The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution

by Greg Lukianoff

To take your own feeling of anger as evidence that somebody harmed you is one of the major cognitive distortions that Greg learned to stop doing when he studied CBT: It is called “emotional reasoning.”

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.

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.

Just as freedom of speech seemed poised to triumph as the vision of the left, Marcuse published his influential 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” He argued that tolerance for speech is only useful in a totally equal society—and that getting to that point paradoxically requires intolerance and suppression of certain viewpoints. In fact, Marcuse flat out argued that there should not be free speech for right-wingers.

As Walter Lippmann once wrote, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”27

In 1961 Robert J. Lifton coined a term that’s perhaps more useful today than it was in his own time: the thought terminating cliché. It refers to overused terms that are employed to shut down discussion.

“A common thread in these directives,” wrote Dr. Sally Satel in an article for the Spectator, “is the total disregard for the patient’s agency, assuming that social forces are the singularly important determinant of their problems.”10

We fear that politicized therapy will prevent people from seeking therapy. And those who do go to a psychologist might actually end up feeling more terrible after being berated for their privilege or disempowered on account of their “oppressed” status. In the midst of a mental health epidemic, this is nothing short of dangerous.

“Although they’re ostensibly heroes within the Star Wars universe, the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).”

Overly involved, anxious parenting meant to help Gen Z succeed has actually done the precise opposite. It has made them less prepared for the real world, dulling their self-reliance, externalizing their locus of control (believing that outside forces have more control over the outcome of their lives than they do), and instilling a paralyzing sense within them that they cannot succeed on their own.

We have a whole culture based on “If you see something, say something.” It’s not “If you see something, do something.” There’s a lot of externalizing problems and handing them over to the authorities.

If you’ve been told to go to someone else all the time, you do. It becomes learned helplessness.

if you’re being unfairly maligned, friends are the people who will stand up for you even when it entails social or reputational risk. And when you are a friend, you will stand up for someone even when you fundamentally disagree. But an ally is only there for you when they agree and when it’s in their own self-interest.

Twitter gunslingers competed to show who was more affronted by the crime of the novel’s success,” Pamela Paul of the New York Times wrote. “American Dirt was essentially held responsible for every instance in which another Latino writer’s book got passed over, poorly reviewed and remaindered.”48

Catastrophizing: You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.” Negative filtering: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.” Emotional reasoning: You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.” Overgeneralizing: You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”

In the famous words of John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”