{"id":119345,"date":"2017-12-12T12:02:24","date_gmt":"2017-12-12T20:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=119345"},"modified":"2017-12-12T12:02:24","modified_gmt":"2017-12-12T20:02:24","slug":"a-field-guide-to-thoughtstoppers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=119345","title":{"rendered":"A Field Guide to Thoughtstoppers"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Michael Greer writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A thoughtstopper is exactly what the term suggests: a word, phrase, or short sentence that keeps people from thinking. A good thoughtstopper is brief, crisp, memorable, and packed with strong emotion. It\u2019s also either absurd, self-contradictory, or irrelevant to the subject to which it\u2019s meant to apply, so that any attempt you might make to reason about it will land you in perplexity. The perplexity won\u2019t do the trick by itself, and neither will the strong emotion; it\u2019s the combination of the two that lets a thoughtstopper throw a monkey wrench in the works of the user\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at some examples to see how this works. One commonly used thoughtstopper that found its way onto the comment pages of this blog a few weeks ago makes a good starting place. The context was a discussion of the problems with unrestricted immigration from nonindustrial countries to industrial countries, and one of the commenters dismissed all such problems out of hand by saying \u201cI believe in people.\u201d<\/p>\n

You must admit that in that context, this is a distinctly odd utterance. I suppose that the logical response would be something on the order of \u201cWhy, I believe in people too; in fact, I\u2019ve seen them repeatedly, so I know they exist.\u201d Respond that way to somebody who says \u201cI believe in people,\u201d though, and you can count on getting a baffled or irritated response from the speaker. It\u2019s clear that this statement\u2014though it resembles in form such utterances as \u201cI believe in UFOs\u201d and \u201cI believe in Santa Claus\u201d\u2014does not resemble them in meaning.<\/p>\n

Translate that utterance in terms of its actual usage, by contrast, and it works out to something like this: \u201cI prefer to feel warm fuzzy emotions about the abstract concept \u2018people\u2019.\u201d Translated that baldly, though, it loses its force as a thoughtstopper, since others would be perfectly within their rights to say, \u201cFine, but why should your preference in emotional states be the basis of public policy?\u201d\u2014or, worse still, \u201cFine, but what about the people who are losing their livelihoods and being driven into destitution because of the public policies you prefer? Why should your feelings count more than their survival?\u201d That\u2019s why a thoughtstopper has to embody the absurdity, contradiction, or irrelevance mentioned earlier\u2014it serves as protective camouflage for the emotional payload.<\/p>\n

A great many other thoughtstoppers get their results by means of the same strategy. Consider that classic example, \u201cLove is the answer.\u201d (This one is especially common in American popular spirituality\u2014in my experience, both the liberal end of Christianity and the New Age movement use it relentlessly.) Again, a logical response might be \u201cOkay, what\u2019s the question?\u201d If you get the bog-standard comeback\u2014\u201cLove is the answer to every question\u201d\u2014you have my permission to make fun of it. \u201cWhat\u2019s the standard excuse for staying in really dysfunctional relationships?\u201d and \u201cWhat do religious zealots inevitably talk about while they\u2019re tying you to the stake?\u201d are two of the obvious questions for which love is the answer; I encourage my readers to come up with examples of their own.<\/p>\n

Taxonomy, the art and science of giving useful names to relevant categories, is as necessary here as elsewhere. We can therefore assign \u201cI believe in people,\u201d \u201clove is the answer,\u201d and other thoughtstoppers of the same general type to the category of Vacuous Belches. A Vacuous Belch combines an absurd, contradictory, or irrelevant utterance with a warm cozy emotional state. It has exactly the same emotional content as the belch of contentment you\u2019ll hear after a good Thanksgiving dinner, or some similarly over-the-top dining experience. It stops thought by replacing it with vague pleasant feelings.<\/p>\n

The opposite of a Vacuous Belch is a Vacuous Shriek. Vacuous Shrieks replace the warm fuzzy emotional state with a cold prickly emotional state. Where Vacuous Belches are usually short declarative sentences, Vacuous Shrieks are usually single words\u2014I\u2019m not sure why this is, but it\u2019s quite consistent\u2014and they stop thought by replacing it with hatred, loathing, and fear. A good Vacuous Shriek combines irrelevance and hatred into the kind of hefty epithet that can be flung at someone like a brick.<\/p>\n

Consider the way that the word \u201cCommunist\u201d was deployed as a Vacuous Shriek by the American right from the Palmer Raids in 1919 straight through to the collapse of the Soviet Union and, in some circles, beyond. It was standard practice, for example, for right-wing speakers in the 1960s to insist that Rev. Martin Luther King was a Communist. In any but a purely thoughtstopping sense, this was impressively absurd, as Martin Luther King was no more a Communist than Lady Gaga is the Tsar Of All The Russias.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Michael Greer writes: A thoughtstopper is exactly what the term suggests: a word, phrase, or short sentence that keeps people from thinking. A good thoughtstopper is brief, crisp, memorable, and packed with strong emotion. It\u2019s also either absurd, self-contradictory, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42813],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t