Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
The Coddling of the american mind
Inclusion of emotion as trauma into the DSM III caused trauma to become subjective. When emotional discomfort equates to physical danger, it shields us from experiences needed to become resilient to the very discomforts we want to skirt in the first place. It’s cyclic and counter-therapeutic to strengthen trigger warnings that discourage reminders of trauma instead of our response to it. Not challenging how we emotionally reason teaches impact over intent, fostering victimization as we look for the aggressors that caused us to feel negatively.
Social media fueling call-out culture let us view public shaming, discouraging defending the ashamed while amplifying cruelty with anonymity-induced virtue-signaling that heightened mob mentality. When anything is classified as hate speech it’s no wonder violence has spiked. It’s important that we feel safe physically, not ideologically or emotionally.
The ‘90s exodus of white male veterans who found postwar education were replaced by race and gender-diverse professors influenced by the social protests of the ‘60s. Their low viewpoint diversity undermined the rigor of scholarly research, churning out a generation of students with an inaccurate understanding of conservatives politics. Television networks evolved into 1000s of podcasts dwarfing us with algorithms disconnecting moral matrices by feeding us more of what we're interested in, encasing us in custom echo chambers. Congressional unity from the 60-year democratic dynasty ended when the new speaker crusaded reforms discouraging members from building cross-party relationships, helping equate party with identity. Facebook changed their age requirement, engineering a social-validation feedback loop by hijacking dopamine kicks when receiving a like or comment.
The $550B postsecondary revenue changes the outlook of the 20 million undergraduates of today. Scaling demands staff, and the quadrupling of administrators resulted in students purchasing institutional packages. Having every facet of our experiences authored, it's not a mystery why we want their universities to mirror our views, inviting protections to make us less vulnerable that accomplished the opposite.