The power of cliche

Preparing a lecture which touches on the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, especially her understanding of evil as epitomised in the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann (who, contra some Reformed "thinkers," -- ahem! -- seemed to think that the Holocaust really did happen.....) I was struck by Arendt's comment on his testimony in his own defence, when he apologized for the fact that so much of what he had to say was dressed up in the language of Nazi civil servanthood: `[O]fficialese  became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche..... Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words.  The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.  No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.'

For my money, Arendt was one of the most perceptive philosophical critics of twentieth century political society; and her observation here about Eichmann is worthy of much reflection.  It is a fine line between being part of a movement, political, theological or otherwise, and abdicating responsibility for ourselves by imbibing as shibboleths the stock phrases of that movement.  Yet the consequences of such abdication can be devastating, as with Eichmann.