In his 1961 book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Robert Jay Lifton described the way the Chinese Communist Party used language to further its ideological aims. One of his examples was something he called the “thought-terminating cliche.” As Lifton described when ideologues deploy such language, “the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized, and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”