I am an athiest. In my life, I have encountered a number of ridiculous, hate-filled rants about my decision to live a life with dignity but without faith. I have heard dumb jokes and listened as I was condescendingly told that I had no capacity for morality, decency or love because I did not accept the lecturer’s choice of religion.

Unlike Campbell, I concluded that ignorance and incivility from athiests is not the solution to ignorance and incivility from theists.

While I suspect Campbell would make no apologies for his incivility, I doubt he would be as happy about his ignorance. And his ignorance is on full display.

“Religions” did not become monotheistic over time. Most pantheistic religions died natural deaths; some exceptions survive in Asia (notably, Hinduism and Shinto, though they don’t have a real parallel to the Western “God” concept). Monotheistic religions were always monotheistic; no one looked at a budget and cancelled the extra God expenditures.

His other articles about Horus and Christ have already been thoroughly dismantled, but prove further that Campbell’s conclusions are spurious. People should always be suspicious of zealots, especially zealots who don’t understand what they are fighting. Campbell is that kind of zealot.

Had Campbell ever talked to any Christians with a shred of empathy, he might see that this “faith in self” concept comes through in a majority of them. However, I suspect that Campbell’s investigation into religious faith has ended with second-hand reports about a handful of Southern Baptists or other closed-minded and fundamentalist branches that have dominated American political discourse since 2002. Religion, of course, doesn’t help anyone when it resorts to bullying, name-calling or any other number of its ills. But neither does atheism. It is unforgivable in both cases.

For many, the experience of God is simply a reminder to elevate one’s self to a
higher and more noble purpose. This has room for human rights, civil rights and the option to love whoever you want.

While Campbell may be self-directed toward finding his willpower, his faith (and mine) still comes from imaginary friends who died hundreds of years ago. His philosophy, as expounded here, is Nietzsche’s. These sources of inspiration — Nietzsche, the Bible — are both external references for internal conditions. They are the words of wiser people than us. Does Campbell’s source of faith – a vast body of excellent atheistic philosophy — “undermine his faith in himself?” I should say not. Nor would referencing a bible, or a community, when life gets hard or questions can’t go unanswered. Such as the question of death.

I stopped believing in God when I did an experiment in an airplane. Terrified of flight, my natural inclination at a moment of great turbulence was toward prayer. I decided not to pray. If I survived, it would prove that I would have survived anyway, and probably would have attributed it to God. You can guess what happened.

Indeed, Campbell and I would agree that the fear of death is ultimately the source of religious power. Though I do note that Campbell betrays himself as an agnostic when he answers that he “doesn’t know” what happens when we die. In fact, he ought to, if his faith in biological textbooks is so certain. His brain activity will cease and his body will begin to decompose.

It’s a fate that all of us will inevitably meet. In Japan, buildings are left to decay without any attempt to repair them. Nature overtakes our greatest monuments. These places are left visible to remind us of this truth: That death is final, and that our death reveals in us the dignity and truth of how we lived.

And so ultimately, the choice to have faith, or to deny faith, will have no meaning. What matters, instead, is how we choose to live. Campbell and I agree on this much. But after landing on the ground and disembarking from my plane, I decided to live a life where I tried hardest to understand and respect the different paths everyone takes to make sense of their eventual demise.

I say this as a person who faces the end of his life with absolute certainty. If Campbell can’t be so certain, I wonder where he finds the inner authority to reject any possible explanation for what comes “next.” Indeed, is merely entertaining the possibility of an afterlife any different from the certainty that God exists? Both assume the possibility for a world beyond our comprehension.

If you take nothing else from my writing, Mr. Campbell, please note this: Looking closely at the two jokes you cite at the start of your article, neither is actually funny.

Eryk Salvaggio is a 2010 graduate of the University of Maine and currently living in Fukuoka, Japan. He was the editor and chief of The Maine Campus from 2007 to 2008 and during the Spring 2009 semester.

Journalism has come to define my thinking in ways that reach beyond the news pyramid and nut graphs. Much of journalism, like life, is rooted in the noble notion of searching for truth, so it makes sense that the two should have a dialogue.

Check your facts. Too often, we conflate what we think with what we know. It’s easy to use statistics we agree with or to base arguments on information that is outdated or never actually true. The credo I’ve adopted is to have at least three independent verifications for anything I state as fact. If you work for a newspaper, you will perpetually second-guess everything you read or write. It’s the nerve-racking but necessary task of critical thinking.

Don’t assume. Making assumptions is simple, but life is complex. Humans naturally reject complexity, particularly when they’re angry. That’s why angry people always sound stupid. Try not to get angry, and you probably won’t sound stupid. Recognize that the solutions you see so clearly aren’t always at the world’s fingertips, and you can start the real work.

Don’t use “I.” Don’t boast or brag. The work you do should stand on its own. As writers, we’re trained to avoid self-promotion and concentrate on getting the job done. The story isn’t always about you.

Don’t bail. If you said you were going to do something but didn’t, don’t disappear. Reporters tell their editors, who need to make decisions to compensate for your mistake. If you fail, it’s a failure. If you fail and hide, it’s an irresponsible failure. Communication is crucial, especially when you’ve screwed something up.

Satisfaction is temporary. At The Maine Campus, it goes like this: You work for two days to get a story. The staff works to get it into print in a 16-hour-long production day. The paper hits the stands about four hours before the next news meeting. Those four hours are the only break anyone gets. Small islands of contentment emerge from long seas of bustle and action. That’s life, and it’s OK. In fact, it’s ideal.

Thank people, even if it’s indirect and a little awkward. I had ardent support from faculty at UMaine, much of it from two who will not be teaching next year: Greg McManus and Margaret Nagle. They were generous in their encouragement and advice. Also to Laura Lindenfeld — anyone who has met her knows why — and to Jeff Goolsby in the art department, for helping a first-generation college student understand what a university education can really mean.

Never rely on a single source. Whether it’s your story or your happiness, no one will tell you the truth. Everyone says they’re being honest. A lot of them mean it. Many don’t. Even the honest ones don’t know the whole story. You need to talk to many people with an open mind to get anything close to the truth, and when you do, all of them will say you got it wrong.

Don’t take it personally. You will screw up sometimes, and if you’re lucky enough to be a newspaper editor, you’ll get about 100 critical e-mails every time you do. They will correct your error — let’s say you called a Student Senate resolution a “bill” — and point out your assumed character flaws. But these people aren’t talking to you, they’re talking to their anger. Learn to pick out valid points from their conversations with themselves, and you’ll be able to fix the real issue without getting heartburn.

Maybe it isn’t “a real newspaper.” A lot of life is fogged up by wondering if what you’re doing has any real meaning in the world, or if you’re just acting out a game of make-believe. I can’t answer that, but I see nothing more “real” than doing what you love with awesome people. So go for it.

Eryk Salvaggio was editor in chief of The Maine Campus from 2007 to 2008 and spring 2009. He has also worked as Web editor, style editor, a copy editor and reporter. He will be moving to Japan in August.

On May 27, 2008, Jason Brooks had a headache. As a result, he crashed his van into Deborah Archer, a mother of seven, and killed her. Brooks drove off without reporting the accident. He was caught a week later. His sentence? Two years.

I wasn’t friends with Jordyn Bakley, and I’m not speaking for anyone who is. But when I saw a picture Friday of Garrett Cheney walking out of the Penobscot County Jail on bail of $50,000 surety after being accused of driving drunk and killing her with his truck as she was walking home, I was angry.

This pattern of minor sentences seems likely to continue.

The idea of releasing the man charged with fleeing the scene of a crime and keeping quiet for months is astounding. If he is responsible, he’s already established a resistance to facing consequences.

Maine law has a shortage of consequences for hit-and-runs. If there’s an accident, a driver is expected to stop and provide “reasonable assistance” to the injured. Failure to do so is classified as a Class D crime, punishable by jail time of less than one year. If there is serious bodily injury, it becomes a Class C crime with jail time not to exceed five years.

There seems to be no elevation beyond that and no distinction for collisions that result in death. There are manslaughter charges, which are a Class A crime punishable by up to 30 years in jail. But those sentences can be suspended, and precedent indicates they will be.

Consider the case of Hamlyn, who was driving drunk. If she hadn’t killed anyone, she would have had her license suspended. But the maximum sentence for operating under the influence in Maine is two years in jail, which is only one year less than Hamlyn’s actual punishment — she was sentenced to 18 years in prison, but her sentence was suspended save three years.

Three years of incarceration for the death of a single mother is a tragedy, and a six-hour layover in a courthouse for the death of Jordyn Bakley seems to indicate the courts don’t take the charge seriously.

This is not a promising pattern. It sends no warning of the consequences of drinking and driving. If anything, these sentences are a relief to serial drunk drivers in Maine: Even if your stupidity kills someone, you’ll probably be able to graduate with people in your residence hall.

Convicted drunk drivers and their mistakes have left enormous wounds in the world, and their jail sentences should fit the audacity of their crimes. A few words in Maine’s legal code could raise “failure to render assistance” in an accident that results in a fatality to a Class B crime punishable by up to a 10-year sentence. If the driver’s blood-alcohol content is over the legal limit, it should be made a Class A crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

This way, drivers who hit people, especially those tempted to drive away without stopping, have more incentive to help. The damage these crimes do to victims and their families is real and enduring.

By no means should we accept the current level of punishment for such offenses. It’s important, ethically and legally, to stay at the scene – in many accidents, the law will result in a simple suspension of your license.

But Maine law doesn’t punish this offense strongly enough, and driving off at the scene of a fatality is even more stomach-churning. Who’s to tell who could have been saved?

I believe people can atone for their mistakes and go on to be better people. I have met some who have done horrible things and changed for the better, who have committed their time to undoing the wrong they have caused.

But no request for forgiveness is worth a damn unless it comes with meaningful consequences.

Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.

Programs like Foursquare broadcast your location whenever you stand still, removing the tedious act of typing and forcing your “audience” to endure a barrage of tweets about how often you have been to that Old Town gas station’s bathroom.

Thankfully, punishment has been dreamed up and doled out to these geotagging narcissists courtesy of pleaserobme.com, a Web site that allows you to search for people’s addresses and see when they’re not home.

Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” I wonder if we’ve simply started outsourcing the task of self-examination: Rather than introspective soul-searching, we bask in constant observation. If our actions are unethical, we don’t explore our impulses and ponder our psychological motivations. We just delete the status update.

I’m exaggerating, of course. Life on Facebook and Twitter is a sort of removed life — a broadcast — and we only hope that soul-searching still takes place outside the gaze prying eyes. The only signs are when someone is posting totally deep song lyrics to their wall.

Let me take up the unpopular case for privacy. Somewhere in the world is a subculture, deemed crazy by the most narcissistic Facebookers, of seemingly delusional privacy addicts.

These people resist disclosing information at every opportunity: They use cash, so as not to leave a credit card trail of their purchases. They swap grocery store cards, so Shaw’s won’t know what they’re buying. They send bogus e-mails on Gmail and lie about their age and gender online whenever possible. They don’t have Facebook pages, and they use proxies to browse the Internet.

By comparison to most, this borders on insanity. Most people don’t care if their supermarket knows they buy two gallons of milk every Tuesday, especially if it means getting special coupons. Some people like having customized advertisements. All of this “being invisible” stuff might seem more fit for a modern recluse.

After all, why should we care about privacy?

For one, you are not as savvy as you think you are. Advertisers are collecting your data, and they’re using it to tailor their pitches to you in various ways. You may think you’re immune, but it doesn’t matter.

Repeated exposure to the same message — regardless of how educated you are — will make you begin to question what you know to be true. That’s why, after listening to Rush Limbaugh every day for about three months, I find myself full of arguments against the existence of global warming.

The same holds true for advertising: Given enough information about your private life and your buying habits, the advertisers will be able to eventually convince you to buy something. Maybe you don’t care. Scratch that — I know you don’t care.

Second, there are rascals with high-powered laptops and bigger rascals with lousy security protecting your data. This adds up to the dreaded security breach: Suddenly, posted to the Internet is your history of purchases made by credit card, debit card, rewards card. The world knows how many condoms you’re buying, how much pornography you paid for last spring break and any number of embarrassing little details.

The only protection is your anonymity — the hope that no one with a life would bother to figure out what you’ve been doing. This is fine and good up to a point, but what if you decide one day to “stick out” and say something true, but unpopular? Might you be convinced to quiet down by that floating data file with your name on it containing evidence of that secret liaison you carried on for a month in 2008?

I’m not paranoid about my data, but as I enter the workforce, I have more than one reason to be afraid of explaining whatever might pop up: things that might look worse than anything I’ve ever actually done.

But is all of this enough to delete a Facebook account, stop tweeting, or skip out on that 20 cents I save every time I buy a bag of rice? No, probably not, and that’s my point: Privacy just isn’t worth it. All I have to do is keep my head down and I’ll be fine.

Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.

Consider the resurrection of the Neanderthal. A blog post on the Discovery Channel’s Web site asks whether or not scientists should, once they can. Since the ethical debate is barely simmering for want of several major scientific breakthroughs, let’s focus, instead, on the theoretical.

The prevailing theory on the Neanderthal is that it was rendered extinct in one of humankind’s earliest forays into genocide. Closer to humans than chimpanzees, with the ability to speak and play music, the Neanderthal was clubbed out of existence by nature’s leaner, meaner Homo Sapiens model.

Some theorize that certain Neanderthal characteristics have made it into our genes through interbreeding. If so, the possibility exists that we could fertilize a Neanderthal child in the womb of a human mother. So the idea of bringing them back through a combination of our most advanced technology — cloning — and our most primal — a womb — has that “Avatar” sense of justice to it. It’s as if our species can undo our past sins, as if to say: “We’ve annihilated you, now let us show you how kind we can be.”

Along the way, we’d probably kill about 30 more, according to researcher Stephan Schuster. That’s his estimate for how many attempts it would take to get a clone up and running. The process would create, at best, 30 stillbirths, and at worst, 30 painfully disfigured, suffering beings coming back into the world after a 30,000-year hiatus.

Should they succeed, scientists will encounter even more ethical quandaries. As Yale University geneticist James Noonan told Archaeology Magazine: “If your experiment succeeds and you generate a Neanderthal who talks, you have violated every ethical rule we have, and if your experiment fails … well. It’s a lose-lose.”

In other words, what you do with one living Neanderthal is as ethically troublesome as what you do with 30 dead ones.

A living Neanderthal would be alone in a world of almost-peers, the descendents of those who eradicated its environment and relatives. While it’s likely the Neanderthal would end up with some form of human rights protections, no law can ban a creature from feeling alienated and lonely.

It’s interesting to hear ethicists discuss this, because it applies to anyone who wants children. No one can promise children a world of social acceptance, love or benevolence. By extension of our ethics on the Neanderthal, we ought not to reproduce altogether. Life, it seems, is not an ethical burden to place on a child.

If a Neanderthal could be sparked into life through a test tube without any risk of pain or suffering, and if an entire playground filled with such babies could emerge from a single lab in a few weeks time, is it acceptable then? The ethicists say the Neanderthal wouldn’t have immunity to diseases, would not know how to cope psychologically with cities or even agriculture. The stress would be akin to panthers pacing in cages, uncertain of how to behave in an artificial environment and being reduced to complete despair and insanity.

The ethicists in Archaeolgy Magazine say if you take away the birth defect risks, give a Neanderthal some friends and a Truman Show-like level of a comfortable habitat, and all systems are go for eventually having a conversation and some lute performances by a resurrected Neanderthalensis.

Of course, for now, the cloned Neanderthal is far beyond our technology, which has yet to produce a bona fide healthy copy of anything. But these questions are still interesting to think about.

After all, the basis of human ethics is the idea that we should do unto others as we would wish to have them do unto us. Given the possibility of our complete annihilation at the hands of some terrifying, dominant insect-like race in 2300 A.D., wouldn’t we be comforted by the knowledge that, come 40,000 years later, we might be brought back to existence by some benevolent and wiser cockroach scientists?

Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.

We’ve been asked to reduce these meaningful human pursuits into pure numbers for ranking purposes. On top of that, spending $7 million a year on the luxury of playing and watching sports may not seem like a priority. In fact, it may be infuriating.

Yet, according to a front-page story in the March 29 issue of The Maine Campus, we’re spending at least $10 million, per year on athletics. Revenue including gifts, corporate sponsorships and ticket and merchandise sales brings in more than $4.5 million, while payroll and benefits for its army of 85 staff members exceeds $5.2 million. Add in maintenance and other expenses and you’ve got a $7 million dollar deficit.

So why don’t we hear about sports cuts? The answer is, they’ve already happened.

According to the Bangor Daily News, Athletics has trimmed $2 million over two years to account for budget deficits. The department has already eliminated the volleyball and men’s soccer teams. It’s cutting an additional $300,000 next year — bringing the department’s cuts to about 20 percent of its 2008 budget.

These cuts are in line with other proposals campus-wide. In fact, the $2.3 million has gone a long way to keep UMaine’s cuts from being even worse. Perhaps that’s why UMaine Athletics is conspicuously absent from the interim report that mandated the deans of UMaine’s academic colleges cut their costs by 20 percent: Athletics has already slashed its budget by the requested amount and will likely exceed its fair share in upcoming years.

For some, this is not enough. If UMaine took the radical step of eliminating its sports program entirely, the numbers are seductive. Even if UMaine kept its hockey team but lost everything else, it would pocket somewhere around $6 million to spend on departments that train teachers and social workers, or keep Maine fluent enough in other languages to secure foreign investments. It could better fulfill its fundamental mission of educating students.

But the same could be said for cutting any struggling academic program with low enrollment. We say every kind of knowledge will add some value to the world; this is a reasonable argument. And to be intellectually honest, we need to include athletics.

Money spent on games may seem like a waste, but eliminating endeavors based on productivity is a dangerous impulse that weighs value on a scale of taste.

If you don’t like sports, you’ll say cut sports. If you don’t like orchestral music, you’ll say cut music. That’s not an answer to a budget crisis; that’s a high school cafeteria. One can make equally compelling cases for the usefulness — or uselessness­­ — of marching bands, painting, poetry, geology, basketball or any other human endeavor that doesn’t make someone rich or take care of the poor.

If making money is a requirement for keeping programs, we begin to treat education as a business, emphasizing the bottom line over higher ideals.

The administration, in their plans for trimming academic spending, has asked us to support exactly this. Instead of figuring out who to starve so that other may eat, we should unite to simply say our state needs to allocate more money to education. This means raising taxes, tuition or both.

It’s not a sexy answer. Entire social movements have organized to slay the tax dragon. We complain with every paycheck. We vote for candidates who promise to give us that money back at the expense of public education. Even if we agree our taxes are too high, we can tell legislators what our priorities are for the money they have.

On Wednesday, Gov. John Baldacci signed a budget that cut an additional $8 million in funding to the University of Maine System. I watched Monday as dedicated students organized to tell Jeff Hecker, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, what they think of the hand he’s been dealt. Where was the protest in Augusta to share our frustration with the dealers?

Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.

Public administration will be shipped to the Augusta campus, where students can learn from the same policymakers who screwed up everything in the first place. Given Maine’s current crisis, you might think they’d get those kids as far from the capitol as possible.

Women’s studies, a controversial and maligned major, will cease to exist. It has always been a graduate pursuit in the guise of an undergraduate degree, though both will get the axe. If history were taught properly, there would be no need for the department to compensate. But with more women in college than ever before, the department has become a victim of its own success. Where the program has tried to reinvent itself — GLBT studies, for example — it simply runs into political minefields that make it an easy target, regardless of the vast need for GLBT support and perspectives in policy and education.Teachers, social workers and other areas need people trained to teach and respond to underserved populations. If we want to turn our backs on educating and empowering struggling Mainers, the women’s studies program is a fine place to start.

The music performance and theater programs, some of the favorite scapegoats of number crunchers, will also be eliminated. Any committee that targets them for cuts is probably incapable of being convinced otherwise.Training an army of bassoon players may seem like an inefficient way to reap economic awards, but not when graduates leave the state in droves for brighter cultural horizons. Essentially, we train people for affluent careers so they can get bored and move.If you love video games and cable TV, Maine will be a great place to be in 2014, when the proposed changes will take effect, assuming they are approved by President Robert Kennedy . Sadly, the educated, energetic workforce and student body that this state desperately needs tends to crave a more engaging lifestyle.

Finally, there’s languages. Supporters know languages are challenging and rewarding cultural pursuits. Until you learn another language, the limitations of a native tongue are incomprehensible. But there’s also a cynical, practical case for languages: money.Rather than starving the department, truly savvy administrators should consider expanding language requirements to more majors. Imagine if UMaine churned out engineering or business school grads who spoke Chinese?

Markets are emerging, opportunities are opening and even the brightest business or engineering students won’t see them if they can’t think outside of the American border. UMaine knows it: On the business school Web page, there’s a picture of students at the Great Wall. Cutting language classes means cutting students — and the state — off from foreign financing for domestic products and markets for Maine exports.

No cuts are easy, but this is far worse: a decapitation. Sadly, it’s expected that humanities — the fields that probe ethics, critical thinking, human culture and meaning — would take the brunt of the blade.The report emphasizes careers, reducing education to its economic potential. Unless we’ve decided, as a state, that our flagship university is no more than vocational training, it’s more important than ever for humanities to prove there’s substance in the supposed gristle of UMaine’s steak.

Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.

It wasn’t a science fiction film, it was a social experiment by way of a reality television show on France’s “Le Jeu de la Mort,” — which translates to “The Game of Death” — last Wednesday. Contestants didn’t kill anyone; their randomly selected partners were actors, and so were the audience members. But the contestants didn’t know that, and they tortured their partners anyway.

The set-up was part of a documentary by French filmmaker Thomas Bornot, who borrowed heavily from a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University researcher Stanley Milgram in the ’60s.

In Milgram’s study, participants were asked to join a research project, where they would be paired with another “participant” — who was actually an undercover actor. Participants were told to read questions over an intercom and administer electric shocks for every wrong answer they received, up to 450 volts.

At a certain point, the actor would scream and demand it to stop. If the participant tried to stop, the head of the study would give one of four pre-arranged verbal prods that urged them to continue.

The result: 65 percent of students administered the maximum voltage, enough to kill the person in the other room. The experiment was repeated in different cities and different environments, but the results remained remarkably constant. On “The Game of Death,” in which this experiment was replicated with a beautiful host and a cheering audience, the number soared even higher: Only 16 out of 80 contestants didn’t kill their “partner.” Milgram’s — and now, Bornot’s — revelation about human nature is that most of us, when ordered to do something, will do it.

Claude Halmos, a psychologist interviewed by BBC about the game show, said while we must teach children to obey, “We must also teach them how to disobey.” This means taking the time to explain rules to kids, rather than asking them to blindly follow them. If children have the freedom to question authority figures in their young lives — such as parents and teachers — then they will grow up to be adults who question authority.

This is not the same as raising a generation of armed revolutionaries. The ability to stop and think when confronted with an order is not an invitation to set a car on fire or burn down a police station — in fact, these kinds of behaviors often occur in situations in which the crowd is the authority, such as in riots. Teaching ourselves to examine our impulses toward order and chaos would bring us a safer, more sane world.

But while the prescription for our species’ future may be useful, it doesn’t help us with the generation of yes-men that are already here. If 65 percent of people would torture someone to death on camera for a chance to “win” a game, and almost all would torture the person for a bit before their conscience got the best of them, then we are a race of closet sociopaths.

Protection from abuses of power is clearly essential. It was the logic behind the trials of Nazis at Nuremberg: By setting the precedent that you would be judged for the orders you give and for the orders you follow, the Allied Forces were trying to create a sense of a higher authority for subordinates to fear. But clearly, it doesn’t work.

No authority, even the fear of God, could stop those shocks. Humans, no matter what they believe in, are hardwired to defer to authority and to lose our sense of responsibility when told what to do.

Is our species hopeless? Not if we begin to condition ourselves to critically analyze every order we take for granted. If there has ever been a practical case for philosophy and ethics classes, it is this one: The ability to stop and examine our actions is becoming an obsolete talent.

Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.

There is delight in finding a word for the previously unnamed: like “thixotropic,” for the pseudo-liquid, pseudo-solid state of ketchup or mustard, or “Schadenfreude,” for that strange sensation of joy when your friends experience a bit of misfortune.

A similar twinge of joy struck me when I discovered the less positive phenomenon of the thought-terminating cliché.

In his book “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism,” author Robert Jay Lifton describes this phenomenon as follows: “The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

In other words, a cliché is a simple phrase that kills a question in the mind of whoever asked it. In totalitarian states like North Korea, these words would include “capitalist.” On the brighter side — that is, on the side of inspiring action — the Soviets had “the revolution,” “progress” and “workers of the world, unite!”

Lifton calls it “the power of non-thought,” and you could imagine the script in Pyongyang:

“But why should we have so many people waiting in food lines when so many people can bake bread?”

“Ha! Spoken like a true capitalist!”

(End of discussion.)

But a revolution isn’t required for the language of non-thought. Indeed, everyday life is riddled with it. Wikipedia even has a list, from which I draw the following examples:

“Who cares?” This signals the end of the conversation. The speaker does not care, and so it is implied that no one would care. Therefore, further investigation of your question is unnecessary.

“No one said life is fair.” Indeed, because “no one” has said this, we shouldn’t bother to ensure that life becomes more equitable. In this category I would include, “Wait till you get to the real world,” as if one has not truly lived until one has lived in a world of traumatic hopelessness.

America loves its bumper stickers because they’re great at eradicating middle ground. “Hope and change” gets into one line, “How’s that hopey, changey stuff workin’ for ya?” gets into another. Then they shout.

Politicians also love these sound bites. Modern politics has become a race to say the most confusing, thought-terminating nonsense possible, and the media has become a vehicle for elaborating on idiotic bumper stickers. If you ever got the sense that someone you were talking to was simply repeating what he or she heard on Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olberman or The Daily Show, you’ve seen this technique create a walking thought-zombie. Keep at it: With patience, you may get to an original idea.

I have been a sucker for many of these, none more so than the old adage: “This, too, shall pass.” I encountered it in a book of Sufi wisdom as “the only permanently true thing.” Indeed, the slogan changed how I lived, rendering me a passive player to anything that happened. Bad grades? They’ll pass. Dead-end job? It will pass. The best times of my life? Don’t get excited, it’s gonna end. A great way to ensure that I stayed in line amongst the walking dead, never asking if anything else was possible.

That is the trick of these slogans, after all: To keep us from envisioning a world of deeper possibility, to prevent us from seeing the blank slate of our own lives when we feel most burdened by darkness. This is why oppressive platitudes are so useful to the totalitarian governments that seek submissive citizens: Because questions lead to ideas, and ideas lead to hope.

Hope is not welcomed by oppressive regimes, dumb politicians or abusive parents.

But hope, questions and ideas are at the core of the most inspiring people I’ve met. For them, conversation is an open door to action. And between the open-door world and the closed-door world, I’ll take an open door every time.

Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.

But Salinger’s death only shines a light on how modern his writing was. Without Salinger, it’s unlikely that we would see contemporary authors value the ‘genuine voice’ as often as we do. It’s clear in the writings of John Updike, but it goes further: Wes Anderson’s Tenenbaum family is a thinly veiled, slightly updated version of Salinger’s Glass family. Dave Egger’s voice in “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is Holden Caulfield raised on TV in the ’70s. Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” strikes similar chords.

Salinger split the world into two groups: Those who got him and those who didn’t. His work was not designed to serve the goals of American literature. Instead, they read as spiritual missives, which drove reviewers crazy. Some despised his tendency to tell readers what to do, but — for the group that got him — this was the core ingredient separating him from the likes of Updike and Hemingway. Not a matter of style but of content.

While “The Great Gatsby” was tackling the problems of class divisions and poverty, Salinger created a world where perpetually wealthy youth struggled spiritually. No wonder some reviewers hated this: It looked too much like America. Much easier to pretend we’d all be fine if only rich girls would marry poor boys.

Salinger’s embrace of Christian and Buddhist mysticism is clear in the perpetually underrated “Franny and Zooey.” Consisting of two parts — Franny’s dinner conversation with her awful boyfriend and Zooey’s conversation with his mother in a bath tub — the book is hardly the thrill ride promised by Hemingway’s asexual, bull-slaying matadors.

Rather, Salinger’s books are, for some of us, manuals for getting by in a world that pulls us into something not ourselves. The answers aren’t as easy as Kerouac’s “get real by getting on a freight train” prescription or Bret Easton Ellis’ “give up” attitude. Salinger’s novels had their own kind of logic, each building on the other into a single volume, with “Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction” serving as footnotes.

Salinger’s embrace of alienation attracted his share of crazies. John Hinckley Jr. had a copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” on him when he pulled the trigger on Ronald Reagan in 1981. So did Mark David Chapman when he killed John Lennon. The crazy and the smart share the burden of alienation, which is why either one sometimes seems like the other. Salinger’s prescriptions, so misunderstood by some, were meant to speak to that condition.

I was certainly in between smart and crazy when I made the three-hour trek to Cornish, N.H., years ago, after reading through his books — and books about him — to find any autobiographical descriptions of his home. I did.

In Cornish, protective town people glared at me suspiciously as I pumped gas. They might have known exactly what I was doing, even if I didn’t know exactly why.

On the side of a mountain with a steep driveway covered in blue gravel, surrounded by high walls, the Salinger compound was visible. No name on the mailbox, you could imagine, but plenty of “No Trespassing” signs.

I stopped in front of the house, knowing I wasn’t going to talk to him or do anything else. I had started moving again when I saw, about 10 feet down the road an old man — white-haired, shuffling up the road in a pair of muddy boots. It was Jerome David Salinger.

I looked at him as we passed. I didn’t stop, but I waved, and he kept walking by, shaking his head. It was pretty much perfect.

Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.