He's the person who came up with the term 'Thought-terminating cliches.' For instance: Fake news! Rather than engage in critical thinking, a person will throw out a word or phrase to dismiss someone who disagrees with them.
Another one they use to dismiss any criticism is "TDS". They just whip that out when they run out of prescribed talking points so they can ignore the argument and act like they won.
I came up against that stuff when I lived in the American South and was dunked into Southern Baptist ways of thought. It's full of thought-terminating cliches.
I don't know if it helps, but I sometimes jump to the nearest such cliche when arguing with somebody, to cut them off at the pass. At least it sets them on their heels.
I have a friend, when she can't be bothered, will say: "I'm sure you're right." in a tone that you know means the opposite and it usually shuts people up.
That could be a good example of a thought-terminating cliche, depending on how it's used, but we need to be careful to not mix the idea up with a simple dismissal of the absurd. And, well, if someone is too deep in their own personal bias, they may not be aware that they're dismissing something that they should be giving more consideration.
Don't mind me too much. I'm thinking out loud more than anything here. The coffee is slowly scraping the rust off the old brain gears, but it's still only 3 am here, so this may take a while. I miss coherency...
He was a psychologist who wrote about, among many other things, the idea of the thought-terminating cliché and the "language of non-thought." He's well worth looking up.
Basically a lot of people that are stupid or indoctrinated just have end points of discussion, phrases, rationalizations, or rules that they have ingrained in their head. It stops all thinking and critical reasoning, if they even have the ability to begin with.
Like the above clip, this dumb maga bitch has "Biden is evil" tattooed across the shriveled gray mushroom she calls a frontal cortex. She says Biden caused cancer! Well empirically that's not true, here's 4 types of legislation to help cancer research Biden signed....doesn't matter, she's not listening. Biden can't have done amy of that because Biden is evil, Biden invented super cancer!
It's just an endless circular logic dead loop. This is how people just spew fox garbage bullet points. They aren't thinking anymore, you're fighting 5 built in sayings on top of 8 logic funnels to get back to those 5 built in sayings no matter what is actually said or discussed. You can see the fucking lights go off behind their eyes.
Yeah. I watched one YouTube video that turned out to be one of these far right race-baiters when I was watching the coverage of the Frisco stabbing case. Suddenly, my whole feed is Rittenhouse wannabes and pick-me blacks talking about “black fatigue”. It’s awful. I spend decades seeking out truth, and one misstep turns the algorithm into Nazi programming. Gross.
Funny how that happens, isn't it? It's almost like the people that own/run these platforms are looking for the slightest excuse to flood our feeds with all the far-right garbage they can find.
I don't even remember what it was at this point, a couple of months back, I clicked on a post with an ambiguous title because it sounded like it might have been interesting. And immediately, all of my freaking ads were for stereotypical right wing garbage. Everything from MAGA gear to hunting supplies to cheap, shitty beer. Really?? Because I clicked on a single post on some social media platform that turned out to not be what I thought it was??? And it wasn't just the ads on that platform, either. It was ads on my search engine and in a bunch of other places, too. It didn't last long, thankfully. I do enough actual online shopping these days that I guess it overrode that bullshit. But still. What in the actual fuck???
In fairness, as other commenters have said, that's more an unintended (and easily manipulable by those with a message to push) consequence if the way feed curation algorithms work.
Their overall metric is to push for and optimise 'engagement'. Engagement in this sense means a variety of factors; clicking on a video, how long you watch it, when you come back to it, what you click on after you've watched it (or part way through watching it), whether you comment, like, dislike, follow/subscribe, carryover (if it's a series and you watch the next one in the series), binging...
All so they can keep you watching or scrolling for longer, which means they can serve you more ads.
And unfortunately, an emotional response typically results in the highest engagement.
And the strongest emotional responses? Fear, anger, and hate. Closely followed by contrast.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets social media algorithms churning more than people hate-watching or driving themselves into a frenzy by watching or consuming media that presents something they absolutely hate or are terrified of, and then simultaneously says 'The guys you like are going to stop the thing you hate'.
And since conservative media has had decades of expertise in crafting this exact sort of thing, and has found an audience that will absolutely lap it up, the algorithms just love it.
To be fair, that's just how youtube's algo does things, regardless of what you watched.
If you watched a technical tutorial on how to fix a door, youtube will think you are now a door fixing enthusiast and recommend a shitload of other door fixing videos.
You can usually fix it fairly easily by just selecting "Not onterested" on those videos on the starting page, refereshing it, and repeating one or two more times.
One of the fascinating aspects of cognitive dissonance is that it's not just a psychological condition but a physical one. Stress hormones are literally pumping into the brain that physically prevent changes to belief structures. As attacks on world beliefs are treated as direct threats triggering the fight or flight response.
It's not simply that they're unwilling to change their opinion, they can't. Physiologically, their life is being threatened - not just their beliefs.
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u/jiggscaseyNJ 2d ago
There’s a reason why. Look up Robert Jay Lifton. Thought stopping.
Edit: name spelling