Thought-Terminating Cliches

Dear Bilchly,

It’s high time you learned the art of the thought-terminating cliche. The thought-terminating cliche is a one-liner that stops a dangerous train of thought in its tracks by offering a false, but plausible, explanation.

A few of my favorites:

• “I’m spiritual, not religious.” (We discussed this previously.)
• “Well, I’m just a _____.” (Pisces, jerk, loser etc.)
• “Boys will be boys.”
• “You do you.”
• “I’m just being true to myself.”
• “I’m a [family last name] so I’m ______.” (short-tempered, anxious, jealous, etc.)

You get the idea.

Your patient might ask himself, “Why did I behave so unpleasantly to my friend?” Whisper back, “Because you’re a Leo,” to one certain type of silly person, and, “because you’re just not a morning person,” to another. Never let them suspect that the problem is that they chose to sin.

I miss true astrologers, those great magicians and stargazers of the past. Damning those souls took finesse and intellectual rigor. I can hardly believe we’ve devolved from sincere Zoroastrians to latte-sipping girls getting their horoscopes from Instagram, but we must work with what we have.

You might wonder why these thought-terminating cliches are so effective, given how obviously bad they are as explanations of the world. The reason is that humans love explanations even if those explanations are false. Simply suggest, “You’re like that because…” and they are hooked.

Never forget that humans are designed to get their “because” from the Enemy. A consequence of their distance from him is that they are now desperate to find meaning – to find a “because” – for themselves anywhere they can. This makes our patients delightfully susceptible to whatever meaning we offer them. Show them a random scattering of dots and they’ll swear there’s a pattern. Built for the “because” of the Enemy, but exiled from his presence, they are susceptible to whatever explanations we present to them.

Thought-terminating cliches are a petty, but delightful, consequence of this larger principle.

Malevolently,

Mulcifer