Thought-terminating cliché
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A thought-terminating cliché is a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance.
The term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Lifton said, “The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. 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.” [1][2]
In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fictional constructed language Newspeak is designed to reduce language entirely to a set of thought-terminating clichés. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World society uses thought-terminating clichés in a more conventional manner, most notably in regard to the drug soma as well as modified versions of real-life platitudes, such as, "A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away".
[edit] See also
- Indoctrination
- Loaded language
- Slogan
- Soundbite
- Newspeak
- Motherhood and apple pie
[edit] References
- ^ Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, page 429
- ^ http://www.watchman.org/cults/usemindcontrol2.htm
