychology: we want what’s difficult to achieve because nobody else has it.

The Oriental mystic is an old magician’s ruse. “Pick a card, any card” says the magician. He then tells you a story about how, when he was a boy, he was orphaned. He went to stay with an uncle in the forbidden lands of the unconquered East. Whilst the magician is slipping your card into his pocket, he tells you that he once got lost in a jungle, where he met a strange mystic who looked a hundred years old. He tells you that the mystic gave him a potion which allowed him to see into the minds’ of other people. Moving around you, he names your card, and you say, “Wow.” But that’s not all… the mystic taught him something far more sinister: He can bend time and space to his whim, and that allows him to move around freely without anyone knowing anything about it. He then tells you to take your card out of your pocket. You reach in, and – lo and behold – there is the card.

The oriental mystic doesn’t exist except as a storytelling device so that you’re creating dots where there aren’t any, and the dots you should be connecting are somewhere you’re not looking. (Of course, there could be loads of mystics with magical powers running around, and I’m just not telling you about them.)

There are plenty of marketers who use variations on this story. The easiest one that comes to mind is Mike Chang and his six-pack secrets.

“Find out why Scientists HATE this man.”

“This one man’s secret to muscle-building is so powerful authorities are going to BAN it.”

Those headlines follow the Oriental mystic archetype – and not because Mike Chang is East Asian.

The three points of the Oriental Mystic archetype:

• Information is secret.
• Information is hard to get.
• The information tells a (misdirecting) story.

There are many more inferred or optional points, but that’s the bare-bones of the Oriental Mystic Archetype.

Final Thoughts

It’s good to break down adverts and other historical artefacts – like the works of old magicians in this instance – because when you break them down like I’ve done above, you realise that they have universal principles which you can apply anywhere. Not just in the “This old lady has the skin of a 25 year old using one ingredient” sense, but in perfectly non-clickbait ways.

All you have to do is imply that the knowledge was hard won, and the reader probably won’t be able to get it themselves, then use that as an obvious selling point.