Lance Armstrong motivates Vince Vaughn in the film Dodgeball by invoking negative emotions that Vince feels a compulsion to move away from. Or maybe it’s just silly and funny.

Now this is actually a technique that some people use to get themselves moving in the direction they want to. It seems that for many people the lure of something better isn’t actually enough to get them taking action. In this case really imagining what they don’t want (broadly defined as pain) can give them the initial spur to move towards what they do want (broadly defined as pleasure).

Be careful however as this way of motivation has two problems. The first is that you need something compelling to move towards otherwise you will only move forward until you are no longer feeling pain, then you fall back into your old habits and don’t take action again until you’re experiencing pain again. (This is the classic pattern of the yo-yo dieter. Diet until you are thin, no pain from being overweight, start eating again, feel pain, start diet again, etc.)

The second issue with this way of motivating yourself is that it’s not a good thing to focus on things you don’t want as that’s inevitably what you’ll end up with. So use this sparingly!

When the Matrix first came out in the cinemas some people enjoyed the philosophical questions and ideas of the film. Soon essays and books appeared discussing those concepts. It surprised me that so much of what was written focused on the, in my mind, relatively inconsequential questions; to what extent is what we experience ‘real’ and is there such a thing as free will. This is the material of introductory philosophy courses looking to introduce students to Plato and Descartes.

Now I accept that films have many layers of meaning and ways to interpret them, there is no right or wrong explanation. But I was surprised that most of the mainstream commentary seemed to miss one of the most obvious interpretations. The Matrix described is a metaphor for the consensus reality that we humans live in. A reality consisting of social conventions, the language that we use to describe the world and our experience, our beliefs and emotions. All these things filter what is out there in the world before we experience it subjectively. It’s pretty obvious from the following dialogue:

Morpheus : The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

The advertisements on TV attempt to create associations between certain emotions and products. ‘Buy X to feel Y’ or ‘You can not be happy until you own X’. The world religions have instilled certain kinds of morality which have now been pervasive in our culture for so long that they are taken as given. Politicians keep telling us we live in democracies when it’s hard to reconcile that with what we experience day to day.

It’s scary once you realise how so much we take for granted in life is completely arbitrary and conventional. The great thing is, once you know it’s all a game you can start changing the rules.

Another animation by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, set to a little philosophical musing by Alan Watts.

In the second part of the documentary Frontline Persuaders, marketers explain how advertising has moved away from explaining the features of products and towards the emotional benefits that a consumer gets from buying products.

The idea is to create meaning system for consumers through which they get identity and an understanding of the world. Douglas Atkin explains how he started to research cults, fans and devotees in order to find out how people become involved in them in order to create that devotion in consumers for brands. People that love Harley Davidson, Mac’s and the Grateful Dead all have something in common that explains their rabid devotion.

Douglas breaks it down into two key points:

1. People want to belong.

2. They want to make meaning (of their lives and the world around them).

It’s easy to think of brands and advertising that try to sell you a lifestyle, a belief-system, a way of thinking about life and the world. I don’t know how you’ve experienced advertising but I’ve always found it pretty transparent. ‘Buy this and you’ll be cool, you’ll be part of the in crowd’. And to be honest I’ve always found it pretty offensive. Someone is telling me what I’ll BE when I buy their product!?

The creepiest part of this documentary is the engineering that is applied to the Song Airline brand. In stead of saying something is great, employees are encouraged to say: ‘That’s so song’. I don’t care what kind transcendent lifestyle experience it is to fly with Song, that’s all it is at the end of the day, an airline. All in all, highly pretentious. And as the presenter points out, despite millions spent on marketing and advertising you’d find it to difficult to come by evidence that shows how successful this kind of marketing is at selling particular products.

What is does succeed in doing however is creating the mindset in many people that purchasing certain things and services actually enhances you personally in some respect. Don’t buy into that.

The first part of the documentary Frontline Persuaders explains how an airline is looking to start a new branch of it’s business to compete against other low-fair airlines.

They show how they have built up a profile of their ideal customer in order to get an idea of how to best market their airline. They probably built up this profile using market research data and information about spending habits from supermarkets, shops and banks.

As one of the commentators points out, it seems that a lot of advertising is becoming more and more focused on grabbing our attention in any conceivable way just to get through the noise of all the other advertising out there. I’m sure we all remember some really interesting, shocking or funny ads, but can’t remember what they were supposed to be selling. Marketers will say that it’s more about gaining repeated exposure with consumers, but that’s something that’s hard to measure.

Contrast that kind of advertising with traditional sales letters, where you can measure the success rate of different kinds of copy and adjust it to get the best results.

I sometimes wonder about what led me to my current interests. A lot of it has to do with all the books I’ve read and the films I’ve seen. Sometimes when I’m watching a film like Star Wars I’ll catch a particular scene that must have been one of many little memes that were planted in my mind when I first saw them.

So where did George Lucas get the memes he put in his films? He was inspired by the author Joseph Campbell who wrote a book called the Hero With A Thousand Faces which is about the arch-typical heroes journey. Campbell incorporated amongst other things some of the ideas of Carl Jung who of course had studied Buddhism and Taoism.

So when Yoda starts talking about being a luminous part of the Force and how there is no difference between himself the rock and the X-wing he is levitating, you could say that he’s another link in a chain that goes back thousands of years (at least). Whatever other value these ideas have, we can at least note how sticky they are.

Do you remember the scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi confuses the Storm Troopers by waving his hands and saying: ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for’? Well that’s a pattern interrupt. The hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used pattern interrupts to temporarily confuse clients so that they would be momentarily more open to suggestion.

Here’s an explanation of how Derren Brown uses his Force powers for evil and entertainment.

Some people have noted the similarity between the Jedi in Star Wars and the Bene Gesserit in Dune, by Frank Herbert. The Bene Gesserit are a group that posses a skill called ‘The Voice’, which is a particular way of speaking that allows them to strongly influence and sometimes control other people. One of the themes in Dune is how language influences thought and this was inspired by Alfred Korzybski who wrote General Semantics and Science and Sanity, books that were read by Bandler and Grinder, the developers of NLP.