So that when you tire of one side, the other serves you best.
Read about the wisdom laws and knock and knock and knock.
It's a secret knock when hammers knock the other wisdom laws.
A philosophy that is so bizarre, rambling, and insane that no one in their right mind can understand it.
There are many reasons for why some, be they an academic or a layman, spout beliefs like this. Maybe in whatever culture they're originally from it makes total sense but outside of it, it is completely nonsensical. Maybe the "philosopher" does have some good points, but doesn't have the writing skills to express their ideas coherently. Maybe the point is so complicated that it would take several college courses to grasp its meaning. Or, maybe the philosopher is just a Talkative Loon.
When someone attempts to explain their Word Salad Philosophy to you, expect plenty of Meaningless Meaningful Words, Delusions of Eloquence, and Perfectly Cromulent Words. May resemble an Ice-Cream Koan. Compare and contrast Insane Troll Logic. Can easily turn into either Word-Salad Humor or Word-Salad Horror.
Straw versions of conspiracy theorists and granola girls tend to base their worldviews on these.
When it's the narrator doing this, see Fauxlosophic Narration.
Examples
- Baccano!: Graham Spector's introspective tendencies as a Talkative Loon turns into ambiguously-self-aware parody in particularly manic moments:
Oh, life is fun! Try saying that ten thousand times every day. It'll screw with your head so bad that all the pain will disappear like MAGIC! Okay okay okay, I've gotten past the sadness and as of now I'm evolving to a higher stage! RIGHT? Tell me you all think so!Life is a magnificent beast, and it excites me. My okay brain is so beyond okay that I think it's finally okay!...you guys tell me something entertaining now.
- The whole premise of Chaos Is Very Good, as it focuses on Ahuizotl learning a frankly insane philosophy. How insane is it? Apparently one of the major truths is that the mouth should be used exclusively as a sexual organ.
- The "philosophical banter" between Twilight and Luna in Twillight Sparkle's awesome adventure:
Twilight: You think you can change fate?Luna: WE CHOEST OUR OWNEST DESTNY!Twilight: Money don’t makes you happy.Luna: BUT EVERTHING ENDEST.Twilight: If a tree falls down and no one is around does it still makes a sound?Luna: WHATEST WALKS ON THY FOUR LEGEST IN THOU MORING, ON TWO AT DINNER AND WITH THREE AT NIGHEST?Twilight: There’s no try. Do it or not.Luna: BUT THERE’S ALSO NOTEST SPOONEST.
- The 13 commandments that make up the American cockstitution in Thirty Hs. Among other things, it would appear that time is now a knotted ball, which you can hide anywhere in your body.
- Yellow Submarine has instances like these:
Paul [singing to himself]: Einstein, Einstein, any any any old Einstein...John: ...could well be applied here. The people in the ball are obviously extensions of our own personalities, suspended, as it were, in time, frozen in space.George: Uh, John?John: ...according to the now-famous theory of relativity...George: John?John: ...which, briefly explained...George: John...John: ...is simply a matter of taking two eggs...George: John...John: ...beating lightly, and adding a little salt and pepper to taste.George: John!John: George?George: How do we get them out?John: Break the glass.
- When they first encounter Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D.:
Jeremy: I must complete my bust, two novels, finish my blueprints, begin my beguine...John: Must you always talk in rhyme?Jeremy: If I spoke prose you'd all find out, I don't know what I talk about.- And in the Sea of Time:
George: Maybe time's gone on strike.Ringo: What for?George: Shorter hours.Ringo: I don't blame it. Must be very tiring being time, mustn't it?John, Paul, George: Why?Ringo: Well, it's a twenty four hour day, isn't it?John: You surprise me, Ringo.Ringo: Why?John: Dealing in abstracts.
- Apocalypse Now: The unnamed reporter played by Dennis Hopper is prone to spirited diatribes of gibberish philosophy, caught up in the magnetism of Kurtz's insanity. A lot of this was improvised by the heavily drugged Hopper.
- Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood had Farraconvict, a parody of the "ex-con turned religious intellectual" trope, whose ramblings go from cliche to odd to just plain gibberish all in a single chain.
- Brand's speech in Interstellar about love being "an artifact about a higher dimension we cannot percieve" and that "transcends the dimensions of time and space" is treated as this by the other characters. And many viewers. It makes sense in context of the later parts of movie and the existentialist themes that are included in almost all of Nolan's movies, but at that moment it seems completely ridiculous.
- Love and Death, Woody Allen's Affectionate Parody of Russian literature abuses this one. "Objectivity is subjective!"
- In Rabelais' GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL, Pantagruel offers to judge the lawsuit between Lord Kissbreech and Lord Suckfist, which has been going on for years because no one but the litigants has any idea what it is about. After each party gives his "case" in a prolonged stream of non-sequiturs and gibberish, Pantagruel gives "judgement" in another such — and both litigants announce that they are completely satisfied, an outcome without precedent.
- Vardaman (from the novel As I Lay Dying), who is too young to comprehend his mother's passing, repeatedly lapses into this. Because flour and sugar and coffee. Jefferson is farther away than crazy.
- Dr. Hamid Parsani, protagonist of Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia, a text described on the back cover as "At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire," is perhaps one of our greatest postmodern wordsaladists. For example: "The nemat-space of the ()hole complex reduces the monopolistic holiness of the Creation, the functionality of the ground's economy (which also forms a taxis-trellis pincer to support the Whole), and the hegemony of the Whole. Nemat-space introduces wholeness to Zero without wiping it out. This is the polytics first practiced and exquisitely elaborated by the Persian cult of Kaxuzi..." etc. etc. for 250 pages.
- Perdido Street Station: The Weaver is an interdimensional being with Blue-and-Orange Morality and a completely alien point of view vaguely based on aesthetic opinion. It spouts a steady stream of not-quite-nonsense to anyone in earshot, but no one is any closer to understanding its motives at the end of the book than they are at the beginning.
- Judith Butler: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power". From confused matthew.
- In essence, she's saying that a shift in thought from a model of power that works as one whole to a model of power that works as a multitude of different things brought a discussion of time to the table, and moved the theories of power from considering power as an object that only certain people have to an object that everyone has more or less of. Or something.
- "First, you think, 'Money makes the world go round, thus, capital structures relationships. Relationships are all the same.'(Althusser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser
philosopher) Second, you think, 'It is more complicated. Society talk and gossip and believes form relationships. Thus relationships will change over time. Oooh, talking is very important. Let's call it hegemony!'"
- In Children of the Mind, Peter makes the mistake of instructing the genetically-enhanced prodigy Wang-Mu to pose as a philosopher of a school that uses vague parables of questionable applicability to appear deep. She pretends to go along with it until they actually meet the man they're trying to fool, at which point she busts out a reasonably coherent and well-thought-out bit of political theory apparently on the fly. She implies that Peter's assumption that she'd be unable to pose as a "real" political philosopher is due to her gender or ethnicity or both.
- The Third Policeman comes with numerous references to, and occasional Wall of Text footnotes quoting, a fictional Word Salad Philosopher by the name of de Selby.
- The Hybrids of Battlestar Galactica speak entirely like this, with complicated philosophy mixed with prophecy and ship maintenance.
- And so does Anders.
- Reuben on iCarly talks completely like this, in muddled rhymes and colloquial sayings. Gibby seems to understand fine, but no-one else does. Until Sam makes up something at the end that makes no sense either, and sends Reuben off crying.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus has its fair share of this trope, most notably with Gavin Millarrrrrrrr in the "How Not To Be Seen" episode.
Gavin: Some people have made the mistake of seeing Shunt's work as a load of rubbish about railway timetables, but clever people like me, who talk loudly in restaurants, see this as a deliberate ambiguity, a plea for understanding in a mechanized world. The points are frozen, the beast is dead. What is the difference? What indeed is the point? The point is frozen, the beast is late out of Paddington. The point is taken. If La Fontaine's elk would spurn Tom Jones the engine must be our head, the dining car our oesophagus, the guard's van our left lung, the cattle truck our shins, the first-class compartment the piece of skin at the nape of the neck and the level crossing an electric elk called Simon. The clarity is devastating. But where is the ambiguity? It's over there in a box. Shunt is saying the 8.15 from Gillingham when in reality he means the 8.13 from Gillingham. The train is the same only the time is altered. Ecce homo, ergo elk. La Fontaine knew his sister and knew her bloody well. The point is taken, the beast is moulting, the fluff gets up your nose. The illusion is complete; it is reality, the reality is illusion and the ambiguity is the only truth. But is the truth, as Hitchcock observes, in the box? No there isn't room, the ambiguity has put on weight. The point is taken, the elk is dead, the beast stops at Swindon, Chabrol stops at nothing, I'm having treatment and La Fontaine can get knotted. note
- Before Cecily Strong was a Weekend Update anchor on SNL, she was The Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started a Conversation With at a Party.
"There are homeless people out there who can’t even pay their mortgages! Is that what George Washington had in mind when he started ‘merica? It’s like, read something, Seth. Learn a book!"
- A lot (read: all) of Jon Anderson's lyrics are like this.
- In the song "Junkie man, tell me what your story is / Out come the wolves" by the punk band Rancid.
"my hand went blind clairvoyant I make love to my trance sister my trance sister went on and my trance parents see from the balcony I looked out on the big field it opens like the cover of an old bible And out come the wolves their paws trampling the snow the asphalt I stand on my head and watch it all go away"
- R.E.M.'s "Life and How to Live It" is doubly this. Not only is the advice rather nonsensical, but it was inspired by a resident of Athens who built two apartments in his house (with him changing apartments as his moods changed) and self-published a rather incoherent and bigoted book of advice.
- Subverted in Poets of the Fall's "Psychosis
," where a chorus that confesses the singer's insanity and opening lines that seem like nonsensical ranting eventually gain context as cynical and bitter musings on fame's superficiality, until they give up and begin to plot sinister ways to exploit it.
It's like I'm a welcoming freak show doormat
Held in awe while growing fat in the head
This is where we all should see red
- Elliot McGucken's patent for creating "exalted" videogames.
This may be the longest, most jaw-dropping rant on the Internet. It is humanly impossible to read this all the way through.
- But if you do attempt to skim through it, you soon notice that perhaps 0.1% of the text was written by McGucken, and the rest is a text-only dump of threads he started on various forums. The schizophrenic nature of it all is thus simply because it was actually written by dozens of "authors".
- He's still frelling insane. His replies to people on internet message boards are a combo of quasi-libertarian rantings about George Washington punching business schools in the face or something, and oratories on the Great Books helping you become Clint Eastwood and shoot lightning.
- Our entry on True Art used to play this for laughs.
- The Conspiracy Theorist Troper Tales page (when it existed):
My dear friend! Thank you for your courage and your energy. As well as just for being you. Speaking of YELLOW (in regards to the pulses of yellow light)I just heard on the radio last night that the new Pantone "color of the year" is Yellow. Last years (or coming to an end) was the color "Blue Iris." Illumi-Nazi Mind Kontrol is everywhere.
- The Postmodernism Generator
randomly generates these whenever you refresh the page.
- The output of the Complaint Letter Generator
borders on word salad at times:
It will give you a new mental map upon which to fix your own position so that you can better deal stiffly with pugnacious Huns who bombard us with an endless array of hate literature. Although my approach may appear a bit pedantic, by setting some generative point of view against a structural-taxonomical point of view or vice versa, I intend to argue that it may not be easy to take steps against the whole unforgiving brotherhood of the worst classes of prolix gauleiters I've ever seen, but it can be done.
- Sally from Peanuts was known for declaring random sentences to be 'my new philosophy in life'. For example "Wolves are making a comeback."
- Pro wrestler the Ultimate Warrior was famous for being a Talkative Loon with No Indoor Voice who went off at length about his convoluted "philosophy" almost every time he was put in front of a working microphone. The short-lived comic book series he wrote, Warrior, was basically a collection of multiple page, near-unintelligible essays on his point of view - spouted from the narrator and the main characters. Besides that, the plot was nonexistent.
- HYBRID
, which can't really be called a Tabletop RPG, is pretty infamous among RPG.Net, which describes the "game" as "unmitigated nonsense." It basically consists of more than 500 numbered rules presented in a non-sequential order. The rules consist of mathematical equations with undefined variables, allusions to social and political issues, pop culture references, cross references to other rules, to non-existent rules, and to rules in other roleplaying games; misogynistic statements, and much more. It first appeared on USENET newsgroup rec.games.frp.super-heroes as a series of disjointed posts by the author, who is known only as "C" and is currently maintained by Phillipe Tromeur. The version numbers are also non-sequential — its current version, 0.21, is a later version than version 0.34. RPG.Net ranks this "game" as the second worst game of all time (the worst being reserved for the Game That Shall Not Be Named).
- Lucky's monologue from Waiting for Godot. See it on the World Gone Mad page.
- In King Lear, Edgar disguises himself as a madman, and he really gets into it. All his subsequent lines take the form of rambling, nonsensical, vaguely theological rants which the actually-mad king takes for "philosophy."
Edgar: Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman: keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders' books, and defy the foul fiend. Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind: Says suum, mun, ha, no, nonny. Dolphin my boy, my boy, sessa! let him trot by.
- Feste from Twelfth Night employs this to stall for time when Olivia reproves him for staying out later than usual:
Olivia: Take the fool away.
Feste: Do you not hear, fellows? Take away the lady.
Olivia: Go to, you're a dry fool, I'll no more of you; besides, you grow dishonest.
Feste: Two faults, madonna, that drink and good counsel will amend: for give the fool drink, then is the fool not dry. Bid the dishonest man mend himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest, if he cannot, let the botcher mend him. Anything that's mended is but patched; virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin, and sin that amends is but patched with virtue. If that this simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not, what remedy? As there is no true cuckold but calamity, so beauty's a flower. The lady bade take away the fool; therefore, I say again, take her away.
- Darkest Dungeon: If a Leper becomes Irrational, his usual koans will be replaced with vaguely-philosophical nonsense like "Iron sleeps in sunshine. Grey. Redemptive." and "Rage begets springtime. Cold essays on murder."
- In Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal, a very badly translated version of Pokemon Crystal Version, some of the strange things that the NPCs say may be this trope. Here's a couple examples:
- THEY [bird Pokemon] WERE FLUTTERING IN THE SKY, MAKING THE SKY MAGNIFICENT. I LET THE WORLDLY PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THEIR GRANDNESS!
- WENT THROUGH THE CAVE JUST NOW, STILL SPIRITFUL.
- The rambling man in Seward Square in Fallout 3 has a worldview that qualifies as this trope.
- One of the players in Darths & Droids has such a philosophy... sort of. Judge for yourselves.Anakin: So why do you act so... {beat} you know...R2-D2: Stupid?Qui-Gon: The way I see it... a character sheet is like a box of chocolates...R2-D2: Oh god, here we go again.Qui-Gon: I mean, it's... You never know what you're gonna kill... So why stress over it? The Tao's principle is spontaneity. You know... um... We play dice with the universe.Anakin: Huh?R2-D2: Roleplaying is his downtime. He likes to turn his brain off.
- Jaden Smith's infamous Twitter quips include "How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?", "Trees are never sad look at them once in awhile they're quite beautiful", and "People use to ask me what do you wanna be when you get older and I would say what a stupid question the real question is what am I right now". (Others, like "If newborn babies could speak they would be the most intelligent beings on planet Earth", while factually dubious, can be tied to more realistic and typical philosophical arguments.)
- Implosion Group's website about Dan Winter- Sacred Geometry & Coherent Emotion, & HeartTuner + BlissTuner
:
Implosion due to Charge Fractality is the ONLY Cause of Life, of Gravity,and ONLY Cause of ANY System to Emerge from Chaos!- Here is Proof ! goldenmean.info/goldenproof < The CLIMAX of our Research.What is the possibility that Planck Length x Golden Ratio= The Hydrogen Radii (Winter's new equation) happens by accident? Answer: ZERO!! Einstein's (&modern physics) failure to figure out why an object falls to the ground, directly resulted in the incredible stupidity not to learn what (FRACTAL) field effect CAUSES LIFE - - Nearly every time Sir Ron Lion Heart goes all vampyric, he speaks only in nonsensical prose and even crazier philosophical ramblings. Rule of Funny applies big time, or else viewers would quickly get bored and leave.
But be careful not to let the attack become forever disfalled upon.Please now witness, on a verge of remembrance, {unintelligble} has just been passed.And the order of which thy book will reveal its Power Star is on a final stroke.
- And it goes on and on and on.
- This can often feature in raocow's ramblings, and, though he occasionally demonstrates a real intellect, most of what he says isn't meant to be taken seriously.
Run forward, pixel-man! We must find the world and all it is worth! Whether it be flies or mouths or army ants, we shall gather them all into a giant ball and roll it all over the world, until it gets high enough to encompass even the continents themselves! Run with me, my friend! Simply run, and forget the loss, and all the world it entails! Jumping over the spheres, and squares of oppression, littering the lands in front of us, beside of us, but forget all that is behind us, for there is only the future, and extremely little else! Run with me, my friend! Keep going and run! Run until the antelopes gaze behind our dust trails; 'til the larks, and the ducks in the pond all confuse us for the blur that we are! Run forward, my friend! Run, and forget the shrimps and the shackles and all the pain that the bureaucracy and its friends want us to endure, for we will not endure; for we baked the past into the most delicious cake the world has ever encountered! It will not bring us our end, but our future will bring us more future! Run, my friend, run! My friend, the pixel-man.
- The SCP Foundation has a parody of this with SCP-7560-J
, a rant by a guy who is basically a cross between Francis Dec and Gene Ray.
- A number of online generators (such as the wisdom of Chopra
and the new-age bullshit generator
) exist that randomly generates pages of word salad using buzzwords commonly associated with New Age and certain kinds of philosophy.
- The mysterious and infamous 4chan quote which has scholars pondering its signification in vain:
"Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?"
- The Yogscast Trouble In Terrorist Town episode "Zombie With A Portal Gun"
has an example of this at the end of a round, where Sjin attempts to to be philosophical, but, well...note
Sjin: It's like I always say, "appreciate what you what, be are the make you appreciate what you dad."
Everyone bursts into laughter
Ben: Are you having a stroke?! - Time Cube was a website by the late self-proclaimed Dr. Otis Eugene "Gene" Ray dedicated to a theory that time was cubic. Unfortunately, he spent more time incoherently attacking academia for realizing the website was the ramblings of a racist and possibly homophobic Talkative Loon and railing against races interacting with each other, especially mixed-race marriages and Barack Obama being elected President of the United States, and the very concept of religions than attempting to explain his theory, and the website became famous for being paragraph after paragraph of rather creatively formatted and bigoted incoherent babble. Even actual attempts to explain it were thwarted by unintelligible Ice-Cream Koans like "Belly-Button Logic Works. When Do Teenagers Die? Adults Eat Teenagers Alive, No Record Of Their Death" and "If you would acknowledge simple existing math proof that 4 harmonic corner days rotate simultaneously around squared equator and cubed Earth, proving 4 Days, Not 1Day,1Self,1Earth or 1God that exists only as anti-side." The website registration expired after Ray's death, but it was mirrored in several places.
- Title Pending: Jared Ferg's audition involves him asking the duo a lot of questions about existentialism and self-confidence that have nothing to do with acting.
- Daniel Dennet coined the term "Deepity" for sayings that appear profound at first glance, but which disintegrate into meaninglessness when actually analysed. This trope could well be perceived as an entire philosophy built of deepitys, or one constructed by people attempting to produce deepitys who lack the basic linguistic skills necessary to construct even a facade of meaningfulness.
- This comment
left on a politics of science blog. (As far as anyone can tell, it's a pseudo-scientific Social Darwinist screed against the idea that white people should support, or mix with, people of other races.) You need to see the entire Wall of Text to get the flavor, but here are a few choice bits:
Ignorance of genomics? Thank G_d there have been no mindless regurgitations of Lewontin's Fallacy here as the sight of a grown man reduced the an extended phenotype of the ethnic interests of the Fallacy's inventor would be unbearable for me. Funny thing, when more than one loci is tested, the Fallacy is exposed as just that. Lack of faithism? We cannot be so lucky.And should that surprised? The genetic continuity of one's group is a real life interest, however humble, however unsexy, and the sense of moral superiority and temporary bit of status one is rewarded with for paying lip service to the faithism de jure is not.neo-liberalism + cultural Marxism = elite power - "The Illusions of Alacrity" by one Y. Serm Clacoxia, quoted in a December 1982 Scientific American essay by Douglas Hofstadternote :
Thus we act: and perhaps action itself is the Anatole's Curlicue of our era. It is high time to recognize that action, and action alone, will be the agent that transmutes the flowery barrier of unutterability into an arbitrary but sacred iota of purposefulness, which cannot help but penetrate into an otherwise nameless and universally spaghettified lack of meaning, which smears and beclouds the crab-lit hopes of half-beings begging for deliverance from their own private, yet strangely tuberculine maelstroms that begat, and begotten were from, a howling sea of ribosomal plagiarism.
- Hofstadter prefaced the quote by noting that it was only one of many nonsensical poems and essays written by Clacoxia, and afterwards opined that it was "deliberate nonsense".
- Søren Kierkegaard's wonderful sentence: "The self is a relation which relates itself to itself, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to itself; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to itself."—from The Sickness Unto Death, published under the pseudonym "Anti-Climacus"note . Possibly a Stealth Parody, especially when one considers Kierkegaard's disdain for Hegel's philosophy as being obscure.
- Hegel's actual philosophy is seen this way, not just as obscure but as pure nonsense. His work has been described as an "unclear thoughtless flow of words" and "meaningless verbiage". A popular example would be Hegel's attempt to argue that 1830s Prussia was not only the freest society in the world but the freest society that could possibly be imagined.
- The writings of Francis E. Dec, even when you get past the insane diction, manages to be a crazy collection of tracts that maintain that we all live in a veritable World of Chaos. Without getting into the Slavic supremacist Cultural Posturing and the rampant racism and antisemitismnote , among many, many nonsensical things, he says that an encyclopedia built in ancient times turned evil for some reason and became a God-Emperor that started oppressing the Polish and Slovene people out of paranoia and lust for power, and that our brains are not actually in our bodies, but are housed in glass cities on the far side of the moon. Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy in particular presents the spectacularly incoherent phrase "Computer God computerized brainthinking sealed robot operating arm surgery cabinet machine removal" as if it were a single word; RationalWiki and zer0 regard this particular rant as incoherent even by Dec standards, the latter using the term "word salad" to describe it.
Gangster Computer Gold worldwide SECRET CONTAINMENT POLICY, made possible SOLY by world-wide Computer God Frankenstein Controls, especially LIFELONG CONSTANT THRESHOLD BRAINWASH RADIO (quiet and motionless, I can slightly hear it; repeatedly this has saved my life on the streets). FOUR BILLION worldwide population ALL living have a Computer God CONTAINMENT POLICY BRAIN BANK BRAIN, A REAL BRAIN, in the Brain Bank Cities on the far side of the Moon, we never see.
- Emanuel Bronner started a soap company in order to spread his ideas. To this day, the labels on Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap carry an upbeat but decidedly nutty mixture of quotations (from Kipling and Thomas Paine, among others), religious ravings, and straightforward advertising. (Scans of the labels are available here
. Each quart bottle carries about 4,000 words.) To his credit, it is GOOD soap.
- A lot of continental philosophy is accused of this, pretty much everything post-modern too.
- Martin Heidegger is perhaps the philosopher with the most famously convoluted writing. For the sake of an example his definition of existence in Being and Time is "The Being of those beings who stand open for the openness of Being in which they stand, by standing it."
- French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are frequently criticized by saying that their ideas reduce to this. It doesn't help that both (and French philosophy generally, it seems) is very jargon-heavy, so if one isn't familiar with the terms used this definitely sounds like gibberish. Foucault even claimed it was required, and he wouldn't be viewed seriously by his colleagues otherwise (John Searle, an American philosopher he knew whom Foucault said this to, related that he was perfectly understandable in conversation). Whether true or not, it's mostly agreed their philosophies can come off this way at least to others.
- Fellow French postmodernists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari deliberately invoke this in their books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Since the books criticize psychoanalysis and its influence on the humanities, they are both written in a style approximating schizophrenic word salad. The main thesis of the books is that the wild creativity and boundary crossing thought patterns associated with schizophrenia can and should be used as the basis for new ways of psychological thinking and anti-capitalist organization. As such, it has a certain poetic value that's hard to come by in most academic works.
- An interview
with a Toronto man named Steve Spiros had him give one of these when all he was asked was his name:
Steve Spiros: You know me. Steve Spiros. Easy going? Those who know me, I'm a nobody. You understand? And you can't kill a person with no body. So...why am I afraid? I'm not afraid. I'm afraid of the Boogeyman. Who's the Boogeyman? You figure it out! I'm getting outta here! I'm going back to Waterloo where the vampires hang out! - Karjam's 'philosophical' writings
tend to boil down to this. One of many examples would be this:
Karjam: If you're an advocate for my philosophy on thoughts, beliefs, imagination and focus, you may come across those who claim the philosophy being difficult or impossible to understand. Now, these people aren't saying this because it really is that difficult to understand. Far from it, actually. Rather, they're saying this because they've rejected what should be obvious; they were trying to meaning in what does not exist, (In other words, they're overthinking things.)Such practices is usually a sign of a closed heart. Therefore, what out when it comes to dealing with them. How they react to being presented with sound, solid truths (which happen to be thoughts) depends on the nature of their closed hearts. The more closed their hearts are, the worst their reactions will be. As a quick note, simply stating that they're overthinking things (and explaining why they're doing it) is usually enough to counter such arguments. However, if they keep on insisting without providing sound, solid truths themselves (which happen to be thoughts),what they're doing is arguing by assertion, a logical fallacy. In addition, do not give proofs and examples even when asked. Even if said proofs or examples happen to be completely solid and sound, that does not automatically mean those with the closed hearts would be convinced. - In late October 2017, a UFOlogist posted this indecipherable gibberish
under a video about setting up a cheap home security system
. The uploader, Techmoan, described it as "the oddest comment [he'd] received in a while", and all that can be gleamed from it is that the bloke has been looking at every security camera video ever looking for evidence of Flying Saucers.
Jones Decor: Some time ago i had a herbal tab incident. It resulted in many tweets and FB posts being deleted the next day. I can feel his pain. I think. - This trope was used in a scientific article on human scepticism from 2015
where subjects were given a selection of word salad philosophy statements and asked to grade their profundity as a means of measuring the relation between the ability to recognize word salad and various other heuristics (such as numeracy, literacy, self-reflection and some well-known cognitive biases like the Sunk Cost Fallacy and Gambler's Fallacy). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that people with low tolerance for word salad (low profoundness) correlated with lower susceptibility towards cognitive biases. Later studies
would show a positive correlation between tolerance for bullshit and tendency towards belief in conspiracy theories.
- In real life, a person's use of word salad elements in speech could be a sign of a brain injury or of a psychiatric illness such as schizophrenia. Thus, as much as this trope might be Played for Laughs in fiction, it can be quite debilitating when it impairs a person's ability to communicate with friends and loved ones.