whateverism

English

Etymology

whatever +‎ -ism

Noun

whateverism (countable and uncountable, plural whateverisms)

1. (politics) Adherence to the Two Whatevers: "We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave."
   • 1994, Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping, updated edition, Princeton University Press, published 2018, →ISBN, page 59:

     The critique of “whateverism” picked up added momentum in late June, when People's Daily published an article by a “special correspondent” who argued that it was not necessarily a revisionist sin to update the Thought of Mao Zedong periodically in accordance with the requirements of a changing reality.

2. (rare) Belief in whatever; apathy, nothingarianism.
   • 2005, Christian Smith, Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul searching: the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers, →DOI, →ISBN:

     Most religious communities' central problem is not teen rebellion but teenagers' benign “whateverism.”

   • 2014, Ana Deumert, Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication:

     In Always On, Naomi Baron […] argues that because we write more than ever before, an inattention to how we write has crept in, a sense of 'linguistic whateverism'.

   • 2015 June 15, Alexandra Molotkow, “Entourage is less a movie, more a giant 404 error”, in The Globe and Mail‎^[1]:

     Work is as important as family is as important as sex, and this isn't nihilism so much as whateverism – whatever's happening right now. It's not that nothing matters; it's that everything matters, until it doesn't any more.

3. (countable) Synonym of ism (an ideology, system of thought, or practice that can be described by a word ending in -ism)
   • 2017 July 19, Ken Eisner, “A Ghost Story scares up a poetic mood”, in The Georgia Straight‎^[2], retrieved 2021-03-11:

     [Terrence] Malick’s ponderously poetic whateverism informs the pacing here, although writer-director David Lowery’s 90-minute mood piece is certainly a bit tighter.

See also

• whataboutism