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February 2 - February 2, 2024
Because he was so familiar with these distortions and their damaging effects, Greg was able to see that universities, or society, or the internet, or somebody was training some young people to think in counterproductive and inaccurate ways.
It’s rare to find a young person speaking up against the dominant view because of the extreme risk of shaming and ostracism—via social media—which is the subject of this book.
The last thing we need, in a complex multiethnic liberal democracy, is for educators to teach young people to divide everyone up into groups and then to teach them that some groups are good, others are bad.
In the five years since the book was published, the disease has metastasized and spread far beyond universities. It now infects journalism, the arts, nonprofits, K–12 education, and even medicine. Show me an organization where people are afraid to speak up, afraid to challenge dominant ideas lest they be destroyed socially, and I’ll show you an organization that has become structurally stupid, unmoored from reality, and unable to achieve its mission.
Social media is on par with the printing press in its sheer disruptive power (an argument former CIA analyst Martin Gurri made in his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public).
social media could one day be a tool of human progress,
Our judgment on someone’s personal morality should be irrelevant to the validity of their arguments.
The explosion of Cancel Culture during the pandemic sent the message to the public that our institutions cannot be trusted to produce an accurate, unbiased body of shared facts.
The consequence of this class shift, according to Ungar-Sargon, is the media’s focus on issues alien to the typical American: “What you see in the liberal press is an obsession with race and gender, an obsession with luxury concerns. Nobody who is living paycheck to paycheck cares. They’re not speaking to an audience that is feeling the pinch of inflation or experiencing this horrific rise in crime.”
K–12 students have a right to freedom of conscience as enumerated by the Supreme Court’s landmark West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette decision in 1943, a case that held students can’t be forced to say the pledge of allegiance against their will.
officials can only make decisions about what titles libraries carry if they are completely neutral and apolitical in applying their standards.
Imagine you’re terribly depressed. At the behest of your loved ones, you finally muster up the courage to go for help. You spend tons of money and hours of your time developing a rapport with a therapist and begin to let your guard down. But as soon as you start really getting to the crux of your troubles and pouring your thoughts and feelings out to your therapist, something changes. Rather than lending you a sympathetic ear or constructive advice your therapist begins to lecture you about your privilege based on your race or gender.
psychology has been taken over by people eager to infuse activism into their practice.
If therapists are more concerned with helping you overcome your group privilege than helping you overcome your personal troubles, we’ve truly reached an abysmal place.
From 2001 to 2019, the science writer and historian Michael Shermer wrote a column called “The Skeptic” in its pages. Over time, he noticed a concerning shift, which he described in a 2021 Substack article: “I have received many queries about why my column ended and, more generally, about what has happened over at Scientific American, which historically focused primarily on science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM), but now appears to be turning to social justice issues.”
Trust in expertise is devastated when the public inevitably wonders, “Well, that might be what your research says, but you wouldn’t tell me if you found something different anyways for fear of being canceled.”
We rely on scientific and medical professionals—the researchers behind our medication, the doctors performing our surgeries, and the psychologists we entrust with out deepest secrets—to help us lead happier, healthier lives. This intimate trust is predicated on their oath to do no harm, not an oath to an ideology.
parents today are making a mistake in excessively accommodating their children’s irrational anxieties:
parental anxiety may, in fact, be contagious cross-generationally. Twin studies suggest a genetic risk factor for anxiety, and many studies and treatment centers are warning about accommodation from parents that permit anxious behaviors in young children, putting them at risk of more serious mental health challenges as young adults.
Revive the golden rule Encourage free, unstructured time Emphasize the importance of friendships Teach kids about differences Practice what you preach
American progressives seem largely unaware that the views American conservatives espouse—like traditional religious norms, sexual morality, and intergroup loyalty—are actually far more common in the rest of the world.
Parents probably teach their children far more by example than what they actually tell their children.
comedy occupies a special place in our culture: where we can overcome differences in order to laugh together; where we can blow off steam and wrestle with third-rail issues; where we can speak truth to power and should not fear reprisal.
The goal of K–12 education is creating thoughtful citizens, not activists.
we need to shift toward smaller, cheaper, non-ideological, student-driven approaches to K–12 education. And, most of all, we must restore a positive vision of education reform, one that maintains a deeply pluralistic society.
While it remains to be seen whether the University of Austin will be successful in its endeavors, every American should be rooting for any new experiment in higher education to work, whether they like its politics or not.
The adulthood of the American mind is a cultural state in which we don’t shrink away from difficult discussions, in which we don’t censor inconvenient facts, and in which we don’t sugarcoat hard truths.
Reinvigorating a Free Speech Culture is also the antidote to authoritarianism.
