In his Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism Robert Jay Lifton gives the following interesting definition of the language of a totalist environment [p.429]:

The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. […] [B]rief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed […] become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

In other words, the preponderance of thought-terminating cliché phrases such as ‘agree to disagree’, ‘it’s all relative’, ‘this is hate-speech’, ‘these are the facts’, ‘[authority figures] all agree’, ‘this is [x] privilege’, ‘that’s your opinion’ is a symptom of being in a totalist environment.

A totalist environment is characterized by fully synthetic thinking, itself a function of a dynamic milieu control of information. In an environment of dynamic milieu control, certain information inputs – phrases, words, images, feelings – are branded as undesirable and banned from circulation. This in turn means that any and all thoughts associated with these information inputs become undesirable and dangerous.

In effect, synthetic thinking, as modulated by milieu control, acts to remove undesirable wrong-think and wrong-speech from all downstream communication feedback loops. Importantly, this is a self-reinforcing mechanism which, over time, generates an equally synthetic, and total, image of reality.

When consistently performed at scale over a given time-space, the causal chain of milieu control >> synthetic thinking >> synthetic reality leads to the emergence of cognitive mercantilism. Cognitive mercantilism is the systemic and dynamic formatting of the cognitive processing of a given local reality [i.e. a country], as directed by the actors in control of the communication mechanism of that local reality [i.e. the state].

This is how this maps to the historical process so far:

local mercantilism [tribal/feudal state] >> colonial mercantilism [empire/colonial state] >> [pseudo] liberal colonialism [we are here] >> cognitive mercantilism