Lessons from Lifton's Chapter 22

When clichés become toxic

Dec 18, 2021

"Bingo Number 22" by Leo Reynolds is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton studied thought reform (also known as brainwashing) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He published his findings on Chinese tactics during Maoism in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism in 1961. To his great surprise, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, copies of Chapter 22 of the book had became underground document for people questioning or leaving cults. Disillusioned cult members spotted many similarities between how the leaders of new religious movements maintained control over recruits and the tactics of the Chinese government under communist dictator Mao Zedong.

Chapter 22 lists eight deadly sins of Maoist thought control. These are milieu control (controlling communication with the outside world); mystical manipulation (invoking a higher cause to justify personal manipulation); the demand for purity (dividing the world into the pure and the impure); the cult of confession (confessing almost becomes a cult in itself); “sacred science” (keeping an aura of sanctity around basic dogma that cannot be questioned); loading the language (widespread use of slogans and catchwords); putting doctrine before people (subordinating human experience to sterile language); and dispensing of existence (denying the right of people defined as impure to live their lives as they see fit - or even to live at all).

All of Lifton’s points are interesting, but this week, let’s focus on just one - loading the language. He noticed that Maoist experts in brainwashing specialized in “thought-terminating cliché.” He writes: “The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expresssed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

Although jargon exists everywhere, Lifton thought that totalist (or totalitarian) jargon was designed to express certainties about the world that cannot be questioned. The language was owned and operated on behalf of a cause. Language was seen in terms of its usefulness. It was designed to dissociate the imagination from actual life experiences. People who were exposed to thought reform felt that their imaginations atrophied as a result.

We have already seen that if you dive down most internet rabbit holes, you will find groupthink at the bottom. Dull clichés act as the glue that holds hedgehog-like narratives together in these circles. They can help believers in sweeping narratives dismiss inconvenient facts with the wave of a hand. Clichés like “the lamestream media” or “Big Pharma” or “cultural Marxism” are roughly equivalent to putting your hands over your ears and pretending you can’t hear any counter-arguments.

As a philosophy graduate, I see an interesting contrast between “thought-terminating cliché” and analytical philosophy. For millenia, philosophers have asked deep questions about the nature of reality. In the 1920s, Ludwig Wittgenstein - a great Austrian-British philosopher - initiated what historians call the linguistic turn of philosophy. He began to look at the questions that philosophers asked, but to step back and think about whether everyday language was the right tool for the task. He concluded: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Wittgenstein famously retired from philosophy after concluding that it was mostly based on torturing language. He became a very toxic primary school teacher, but gave up after beating up one of his unfortunate pupils. After a few further adventures, he decided that it was time to return to philosophy. His later work - mostly published post-humously after his death in the 1950s - explored to what extent we can use everyday language to tackle deep issues.

The linguistic turn of philosophy led by Wittgenstein was one of the major influences on analytical philosophy. This approach can be characterized by the stereotype of a philosopher asking us to define our terms at the beginning of a debate. Yes, this is annoying, but it can also be a powerful tool when we are dealing with people who are using clichés to shut down enquiries into their core dogmas.

For example, imagine we are having a deep conversation with a COVID denialist. He or she keeps using the “Big Pharma” cliché. But what does it mean? Does it include upstart biotech startups like Moderna, which was only founded in 2010 and is trying to steal market share from existing players? Does it include publicly funded scientists doing basic research at universities? How exactly does “Big Pharma” stop upstarts who have developed promising cures? Asking questions like these will probably trigger cognitive dissonance in our denialist friends, but it will also help us maintain a little distance from narratives that we might otherwise find appealing.

See you next week! The next edition will be published on Boxing Day instead of Christmas Day.

Further reading

Lifton’s Losing Reality contains his infamous Chapter 22, as well as more recent work on Donald Trump and other gurus

Wittgenstein once nearly came to blows with liberal philosopher Karl Popper - read about it here

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