gustave flaubert (1821-1880) was an acclaimed french novelist, best known for writing madame bovary. less well-known is some of the work he did on a topic that preoccupied him for much of his life: human stupidity, especially of the bourgeois type. his interest led him to start compiling all the insipid clichés and dumb parroted opinions he would hear in high society parties and the like into a collection that eventually became a satirical work called the "dictionary of received ideas", intended to be the ultimate reference for your typical unthinking bourgeois idiot who knows little but needs something to contribute to conversations. all you have to do is look up any topic in the dictionary, and there you can find the stock response to give, no critical thinking requiredi suppose you could also view the dictionary as part of flaubert's prolonged literary war against clichés, which he painstakingly avoided in his novels. for example, quite a few entries in the dictionary take the form "X: Always 'Y' or 'Z'", pointing out how certain words always seem to be used together to the point where they've just become part of a package, like a mini-expression or, as flaubert fears, a cliché. .
this was an interesting concept to me because i feel like i've run into this sort of thing myself. in my younger and more vulnerable days, i used to browse reddit quite a bit. i know, i know, but to be fair it really did used to be somewhat better back in the day. what eventually motivated me to quit was when i realized that i could easily guess what the top 5 comments of a thread would be even before opening it up. this is because over time, the site had devolved into endless repetition of the same references, the same stupid jokes/puns, the same tired takes, and so on. posters had figured out what sorts of things got the most updoots, and would relentlessly milk them. i guess that's pretty bad, but what might be even worse is that the "hivemind" was so content to continue updooting the same stuff over and over again. after browsing long enough, i had learned the entire canon of stock responses, and probably could have put together my own satirical "dictionary of redditarded ideas"there are even some entries from the dictionary of received ideas that are somehow valid for reddit as well, like the "Astronomy" one. redditors always held astronomy in high regard ("An admirable science"), and when astronomy came up i also recall seeing many astrology dunks ("In speaking of it, poke fun at astrology").. there was nothing new or interesting to be found, so i quit. i imagine flaubert must've had a similar moment going to some parisian party, hopping into a conversation about something or the other, and realizing that he could predict everything that people were going to say.
anyways, down below on this page i've collected some of my favorite entries from flaubert's dictionary of received ideas. it's fascinating to me how many are still relevant and/or funny despite being well over a hundred years old. i suppose it's just evidence that while technology may advance and aesthetics trends come and go, human nature will never change. even if the topics they enthuse about are different, many of the types of guy and the attitudes that flaubert pokes fun at still exist to this day. now they just talk about crypto or elon musk or some bs all the time instead of railways and napoleon, like in flaubert's entry for railways: "If Napoleon had had them, he would have been invincible. Enthuse about them, saying: "I, my dear sir, who am speaking to you now, was at X this morning: I had taken the train to X, I transacted my business there, and by X o'clock I was back here." i guess to be fair railways actually are useful and still heavily used to this day, and napoleon did kind of come pretty close to conquering europe, so there's that.