The coddling of the american mind

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Be the fire and wish for the wind (because air strengthens fire).

The Coddling of the American Mind exposes “safetyism” as what happens when you allow a concept like safety to become a cult. Authors Lukianoff and Haidt, or as I’ll refer to them from hereon, L&H, argue that since the inclusion of emotion as trauma into the DSM III, trauma has crept into a subjective state. They’re saying if people think something is traumatic, then it is traumatic, which is dangerous. It’s also true, since all we know is our perception of the world. I do, however, agree that when we let what L&H call concept creep go so far that emotional discomfort gets equated to physical danger, we’re essentially shielding people from the regularly-occurring daily experiences that are needed to become resilient to the same small emotional discomforts they want to skirt in the first place. It’s cyclic and counter-therapeutic because the advice of avoiding trigger warnings discourages reminders of trauma, strengthening our trauma instead of our response to it.

L&H say that keeping the creep at bay is accomplished through noticing cognitive distortions, as is done in Cognitive Behavior Therapy, hereon known as CBT. Not challenging how we emotionally reason events to our feelings teaches us to value impact over intent, which in turn fosters victimization as we look for the aggressors that caused us to feel negatively. If you don’t think you’re the captain of your own ship, then kill yourself, or rather, have whoever’s in charge do it for you (that’s from me, not L&H. I trust you’ll be able to pick out the distinctions on your own).

Rounding out their exposé of coddling’s drivers, L&H discuss social media’s red hands. They talk about a guy named Marcuse who wanted to teach intersectionality (discrimination against a black woman is more than the sum of black discrimination plus female discrimination) as a means of combating the age-old us vs. them movement of the good, poor oppressed and the bad, privileged oppressors. Unfortunately, his teachings of intersectionality and microaggressions (asking a Japanese guy if he knows any Japanese words) sparked a revolution in the opposite direction, helping us develop a call-out culture where we gain prestige by publicly shaming offenders of the things Marcuse helped to define and identify. Social media has been central to fueling call-out culture by always providing us an audience to watch people being shamed. It hijacks our hunter-gatherer pratfall humor to lust after the fact that bad things are happening to others, not us. The collective nature of global call-outs discourages defending the ashamed while amplifying cruelty, virtue-signaling (what people say to advertise their virtue) and anonymity-induced deindividuation, disinhibiting us and heightening mob mentality.

L&H segue into their second part by describing the impractical consequences of these great, stoked untruths, the first of which are intimidation and violence, whose definitions have similarly undergone some recent concept creep. The response to all of these perceived injustices incurred through intersectionalities and microaggressions have spurred action. Violence once referred to physical violence, but now that the DSM has allowed emotional trauma to encircle physical trauma, when someone perceives emotional trauma after hearing something radically or ideologically disagreeable, its being weighed the same as doing someone physical harm. The cognitive distortions that create this justification are resulting in many feeling that responding to “hate speech” with physical violence is justified, because as L&H put it, words are violence and violence is safety. You can see the dangerous contradictions that start to emerge. The kicker is that these oppressed, who the right like to lump into the anti-fascist (ANTIFA) category, say that if you condemn this bastardized self-defense violence, you’re abstinence is the same as condoning the ideas of your oppressor. When anything can be classified as hate speech by this generation as sensitive as an exposed wire, it’s no wonder campus violence has spiked. It’s important that everyone feel physically safe. That’s a right for safe spaces like universities where conflicting views are meant to pit ideologies against each other intellectually. What’s not important is that people feel ideologically or emotionally safe on campus. What’s important is being strong, not a little cuck bitch. As Obama Green Jobs Advisor Van Jones puts it, “Put on some boots and learn how to withstand adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym. The world is the gym, and the whole point of it is that it has weights.”

L&H try to dissect how we got here, and who is responsible. They talk about the makeup of professors and how the late ‘90s was when all the Greatest Generation professors, those predominantly World War II white male veterans had used federal legislation to help them find education in a postwar period, began to retire. They were replaced by a caste of race and gender-diverse Baby Boom professors that were much less diverse in their politics, being minorities and that many of them were influenced by the social protests of the ‘60s. Their entry into academia was not a side effect of post war legislation like their predecessors, but rather to continue the fight for social justice and progressive social ideas. L&H argue that because this generation of professors came in less politically-diverse, especially in fields dealing with politicized content, that it undermined the quality and rigor of scholarly research. This in turn churned out students filled with an inaccurate understanding of conservatives, politics, and much of the United States, circling back to the fact that this low viewpoint diversity makes communities more susceptible to witch hunts, seeking to find the black sheep in the untruth of us vs. them.

The third part of the book focuses on the six things contributing to this reduction in viewpoint diversity, the first of which L&H describe as the polarization cycle. We know the vitriol of today’s political environment is a new thing. Even though we have seemingly plenty of enemies to spare, L&H attribute historic bipartisanship to a pile of common challenges and enemies (e.g., The Great Depression, WWII Axis Powers, Cold War Soviets, etc.) Because tribalism runs high in our species, we were doing fine until the collapse of the Soviet Union. All the sudden intratribal conflict was back in fashion. Coupled with the change in media environment (moving from the three national television networks of yesteryear to the thousands of podcasts of today, each dwarfing mainstream followers and YouTube algorithms that disconnect moral matrices by feeding people more of what they’re interested in, encasing them inside their own custom echo chamber of belief) and congressional hostility (when the democratic dynasty ended their almost 60-year run and Newt Gingrich became speaker, crusading reforms meant to discourage new members from building cross-party relationships), it was easy for people to equate party affiliation with worldview and social/cultural identity. It’s described as an affective polarization responsible for current negative partisanship. Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability (Cambridge Analytica isn’t the exception, it’s the new rule).

Next, L&H attribute the decline of civility to the rise of anxiety and depression. They describe how rising levels of collegiate anxiety and depression the past few years may be because when iGen was in the full swing of youth, Facebook changed the age requirement to 13. The Facebook COO is quoted as saying, “How do we consume as much of people’s time and conscious attention as possible?” They engineered a social-validation feedback loop by hijacking the brain to get a dopamine kick when receiving a like or a comment. It’s hijacking because the brain developed a strong neural architecture through conditions of close, continuous face-to-face contact. They describe social media’s effect on aggression (making males more physically aggressive and females more relationally aggressive (i.e., hurting their rivals’ reputations, relations and social statuses)). When anxiety increases, so does a student’s perception of danger within innocent questions, enabling microaggressive perceptions, trigger warnings, and disinvitation (disallowing provocative speakers from delivering content on campus) inclinations. Depression is a different beast with farther-reaching consequences, because the problems of the depressed loom larger and seem more pervasive. One’s resources for dealing with problems seem smaller, and one’s perceived locus of control becomes more external [and out of their control], all of which discourage efforts to act vigorously to solve problems. Repeated failures to escape from what is perceived to be a bad situation can create learned helplessness, where a person believes that escape is impossible and therefore stops trying, even in new situations where effort would be rewarded.

Following a discussion on anxiety and depression, you might imagine L&H’s next point of contention would be with what galvanizes those disorders: Paranoid parenting. They talk about how stories like that of Adam Walsh (impetus for the milk carton missing child photos and true crime TV), combined with the ‘60s crime wave and the ‘80s spread of cable news (which offered non-stop coverage of missing child cases) inspired the ‘90s parents to be fearful and defensive of their kids. L&H describe this happening cross-culturally with societies that attain material prosperity and women’s rights. When women gain equal standing (i.e., educational equality, political rights, access to good healthcare and contraception) birth rates plummet and couples stifle childbirth to 1 or 2 kin. Having fewer children means investing more time with what you have, generating more fear of loss of that investment (my word, not theirs). L&H circle back to the truth that kids are, however, antifragile, and need to be served a fair amount of adversity in order to strengthen them against other adversities they’ll face throughout adolescence and adulthood. They draw a line in saying there is such thing as too much diversity, but make a point to highlight programs like Free Range Kids and LetGrow, where kids are allowed to fall more and learn from their mistakes. Lastly, L&H circle back to how too much adversity (most often seen in those with broken families and in lower socioeconomic statuses) don’t make it to college. At 38 of the top schools, there are more students from families in the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. What they’re suggesting is that due to the predominance of fragile undergraduates swarming campuses today, overparenting is a far more likely cause of fragility than underparenting.

Anxiety and depression persist on campuses, but their seeds are sewn through paranoid parenting. This shielding of life’s rough edges by parents is also responsible for the decline of play. L&H look at play anthropologically, saying how that although we played the role of predator and prey in our evolutionary lineage, being prey for longer is likely why kids enjoy practicing their fleeing and hiding skills. They follow up anthropology with a bit of biology, explaining the experience-expectant development. We have 22,000 genes, but between our 100 billion neurons, our brains have hundreds of trillions synaptic connections we can make. The brain is wired a certain way, and nature gives it a first draft to work from. Experience, however, is so essential because our brains have an incredible motivation to practice behaviors that will give it the right kind of feedback to later optimize itself in the environment that it finds itself in. It’s part of why we can’t help but play, despite the risk. This ability for free play, however, is disappearing (as kindergarten curricula have shifted from focusing on building social relationships, facilitating hand’s-on exploration and symbolic play to spending a majority of students’ time on preparing them to meet state testing thresholds). Wealthier kids are now also less likely to play with neighboring kids after school in place of structured extracurriculars. We want our kids built up with the things we never had as they’re judged more consummately by higher education institutions, but as the author of Excellent Sheep says, “the only point in having more is to have more than everybody else. No one needed 20k atomic warheads until the other side had 19k.” L&H use the quote to illustrate how students are more academically-prepared than ever before, citing preparation as a paradox of upper-middle-class rearing in that what parents do to help kids get admitted to college makes them less able to thrive once they’re there. They end the chapter hailing a quote (which I’ve shortened) Chief Justice John Roberts delivered at his son’s middle school commencement: “Treat me unfairly so that I may value justice. Betray me so I may know the importance of loyalty. Isolate me so I don’t take friends for granted. Give me bad luck so I’m conscious of the role chance plays, so I may appreciate that my success and others’ failure are neither completely deserved. Let my opponents gloat over me when I lose so I may learn sportsmanship. Ignore me so I know the importance of listening to others. Cause me pain so I may understand compassion. Whether I want these things or not, they’ll happen. Whether I benefit from them depends on my ability to see the message in my misfortunes.”

L&H aren’t blind to the fact that campuses themselves are contributing to coddling. With $548 billion in postsecondary revenue, the lives of the 20 million (40% of stateside 18-24 year-olds) undergraduates of today is very different than it used to be. Scaling demands staff, and costly degrees are blamed on administrative hiring quadrupling that of faculty. Administrators spread like a virus, thinking the best way to solve any problem is by creating a new Office. Because the cost of this education will be a lifelong utility cost, what people are buying now is less of an education and more of a luxury product. Students are purchasing institutional packages, and when they can author every facet of their experience, why is it strange that they suddenly want their universities to mirror their views. It invites protections meant to make us less vulnerable while accomplishing the opposite.

L&H circle back to technology-enabled students as a catalyst for social justice and safetyism, because not since Vietnam of the civil rights struggles of the ‘60s have the masses been exposed to the beating, killing, and deporting of so many minorities by armed members of the government. It’s bizarre how social justice warring is what pops out of this amalgam of events when our species naturally favors fair distributions, not equal ones. Even as toddlers we recognize the importance of proportionality (those who work harder should get more reward), but the sticking point is that we’re only more willing to accept a decision or action (even one against ourselves) when we perceive that what lead to that decision was fair. It’s a sticking point because that perception is gone. We don’t think what’s happening is just, not in process or distribution, and it leads to safetyism.

So this is all bleak as fuck. L&H try to coo us readers with some food for thoughts. They suggest that to get back to where we were before all this, or to arrive at a place better than even that, we need wiser kids. Great, how do we get wiser kids? L&H suggest engaging children in productive disagreement, teaching them to frame argument as debate, not conflict (argue as if you’re right, listen as if you’re wrong). We need to Let Kids Play Again. We need to teach them CBT and mindfulness, making them aware of how emotions are biasing rational thought. We need to teach the difference between evidence and opinion #allnewsisfake. We need to include social and moral psychology in public schooling. We need wiser universities, which is unlikely now that the machine has momentum.

The problem with all these fixes is that they blur tribal lines. Tribalism is how Big Power herds us as they do. If all of us suddenly see through the charade, at least in the minds of the elite, what we have are not a mass of informed consumers, but a seed for anarchy (me, not them). Good book.