In which Wolf reads you the ingredients list. It's pretty scary. Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/2U8TzpcTW2I NPR article: https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2020/09/03/908835251/without-evidence-is-a-new-catchphrase-at-npr
You live in a world that would really prefer you not think too hard. In fact, a lot of people would love to do your thinking for you, if you'd let them.
What I find astonishing is that a lot of people actually seem relieved at this prospect. It's like the government, media, and corporations are saying, "You don't need to concern yourself with all that pesky thinking and deciding. Here's a bunch of pre-packaged beliefs, fresh as Twinkies. We'll just keep delivering them to your little screen every day, and all you have to do is to just keep eating them. Aren't they yummy?" And a lot of people reply, "Yay, I love Twinkies! I'm so happy I don't have to think about what to eat, I'm just going to eat nothing but Twinkies."
If you're happy just eating whatever anyone hands you, or think what one source of information tells you, then you can just click away now.
Oh, are you still here?
Right. Then I'm going to tell you one of the main secrets used to manipulate people like you into becoming docile human sheep. It's actually a lot like hypnosis. When the hypnotist says, "You are getting sleepy," they're relying on your level of suggestibility. If you're willing to accept the suggestion, then what do you know? You're are starting to feel sleepy. Your eyelids are getting heavier... and heavier...
OK STOP that. Wake up.
That's the power of suggestion, and one of the main ways that you are hypnotized into giving away your personal power is a specific suggestion technique called the "thought-terminating cliché."
When you're having a conversation or debate, and someone makes a really good point that challenges what you believe, it's normal to pause and consider it. You try to make it fit with what you already know, and try to decide whether to throw out the piece they're offering you by saying why it doesn't fit (in other words, "refute" the point). But if it fits into the puzzle better that what what you already have there, might end up deciding which pieces from your own partially assembled puzzle to throw out as you update your beliefs.
I know, beliefs aren't just like a jigsaw puzzle. It's an analogy, OK?
Twinkies are junk food, and by analogy, thought-terminating cliches, are junk thoughts. Like Twinkies, they might taste good and fill you up, but they don't actually carry any nutritional value. How about we just just start calling them Thinkies?
So in this video, I'm going to give you four specific examples of junk thought Thinkies people try to feed you. There are many more of course, but these should serve to show you the hypnotic pattern you should look for.
First, one classic Thinkie is "That's just the way it is." When someone says this, they're trying to get you to accept the status quo, and stop thinking about how things might be improved. This one is such a classic that back in 1986 Bruce Hornsby's song "The Way It Is" rose to #1 on the pop charts, with it's takeaway in the refrain: "Ah, but don't you believe them."
Here's the second: when someone says something that they may believe strongly, but to which they fear others might react poorly, they finish with, "Just sayin'." This is an attempt to deflect any criticism or discussion of the grenade the other person just lobbed into the conversation. "Wow, you look like crap!"
"What the hell!? What's you're freakin' problem!"
"Just sayin',"
"Oh, well, that's OK then." This is the drive-by shooting of conversation.
Now a bit more serious. The psychiatrist that actually came up with the term "thought-terminating cliché," is Robert J. Lifton. His 1961 book, "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism" examines the brainwashing techniques used by the Chinese Communist Party on both foreign nationals, which they kept for years sometimes in prison, as well as Chinese citizens.
He wrote:
"The language of the [totalitarian] 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. In [Chinese Communist] thought reform, for instance, the phrase ‘bourgeois mentality’ is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome concerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of alternative ideas, and the search for perspective and balance in political judgments. And, in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these cliches become what Richard Weaver has called “ultimate terms”: either “god terms,” representative of ultimate good; or “devil terms,” representative of ultimate evil. In thought reform [brain washing], “progress,” “progressive,” “liberation,” “proletarian standpoints” and “the dialectic of history” fall into the former category; “capitalist,” “imperialist,” “exploiting classes,” and “bourgeois” (mentality, liberalism, morality, superstition, greed) of course fall into the latter. [Totalitarian] language then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull... [it is] ‘the language of nonthought.’"
If this sounds familiar, then you've probably read George Orwell's novel 1984, where the totalitarian party INGSOC has its three thought-terminating clichés up on every wall and building:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Back in 2020 I noticed that a lot of media had started doing "hit-and-run fact checking" by tagging things people said (well, mostly what President Trump said) as having been said "without evidence." For instance, in 2020 NPR reported that President Trump was asked for his opinion on the shooting that took place in Kenosha Wisconsin in which Kyle Rittenhouse killed two men and injured a third. Trump replied that it looked like "self defense." Rittenhouse was later acquitted on exactly those grounds: self-defense. At the time however, NPR reported that Trump claimed, "without evidence, that it appeared the gunman was acting in self-defense."
Now, they could have just said that Trump said that to him it looked like self-defense, but they deliberately added the phrase "without evidence." This had two effects: first it implied that Trump had no evidence (there were significant facts available at that time that counted as "evidence") and second, it had the effect of impugning Kyle Rittenhouse in the court of public opinion.
In fact, NPR later admitted in their "Public Editor" column that "without evidence" had become a sort of "catch phrase" for them and that they had misused it on occasion, including that specific occasion when they reported Trump's take on the situation. The link to that NPR article is in the description.
But the damage was already done. You won't hear that in their on air stories, you'll just see this little retraction printed on their on budsman column.
When I went to Google and typed the exact phrase, searched, "Trump said without evidence" I get close to 50,000 hits. But when I Google for "Biden said without evidence," I get less than a thousand. Now, I've heard Biden say plenty of things without evidence, but he really doesn't get fact checked that way by the mainstream media. If I restrict my search to just CNN's web site, the phrase "Trump said without evidence" gets 70 hits, and "Biden said without evidence" gets zero. To me, this is definitely evidence of media bias, and not evidence that Biden always supports his assertions with evidence.
So the next time you hear a media report that includes the words "So-and-so said without evidence," or when someone tells you to "do your part for the greater good," or that "God moves in mysterious ways," or that some information can't be brought to light for unspecified "security reasons," or someone tells you that "words cause harm" and in the next breath say, "silence is violence," or that the news is "obviously fake" or, "obviously true", then you need wake up and realize that they are offering you a diet of junk thoughts in an attempt to literally hypnotize you into handing them your power to think for yourself.
But what do you think? Leave a comment and please like the video, share it with a friend, you know, let me know that you appreciate these. See you tomorrow.