I'm a big fan of Martin Amis, though reading his essays is a sharp lesson in humility. I highly recommend 'The War Against Cliché' if you want to see a master essayist at work. He's very funny, too.
If you found this piece interesting, you'll probably like my one on academic writing (linked above).
And if you missed last week's mammoth essay on existential freedom, do give it a read. It's among my best work.
Thanks as always to my paid subscribers, who make this possible. I'll respond to comments over the coming days.
Superb essay as always Frederick! At the risk of sounding like a suck-up, I love it when I get up in the morning - more accurately at the 'Crack of Noon' in my case, nyuk, nyuk - and see that you've written another post because I know it will be thoughtful and stimulating - as are most of your commenters. I'll never regret subscribing to your substack and encourage others to as well. Money well spent. As a matter of fact "It's a No-Brainer!".
Ha! Thanks, Attila – much appreciated. I'll happily take a cliché deployed in full knowledge of the crime. Grateful as always for your generous support. "Onwards and upwards!"
This is brilliant. I also have a reptilian reaction to cliches and now you put this feeling into words. Cliches are the instruments by which ideologies suppress thinking. I recall my childhood in the USSR -- we where waterboarded by slogans, from kindergarten reading books and banners on the streets, to TV and media. Importantly, it was safe to express yourself in slogans. You could not go wrong repeating the official CPSU slogans -- but expressing your thoughts in your own words was open to interpretation -- and that could land you in trouble because the interpretation could deem your thoughts to be not sufficiently pure.
Today, the Woke speak in slogans. Slogans create an intellectual shortcut -- why engage with an argument about affirmative action, when you can just hurl back "level the playing field"? And indeed these cliches is a way to signal your tribal allegiance -- "nuance", "guardrails", "shared values", "privilege" -- you can identify a progressive from just a few sentences. In fact, ChatGPT is very good at doing it -- I often use it to rank personal statements for Woke index -- and it uses the code words to do so.
Thank you, Anna. I greatly appreciate your comment, which is more a testimony than simple agreement, and is valuable for that reason. What you describe from your childhood seems completely foreign until one realises this is exactly what's happening in the classrooms of the West now. As for "waterboarded by slogans", this is exactly the kind of phrase I wish I'd come up with.
no person is illegal [and/or immigrants and refugees welcome]
love is love
diversity makes us stronger
kindness is everything
all are welcome here
Let's look at what these slogans really refer to.
"We believe ..." The opening clause affirms belief, like religious belief, not the end result of rational thinking. Leftism is actually a secular religion, and an idolatrous one. The sign owner wants us also to share his or her faith in these slogans. Anyone who disagrees with them is a bad person, a bigot and racist and misogynist like Archie Bunker, and should be humiliated. Such a person probably voted for Trump, who is evil incarnate, literally worse than Hitler.
"Science is real ..." The reference to science is presumably climate science, but ignores the science of sexual reproduction in mammals, consistent with trans ideology. Gender can be defined scientifically with reference to chromosomes and sexual dimorphism. They don't like that. Leftists, as you might recall, perverted and corrupted science during the plandemic by ignoring medical data that threw into question the necessity of the lockdowns and mandates. They wanted medical tyranny implemented for political reasons, as a form of social engineering, to bring about the Great Reset. Fauci identified himself with science, which is called scientism, or scientific fundamentalism, which ignores the principle of falsifiability and sees science as an end product, not as an open-ended process. As for climate science, it too has been politically influenced to justify greater funding and state control. I am not against climate science, having studied it, but I also know that the IPCC is a political organization. So the sign should read: we believe in scientism, not science.
"Women's rights are human rights ..." This is a veiled reference to the "right" to abortion. Ironic, since abortion actually violates the most fundamental human right, which is not to be murdered. The human rights of the unborn child are violated for the sake of the mother's choice to not be inconvenienced by having a child - which many later regret. Pretending that's a human right is absurd. And if the slogan "womens rights are human rights" has nothing to do with abortion and should read at face value, then it's redundant: women are human, so of course their rights are human rights. So are men's rights, and the rights of children. Interesting also how Leftists talk of "rights" (a concept from the Enlightenment) but actually don't mean individual rights, such as freedom of speech or freedom of religion or the right to refuse an experimental drug. They are distorting the concept of rights to really mean the right of the collective to infringe on human rights, as happened during the plandemic. You'll notice that feminists are silent when women's rights are brutally violated by Islamists but very vocal about nonsense like manspreading or mansplaining. Where are the rights of the women assaulted and murdered on Oct 7th, for instance? So-called human rights tribunals are not there to protect individual rights; they exist to legally and financially enforce Leftist ideology, such as the enforcement of hate-speech laws that violate freedom of speech. Leftists have twisted the meaning of rights, divorcing them from universal Enlightenment principles, and now use them to justify collectivist 'progressive' political goals -- the aggressive pursuit of which infrequently violates actual rights.
"Black lives matter ..." This is a radical revolutionary Marxist movement that caused violent riots in 2020, got people killed, advocated for the murder of the police, and stole millions of dollars. Yet it was endorsed by Democrats, the mainstream media, big corporations like Walmart, and Leftist billionaires. Some police also took the knee. The idea is that black people are somehow oppressed in Western nations, which is absolutely not true. It seems to be an excuse for anti-white racism, violence, theft, and breaking the law. Interesting how unborn black lives don't matter to BLM, or victims of black-on-black crime, exposing the hypocrisy of the movement. MLK distanced himself from the early version of this, the Black Power movement, because he was strictly for non-violence. The Black Power movement was openly Marxist and violent. It continues to this day with BLM. What's new is the mainstream endorsement of this terrible, racist ideology.
"No person is illegal ..." This refers to the mass immigration of millions of undocumented persons in the USA. The person himself might not be illegal, but his actions in crossing the border illegally are. What is the Democrats' solution? It used to be border policing and deportations as well, as recently as the Obama administration, but under Biden, millions were allowed in and even bussed and flown to northern states. If you talk to Democrats, they either deny this or endorse it. They really believe that deportations started with Trump. They demonize ICE, rather than thanking them for their service in protecting the borders. From their perspective, it's okay if criminals, rapists, gang members, and terrorists flood into the country because "diversity" is good and racism is bad. The same thing is happening legally as well in every Western nation through mass immigration, fundamentally changing the West and not for the better. Liberal white people who support mass immigration are essentially voting for their own replacement and for the transformation of the West from a high-trust to a low-trust society full of crime and third-world problems, such as overcrowding, squalor, acid attacks, honour killings, Islamic terrorism, etc. They are voting for the incremental breakdown of society. They won't let migrants into their homes or their upper-class neighbourhoods, but they are happy for working-class whites to be replaced, for rents and housing prices to go up, for crime to go up, for drug cartels and human traffickers to take over, for greater strain on public education and health care and infrastructure, and in the end, the sucide of the most free and prosperous civilization in human history. All so they can declare what good people they are. The only thing you can say in favor of mass immigration is that it theoretically increases the GDP through more workers, but at a huge social cost to the host society that's not really worth it.
"Love is love ..." This refers to the LGBTQ agenda. I have no issue with gay people who keep their private lives private, but we all know that in recent years, Leftists have imposed this agenda on all of us, resulting in minors getting irreversible mastectomies and castrations, and the corruption of children through the education system. It started with gay marriage but has ballooned into something much larger: it has been weaponized to radically weaken and transform the West. Police and military have been forced into it. Sports teams and athletes. TV and movies normalize it. Pride flags on government properties and countless businesses. It's clearly a highly organized and well-funded political agenda that even some gay people disagree with, are embarrassed by, and wish to separate from. They want LBG but not T. Now it has spilled over into some Leftists advocating for pedophilia. More young people than ever identify as gay or trans, far beyond normal baselines, indicating that they have been indoctrinated into it and it is not their natural predilection.
"Diversity makes us stronger ..." Mayor Kahn of London likes to use this one a lot. It makes Islamic terrorism stronger, but it weakens London and all other Western cities and towns. Every city and town in the West has seen a massive influx of immigrants (both legal and illegal) from China, India, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa in recent decades. Many are decent folks and hard-working and have good values. They assimilate and add to the West. But many others do not assimilate. They detract from the host society and are parasitic. They are not deported, unfortunately. They take over incrementally, harming everyone, including other immigrants. The erasure of whites in the West -- which they founded and built up -- is the gradual suicide of the West. Some like Mayor Kahn or Mamdani should not even be allowed in the UK or USA. Instead, they were elected to high offices and used those offices to destroy the host country. Virtue-signalling Leftists who go along with this are useful idiots of their own demise. "Diversity" in DEI hiring just means not hiring white men (unless they are trans). It is racist and misandric.
"Kindness is everything" and "all are welcome here." That's funny coming from such judgmental and often hateful people. They actively demonize and exclude traditional Christians, conservatives, white men, Trump voters, and anyone else who dares to disagree with their worldview, or doesn't fit into the Utopian vision they share. They are not kind, and they are not welcoming to people with different points of view, and will often act to censor them, doxx them, get them fired, or otherwise ruin their lives. To be fair, many Democrats and liberals are not hateful or unkind, but the movement leaders they follow are, and so ultimately is the ideology they subscribe to, whether they know it or not.
These lawn signs are a way of declaring "we are good people" (and by implication that Trump voters or conservatives are not). But when I see these signs, I don't think "oh they must be good people who are kind and tolerant." No, I think these people are stupid followers of bad ideologies they don't understand, who take positions on complex political issues based on emotion, not reason.
And I also think that if I happen to run into such people, I must be very careful what I say around them because I know they can eaily taken offense over a single word. For example, when I met a guy I used to be friends with years earlier, he called me a fascist for supporting Trump. Another guy I met took offence that I was not a fan of feminism and worked to get me fired from my job. And he succeeded.
I find these sorts of people to be dangerous, hateful and angry, and now try to avoid them -- but they are everywhere because Leftism is a world religion infecting the minds of billions now. It has taken over the West, usurping traditional Judeo-Christianity, common sense and Enlightenment principles in favour of collectivism, Trump Derangement Syndrome, gynocentrism and misandry, anti-white racism, groupthink, and neo-Marxism. I agree with the author above that such slogans are not a good replacement for thought. They actually work to erase thought. They are Orwellian in that sense.
Such slogans are the antithesis of thought. That's why you find them used in totalitarian societies, e.g., Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Empire, One Leader), Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz (The common good before the individual good) , Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), Workers of the world, unite!, The Five-Year Plan in Four Years!, Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live, To rebel is justified! (Zao fan you li), Never forget class struggle! (Qie ji jie ji dou zheng), Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Destroy the Four Olds! (Po si jiu), Clear away all pests! (landlords and political dissidents), Smash the canine heads of the reactionaries!, Study Chairman Mao’s writings, follow his words, act according to his directives. Or now the modern version of the above: "diversity is our strength" and "black lives matter."
Brilliant points ThinkforYourself! I couldn't agree more! I've learned that trying to argue logically with or trying to persuade these self absorbed leftists is a fool's errand - a monumental waste of time - because they are adherents to a false religion and can't be argued out of it any more than I could be argued out of my own Faith. I've learned that the only proper response to any of them is a loud and hearty "Go eff yourself!"
I modified that last phrase out of respect for Frederick.
So true. As a friend of mine used to say, "eff the effing effers" :) You cannot win an argument with someone who is indoctrinated into an irrational ideology. But such people can be deprogrammed by removing them from the social milieu where they receive affirmation for their mistaken views. The use of reason is key. For example, I used to think feminism meant women's rights, but slowly realized through bitter experience that it was really just the hatred of men. I got rid of my Facebook profile, and stopped virtue-signalling on social media. I quit activist causes that I'd been part of for more than two decades. That was hard but I did it. I spent a few years reading and thinking, offline. I de-programmed myself. I was a Leftist for 25 years and now am a heretic and apostate, much like an ex-Muslim or ex-cult member. Thus I feel it necessary, a moral duty, to speak out about it now. I am not alone either. There are thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of apostate Leftists who see through neo-Marxism clearly, but for years were duped into being fanatical and unwitting followers of it. I credit my transformation to the anti-feminist thinker Janice Fiamengo, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (who said "think for yourself!"), and to God, who gave me the capacity to reason my way out of deeply ingrained false beliefs towards some semblance of sanity and Christian faith. As a consequence, I left academia, which is wholly corrupted, and started a new life, for the better. But after I did this, Leftism's reach greatly amplified -- around 2016, when Trump was elected. The Left panicked and went into overdrive, giving us a decade of planned revolutionary social upheaval through ideological subversion. I might have saved myself, but my country is effed by these effing effers.
Heh. I have a t-shirt hidden in a drawer that says "Eff You You Effing Eff!" I plan to wear it if - heaven forbid - I ever have to make my last stand. Which is all I'd be capable of at this point in my life, fire and maneuver being beyond my abilities at this point. Reminds me of a saying I read long ago - "Lord, if today is the day You take me, let it be in the middle of a pile of hot brass". Heh again.
I think I may need to sit with this for awhile. A huge pivot in my thinking. I may have to abandon my personal lived experience to recognize my privilege and oppression of brown bodies.
And don't forget that the intersectional matrix of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy weaponizes epistemic violence to marginalize racialized bodies, thereby reifying subaltern oppression within neoliberal structures. This systemic arrangement devalues the knowledge systems of brown people, reducing human beings to commodified units within a dominant cultural narrative. Consequently, institutional hierarchies continuously reproduce these power dynamics to exclude marginalized voices from the centers of economic and social influence. Yeah, don't forget that pearl of wisdom, whatever it means.
Imagine going to all that trouble and risk just to display an overgrown bumper sticker. The world's tallest anticlimax.
I truly enjoyed this meditation on the nature of cliches. For a moment I thought, Well doesn't any expression uttered often enough become one of those? Actually, no. For something to reach cliche status it must fail at an elementary level. It cannot be literally true. It must be trite, or simplistic, or intellectually dishonest, or it must serve some pretension. "Time is money" is NOT cliche because it rings true and is a quite useful reminder. "What does not kill you makes you stronger" IS cliche because it fetishizes suffering. It is also objectively untrue; some things just hurt you, full stop, and leave you permanently damaged.
We are surrounded by cliches now because it's a performative world. Originality is hard, but posturing is easy. On hundred thousand likes are ever just one flashy, banner-waving stunt away.
There are few things more irritating than someone offering you a hackneyed platitude when going through a tough or horrific situation. Whenever anyone tells me that “things work out in the end”, I’m always tempted to give them a list of horrific historical incidents in which things didn’t work out well for most of the people involved. Good luck trying to console someone with Stage 4 ass cancer that “everything happens for a reason.”
"They're refugees fleeing the climate crisis"!!! lolol
How many of those Moroccan men would have given that answer!?
But there are some things so stupid only a [journalist/politician/professor] would say them.
Our thinking classes have given themselves an ideological lobotomy yet don't know it.
They feel the power of love when they look in the mirror (or when they hear their own bloviating voices) and the love of power for the rest of the day.
We're living through some terrible combo of "Camp of the Saints" and "Idiocracy".
Thank YOU, for introducing Martin Amis to ME! I'm 68 and can't believe I've not run across his name before now! Old dog learns new........y'know.......
Some people proudly frame such brainless slogans and adorn their homes with them. It makes me feel kinda sick when I see them, because I can't help but imagine being such a vapid and dull person for a few seconds.
I have just been discussing much the same topic on another thread. I think the problem is lack of context and allowing meaning to widen from the specific. If I am talking about the discovery that what actually burns during combustion is oxygen, and not phlogiston, then in that case the scientific understanding has in fact been a paradigm shift. That is what the term means. It is an accurate usage, not a cliche. On the other hand if I am discussing being able to see something in the light of a different form of, say, politics or economics, am I not talking about a shift in the frame of reference, rather than a paradigm?
As a young person I had a large vocabulary, gleaned from wide reading. I always tried to use the most appropriate word, or phrase, that would convey my specific meaning. Then I went to university as an adult and discovered that it seemed to be preferable to use words that sounded fancy, even if the context was inappropriate. It made one sound clever! In fact, it almost seemed as if deliberately using the wrong word was fine, provided it sounded like you knew what you were talking about. (Even when you didn't.)
Different academic disciplines and different industries also develop jargon that has a specific meaning for those who understand it. Others who are peripheral to the actual meaning hear the word or phrase and start using it without quite understanding the specific meaning. If this is then picked up by an author or journalist and is "released into the wild" it starts to change in meaning. There comes a stage where the world or phrase can have several, sometimes contradictory, meanings at the same time. Eventually the term in usage can end up complety different to the original meaning. Consider the word "decimate". Originally a punishment in the Roman legions where one soldier in ten was chosen at random, the word has come to mean "to utterly devastate".
Bring back context and specitivity, please. I've never seen "The Matrix". I know nothing about the colour of pills.
You're right about context, and thanks for the example of "paradigm shift", which earns its place in a chemistry lab but gets borrowed for effect in a seminar room. A lot of it is just posturing to sound clever, and the language of postmodernism is the exemplar – impenetrable by design. At other times, the lack of context is the point. The pill language you mention is a good example of in-group tribal signalling.
I think linguistic cliches have a role, certainly in casual conversation. They convey a concept that is widely understood. "We need to think out of the box" is an assertion that what is being done is not working, and that more than just knee jerk repetition or twiddling of dials is required.
Cliches that relate to causes are more problematic. They are useful for identifying friend or foe, but they reinforce the conclusion the cause has already agreed upon, and discourage continued thought or persuasion on a topic that is clearly contentious. They are the opposite of "thinking outside the box", and serve as mantras to reinforce belief and marshall troops, while denying the pursuit of truth (it is already determined) or compromise.
But how do you counter absurdities such as "trans women are women" with more than a simple but ineffective "they are not", without resorting to what almost inevitably becomes some other cliche?
The very fact the mantra has been pronounced requires denial, while also signaling that any serious engagement of the topic will be an impossible waste of time. I suppose, once one recognizes this pattern, you can learn to walk away. I'm increasingly exiting with something along the lines of "if you can't make arguments instead of assertions, please don't bother", but this risks becoming a cliche of it's own!
At any rate, I agree cliche should largely be avoided in formal writing, and I suspect the adoption of cliches as slogans is the cue to question everything that follows, and that the cliches of thought and heart are likely to lie beneath.
I'm much more forgiving of clichés than the piece suggests. I was being a little mean for laughs. I use them in conversation and short texts, as we all do, because they're usually shortcuts and often true. Only in essay writing do I make an effort to avoid them, because fresh imagery is more enlivening and forces me to think more clearly about what I'm saying.
Slogans are a different matter and I avoid using them always and everywhere unless I'm being ironic. That's the point I think we agree on: slogans let a person off from the work of thinking, which is why demagogues and mass movements love them.
The problem with slogans like "trans women are women" is that they're unfalsifiable on their own terms. It's a claim about identity pretending to be one about biology. My response is the same as yours: if you can't make an argument instead of an assertion, then don't bother. It's essential to intellectual honesty and not remotely clichéd in pen, mind or heart, in my view.
I'm a big fan of Martin Amis, though reading his essays is a sharp lesson in humility. I highly recommend 'The War Against Cliché' if you want to see a master essayist at work. He's very funny, too.
If you found this piece interesting, you'll probably like my one on academic writing (linked above).
And if you missed last week's mammoth essay on existential freedom, do give it a read. It's among my best work.
Thanks as always to my paid subscribers, who make this possible. I'll respond to comments over the coming days.
Thanks for reading!
Superb essay as always Frederick! At the risk of sounding like a suck-up, I love it when I get up in the morning - more accurately at the 'Crack of Noon' in my case, nyuk, nyuk - and see that you've written another post because I know it will be thoughtful and stimulating - as are most of your commenters. I'll never regret subscribing to your substack and encourage others to as well. Money well spent. As a matter of fact "It's a No-Brainer!".
I couldn't resist ending with a cliche. :)
Ha! Thanks, Attila – much appreciated. I'll happily take a cliché deployed in full knowledge of the crime. Grateful as always for your generous support. "Onwards and upwards!"
I thought the phrase "Black Lives Matter" had to be the dumbest, most manipulative slogan I had ever heard, until “No human being is illegal” arose.
And the loud denunciation of, "All lives matter."
This is brilliant. I also have a reptilian reaction to cliches and now you put this feeling into words. Cliches are the instruments by which ideologies suppress thinking. I recall my childhood in the USSR -- we where waterboarded by slogans, from kindergarten reading books and banners on the streets, to TV and media. Importantly, it was safe to express yourself in slogans. You could not go wrong repeating the official CPSU slogans -- but expressing your thoughts in your own words was open to interpretation -- and that could land you in trouble because the interpretation could deem your thoughts to be not sufficiently pure.
Today, the Woke speak in slogans. Slogans create an intellectual shortcut -- why engage with an argument about affirmative action, when you can just hurl back "level the playing field"? And indeed these cliches is a way to signal your tribal allegiance -- "nuance", "guardrails", "shared values", "privilege" -- you can identify a progressive from just a few sentences. In fact, ChatGPT is very good at doing it -- I often use it to rank personal statements for Woke index -- and it uses the code words to do so.
Thank you, Anna. I greatly appreciate your comment, which is more a testimony than simple agreement, and is valuable for that reason. What you describe from your childhood seems completely foreign until one realises this is exactly what's happening in the classrooms of the West now. As for "waterboarded by slogans", this is exactly the kind of phrase I wish I'd come up with.
This is diabolically funny. And satisfyingly accurate to read. Bravo.
Thanks, Lucy! 😄
One sees virtue-signalling lawn signs that say:
We believe [or "In our America"]
science is real
womens rights are human rights
black lives matter
no person is illegal [and/or immigrants and refugees welcome]
love is love
diversity makes us stronger
kindness is everything
all are welcome here
Let's look at what these slogans really refer to.
"We believe ..." The opening clause affirms belief, like religious belief, not the end result of rational thinking. Leftism is actually a secular religion, and an idolatrous one. The sign owner wants us also to share his or her faith in these slogans. Anyone who disagrees with them is a bad person, a bigot and racist and misogynist like Archie Bunker, and should be humiliated. Such a person probably voted for Trump, who is evil incarnate, literally worse than Hitler.
"Science is real ..." The reference to science is presumably climate science, but ignores the science of sexual reproduction in mammals, consistent with trans ideology. Gender can be defined scientifically with reference to chromosomes and sexual dimorphism. They don't like that. Leftists, as you might recall, perverted and corrupted science during the plandemic by ignoring medical data that threw into question the necessity of the lockdowns and mandates. They wanted medical tyranny implemented for political reasons, as a form of social engineering, to bring about the Great Reset. Fauci identified himself with science, which is called scientism, or scientific fundamentalism, which ignores the principle of falsifiability and sees science as an end product, not as an open-ended process. As for climate science, it too has been politically influenced to justify greater funding and state control. I am not against climate science, having studied it, but I also know that the IPCC is a political organization. So the sign should read: we believe in scientism, not science.
"Women's rights are human rights ..." This is a veiled reference to the "right" to abortion. Ironic, since abortion actually violates the most fundamental human right, which is not to be murdered. The human rights of the unborn child are violated for the sake of the mother's choice to not be inconvenienced by having a child - which many later regret. Pretending that's a human right is absurd. And if the slogan "womens rights are human rights" has nothing to do with abortion and should read at face value, then it's redundant: women are human, so of course their rights are human rights. So are men's rights, and the rights of children. Interesting also how Leftists talk of "rights" (a concept from the Enlightenment) but actually don't mean individual rights, such as freedom of speech or freedom of religion or the right to refuse an experimental drug. They are distorting the concept of rights to really mean the right of the collective to infringe on human rights, as happened during the plandemic. You'll notice that feminists are silent when women's rights are brutally violated by Islamists but very vocal about nonsense like manspreading or mansplaining. Where are the rights of the women assaulted and murdered on Oct 7th, for instance? So-called human rights tribunals are not there to protect individual rights; they exist to legally and financially enforce Leftist ideology, such as the enforcement of hate-speech laws that violate freedom of speech. Leftists have twisted the meaning of rights, divorcing them from universal Enlightenment principles, and now use them to justify collectivist 'progressive' political goals -- the aggressive pursuit of which infrequently violates actual rights.
"Black lives matter ..." This is a radical revolutionary Marxist movement that caused violent riots in 2020, got people killed, advocated for the murder of the police, and stole millions of dollars. Yet it was endorsed by Democrats, the mainstream media, big corporations like Walmart, and Leftist billionaires. Some police also took the knee. The idea is that black people are somehow oppressed in Western nations, which is absolutely not true. It seems to be an excuse for anti-white racism, violence, theft, and breaking the law. Interesting how unborn black lives don't matter to BLM, or victims of black-on-black crime, exposing the hypocrisy of the movement. MLK distanced himself from the early version of this, the Black Power movement, because he was strictly for non-violence. The Black Power movement was openly Marxist and violent. It continues to this day with BLM. What's new is the mainstream endorsement of this terrible, racist ideology.
I continue through the list in the comment below
continuation of comment …
"No person is illegal ..." This refers to the mass immigration of millions of undocumented persons in the USA. The person himself might not be illegal, but his actions in crossing the border illegally are. What is the Democrats' solution? It used to be border policing and deportations as well, as recently as the Obama administration, but under Biden, millions were allowed in and even bussed and flown to northern states. If you talk to Democrats, they either deny this or endorse it. They really believe that deportations started with Trump. They demonize ICE, rather than thanking them for their service in protecting the borders. From their perspective, it's okay if criminals, rapists, gang members, and terrorists flood into the country because "diversity" is good and racism is bad. The same thing is happening legally as well in every Western nation through mass immigration, fundamentally changing the West and not for the better. Liberal white people who support mass immigration are essentially voting for their own replacement and for the transformation of the West from a high-trust to a low-trust society full of crime and third-world problems, such as overcrowding, squalor, acid attacks, honour killings, Islamic terrorism, etc. They are voting for the incremental breakdown of society. They won't let migrants into their homes or their upper-class neighbourhoods, but they are happy for working-class whites to be replaced, for rents and housing prices to go up, for crime to go up, for drug cartels and human traffickers to take over, for greater strain on public education and health care and infrastructure, and in the end, the sucide of the most free and prosperous civilization in human history. All so they can declare what good people they are. The only thing you can say in favor of mass immigration is that it theoretically increases the GDP through more workers, but at a huge social cost to the host society that's not really worth it.
"Love is love ..." This refers to the LGBTQ agenda. I have no issue with gay people who keep their private lives private, but we all know that in recent years, Leftists have imposed this agenda on all of us, resulting in minors getting irreversible mastectomies and castrations, and the corruption of children through the education system. It started with gay marriage but has ballooned into something much larger: it has been weaponized to radically weaken and transform the West. Police and military have been forced into it. Sports teams and athletes. TV and movies normalize it. Pride flags on government properties and countless businesses. It's clearly a highly organized and well-funded political agenda that even some gay people disagree with, are embarrassed by, and wish to separate from. They want LBG but not T. Now it has spilled over into some Leftists advocating for pedophilia. More young people than ever identify as gay or trans, far beyond normal baselines, indicating that they have been indoctrinated into it and it is not their natural predilection.
"Diversity makes us stronger ..." Mayor Kahn of London likes to use this one a lot. It makes Islamic terrorism stronger, but it weakens London and all other Western cities and towns. Every city and town in the West has seen a massive influx of immigrants (both legal and illegal) from China, India, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa in recent decades. Many are decent folks and hard-working and have good values. They assimilate and add to the West. But many others do not assimilate. They detract from the host society and are parasitic. They are not deported, unfortunately. They take over incrementally, harming everyone, including other immigrants. The erasure of whites in the West -- which they founded and built up -- is the gradual suicide of the West. Some like Mayor Kahn or Mamdani should not even be allowed in the UK or USA. Instead, they were elected to high offices and used those offices to destroy the host country. Virtue-signalling Leftists who go along with this are useful idiots of their own demise. "Diversity" in DEI hiring just means not hiring white men (unless they are trans). It is racist and misandric.
"Kindness is everything" and "all are welcome here." That's funny coming from such judgmental and often hateful people. They actively demonize and exclude traditional Christians, conservatives, white men, Trump voters, and anyone else who dares to disagree with their worldview, or doesn't fit into the Utopian vision they share. They are not kind, and they are not welcoming to people with different points of view, and will often act to censor them, doxx them, get them fired, or otherwise ruin their lives. To be fair, many Democrats and liberals are not hateful or unkind, but the movement leaders they follow are, and so ultimately is the ideology they subscribe to, whether they know it or not.
These lawn signs are a way of declaring "we are good people" (and by implication that Trump voters or conservatives are not). But when I see these signs, I don't think "oh they must be good people who are kind and tolerant." No, I think these people are stupid followers of bad ideologies they don't understand, who take positions on complex political issues based on emotion, not reason.
And I also think that if I happen to run into such people, I must be very careful what I say around them because I know they can eaily taken offense over a single word. For example, when I met a guy I used to be friends with years earlier, he called me a fascist for supporting Trump. Another guy I met took offence that I was not a fan of feminism and worked to get me fired from my job. And he succeeded.
I find these sorts of people to be dangerous, hateful and angry, and now try to avoid them -- but they are everywhere because Leftism is a world religion infecting the minds of billions now. It has taken over the West, usurping traditional Judeo-Christianity, common sense and Enlightenment principles in favour of collectivism, Trump Derangement Syndrome, gynocentrism and misandry, anti-white racism, groupthink, and neo-Marxism. I agree with the author above that such slogans are not a good replacement for thought. They actually work to erase thought. They are Orwellian in that sense.
Such slogans are the antithesis of thought. That's why you find them used in totalitarian societies, e.g., Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Empire, One Leader), Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz (The common good before the individual good) , Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), Workers of the world, unite!, The Five-Year Plan in Four Years!, Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live, To rebel is justified! (Zao fan you li), Never forget class struggle! (Qie ji jie ji dou zheng), Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Destroy the Four Olds! (Po si jiu), Clear away all pests! (landlords and political dissidents), Smash the canine heads of the reactionaries!, Study Chairman Mao’s writings, follow his words, act according to his directives. Or now the modern version of the above: "diversity is our strength" and "black lives matter."
Brilliant points ThinkforYourself! I couldn't agree more! I've learned that trying to argue logically with or trying to persuade these self absorbed leftists is a fool's errand - a monumental waste of time - because they are adherents to a false religion and can't be argued out of it any more than I could be argued out of my own Faith. I've learned that the only proper response to any of them is a loud and hearty "Go eff yourself!"
I modified that last phrase out of respect for Frederick.
So true. As a friend of mine used to say, "eff the effing effers" :) You cannot win an argument with someone who is indoctrinated into an irrational ideology. But such people can be deprogrammed by removing them from the social milieu where they receive affirmation for their mistaken views. The use of reason is key. For example, I used to think feminism meant women's rights, but slowly realized through bitter experience that it was really just the hatred of men. I got rid of my Facebook profile, and stopped virtue-signalling on social media. I quit activist causes that I'd been part of for more than two decades. That was hard but I did it. I spent a few years reading and thinking, offline. I de-programmed myself. I was a Leftist for 25 years and now am a heretic and apostate, much like an ex-Muslim or ex-cult member. Thus I feel it necessary, a moral duty, to speak out about it now. I am not alone either. There are thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of apostate Leftists who see through neo-Marxism clearly, but for years were duped into being fanatical and unwitting followers of it. I credit my transformation to the anti-feminist thinker Janice Fiamengo, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (who said "think for yourself!"), and to God, who gave me the capacity to reason my way out of deeply ingrained false beliefs towards some semblance of sanity and Christian faith. As a consequence, I left academia, which is wholly corrupted, and started a new life, for the better. But after I did this, Leftism's reach greatly amplified -- around 2016, when Trump was elected. The Left panicked and went into overdrive, giving us a decade of planned revolutionary social upheaval through ideological subversion. I might have saved myself, but my country is effed by these effing effers.
Heh. I have a t-shirt hidden in a drawer that says "Eff You You Effing Eff!" I plan to wear it if - heaven forbid - I ever have to make my last stand. Which is all I'd be capable of at this point in my life, fire and maneuver being beyond my abilities at this point. Reminds me of a saying I read long ago - "Lord, if today is the day You take me, let it be in the middle of a pile of hot brass". Heh again.
Of course the t-shirt is a bit more blunt in its phrasing. Edited out of respect for Frederick's site, again. :)
I think I may need to sit with this for awhile. A huge pivot in my thinking. I may have to abandon my personal lived experience to recognize my privilege and oppression of brown bodies.
😆
And don't forget that the intersectional matrix of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy weaponizes epistemic violence to marginalize racialized bodies, thereby reifying subaltern oppression within neoliberal structures. This systemic arrangement devalues the knowledge systems of brown people, reducing human beings to commodified units within a dominant cultural narrative. Consequently, institutional hierarchies continuously reproduce these power dynamics to exclude marginalized voices from the centers of economic and social influence. Yeah, don't forget that pearl of wisdom, whatever it means.
Um…maybe think about flying that off the top of the Kremlin first…?
“Does my compassion look big in this?" 😄
Imagine going to all that trouble and risk just to display an overgrown bumper sticker. The world's tallest anticlimax.
I truly enjoyed this meditation on the nature of cliches. For a moment I thought, Well doesn't any expression uttered often enough become one of those? Actually, no. For something to reach cliche status it must fail at an elementary level. It cannot be literally true. It must be trite, or simplistic, or intellectually dishonest, or it must serve some pretension. "Time is money" is NOT cliche because it rings true and is a quite useful reminder. "What does not kill you makes you stronger" IS cliche because it fetishizes suffering. It is also objectively untrue; some things just hurt you, full stop, and leave you permanently damaged.
We are surrounded by cliches now because it's a performative world. Originality is hard, but posturing is easy. On hundred thousand likes are ever just one flashy, banner-waving stunt away.
"Originality is hard, but posturing is easy". Exactly. Thanks, Scott.
There are few things more irritating than someone offering you a hackneyed platitude when going through a tough or horrific situation. Whenever anyone tells me that “things work out in the end”, I’m always tempted to give them a list of horrific historical incidents in which things didn’t work out well for most of the people involved. Good luck trying to console someone with Stage 4 ass cancer that “everything happens for a reason.”
Absolutely. I've been on the receiving end of it myself. It benefits the person saying it rather than the person it's said to.
"They're refugees fleeing the climate crisis"!!! lolol
How many of those Moroccan men would have given that answer!?
But there are some things so stupid only a [journalist/politician/professor] would say them.
Our thinking classes have given themselves an ideological lobotomy yet don't know it.
They feel the power of love when they look in the mirror (or when they hear their own bloviating voices) and the love of power for the rest of the day.
We're living through some terrible combo of "Camp of the Saints" and "Idiocracy".
Great work as always!
Thank YOU, for introducing Martin Amis to ME! I'm 68 and can't believe I've not run across his name before now! Old dog learns new........y'know.......
Some people proudly frame such brainless slogans and adorn their homes with them. It makes me feel kinda sick when I see them, because I can't help but imagine being such a vapid and dull person for a few seconds.
I have just been discussing much the same topic on another thread. I think the problem is lack of context and allowing meaning to widen from the specific. If I am talking about the discovery that what actually burns during combustion is oxygen, and not phlogiston, then in that case the scientific understanding has in fact been a paradigm shift. That is what the term means. It is an accurate usage, not a cliche. On the other hand if I am discussing being able to see something in the light of a different form of, say, politics or economics, am I not talking about a shift in the frame of reference, rather than a paradigm?
As a young person I had a large vocabulary, gleaned from wide reading. I always tried to use the most appropriate word, or phrase, that would convey my specific meaning. Then I went to university as an adult and discovered that it seemed to be preferable to use words that sounded fancy, even if the context was inappropriate. It made one sound clever! In fact, it almost seemed as if deliberately using the wrong word was fine, provided it sounded like you knew what you were talking about. (Even when you didn't.)
Different academic disciplines and different industries also develop jargon that has a specific meaning for those who understand it. Others who are peripheral to the actual meaning hear the word or phrase and start using it without quite understanding the specific meaning. If this is then picked up by an author or journalist and is "released into the wild" it starts to change in meaning. There comes a stage where the world or phrase can have several, sometimes contradictory, meanings at the same time. Eventually the term in usage can end up complety different to the original meaning. Consider the word "decimate". Originally a punishment in the Roman legions where one soldier in ten was chosen at random, the word has come to mean "to utterly devastate".
Bring back context and specitivity, please. I've never seen "The Matrix". I know nothing about the colour of pills.
You're right about context, and thanks for the example of "paradigm shift", which earns its place in a chemistry lab but gets borrowed for effect in a seminar room. A lot of it is just posturing to sound clever, and the language of postmodernism is the exemplar – impenetrable by design. At other times, the lack of context is the point. The pill language you mention is a good example of in-group tribal signalling.
I think linguistic cliches have a role, certainly in casual conversation. They convey a concept that is widely understood. "We need to think out of the box" is an assertion that what is being done is not working, and that more than just knee jerk repetition or twiddling of dials is required.
Cliches that relate to causes are more problematic. They are useful for identifying friend or foe, but they reinforce the conclusion the cause has already agreed upon, and discourage continued thought or persuasion on a topic that is clearly contentious. They are the opposite of "thinking outside the box", and serve as mantras to reinforce belief and marshall troops, while denying the pursuit of truth (it is already determined) or compromise.
But how do you counter absurdities such as "trans women are women" with more than a simple but ineffective "they are not", without resorting to what almost inevitably becomes some other cliche?
The very fact the mantra has been pronounced requires denial, while also signaling that any serious engagement of the topic will be an impossible waste of time. I suppose, once one recognizes this pattern, you can learn to walk away. I'm increasingly exiting with something along the lines of "if you can't make arguments instead of assertions, please don't bother", but this risks becoming a cliche of it's own!
At any rate, I agree cliche should largely be avoided in formal writing, and I suspect the adoption of cliches as slogans is the cue to question everything that follows, and that the cliches of thought and heart are likely to lie beneath.
"cliche or sorts" *of
I'm much more forgiving of clichés than the piece suggests. I was being a little mean for laughs. I use them in conversation and short texts, as we all do, because they're usually shortcuts and often true. Only in essay writing do I make an effort to avoid them, because fresh imagery is more enlivening and forces me to think more clearly about what I'm saying.
Slogans are a different matter and I avoid using them always and everywhere unless I'm being ironic. That's the point I think we agree on: slogans let a person off from the work of thinking, which is why demagogues and mass movements love them.
The problem with slogans like "trans women are women" is that they're unfalsifiable on their own terms. It's a claim about identity pretending to be one about biology. My response is the same as yours: if you can't make an argument instead of an assertion, then don't bother. It's essential to intellectual honesty and not remotely clichéd in pen, mind or heart, in my view.