The Stereotypical Mind

It is about the bureaucratic deformation of the mind, which I think is one of the major contemporary problems in all societies, industrialized or underdeveloped. The book deals with the problem of how specialization in life’s activities can create this kind of deformation of the mind. In order to fulfill his task in an efficient and perfect way, a person finds himself secluded in a position in which he cannot see how what he does can have tragic and catastrophic repercussions and consequences in other areas or activities of society.

I remember in military school all those incredible documents we had to write or read. The language was so stereotyped that it gave you an idea of something totally disconnected from what real life is…Also used are scripts from a radio broadcaster in Iquitos who likes to exaggerate, a kind of tropical journalist, very primitive, who is really an incarnation of the stereotypical mind, a mind that moves only among stereotypes, totally incapable of saying or creating anything original.

—Mario Vargas Llosa A Writer’s Reality

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