Wisdom, depth, and profundity are valuable. We seek out thinkers who can offer penetrating insights into the human condition, who can help illuminate some of the most fundamental questions with which humanity grapples: questions about the meaning of our existence, the character of good and evil, the ultimate nature of reality, the key principles of human psychology, and how to become better, more successful, and more fulfilled human beings. Let’s call such questions Life’s Big Questions.

Unfortunately, for every sage with real insight to offer, there’s a charlatan, pseudo-intellectual, or fake guru ready to take advantage. How are we to distinguish genuine insight from their sham pronouncements? 

Perhaps the easiest way to learn how to spot pseudo-profundity is to learn some of the basic recipes for creating it. This essay explains three key recipes that can be used to fake deep insight. Of course, having learnt the recipes, you might set up shop as a false guru yourself. I am trusting you won’t do that!

Recipe 1: The Deepity

The philosopher Daniel Dennett identifies one key recipe for generating pseudo-profundity: The Deepity. Deepities sound deep but aren’t. Take Dennett’s illustration:

Love is a just a word

This seemingly profound pronouncement is very much in Life’s Big Questions territory, relating to both the fundamentals of human psychology and the ultimate nature of things. But does it, in fact, say something deep? Dennett suggests that appearance of depth is illusory, and is generated by trading on an ambiguity between two very different readings. Put the word ‘love’ into quote marks, so that the sentence becomes about the word “love,” like so:

“Love” is just a word

This sentence says something true, but rather banal. Of course love is a word—a word containing four letters. Remove the quote marks, on the other hand, and the sentence says something false. Love may be many things: an emotion, perhaps even an illusion, but it certainly isn’t a word. The appearance of depth is generated by the ambiguity between these two readings.

Here’s another example:

Reality is a human construct

The word “reality” is a human construct. So too is the concept or idea of reality. However, reality itself is not, for the most part (setting aside the houses, canals, etc. we build), a human construct—reality would still be there even if humans had never existed. Fail to be clear about whether we’re referring to the word, the concept, or the thing itself, and, again, the illusion of depth is generated. This sort of muddle is so common in philosophy that it even has a name: the use/mention fallacy. Philosophy undergraduates are regularly warned about it in their first year. The moral is: don’t confuse using a term to say something with saying something about the term.

Recipe 2: The Tritenalogy

If you want to cook up some fake profundity, analogies can be helpful. Another recipe for pseudo-profundity, which, in my book, Believing Bullshit, I call the Tritenalogy, involves taking some banal, or even dubious, observation regarding one of Life’s Big Questions, and wrapping it in an analogy. “Life is like a…” provides a classic example.

First, take some clichéd observation, such as:

Life is full of surprises

We should make the most of things while we can

We often feel there’s something missing from our lives

Now package your cliche within a “Life is like…”  analogy, such as:

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 garden. You reap what you sow.

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

You’re now starting to sound much more like a guru. Or perhaps a vicar. Sermons and parables often take the form of tritenalogies. The comedian Alan Bennett’s monologue “The Sermon,” which Bennett gave dressed as a vicar, nicely satirises such vacuous yet nevertheless deep-sounding homilies:

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! 

I suggest the famous “Footprints in the Sand” parable nicely illustrates how analogy can be used to generate pseudo-profundity:

A man once dreamt that he walked along the beach,
and as he walked along,
he saw his life flash before his eyes.
As he looked back over his life,
he saw that for every memory there were two sets of footprints in the sand,
one belonging to himself and the other belonging to the Lord.
But as he looked more closely,
he saw that for the most difficult and painful memories in his life,
there was only one set of footprints.
Turning to the Lord, he said,
“Lord, when I needed you the most, why did you leave me?”
And you might know what God said back.
God says back, “Those were the moments I carried you.”

This analogy drawn between, on the one hand, the course of our lives and, on the other, a walk along a beach is intended to teach us a lesson—that during our darkest moments, when God might seem absent, he actually provides the most support. 

Of course, most atheists will view the intended lesson as a bit of unsubstantiated wishful thinking: an attempt to explain away what otherwise looks like evidence against the existence of God (surely, if there were a God, he wouldn’t abandon us when things get tough). However, by means of analogy, what might otherwise look like an implausible attempt to deal with a serious objection can be transformed into something reassuringly “deep” and “profound!”

Recipe 3:  The Use of Jargon

Religious, mystical, and New Age examples of pseudo-profundity are commonplace, but these aren’t the only domains affected. The academic and intellectual worlds also attract their fair share of fake profundity, as do the business, marketing, lifestyle, and health consultancy industries.

One popular recipe is to introduce terms that appear to have meanings similar to those of more familiar terms, though their exact meaning remains elusive. So, for example, rather than talking about people being happy or sad, talk about “negative or positive attitudinal orientations.” Then translate some banal observations into your terminology. 

For example, the obvious fact that our emotional states tend to rub off on others—e.g. happy people tend to make those around them feel happier—can be expressed as “positive and negative attitudinal orientations have high transferability.” Also, if you’re selling business, marketing, health, and self-help advice, it helps to create the impression that you know how to access powers into which your customers can profitably tap. So talk about forces, energies, dynamics, synergies and/or balances a lot. Thus armed, you can start selling tickets to your conference “Utilizing Positive Attitudinal Energies Within a Commercial Environment: Synergies for Change.” 

A risk, of course, is that someone insufficiently deferential towards your extraordinarily deep, if somewhat difficult to pin down, insights will show up and start asking simple, back-of-an-envelope style questions, such as “Er, what exactly is a positive attitudinal orientation?’ Under no circumstances should you, as an aspiring guru, provide a clear, straight answer. Rather, respond by using other bits of your newly invented terminology, like so: “Positive attitudinal orientations are the inverse of the negative, and are reflecting the inner dynamic of the individual’s psyche.” This will impress those already onboard, who will be under the impression you are definitely on to something given the truisms around which you have built your new philosophy. And because you are offering the secret to understanding how the business, or marketing, etc. world really works, they probably won’t want to risk missing out.

It can be to your advantage to include a little scientific terminology in the mix. As the 19th-century scientist James Clerk Maxwell notes, 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.

So why not draw some parallels between positive attitudinal energies and quantum mechanics? Pseudo-intellectuals often adopt scientific terminology in order to create an impression of depth. Several postmodern examples are entertainingly exposed in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s book Intellectual Impostures, which I highly recommend. In fact, so easy is it to generate seemingly deep postmodern twaddle that the Post Modern Essay Generator website will now create your own example for you on demand. Simply go to https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

In my opinion, the key to generating effective, even contagious, pseudo-profundity is to say things that:

(1) tap into our powerful desire for answers to Life’s Big Questions,

(2) are ambiguous and elusive, and

(3) are built around a grain of what’s widely considered “common sense.” 

Incidentally, that grain doesn’t need to be true—it just needs to be widely assumed to be true. Examples are the common sense beliefs that:

there’s more than just the spatio-temporal, material world (widely assumed, though questionable),

positive thinking is effective (it is, up to a point),

our emotional states tend to rub off on others (certainly true), or 

staying healthy requires a holistic approach.

By addressing Life’s Big Questions—questions almost all of us find fascinating—you immediately have a potentially very large audience. And that grain of apparent common sense around which you have constructed your B.S. will also create the impression you are on to something. 

The right sort of ambiguity and elusiveness built into your pronouncements will then allow you to both (i) create the impression that you are offering much more than a bit of common sense, while at the same time (ii) give yourself sufficient wiggle room that, if anyone attempts to refute what you say, you can patronizingly put them down as someone that’s failed properly to grasp the deep sophistication of your thought. Always leave your audience with the impression that your critics’ supposedly devastating objection reveals only the paucity of their own understanding!

How to Expose Pseudo-profundity

I should stress that while some purveyors of pseudo-profundity are deliberate charlatans, I suspect most are sincere. They don’t just succeed in convincing others that they’ve got some deep insight; they convince themselves too.

What’s the most effective way of combatting pseudo-profundity? Clarity is its greatest enemy. The one thing a fake guru will want to resist, above all, is having their claims translated into clear, unambiguous prose. Deepities illustrate why. Once we’ve pinned down exactly what the purveyor of a deepity is saying, it’s clear it’s either something banal, or else something interesting but obviously untrue.

It’s not always easy to expose what’s gone wrong, however. Most fake gurus are aware, at least at some level, that clarity is going to cause them serious problems. They are likely to accuse anyone providing a clear paraphrase of what they’re saying of misrepresentation. They won’t clearly spell out what they do mean, of course. Rather, they’ll resort to more convoluted and elusive pronouncements, produce further smokescreens, and no doubt mix into all their evasion some patronising put downs of the critic. Consequently, it can take considerable time and effort to reveal the truth.

Humour and mockery can be useful. Alan Bennett’s “sermon” provides one nice example. The reason a little mockery can be effective is because of its power to break the spell that pseudo-profundity is able to cast over us. In Hans Christian Anderson’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the Emperor parades around naked. He and his subjects are all convinced that he is wearing finery so fine that only someone of exceptional sophistication can see it. Only when a small boy points and laughs is the spell broken and everyone suddenly realises how foolish they have all been. It is precisely because mockery has this spell-breaking power that those spouting pseudo-profundity often take huge, exaggerated offence at it. Any belief can be mocked and satirised, including valuable and true beliefs, and no belief should be rejected just because people laugh at it. However, the inclusion of a little mockery in the criticism of pseudo-profundity can be entirely appropriate. And, of course, deserved.

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Stephen Law is a philosopher and author based at the University of Oxford. He researches primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and essentialism. He is author of numerous popular books, including The War for Children’s Minds. Read more of his essays here.