The Picard Maneuver"Thought-Terminating Cliches"
HegarThis term seems like just an insult wearing academic robes. And a tautology. All cliches over simplify the world, side-stepping complex analysis.
There's nothing "thought terminating" about acknowledging that a problem is beyond your scope - which is what the first two mean. I've only heard YOLO used to encourage risk-taking, which is completely different.
Realistically, these are often just social cues that you're bored with the conversation.
Obviously whether you use a cliche to avoid thinking deeper or not depends on context and individual. It's not inherent to the phrase.
BeaverDonutI don’t think either of these are really thought terminating cliches inherently. The phrase is more for their usage as a rhetorical device to end arguments. They become them when they are “used to intentionally dismiss dissent or justify fallacious logic” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché)
The Wikipedia article has multiple conflicting definitions, including:
"any use of the language, especially repeated phrases, to ward off forbidden thoughts”
"Claim Y sounds catchy. Therefore, claim Y is true."
"the start and finish of any ideological analysis"
The problem is that the term is just BS, in part because the idea it was made to support is complete BS.
It was coined in 1961 by a psychologist who was making the argument that totalitarian states have no real ideology, just '
Defining 'Totalitarianism' was cold war project of western academia, trying to come up with a way to say that the nazis and soviets were the same. They weren't though. Only far right US Nationalists still claim this. The term has very low analytical use, so once the pressure to create this propaganda evaporated with the end of the USSR the term quickly became defunct.
Thought terminating cliches was coined by a psychologist in ’61 trying to claim that 'totalist thought is characterized by thought terminating cliches.' To translate: the west has reasoned ideology, everyone else just spouts cliches.