Many people have already characterized the devotion to the Second Amendment (“gun rights”) and to the NRA in general as somewhat cultish. That the GOP has been in such lockstep with the NRA over so many decades, running interference for them in the form of blocking any enactment of meaningful gun reform, means that the GOP, too, as an organization, is married to this ideology of violence. The enthusiasts in the cult, sometimes referred to as “ammosexuals” due to their overweening infatuation with weaponry, defend the wording of the Second Amendment as though it were sacred (never mind the fact that it doesn’t say what they think it says, according to former Chief Justice Warren Burger).
When mass shootings occur, it has become expected—more than expected, a cliché—for those gun worshippers to console themselves, saying that nothing could have kept the latest tragedy from happening; it’s all terrible; but our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims.
The word cliché dates back to an era of printing where full phrases and sentences, if common enough, could be pressed onto a plate for repeated printing. These common phrase plates were clicked into place, hence cliché, which indicates the sound of such an action. The onomatopoeia survives in our understanding of these trite, boilerplate terms as sounds tacked into place as the occasion arises.
Robert Jay Lifton, in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, goes into detail about the thought-terminating cliché, which precisely describes “thoughts and prayers.” His explanation sheds light on how the implementation of the phrase among the NRA crowd works.
The language of the totalist 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 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.1
When someone uses “thoughts and prayers,” they are reducing the mass shooting to three little words, far easier to digest than the complex and terribly nuanced situation that brought the shooting about. All such shootings can be so reduced, repackaged, and subsequently ignored. (“Thoughts and prayers: we’ve done all we can do.”)
And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these clichés become what Richard Weaver has called “ultimate terms”: either “god terms,” representative of ultimate good; or “devil terms,” representative of ultimate evil.1
It’s right in the phrase. “Prayers” directly invoke God, making it feel to the person uttering the cliché that they are in the right; God is on their side.
Totalist 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: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “the language of nonthought.”1
This is crucial to understanding Lifton’s argument. It bookends what Felicitas D. Goodman said in Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia: “Disregarding such forms as clichés, no sentence uttered is likely to have been uttered in exactly that way before.”2 Clichéd phrases are lifeless; they convey no real content other than the superficial. Because of this quality, this lifelessness, they snap organic original thought. They stifle critical thinking and relegate the believer to a barren alley, limited and devoid of meaning.
Clichés are words or phrases that operate on the same level as a symbol. Anna Freud, in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, underscored how symbols behave in human interaction:
Symbols are constant and universally valid relations between particular id contents and specific word or thing representations. … The technique of translating symbols is a short cut to understanding, or, more correctly, a way of plunging from the highest strata of consciousness to the lowest strata of the unconscious without passing at the intermediate strata….3
Clichés are instantly recognized and penetrate into consciousness without any stoppage for consideration or deeper thought—that is, they bypass the prefrontal cortex completely.
Clichés also produce an instant feeling of familiarity, almost a sense of home or of homing in. When two people share clichés, they feel, even if only faintly, a bond of kinship or understanding. Lifton explained such usage “is in part an expression of unity and exclusiveness: as Edward Sapir put it, “’He talks like us’ is equivalent to saying ‘He is one of us.’”4 Each of these enthusiasts is speaking the other’s language.
But that clichés work instantaneously is the key insight here. There is no need to elaborate on a symbol—either it communicates or it doesn’t.
That the symbol operates in words adds a superimposed layer of meaning that can be superficially manipulated, especially if the word or phrase is specifically crafted for one occasion or one particular audience. It is at this level that the auditor—the listener—can be directly prompted or guided in his or her interpretation of the symbol when initially learning its import.
So with “thoughts and prayers,” the phrase almost certainly was introduced to the gun worshipper in the context of a public show of sympathy by someone who was already in the ideological camp of gun veneration; and it is in that context that all utterances of “thoughts and prayers” arises, to shift attention from the atrocity and focus attention back on demonstrating a public show. The phrase evokes a performance of grief, but it shuts down true reflection.
For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed.4
Some people, emerging from other forms of cultish situations, have remarked on how being in such a totalized condition tends to create tunnel vision, an inability to see outside deliberately constructed barriers or limits. “Thoughts and prayers” defines the lane in which adherents to the gun cult can travel and beyond which they cannot deviate. They no longer can even consider reform efforts, because the phrase has halted the thought process.
Lifton summed thusly:
As in other aspects of totalism, this loading [of language] may provide an initial sense of insight and security, eventually followed by uneasiness. This uneasiness may result in a retreat into a rigid orthodoxy in which an individual shouts the ideological jargon all the louder in order to demonstrate his conformity, hide his own dilemma and his despair, and protect himself from the fear and guilt he would feel should he attempt to use words and phrases other than the correct ones. Or else he may adopt a complex pattern of inner division, and dutifully produce the expected clichés in public performances while in his private moments he searches for meaningful avenues of expression. Either way, his imagination becomes increasingly dissociated from his actual life experiences and may even tend to atrophy from disuse.4
The more these ideologues use “thoughts and prayers,” the further away they get from connecting, really connecting, with the community that has suffered such heartache. They connect less and less, also, to themselves.
1 Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, p. 429.
2 Felicitas D. Goodman, Speaking in Tongues, p. 101.
3 Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, pp. 16-17.
4 Lifton, op. cit., p. 430.