The Triangle of Clichés

How bullshit reveals as much as it conceals.

For the most part, clichés conceal reality, either by euphemism or by being so overused that their meaning becomes foggy and imprecise. Paying attention whenever they leak into an argument or a piece of writing is worthwhile not only for the sake of stylistic polish but to ensure the clarity of the ideas being conveyed. An over-reliance on clichés suggests a lack of scrutiny and self-reflection, that ideas that are both unoriginal and unexamined are being shuffled into the discussion. Sometimes, during exceptionally unfortunate conversations (or a typical Twitter thread), clichés might be passed off as original, newly-discovered truisms to be then promulgated with all the bashless cockiness of a college student who’d recently read Ayn Rand or Howard Zinn for the first time.

But clichés can also be revealing: what they conceal tells us as much about the applier of the clichés as it does about the society that had produced them.

The sheer amount of euphemisms we have for death and sex is a story onto itself. So is the profusion of hackneyed phrases celebrating (sometimes contradictory) aspects of our social status quo. This is a free country and everyone is entitled to their opinions, for example, are simplistic but powerful heuristics that shore up that old and defiantly American commitment to protect open discord. Shouting fire in a crowded theater, in contrast, belongs to the countervailing attitude, equally American in its ignobility, that always seeks to narrowly circumscribe and eventually curtail difference of opinion.

With time, as the battle lines of our culture wars move back and forth, we see an accretion of such phrases, indicating that a different set of ideas had been introduced into our bloodstream and has already ossified: facts don’t care about your feelings, silence is violence, he’s gonna run this country like a business… Beware any interlocutor who lets clichés flow through them too freely. At worst, they’re trying to sell you something (or sell you on someone). At best, they’re not fully attending the fine print of their own arguments, like someone typing on their phones while talking to you. We’d have a more interesting culture war if we all showed a little less tolerance to this.

But the thing that made me think of clichés is freedom. For a full hour today I had convinced myself that America’s international volunteer nation-building force is called the Freedom Corps instead of the Peace Corps. My confusion is easy enough to explain (besides faulting my risible brain), as both freedom and peace appear prominently in the English vocabulary of opaque political feel-goodies, words that evoke this fuzzy feeling of vague righteousness and yummy patriotism. Add equality (or fairness) and we’ve got us the ultimate trio of nebulous political promises.

But here again, the clichés tell us something. Not for nothing do politicians and moral perorators make ample use of this trifecta; it’s a triangle of goods that we expect governments to provide or protect, and it’s been the same since long before we had a word for politics.¹ We want a society that’s governed by order, one that’s safe, peaceful, and predictable. We want to feel unobstructed in our pursuits, to move and act according to our moods and passions. And we want to feel that we aren’t left out, that we have enough and that nobody is taking advantage of us (sociologists like Jonathan Haidt even suggest that we have an evolutionary distaste to witnessing extreme inequality, regardless of where we personally fall in it).

But of course like the tacky corporate triangle of management, you can’t have all three. Maintaining the peace comes at the expense of your freedom, as does an assurance of equality (of any kind). Enforce too radical an equality or give the radical liberty of anarcho-capitalists a chance and see just how much order and peace will ensue.

We all want all three, but not under the same terms. One way we overcome these ideas’ irreconcilability is by exploiting their convenient imprecision. Whose freedom? How much equality? What kind of peace? And who gets to decide? A politician or a bumper sticker (or lauded authors that write like both) can promise equity and liberty while trusting the scared, needy, wishful part of our brain to fill in the blanks. Surely freedom extends to me brandishing my assault rifle in public while coughing in people’s faces and stealing medical equipment, but not to you kneeling during the anthem or making fun of me. Surely equality means my right to take stuff from people who have more than me, even if it means looting small businesses (it always ends with larceny, doesn’t it?). Surely peace refers to me being able to prevent you from doing that thing you do that I hate.

Not all the ways in which these trade-offs play are as grotesque, of course. We set ourselves completely different rules of conduct for the many spheres of life: home, work, public square, Rammstein concerts… a change of venue lets us recast our principles with different valence. It also lets us empower different authorities to police these values. Peace is the only thing that government should enforce, says the libertarian, leaving fairness to be negotiated on the level of social norms and personal charity. Whereas a police abolitionist sees fairness as the primary concern of the political sphere, while counting peace and freedom as merely the fortunate byproduct of a fair society.

And when that’s not enough, we carve out exceptions. Just ask the Moral Majority’s hangers-on what they think about family values in the age of Trump, or the propitiators of equity for their thoughts on Harvard’s decades-old policy of rejecting Asian American applicants in the name of diversity.

Clichés are the shortcuts of thought. As anyone will attest who had the misfortune of spending time with me as I languorously strain to find the right word, these shortcuts can be a blessing. But considering how they fog up our political (to say nothing of moral) dials, I think it’s ok if we take a couple more seconds before speaking.

1. If these trade-offs aren’t painful enough when balancing three values, you can turn the triangle into a diamond by throwing in justice. I chose not to, being unconvinced that justice is as distinct as the other three when it comes to the role of government. If anything I see it as the human urge that looms over the other three. A person’s appetite for justice can be seen as a desire to redress an inequality or an unfairness, or to restore peace. It can also be a call to eliminate restrictions on one’s liberties that were unjustly imposed. Either way, justice is a reaction to a violation of the proper order of things, rather than an order to be sought in itself. Another value missing from the triangle is dignity. To the extent that dignity is a matter of the political sphere, it should be considered a balancing of freedom and fairness (honoring one’s faith is providing the freedom to practice it, honoring one’s identity is ensuring it isn’t subjected to unfair treatment), at least within a liberal-democratic framework. An ethno-state or a theocracy would elevate dignity as its highest principle, but with much fewer beneficiaries.