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The unspoken taboo against nuance - Magical Realist - Sep 18, 2026 “An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you.” “The word, although prevalent in our day, has lost its reasoning value, and has value only as an accessory to images. In turn, the word actually evokes images. But it does not evoke the direct images related to my personal experience. Rather, it calls up images from the newspaper or television. The key words in our modern vocabulary, thanks to propaganda and advertising, are words that relate to visual reproduction. They are stripped of all rational content, so they evoke only visions that whisk us away to some enchanted universe. Saying ‘fascism,’ ‘progress,’ ‘science,’ or ‘justice’ does not suggest any idea or produce any reflection. It only causes a fanfare of images to explode within us: a sort of fireworks of visual commonplaces, which link up very precisely with each other. These related images provide me with practical content: a common truth that is especially easy to swallow because the ready-made images that showed it to me had been digested in advance. Make no mistake here: this is how modern people usually think. We are arriving at a purely emotional stage of thinking.”–Jacques Ellul I see this. I saw it at my family reunion where my brother and brother-in-law emotionally bonded over their litany of conservative whines and bothers as if expressing something deep within themselves. They were not. It was just a little show put on a million times everyday across our country for each other where we recite all the cliches and catch words we are force fed thru the media locating us comfortably on some idealogical spectrum of concise and familiar political positions. I say positions again, and not real thoughts. When you recite and identify yourself with a public and broadly disseminated position or point of view, the last thing you are actually doing is expressing anything like real time thoughtful consideration. You’re only parroting what the media has conditioned you to say, never breaking thru to anything new or poignant at any time. Real time thinking in fact does not suit casual socializing very well because it expresses ambiguity and reservation and restraint rather than things we can confidently claim to believe in or “tag” ourselves with. It complicates and raises disturbing questions instead of seizing upon pat and easily opined answers. Our beliefs and opinions always being the least individual thing that can be said about us