Feng Shui Cannot Fix Laziness

Translator's note. Every consultant needs a sentence that explains failure in advance, and in this trade it is: I have fixed your feng shui, but you must also work hard. The piece is a short exercise in consistency. It does not ask whether feng shui works. It asks what a practitioner is implicitly claiming when he says his method can change a career but not a habit.

The line is familiar. The master finishes the adjustment, packs his compass, and says: the feng shui is done. But you must work hard. If you do not work hard, the best adjustment in the world will come to nothing.

On the surface this is unobjectionable. Of course a person who does nothing gets nothing. Without action there is no result to speak of — not a good one, and not a bad one either.

But look at it from the angle the practitioner himself insists on: the relationship between a site and a fate.

Rank the things

He has just told you what feng shui can do. It can make you an official. It can make you rich. It can keep you from dying young. It can keep you from getting cancer.

Now compare the items on that list with the item he says it cannot do.

Which is the larger claim — that a house can determine whether you live or die, or that a house can determine whether you get out of bed? Which is more plausible as an effect of moving a wall: a change in your income, or a change in your willingness to work?

If a method can reach the large item, it can reach the small one. A force capable of turning a clerk into a magistrate is not going to be defeated by a preference for sleeping late. The claim is internally inconsistent the moment the two are placed side by side.

The reverse reading

Take the sentence seriously and it gets worse.

Is laziness hard to fix? Is it really the kind of thing that lies beyond the reach of environmental influence?

Consider what actually changes a lazy person's behaviour. Being told off in front of others. Being watched. Having the money supply cut. These are all changes in the external environment. They are not subtle, and they work — quickly, reliably, and without a compass.

So the practitioner is in an odd position. He is saying that rearranging the furniture and the surrounding hills cannot produce diligence, when plain social pressure produces it every day. If his method cannot do what a scolding does, on what basis does it claim to do what surgery does?

The child at the desk

The version of this that clients hear most often concerns children. The practitioner adjusts the house. The child still will not study.

Now the claim has to be made explicitly. If the adjustment cannot even produce a child who opens a book, what is being promised when the same practitioner says the boy will be sent abroad, will inherit a billionaire's fortune, will take over a conglomerate?

There is no version of this that survives being said out loud. A method that fails on the small, near, verifiable thing — will he do his homework this week — has no business being sold on the large, distant, unverifiable one.

Why the sentence is popular

The sentence is popular because it is free insurance. It costs the practitioner nothing and covers every outcome:

• The client prospers: the adjustment worked.
• The client fails: the client did not try.

And because it sounds like moral advice rather than a technical claim, objecting to it makes you sound like the sort of person looking for an excuse not to work. That is the trick. It is not an argument about feng shui at all. It is an argument about your character, deployed at the exact moment when the feng shui claim would otherwise have to be tested.

Anyone who says it has already told you that his method cannot be evaluated. Believe the sentence, and act accordingly.