Clichés 3.0: Don’t Kill the Messenger

The center cannot hold, you can’t handle the truth, and you’re in denial about your Oedipus complex. All is in limbo in The Random Age.

Photo by Jaime Spaniol on Unsplash: The battle is fought with unnamed passion.

My post-retirement listening tour continues: now my listening has structure. I’m still searching for originality, but most of what I hear is underpinned by some sort of larger message that is not very original or compelling. Clichés 1.0 and 2.0 were about clichés that controlled aberrant behavior: shaving the extremes so you had the bell curve center and none of the outliers. Yeats warned that the center cannot hold - and it rings true: we put so much in the center, where things are visible; the distances are not great, the boundaries familiar. The cliché Moderation in all things comes from the world of 1.0, where I examined the sayings that cautioned us to:

keep the steady pace, not to commit to bursts of speed;

to read smoke as fire;

to accept isolation as the price of greatness or authority;

and finally that you need to be sacrosanct about your image, what people think of you is who you are

— all messages I refuted vehemently, but the retreat to protective attitudes and behaviors is still the norm. Clichés express what has happened within the herd, then it is formalized it and mass-produced — the equivalent of muzak…