Phil Christman has this rather good idea, which he exposits here, of "discursive basilisks."
Basically, there are some discourses that are so bad that the only healthy way to engage with them is not only not to engage with them but if possible not to directly look at them. Certainly to attend to them with any specificity is to boost their power. You can talk about them in a vague way, you can gesture at them, but you need to stay carefully on the side of the use-mention distinction, where you’re vaguely gesturing at them. There is something radioactive about the words themselves.
This is how he explains it initially. But for my money, there's an expansion a little later on, spinning from that last sentence, that's even better. The discursive basilisk is something that
will play and replay in your head forever and make your head a worse place to live.
I want to riff on the idea of a discursive basilisk a little bit, in ways that Christman probably didn't intend.
My experience of the discursive basilisk is that it's like a persistent infestation. It's an idea, acquired unconsciously, even osmotically, at the same time that I am consciously developing a philosophical worldview antithetical to that very idea.
(My mother grew up in a cult. She has moved to the cult continuously since she was a teenager. She raised me without religion. But growing up a Christian conservative casts shadows. Perhaps discursive basilisks behave upon me the way they do because shadows can themselves cast shadows.)
They speak, always, in a voice in my head that I tend to call "the little dissident." I think perhaps we all have this voice of advice and admonition in our skulls, brandishing encomiums to cruelty, that, if listened to, will do nothing but transform us into the worst and ugliest versions of ourselves.
And there has been, so far, no true permanent way to silence it. To consciously think the opposite, as if to countermand it, is still to pay it the due of attention; to consider it seriously, to roll the idea of behaving that way around in your mind, and realize just how horrific the effects of it would be (destroying every good thing in your life is almost always the sole and exclusive outcome) does nothing.
Indeed, if anything, these embolden that voice. This is why — and if this is indeed an experience others have, you will understand it — I am not going to, why I can not, name those basilisks.
How to handle these unwanted invaders? Christman's discursive basilisk is a socio-politico-cultural thing. You can't ignore it, though seeking it out is dangerous.
But the discursive basilisk I'm thinking about here — the little dissident — the best way I know to handle it is to ignore it. (And, hopefully, one day forget it.) When the thought emerges, I try to divert myself. Think of something different. Not an oppositional thought, but a orthogonal one.
The other thing is that I try to behave in ways that lead to my best self. (Not in terms of productivity, because I very infrequently work myself up to try and write short fiction, I can only call myself a composer still because of the Twelfth Doctor Fan Audios, months and seasons can pass between poems; but in terms of how I act in the world, towards others.) This is the long-term project, this is trickier, because your best self isn't about you, it's about everybody else, and because there is no angelic counterpart to the devilish dissident.
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There is one final postscript I want to add.
There is, for me, for many probably, an additional fear that is harbored towards one's personal basilisks, towards one's dissident voice: that one day, one will reach a sufficiently low point, that one's usual capacities will be diminished enough that this voice, which asks of you only that you become your worst self, will become a siren singing an irresistible song.
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