The Seller of Ready-Made Phrases

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Every town has one.

He is not remembered for his intelligence, nor for his kindness, nor even for any remarkable achievement. Yet somehow, he is always welcome at every table, every meeting, every celebration, every debate.

His greatest talent is not speaking.

It is sensing.

Like an experienced sailor reading invisible winds, he instinctively discovers what people want to hear before they hear it themselves.

Then he delivers it.

Never more.

Never less.

Ask him about politics.

"Balance is everything."

Ask about economics.

"We all have to do our part."

Religion?

"We must respect every opinion."

Science?

"We should trust the experts."

Art?

"Beauty is subjective."

Life?

"It is what it is."

His vocabulary seems endless, yet every sentence has already been spoken thousands of times before. Originality would be dangerous. Nuance could isolate him. Doubt might require thought.

Ready-made phrases are safer.

They are social currency.

The remarkable thing is that nobody notices.

People mistake familiarity for wisdom.

The more predictable the answer, the more comfortable the audience feels.

Perhaps this explains why Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, the Brazilian master of irony and arguably the greatest writer in the Portuguese language, wrote one of his most brilliant short stories back in 1881: The Theory of the Medallion.

In that extraordinary tale, a father gives practical advice to his son on how to become socially successful. Curiously, almost none of the advice concerns becoming knowledgeable, courageous or virtuous.

Instead, the son is encouraged to avoid original ideas, distrust independent thinking, cultivate moderation, repeat respectable opinions and never expose himself unnecessarily.

The ideal citizen is not the one who thinks.

It is the one who fits.

More than a century later, one could easily believe Machado had written about our own time.

The salons changed into television studios.

The newspapers became social media.

The audience became algorithms.

But the medal remains exactly the same.

Our seller of ready-made phrases has simply modernized his inventory.

He no longer memorizes quotations from classical authors.

He memorizes hashtags.

He no longer waits for tomorrow's newspaper.

He waits for today's trending topic.

His convictions update automatically.

Not because he has changed his mind.

Because he never truly had one.

Acceptance has become the highest virtue.

Standing out is dangerous.

Thinking independently is expensive.

Belonging is profitable.

Entire careers are built this way.

Entire reputations.

Entire public personas.

The applause often comes not to those who contribute the most, but to those who most accurately echo the emotional soundtrack of their tribe.

That is why clichés survive every generation.

They demand almost nothing from those who speak them and even less from those who hear them.

Everyone leaves feeling validated.

Nobody leaves transformed.

From this and many other everyday stories, I draw the conclusion that one of the worst consequences of living in society has been the institutionalization of hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty as tools for social climbing, allowing people to present themselves, sometimes as victims and sometimes as figures of distinction, invariably pursuing motives far from noble. And because this vice works so remarkably well, it continues rewarding people of questionable character yesterday, today and always.

Still, there is something strangely comforting about all this.

Fashion changes.

Slogans change.

Crowds change.

Even medals eventually lose their shine.

Truth, however, has an inconvenient habit of waiting patiently.

It has no need for applause.

As Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon wrote in That's Life, immortalized by Frank Sinatra:

"That's life," as everybody says... and as strange as it may seem, some people take pleasure in trampling dreams. But I refuse to let that bring me down, because this old, beautiful world just keeps turning.