The World's Stupidest Sentence is Now the Tallest

How borrowed feelings do the thinking for us.

A few weeks ago, a Russian couple climbed to the top of the Empire State Building in New York, a feat of genuine bravery and skill. I’m not sure which laws they broke in the process, or whether they paid any price for such reckless behaviour, but the real crime occurred when they reached the top. They unfurled a banner that said:

“When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace.”

Perhaps they thought elevating the phrase to 1,500 feet would elevate the message as well. It did not. All that preparation and sheer physical courage just to haul a fortune cookie up a spire. What next? The Eiffel Tower, presumably, to remind us that “everything happens for a reason”. Maybe then the Burj Khalifa, from whose tip we are enjoined to “live your best life” – the world’s stupidest sentence becoming, at last, the tallest.

Am I being mean? Perhaps, but I can’t help it. I’m simply the sort of person for whom clichés and platitudes have a distressing effect. An utterance like “at the end of the day, it is what it is” triggers an ancient, reptilian response in my brainstem, which identifies the phrase – correctly – as something rancid and harmful.

The novelist and critic Martin Amis took cliché with the seriousness of a general who treats the language itself as a battlefield. In his collected essays, Amis writes that all writing is a war against cliché.

“Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice”.

Amis identifies three kinds, then. The first, clichés of the pen, is familiar enough. Any half-decent writer consciously avoids dead phrases and platitudes. When someone tells me that I must “think outside the box”, I know immediately that he is inside one, that he was in fact born in the box, and that he intends to die there, comfortably, surrounded by others muttering about “synergies” and “paradigm shifts”. Clichés are sins of writing, or symptoms at least of something noxious, like little patches of verbal mould sprouting across the sentence.

But a cliché is not merely a borrowed phrase but a borrowed perception. When a phrase goes slack it’s because the thought behind it has slackened first. The words arrive pre-packaged, like a microwave dinner. Their blandness is a given but also a convenience. It saves anyone the trouble of seeing things directly. Indeed, in the mouth of a politician or bureaucrat, the cliché serves that precise purpose, which is why, somewhere at this very moment, a politician is repeating the lie that “diversity is strength” to an audience too bored to ask what the phrase actually means. That’s the point of it.

This is where Orwell still matters (and invoking Orwell in an essay like this is admittedly a cliche or sorts). His famous essay on the subject should be read by anyone who cares about the truth – which is perhaps why those indicted by it don’t. His complaint is our complaint: that ugly sentences make certain kinds of dishonesty easier to impart, because euphemism puts intellectual distance between the words and the things they’re describing. This is how the bombing of civilians becomes “pacification”, and murder becomes “liquidation”. These are phrases designed not just for politicians but for us, so that our own consciences might be soothed about the crimes committed in our name.

A cliché of the mind is more serious still. The tired phrase is the Trojan horse of the tired idea – waved through the gates because it looks like a gift, the ideology already inside the walls before anyone thought to inspect it. This is the line you thought you arrived at through your own thinking but which is simply prepackaged ideology, handed to students like freebies at the freshers’ fair. “Lived experience”, “my truth”, and “the wrong side of history” are statements with ideology already baked in. Uttering them simply advertises an ideological viewpoint and signals allegiance to progressive orthodoxy.

Mental clichés are attractive because they're both shortcuts to an agreed-upon worldview and, to the speaker's ears, morally insightful. Language is the instrument through which we discover what we actually think. The cliché exists precisely so that we may forgo that discovery. That is why hyper-educated people are so vulnerable to them. A stupid slogan, repeated often enough by “serious and clever” people in seminar rooms, lends moral standing. Nobody wants to be the person who asks what “my truth” actually means, because doing so not only ruins the mood but also commits self-sabotage at a cost of fifty grand a year.

Let’s not pretend this is a vice of the left alone, though. The right has its “woke mind virus”, its “luxury beliefs”, and (a recent entry) “suicidal empathy”. These were genuinely useful conceptual metaphors, but they’ve become exhausted by repetition – which is to say, they’ve become clichés. The people who most need to understand them have stopped listening, if they were even listening to begin with. Then there’s “red-pilled” and its variants. Once a vivid image lifted from The Matrix, it now arrives pre-dead to my ears, telling me nothing except the tribe of the person who speaks it. What does “black-pilled” mean? I’m not sure. Is there a purple-pill? A black-and-white-pill? I neither know nor care.

But the most dangerous category of cliché is the last one: clichés of the heart. Progressives have no real rivals in this category. True, the right has “family values” and the rest, but the progressive versions carry all the institutional weight today.

A cliché of the heart is what happens when feeling itself is borrowed, like an item in someone else’s wardrobe. Compassion especially arrives with a set of instructions about how to wear it and on what occasion. Outrage, empathy and tolerance all follow the same directions. This is how you know what to feel about environmental policy, immigration and gender surgery. The progressive reaches for the feeling that decent people are expected to have and wears it proudly.

It’s tedious for everyone else, as clichés are. Yet they persist, as clichés do, because we learn to ignore them – or worse, start imitating them, in a way we hardly notice at first. This is how progressivism has convinced polite society that plain speaking about obvious reality is indecent.

I’m as guilty as anyone. When someone is made a professor at Cambridge because it flatters the people who put him there, I know the lay of the land before I’ve formed a thought, because certain subjects sit in a terrain already wired for trespassing. Every misstep is an emotional landmine, every joke has to be risk-assessed in advance (something I do automatically now, and I suspect you do too).

Nor does the disease spare the phrases I’d defend, such as “protect women”, “tell the truth”, and “common sense”. A cliché doesn’t stop being a cliché because it’s true, and it’s all too easy to let a phrase stand in for the argument instead of going to the trouble of making it.

The point is that slogans and other prepackaged thinking arrive already knowing what you think, and too often do the job of thinking for you – which is to say, stop you from thinking at all. “No human being is illegal”, to take one further example, is not an argument and answers a claim almost nobody made.

Does this sound like cynicism? Perhaps. It’s hard not to be cynical in this environment. But the point is not that kindness, solidarity, or concern for the vulnerable are wasted emotions. Quite the opposite. It’s that some will treat these things with an emotional vocabulary that serves as a substitute for judgment. Once compassion is treated as a fashion accessory, any argument against your position is just “bad vibes”.

If your first response when you see 50,000 men break into another country is to say “they’re refugees fleeing the climate crisis” – as a famous English radio talk show host did this week – then you’re claiming to be morally serious while illustrating the precise opposite. Absurd as that statement is, it’s taken seriously by an incurably sanctimonious class of people for whom mass immigration is a talking point in a culture war they wage for a living. The difficult questions – What happens next? Who will pay for it? Who lives with the consequences? – never get asked because the answers embarrass the beliefs that hold their world together. This is why clichés of the heart are moral failures rather than merely literary or intellectual ones.

Progressive politics is especially vulnerable to them because compassion and tolerance are trivially easy to claim in theory while demanding little evidence in practice. Take women’s spaces. There is nothing so facile as calling a woman “hateful” for objecting to a male body in a changing room. Men, especially, find this easy because the empathy they demand of others is the very thing they lack when it matters. They cannot imagine what it is to be a girl in a changing room with a man in a dress – or out of one.

Or take the girls in Britain’s forgotten towns and cities, lost to the vocabulary of “cohesion” and “community relations”. Rape gangs are hard for bureaucrats and politicians to process in a way that doesn’t indict the beliefs they cherish, so they reach for the handbook of approved phrases put together by a comms team of failed marketers and activist journalists.

Meanwhile, the hijab becomes “empowerment”. The NGO sector applauds a woman in London for “choosing to wear it” while women in Iran are beaten for taking it off. This is cheap virtue, straight off the rack. Does my compassion look big in this?

Real compassion asks what is true even when the answers are awkward. It knows the difference between people and ideas. It can distinguish between intentions and outcomes. True compassion, above all, insists on hard reality over the comfort of a fantasy, and that takes a kind of courage the sentimentalist never has to find. J.K. Rowling has it. So does Graham Linehan, whose life was taken apart by an industry that runs on borrowed feelings – including that men can be women simply by declaring as much, and that dissenting views are evidence of bigotry. One day the entertainment industry will take a different view, but the apology won’t arrive, because it will edit the whole episode out and recast itself as the hero.

The climbers put their cliché where everyone could see it, flapping 1,500 feet above Manhattan. On the way down, the man stopped on a ledge, set up the camera and proposed. They took selfies with the ring, but they had backup in the form of the helicopter dispatched from the newsroom to circle the event and broadcast it to the rest of us – a microwave dinner served at 1,500 feet and devoured by an audience that’s lost all taste for the things that matter.

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