There’s a term for phrases like “it’s just a tool”: thought-terminating clichés.
Here you’re treating thought-terminating clicheness as a quality inherent to the phrase “it’s just a tool”, not to the subjective motivations of the people using the phrase in a thought-terminating capacity.
I think, especially in discussions where strong opinions abound and form cliques, labeling certain phrases as “thought-terminating cliches” is itself a form of permission to forego any critical engagement with an argument. Or, to put it another way, to use a cliche to terminate thought. I think it’s worth my time and effort to say, essentially, “hold on, I don’t think we should immediately dismiss anyone who tries to distinguish the tools from the tool users, that line of thought has some important and useful ramifications for this conversation.”
The reason I decided to reply was this:
Here you’re treating thought-terminating clicheness as a quality inherent to the phrase “it’s just a tool”, not to the subjective motivations of the people using the phrase in a thought-terminating capacity.
I think, especially in discussions where strong opinions abound and form cliques, labeling certain phrases as “thought-terminating cliches” is itself a form of permission to forego any critical engagement with an argument. Or, to put it another way, to use a cliche to terminate thought. I think it’s worth my time and effort to say, essentially, “hold on, I don’t think we should immediately dismiss anyone who tries to distinguish the tools from the tool users, that line of thought has some important and useful ramifications for this conversation.”