Persuasion, Occultism, and Lizard-Thinking

The bit of The Persuaders that interested me the most was its look into the confusion and desperation of advertisers themselves. It’s easy to think of advertising as a kind of all-knowing conspiracy, given how omnipresent it is and how it conditions and affects us in ways we don’t really appreciate, but seeing the burden for any one group trying to actually pull it off makes it much less scary and more personal. The idea that advertisers are themselves unsure of the effects of their work, and that many of them are artistic people who resent having to work in the industry, fleshes out the profession in a way I never really thought about before.

There’s a kind of schadenfreude that comes from seeing people slowly fail at creating an ad campaign, but Rapaille’s seminars create a much bigger picture of the kind of soft mysticism that happens in the field. Having read his interview, his work on Nestle seems like a straightforward, smart campaign based on raising children with coffee, but it’s not very long before we see him as the kind of person who removes people’s chairs and makes them scribble out their memories to find out their “true” opinions. If you’re curious, the “reptilian brain” thing comes from the triune brain hypothesis, a theory of the brain which has been thoroughly criticized by people who at least seem to know what they’re talking about. (My pet reason for doubting it is that its idea of the primitive unreasoning reptile-brain doesn’t fit well with things like toolmaking crows.)

But the best takeaway from Rapaille, for me, is that it doesn’t really matter which underlying system he’s using. He could just as easily be starting with the eight-circuit model of consciousness, because he’s still going to get some lucky hits on the back of folk-psychology alone. The fact that any company with a diverse-enough ad campaign will never know if his advice worked would be enough to keep him afloat anyway, because he’s accomplishing for corporations what bad self-help books do for individuals.

Even modern esotericism takes these things deathly-serious, given its concern with ideas-as-supernatural-agents, although not much of it makes these kind of connections outright. This very blunt statement of it is taken from The Psychonaut Field Manual, Third Edition by Bluefluke the Arch-Traitor.

Ultimately, companies are often prepared to believe very superstitious things, and their tendency to go too far and create cultish structures is already well-discussed. I don’t mean to discredit it entirely when I call it “mysticism”, though, because even guesswork systems of the human mind can accomplish a lot when enough money and effort’s poured through them, and you don’t need a neurologically accurate picture of your customer to make them want something. I just think it’s important to understand that this is a very messy, groping-in-the-dark method of understanding people, and that ultimately it leaves a big gap in the way advertisers understand the world. Whether closing that gap and giving them a truly effective brain-model is a good idea is a question for another essay.