For many of us, and I think for most activists, we speak (and thus think) in clichés. Our arguments are inherited and memorized; our discussions follow a script we didn’t write. Public discourse has become an echo chamber, a playback loop, in which people who subscribe to various political doctrines, sets of values, or orthodoxies simply recite against each other from the tele-prompters in their heads. You offer your cliché, I recognise it, and reply with the corresponding counter-cliché of my school of thought. We are having someone else’s discussion. No one is listening and no one has to listen, not even to what they themselves are saying, because no one is saying anything authentically their own.
We have become possessed by ideologies; turning ourselves into spokespeople instead of independent thinkers. If you reply to someone’s cliché with an actual unpracticed, unique critical observation, watch how quickly they shut down the conversation. “This is what I think, if you don’t agree, to hell with you”, is usually the basic response. They cannot process what you said, and certainly can’t respond to it, because you have already thought more about their argument than they have. You are not supposed to offer anything except a counter-cliché to which they can access an appropriate, preexisting reply.
They become bewildered when authentic thought invades the recital of orthodoxies; the closest they can get to real interaction is to try to interpret what you said, rather than actually listen and process it; so they assign it a meaning consistent with the counter-clichés they are used to, and completely miss your point.
We are losing our ability to communicate because a very large proportion of us do not even know what we ourselves think, instead just aligning ourselves with sets of thoughts crafted and arranged by others.
This is nothing short of catastrophic.