What would people do without clichés? One of the current favorites is, “at the end of the day,” which seems to be a replacement for “When all is said and done” or the more academic, “In the final analysis….” Most people speak—and think—in clichés most of the time. That has two advantages: it’s easier to spout a cliché than to find a new way of expressing the idea, and everyone knows what it means. Your friends will forgive you for using clichés and probably won’t even know that you are using them. Clichés, however, at best indicate lazy thinking and at worst signal a slovenly mind. That’s why we need to beware politicians who speak primarily in clichés.
Neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln spoke in clichés. Moving closer to the current time, Franklin D. Roosevelt also had a way with words, as did John F Kennedy, who knew how to spark our imagination. As much as I disliked his politics, Ronald Reagan could turn a phrase. President William Clinton also had some good things to say, including one appropriate for today’s political environment: “The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.”
The “destruction of the truth” would seem to be embodied in the concept of fake news. We have always had propaganda, of course. And, in one way or another, propaganda has always been a weapon of war. The current problem with our political messaging is the way it obscures the fact that “languaging” can be “weaponized” to use against a perceived “enemy.” We are, in fact, currently engaged in a language war.
Language in support of a particular point of view began a long time ago, of course. In the West, most of us are familiar with how Catholics and Protestants used language to disparage one another while supporting a alternative view. More recently, Democrats and Republicans have done the same. Differences of opinion perception are, of course, to be expected and are perfectly OK when both—or all—sides make a deliberate effort to discover and speak the truth. Propaganda is always problematic, however. Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen is just one example of the way propaganda can influence politics.
A long time ago, a behavioral psychologist, B. F. Skinner demonstrated that even a rat learns. In some ways, we (humans) are rats in a complex Skinner Box, with our rewards and punishments being delivered by the media we use. We need to remember that when we listen to music, when we watch TV shows, and especially when we watch the “news.” The TV shows aren’t only selling us beer and new cars. They are also selling us a belief system. Currently, the major conflict between competing belief systems is science and religion.
The problem with science is that scientists are often too quick to conclude that they have all the evidence for something when they don’t, as the history of new discoveries replacing the old demonstrates. The problem with religion is its tendency to believe that it has all the answers, as the history of religious wars amply demonstrates. By now we should have learned that arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice. It also bends toward truth. At one time, everyone believed that the earth was flat. That was, after all, their experience. Unless you see Earth from the perspective of space, it certainly seems flat, with the exception of a few mountains here and there….
At the end of the day, people believe what their experience suggests is true. The problem is that once people believe something, it is very difficult to persuade them that what they believe is false. An old saying, Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig loves it, applies. Further, “pig” is a matter of perspective. Some of those who believe strange things are perfectly decent people in ways other than their belief for which there is no logical support. I know and like some people who believe everything they hear on FOX news is the “truth” and that other news sources are lying. I think of that belief as “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS). Some think that TDS should apply to those who say “bad things” about President Trump.
My take on Trump Derangement Syndrome, however, is that the phrase really should be used for those who believe that Trump’s truth is the only truth rather than for those who find fault with much of what President Trump says and does. We need to apply the same rigor to thinking about Trump and politics that engineers use to plan and execute missions to the moon and beyond. We need “evidence based” politics for a change and a commitment to a politics of Zero Defects.
We’ll be right back…
