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Was introduced to this concept some years ago, and have found since that challenging a thought-terminating cliché is seldom welcome. In group settings and often
by motohagiography 5y ago
Was introduced to this concept some years ago, and have found since that challenging a thought-terminating cliché is seldom welcome. In group settings and often on teams, most people are content to be aligned to the perception of what represents power, with no thought as to whether it is moored to reality, truth, or has consistency with anything external. These clichés are a mechanism that facilitates that non-relationship to the world.
A friend recently observed that he had more in common with people in his opposite political tribe than he did with ostensible centerists, and he said it was because the people on the other team also believed something, where the ones in the middle were in-effect, nihilists, or believing nothing. I mention it because when I thought of nihilisim, I always interpreted it as an active kind of anti-belief, or against all belief, instead of a bland passivity, detached from a moral anchor or foundation. For this kind of nihilist, the thought-terminating cliché is the necessary boundary of their ontology about the world. It's the person saying, "it is what it is," as they do horrible things. If you have ever spent time in bureaucracies, it is easy to see how a bunch of people trained to accept small injustices passively can be mobilized into an atrocity machine. They're "de-moralized," which we misuse to describe frustrated efforts, when what it means is that by lacking roots to beliefs and replacing them with this thought-termination, they do not exercise moral agency. They're just following orders.
I've concluded the clichés are worse than thought terminating, they are jingoistic slogans of nihilism people repeat to justify and release themselves from moral agency.
All this is to say, it's an important concept. Thought-terminating clichés are the mental reference points for the origins of what we understand now as the banality of evil.
- ehnto 5y agoI have noticed it's more prevalent in people with very strong routines, perhaps mundane jobs and a very structured life. I imagine it's because they've got strong incentive to maintain the status quo but they're also tired of talking about the same thing over and over, so they serve as social shortcuts to getting to a new topic (or getting you to go away). One other thing I see it used for is to divert from negative topics people are tired of re-hashing. Talking about drought in a farm town gets pretty tiresome as the months go on, that's when you start getting the "it is what it is" statements. They care really, they just gain nothing from talking about it constantly.
- darkerside 5y agoI don't disagree with your principle. That said, we need to release ourselves from thoughts at times. We can adjudicate forever whether the blue you see is the same as the blue I see, or which is the superior potato chip, or whether to take the road less traveled or not. And if we remain locked in eternal debate, we end up like Sylvia Plath's protagonist, watching the figs shrivel up as life passes us by. People sometimes learn of Kahneman's system 1 and system 2 thinking and decide it's a failure to ever use system 1. No! System 1 is used for most of our day, to free us up for the decisions that really matter. An underrated aspect of the art of making decisions is deciding which decisions to make deliberately.
- mousepilot 5y agolol this is like a two paragraph thought terminator.
- inter_netuser 5y ago"Thought-terminating clichés are the mental reference points for the origins of what we understand now as the banality of evil." there is research into this? how did we get from "zomg conspiracy" to "banality of evil"?
- herval 5y agoHannah Arendt said it in that very book: "[Eichmann] was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché," and he used these clichés as a mental defense mechanism to avoid thinking about what he was doing for the Nazi Party." https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9#cite_ref-4 https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
- howaboutnope 5y ago> The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules." -- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" > When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. -- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" Keep this in the back of your head when you hear some SV gurus speak, and see what you can notice.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]