The world of labels, stereotypes and commonplaces (also known as clichés, if we get real) is a true jungle of confusion, a realm of labels behind which we try to find magical, miraculous and prefabricated explanations for what we can’t find a better answer. These explanations, in the form of idioms pawed and groped, act as a comfort that motivates us in the face of frustration or a way of calming our conscience and feeling better about those circumstances that we hate but that we have to show to others in a reasonably presentable way.
There is a certain consensus that every cliché or stereotype has a dose of truth within it and I believe that this is true. A dose, that which refers to common sense, to cold logic that does not need to be demonstrated. A dose that ends up wrapped, hidden and buried under tons of creativity that means nothing even though many people agree that they mean everything.
Below we will briefly describe 10 examples of seemingly respectable nonsenses that people keep repeating, and repeating, and repeating until they pass off as truth, something that doesn’t really stand up to anything solid, even though under the multiple layers of fossilized varnish there is a bit of logic that even a very small child might agree with.
1. Mothers know best
A mother knows those kinds of things. No one knows a son like his mother. A mother is a fortune teller. A mother looks at her child with x-rays in her eyes. Because genetics, by osmosis, infuses mothers with a superpower according to which they know perfectly all the springs of their little ones’ personalities and they realize even the slightest circumstance that attributes them.
Well, I am sorry to disappoint the mothers of the world who think they are so clever and the women of the world who pretend to make common cause with this allegedly hypertrophied intuition and defend that a mother knows best. A mother, if she has lived with her children long enough, if she is intelligent and in the midst of the world and, above all, if she has the capacity to observe and listen to them (to them, not to herself, and then to project it onto them and confuse everything), then she will realize many things, naturally. And yet many others will escape her. Because a mother is a mother, not a goddess of wisdom.
2. Every effort has its reward
Not true. It can be very motivating to think in these terms and, what the hell, it’s true that many efforts have their reward. But life is not perfect. Justice is a tremendously liquid social and philosophical construct, not a biological certainty. Sometimes we try very hard and we don’t succeed, because – luckily and unfortunately – not everything depends on us, but we have to count on the contingencies that come from the environment.
The ultra-liberal ideology finds its maximum exacerbation in the countries of Anglo-Saxon culture and spreads to the rest of the countries more effectively than a coronavirus. After all, it is those countries that are giving orders. Well, this ideology invites us to blindly trust in our own capacities (a mini-point for the system) at a really perverse price: if you fail it is because you have not tried hard enough, you are not valid enough, those who have succeeded owe their success solely to their own merits. Can I give you some advice? Don’t mix up effort with merit, prepare yourself a little for failure while you dream of the success you deserve and, in the absence of a good sponsor, be what you need to be.
3. Where there’s a will, there’s a way
This toxic, gooey, delusional belief is a Siamese twin of the previous one. You think so? Well, what can I say… good luck! If you think I’m exaggerating, you just have to connect to your social networks for a while and let the chit-chat of the hundreds of coaches that proliferate out there distill on your screen with their inspirational brilliance that you’ll perceive as a paternalistic caress before you continue watching your miserable life.
Because attitude is important but it’s not always what counts. Because the famous never give up that every self-respecting American has internalized since a midwife first laid a hand on him often hides the perverse mandate not to accept that you have been defeated (for the moment).
Because to unthinkingly believe that will is power is pure, hard, magical thinking, more characteristic of a Neolithic tribe or simply a small child in the process of maturing, than of an adult connected to real life. I’m sorry to be a buzzkill, but striving, wanting to improve, trying to surpass oneself and other magnificent exercises should never lead us to believe that we are capable of anything we set out to do because that is, with all the letters, a lie, magical individualism. It is to deny the powerful influence of the environment, to disregard the wise orteguian maxim according to which a human being is himself and his circumstances, so that if he does not save them he will not save himself.
4. So many people cannot be wrong at once
The majorities are sovereign and that means that, in themselves, they are always right. Of course they are. Because consensus equals truth. Because majority equals lucidity. Because the dream of a perfect democracy is a marvel that no monster will ever produce. That’s why, if so many people think something, so many people can’t be wrong at the same time. In reality, the majority is sovereign, and what a remedy. We will see if they are right. Don’t you believe it? Open a history book at random or, better yet, turn on the TV, go out on the street, go on Twitter and tell me your findings.
5. Human beings are, above all, rational
Above all, always and everywhere, what guides human behavior most is logic. That is why we smoke in spite of knowing it is bad and eat everything that is not good for us in spite of knowing full well how harmful it is. That’s why we drive around in spite of drinking or get into vehicles that take people we don’t know behind the wheel, and eat dishes prepared by people we don’t know what they look like or where they are. That’s why we board ships and planes knowing they might sink or crash. That’s why we light barbecues surrounded by trees. That’s why we keep destroying the environment even though we have no other environment to live in. That’s why public sex education campaigns work so well (bloody irony mode on), not to mention those aimed at eliminating drug use. That’s why we squander our income on buying a house that won’t be completely ours for another forty years and get married dead in love without having signed the man-da-to-ry separation of property. That’s why we sunbathe for hours to look our best, even though we know all there is to know about skin cancer and premature aging. That’s why… That’s why as long as we don’t understand that human behavior is mediated by multiple factors and that logic is only one, we will continue to make fools of ourselves as a species.
6. Any job that’s not sexual is decent
Prostitution is a profession that is always and, in all circumstances, denigrating the deepest nature and spiritual dignity of all persons who practice it. Cleaning up the shit, piss and vomit from the infected bathroom of a sleazy bar for two bucks is a dignified job. Giving your soul to a chain of bad and copied clothes that will exploit you as much as they can for a handful of euros, strangling your schedule without paying you properly in return and preventing you from developing any other activity because the important thing is ” the necessities of the store “ is an honorable job. Smearing the earth with boiling asphalt in the middle of summer so that the rhythm of the cars doesn’t stop, directing traffic by making you deaf and dissolving your lungs, looking for coal in a mine so that there is no lack of heat in the country’s most antiquated chimneys, is in itself decent, something that honours human dignity. Does that mean that sex work is decent and that the official discourse on the subject is wrong? I leave that conclusion to your own reflection, since I’m not talking about the oldest profession in the world but about the many ways in which indignity – increasingly made up – is embedded in our working lives. We would do well to refine the qualification of a job as fair, decent and dignified… because things are not always what we want them to seem.
7. You learn from everything
That true learning happens through one’s own emotional experience is something I am more and more convinced of every day. No one learns in someone else’s shoes and, as the good guy in Cervantes pointed out, there is no bad book that doesn’t contain something good (or something like that, I couldn’t access the original quote).
But from there to obsessively chasing the lesson behind all the little annoyances and big misfortunes that every biography is peppered with, to believing that there is a lesson waiting to be learned behind every bad thing that happens to us in life, there is a respectable distance. Because, although there is potential learning in everything that happens to us, in reality we are not always capable, nor do we want to be, of incorporating that wisdom.
To pretend that the misfortunes and sorrows of a life are encrypted messages that destiny, God, the cosmos send us with the aim that we grow, that we learn something, may be a very respectable belief that helps some people to move forward, but it should never be established as something obligatory and expected by everyone. Because a person has the right not to learn anything from that painful break-up, he may not find the lesson to be learned in the death of his loved one, he may be unable to find the meaning of his house collapsing because of someone’s negligence in the construction site next door. And I think that’s perfect.
Someday all this pain will be useful to you is the exquisite title of a no less exquisite book written a few years ago by Peter Cameron (haven’t you read it? and you think you’re modern? run and get it!), but let’s not take it as a rigid and universal rule for human life.
8. The East is the only thousand-year-old thing that exists
There is a tendency in our society to consider that, beyond the Mediterranean, where the Urals lose their ancient name and a little before the domain of the rising sun is over, there is a particularly wise wisdom, a particularly historic history, a peculiarly spirituality that has its roots in the night of time, a time that only exists there and that, because it is ancient, turns everything that comes to us from the Far East into ground gold.
It is, ultimately, the tendency to believe that the only millennial thing that exists on the face of the Earth are the Eastern cultures. What comes from the East is valuable and fascinating because it comes from a millenary culture. However, although it may not seem so to you because you belong to it and have more than seen it, your western culture is also millenary, it is also wise, rich and profound in its own way, leaving aside its many aberrations. Becoming fascinated with the distant and exotic is sometimes inevitable, but while you are doing this, don’t lose sight of the fact that sometimes those same riches await you in the near future.
9. Sexual orientation is private
And that’s why I don’t have to make any public allusion, either at work or in any other circumstance, to the kind of people I’m sexually attracted to, since that’s nobody’s business. Nobody’s? On the contrary: it is everybody’s business!
After all, the world’s heterosexuals have been teaching us for millennia that there is nothing more public and more easily discussed than sexual orientation, even with very young children. Moreover, people are encouraged, motivated, and make constant efforts to get people to talk about it. Because every time a man talks about his girlfriend (or his non-girlfriends, if you know what I mean), every time a woman talks about her boyfriend (or her non-boyfriends) in any of the ways you can talk about it, they are making their sexual orientation public.
There is a fool within every human being and that is inevitableIn other words, they are taking it for granted that it is a subject that can be talked about quite naturally, without being asked about. And if they do, why can’t the others? Note: what is private is what you like to do in bed, who you usually do it with, where, how many times, in which places… That is what is private. But if you like men or women, that way, it is a perfectly publishable fact in any democratic society. That is, you can share it with another person (that’s what “making public” is all about) from spontaneity and naturalness, not even with a hint of militancy or intention. If not, either the problem is with the society you live in, or (let’s not rule out) the problem is directly with you.
10. Family ties guarantee affection
The higher the degree of kinship, the closer and more positive the affection. Therefore, since we are parents and children, we must love each other very much, no matter what, just as between brothers and sisters and cousins it is obligatory to love each other and get along well, with sympathy and complicity that are bomb-proof. It will happen for sure. No matter how different we are. No matter how much dogging we do to each other. Even if we don’t show any interest in seeing each other or enjoy much of the time we share.
Well, I feel sorry for the defenders of the perfection of everything family-oriented, but that’s not the way it goes. What are you saying? What you just heard. Neither kinship guarantees the quality of affection nor obliges one to feel an affinity for someone. To be kind people, that is to say, susceptible to be loved, interested in the other, caring for the other, nice and interesting, generous and funny, that is a better predictor of how much we will love each other. Because the fact that you are my father, or my son, or my cousin in the town, will not by itself make me want to come and see you. For that to happen you have to be someone I want to go and see, someone who is nice to be with, not just someone who shares my surname and a scattered handful of genes.
We all say and think a lot of stupid things throughout the day. It’s hard to admit, I know, but there’s (at least) one fool in every human being and that’s inevitable. Now, if you put your mind to it, you can keep it at bay and prevent it from multiplying. It’s a matter of detecting those wrong, unfounded or unfair beliefs with which you move through life. Those silly things that you believe and that, although they don’t cause you great drama, don’t help you to feed yourself either. Here we have given you 10 more or less innocent examples but, if the list gets complicated, then put yourself in the hands of a psychologist. Change will be exciting, I promise you.
