Thought-Terminating Clichés
On the atrophy of imagination
For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed. – Robert Lifton
I’ve been following James Lindsay’s work for a long time.
I think he has done the most, and the best, work on understanding, explaining and now developing tools against what can broadly be termed Woke Marxism, a toxic blend of Post-Modernism and Neo-Marxism.
If you think of Western Civilization as a base cultural operating system, then Woke Marxism is the virus that has infected it, that is killing it.
Each one of those terms deserves some study and understanding and one fairly quick way to wrap your head around what these terms mean is to use the public Social Justice Encyclopedia that James is gradually building:
Most of Lindsay’s work takes the form of long (to very long) podcasts that do deep dives into different aspects of this universe. Here is a great example:
The problem is that most people will never make the time to understand this stuff, which is why I was so happy to recently discover that he has been producing short Bullets of 15-20 minutes that focus on tools and practical applications of countermeasures against the rising tide of this acid bath.
I want to start boosting some of his work, and his Bullets are a great way of doing it.
I’m starting off with this recent one:
Thought-Terminating Clichés
They are a tool of “cult mind control”
A powerful tool in the Woke Marxist toolbox is something called a "thought-terminating cliché." These are short, pithy statements, demands, or slogans that are designed to stifle thought in their targets as well as in those saying them. "Check your privilege!" is a good example. So is "Trans women are women!" or "Believe all women!" No doubt, you will have been on the receiving end of hundreds of examples of this kind of damaging non-speech over the last several years, and it's helpful to have a name for it. Join host James Lindsay for this episode of New Discourses Bullets to learn all about them and their relevance to the Woke movement.
Woke Marxism is truly alive and well in Australia.
The number of email signatures I see nowadays from the mid-level and senior people in the financial services managerial class is steadily rising.
Here are just three examples of email signature footers that I have in my mailbox:
I respectfully acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I work. I pay my respects to the Elders past, present and future. I also accept the invitation in the Uluru Statement from the Heart to walk together with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.
We acknowledge that CFS is spread across many traditional lands; in the spirit of reconciliation we pay respect to the Traditional Owners of these lands and waters throughout Australia. We also pay our respect to all Elders past, present and future.
CommBank acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the lands across Australia as the continuing custodians of Country and Culture. We pay our respect to First Nations peoples and their Elders, past and present.
Anyway, back to Thought-Termination.
James reads a passage from Robert Lifton’s masterpiece with excellent commentary:
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'brainwashing' in China: Lifton, Robert Jay
Loading the Language
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliche. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. In thought reform, for instance, the phrase "bourgeois mentality" is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome concerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of alternative ideas, and the search for perspective and balance in political judgments. And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these cliches become what Richard Weaver has called "ultimate terms": either "god terms," representative of ultimate good; or "devil terms," representative of ultimate evil. In thought reform, "progress," "progressive," "liberation," "proletarian stand-points" and "the dialectic of history" fall into the former category; "capitalist," "imperialist," "exploiting classes," and "bourgeois" (mentality, liberalism, morality, superstition, greed) of course fall into the latter. Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling's phrase, "the language of nonthought."
To be sure, this kind of language exists to some degree within any cultural or organizational group, and all systems of belief depend upon it. It is in part an expression of unity and exclusiveness: as Edward Sapir put it, " 'He talks like us' is equivalent to saying 'He is one of us'." The loading is much more extreme in ideological totalism, however, since the jargon expresses the claimed certitudes of the sacred science. Also involved is an underlying assumption that language—like all other human products—can be owned and operated by the Movement. No compunctions are felt about manipulating or loading it in any fashion; the only consideration is its usefulness to the cause.
For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed. This is what Hu meant when he said, "using the same pattern of words for so long . . . you feel chained." Actually, not everyone exposed feels chained, but in effect everyone is profoundly confined by these verbal fetters. As in other aspects of totalism, this loading may provide an initial sense of insight and security, eventually followed by uneasiness. This uneasiness may result in a retreat into a rigid orthodoxy in which an individual shouts the ideological jargon all the louder in order to demonstrate his conformity, hide his own dilemma and his despair, and protect himself from the fear and guilt he would feel should he attempt to use words and phrases other than the correct ones. Or else he may adopt a complex pattern of inner division, and dutifully produce the expected cliches in public performances while in his private moments he searches for more meaningful avenues of expression. Either way, his imagination becomes increasingly dissociated from his actual life experiences and may even tend to atrophy from disuse.
It's all about words, and language.
As James says, these slogans and cliches are “linguistic weapons” designed to terminate thought, to collapse critical thinking and to invite “imagination…to atrophy”.
You cannot fight the invisible, so all of this is about “seeing” first, so as to understand, resist and fight back.
For this is a war after all.
Paul Collits recently wrote a wonderful piece that included this excellent section about the ideological capture of our universities.
Fourth, there is the massification of higher education.
This has been simply breathtaking in its simplicity and effectiveness. The Marxists in our universities that dominate teaching and research formed informal alliances with the woke human resources class which now occupies over half of the staff positions in most universities, with policy-makers who have ramped up the numbers of students they bullied into going to university and with the education bureaucrats who determine school curricula and who have dumbed down two successive generations of clueless, content-free students. Talk about a policy community! It is a perfect combination. Teach them what to think but not how to think, and fill the universities with a whole generation of potential automatons.
And finally, here is the introduction to Lindsay’s excellent book Race Marxism.
Highly recommended.
Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis
If you already know what Critical Race Theory is, the purpose of this book is to cement, refine, and deepen what you already know about it and to place what you know about it beyond any doubt. If you’re newer to Critical Race Theory and are just beginning to find out what it is, buckle your safety belts and try to hold on. This book uniquely provides a deep and scholarly but totally unvarnished explanation of Critical Race Theory from the perspective of someone who truly understands it and doesn’t believe a bit of it. The gap it fills is an important one, too. All existing deep engagements with Critical Race Theory are almost totally useless. They either come from biased cheerleaders who present it in an unrealistically positive light or from naive scholars who can’t see the ideological forest for the philosophical trees that compose it. This book is the first comprehensive attempt at a remedy to this civilization-threatening problem, and it has been written, perhaps, only just in time.
The underlying premise of this book is simple. We should not attempt to cure what we don’t understand, and attempting to cure Critical Race Theory is an obligation of every person in this world who wishes to remain free. Therefore, the purpose of this book is to aid you in understanding Critical Race Theory for what it is: a belief system that can be summarized entirely in two words, which are given as the title of this volume: Race Marxism. It is also to encourage you to understand the need to resist this scourge against the free people of the world and humanity and hopefully to take smart, strategic steps to stop this monster before it does the damage it will inevitably do if it is not halted—and soon.
Understanding comes first. Therefore, this book begins with an attempt to define Critical Race Theory, both in my own words and in its. This task, we are told by its adherents, is impossible for those who don’t embrace the Theory. This is a typical Marxian trick, as you will see. The job here is done well. The first chapter defines Critical Race Theory in the usual approach, through explanation, and the second is given to defining it in terms of its beliefs. The third and fourth add the historical philosophical context that cements the claim that Critical Race Theory arises from Marxist thought and its predecessors in an undeniable way. The fifth chapter proceeds from the maxim that Critical Race Theory is as Critical Race Theory does and explains the “praxis” of CRT (the Theory put into practice, as every Marxian Theory must, by definition—the point, after all, of understanding the world is to change it, so Marx himself tells us). The final chapter offers some suggestions about what we can begin to do about the problem of Critical Race Theory.
The analysis in this book is thereby offered humbly to the world and its free citizens as a means of understanding and resisting this terrible ideology at a crucial moment in history, where it threatens us all in a way far bigger than most of us realize. As the author, I wish to make clear that I did not come to the conclusions of this book easily and, in fact, resisted for many years the central contention of the book—that Critical Race Theory is race Marxism—until the evidence overwhelmed me. It is my hope that those who read it will find it not only helpful but useful in turning back this advancing tide before it is too late. As I write this (in mid-August 2021), I am optimistic that this is possible, thanks to the valuable work that many have produced and put into action over the last few years, often at great personal sacrifice. I am honored to have contributed to this and am humbled by the excellent work others have done and continue to do in this incredibly important endeavor.
Thanks for being here.
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It isn’t woke Marxism that is killing the culture. The culture (a development of Christian faith and practice) is nearly dead from a lack of faith, and other virtues. The Marxists fill the void where people, having lost the desire for truth, and the ability to recognize it, accept any old lies the propagandists throw their way.
"Thought terminating cliché" — superb analysis.
(We just mustn't let it's use become a thought terminating cliché…)