The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

by Jonathan Haidt

Be Slow to Anger, Quick to Forgive The Tao Te Ching lists “ideas of right and wrong” as a bedevilment. In my 35 years of studying moral psychology, I have come to see this as one of humanity’s greatest problems: We are too quick to anger and too slow to forgive. We are also hypocrites who judge others harshly while automatically justifying our own bad behavior. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.[23] Jesus was not telling us to avoid judging others entirely; he was warning us to judge thoughtfully, and to beware of using different standards for others than we use for ourselves. In the next verse he says, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye?”[24] He urges us to fix ourselves first, before we criticize anyone else. Social media trains us to do the opposite. It encourages us to make rapid public judgments with little concern for the humanity of those we criticize, no knowledge of the context in which they acted, and no awareness that we have often done the very thing for which we are publicly shaming them.