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March 28 - April 10, 2023
This is a book about three Great Untruths that seem to have spread widely in recent years: The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
What is new today is the premise that students are fragile. Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection. There is no expectation that students will grow stronger from their encounters with speech or texts they label “triggering.” (This is the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.)
CBT teaches you to notice when you are engaging in various “cognitive distortions,” such as “catastrophizing” (If I fail this quiz, I’ll fail the class and be kicked out of school, and then I’ll never get a job . . .) and “negative filtering” (only paying attention to negative feedback instead of noticing praise as well). These distorted and irrational thought patterns are hallmarks of depression and anxiety disorders.
Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.
We have always been ambivalent about the word “coddling.” We didn’t like the implication that children today are pampered, spoiled, and lazy, because that is not accurate. Young people today—at a minimum, those who are competing for places at selective colleges—are under enormous pressure to perform academically and to build up a long list of extracurricular accomplishments.
Meanwhile, all teens face new forms of harassment, insult, and social competition from social media. Their economic prospects are uncertain in an economy being reshaped by globalization, automation, and artificial intelligence, and characterized by wage stagnation for most workers. So most kids don’t have easy, pampered childhoods.
That means seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).
We identify six explanatory threads: the rising political polarization and cross-party animosity of U.S. politics, which has led to rising hate crimes and harassment on campus; rising levels of teen anxiety and depression, which have made many students more desirous of protection and more receptive to the Great Untruths; changes in parenting practices, which have amplified children’s fears even as childhood becomes increasingly safe; the loss of free play and unsupervised risk-taking, both of which kids need to become self-governing adults; the growth of campus bureaucracy and expansion of its
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But it turns out that the harm was severe.3 It was later discovered that peanut allergies were surging precisely because parents and teachers had started protecting children from exposure to peanuts back in the 1990s.
“For decades allergists have been recommending that young infants avoid consuming allergenic foods such as peanut to prevent food allergies. Our findings suggest that this advice was incorrect and may have contributed to the rise in the peanut and other food allergies.”
Vaccination uses the same logic. Childhood vaccines make us healthier not by reducing threats in the world (“Ban germs in schools!”) but by exposing children to those threats in small doses, thereby giving children’s immune systems the opportunity to learn how to fend off similar threats in the future.
by shielding children from every possible risk, we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren’t risky at all and isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master
There’s an old saying: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”
If students have been told that they can request gender-neutral pronouns and then a professor fails to use one, students may be disappointed or upset. But are these students unsafe? Are students in any danger in the classroom if a professor uses the wrong pronoun?
Research on “post-traumatic growth” shows that most people report becoming stronger, or better in some way, after suffering through a traumatic experience.30 That doesn’t mean we should stop protecting young people from potential trauma, but it does mean that the culture of safetyism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and of the dynamics of trauma and recovery.
Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.
A culture that allows the concept of “safety” to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.
Like the immune system, children must be exposed to challenges and stressors (within limits, and in age-appropriate ways), or they will fail to mature into strong and capable adults, able to engage productively with people and ideas that challenge their beliefs and moral convictions.
Concepts sometimes creep. Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the 1980s that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages—even
Safetyism is the cult of safety—an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims.
we could just as easily have quoted Buddha (“Our life is the creation of our mind”)2 or Shakespeare (“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”)3 or Milton (“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”).
She helps him see that fortune is fickle and he should be grateful that he enjoyed it for so long.
“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”5
If the rider can reframe a situation so that the elephant sees it in a new way, then the elephant will feel new feelings, too, which will then motivate the elephant to move in a new direction.
But Beck saw a close connection between the thoughts a person had and the feelings that came with them. He noticed that his patients tended to get themselves caught in a feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs caused powerful negative feelings, which in turn seemed to drive patients’ reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative beliefs. Beck noticed a common pattern of beliefs, which he called the “cognitive triad” of depression: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.”
Many people experience one or two of these thoughts fleetingly, but depressed people tend to hold all three beliefs in a stable and enduring psychological structure. Psychologists call such structures schemas. Schemas refer to the patterns of thoughts and behaviors, built up over time, that people use to process information quickly and effortlessly as they interact with the world. Schemas are deep down in the elephant; they are one of the ways in which the elephant guides the rider.
With repetition, over a period of weeks or months, people can change their schemas and create different, more helpful habitual beliefs (such as “I can handle most challenges” or “I have friends I can trust”). With CBT, there is no need to spend years talking about one’s childhood.
The evidence that CBT works is overwhelming.7 A common finding is that CBT works about as well as Prozac and similar drugs for relieving the symptoms of anxiety disorders and mild to moderate depression,8 and it does so with longer-lasting benefits and without any negative side effects.
A charitable approach might be to say, “I’m guessing you didn’t mean any harm when you said that, but you should know that some people might interpret that to mean . . .”
Or would you rather give all students advice on how to be polite and avoid giving accidental or thoughtless offense in a diverse community, along with a day of training in giving one another the benefit of the doubt and interpreting everyone’s actions in ways that elicit the least amount of emotional reactivity?
if you accidentally say or do something that a member of a group finds offensive, but harbor no dislike or ill will on the basis of group membership, then you are not a bigot, even if you have said something clumsy or insensitive for which an apology is appropriate. A faux pas does not make someone an evil person or an aggressor.
When an individual goes so far as to describe someone as having blood on their hands for supporting the idea of bringing a highly controversial speaker to Williams, they are advancing the belief that what offends them should not be allowed on this campus precisely because it offends them and people who agree with them.
“Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”
Olivia— Thank you for writing and sharing this article with me. We have a lot to do as a college and community. Would you be willing to talk with me sometime about these issues? They are important to me and the [dean of students] staff and we are working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold. I would love to talk with you more. Best, Dean Spellman4 What do you think about Dean Spellman’s email? Cruel or kind?
There is a principle in philosophy and rhetoric called the principle of charity, which says that one should interpret other people’s statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible.
We just don’t feel as much empathy for those we see as “other.”
We are all descended from people who belonged to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict.
Any kind of intergroup conflict (real or perceived) immediately turns tribalism up, making people highly attentive to signs that reveal which team another person is on.
What happens when you train students to see others—and themselves—as members of distinct groups defined by race, gender, and other socially significant factors, and you tell them that those groups are eternally engaged in a zero-sum conflict over status and resources?
HUSBAND: Our son Hal led a platoon in Iraq. WIFE: When he got back he sat us down and said: “Mom, Dad, I’m gay.” HUSBAND: That took some getting used to, but we love him and we’re proud of him. WIFE: Our marriage has been the foundation of our lives for forty-six years. HUSBAND: We used to think civil unions were enough for gay couples. WIFE: But marriage is a commitment from the heart. A civil union is no substitute. HUSBAND: Our son fought for our freedoms. He should have the freedom to marry.
This is the way to win hearts, minds, and votes: you must appeal to the elephant (intuitive and emotional processes) as well as the rider (reasoning).45 King and Murray understood this. Instead of shaming or demonizing their opponents, they humanized them and then relentlessly appealed to their humanity.
More generally, what will happen to the thinking of students who are trained to see everything in terms of intersecting bipolar axes where one end of each axis is marked “privilege” and the other is “oppression”? Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
some theoretical approaches used in universities today may be hyperactivating our ancient tribal tendencies, even if that was not the intention of the professor.
we can begin to see the way that social media amplifies the cruelty and “virtue signaling” that are recurrent features of call-out culture. (Virtue signaling refers to the things people say and do to advertise that they are virtuous.
the February 1 riots at UC Berkeley, because they marked a turning point—an escalation of conflicts over campus speakers. Berkeley and its aftermath were the start of a new and more dangerous era. Since then, many students on the left have become increasingly receptive to the idea that violence is sometimes justified as a response to speech they believe is “hateful.” At the same time, many students on the right have become increasingly eager to invite speakers that are likely to provoke a reaction from the left.
The author also engages in dichotomous thinking: If you condemn my side’s violence, that means you condone Yiannopoulos’s ideas. You must “pick a side.”
However, now that some students, professors, and activists are labeling their opponents’ words as violence, they give themselves permission to engage in ideologically motivated physical violence. The rationale, as an essay in the Berkeley op-ed series argued, is that physically violent actions, if used to shut down speech that is deemed hateful, are “not acts of violence” but, rather, “acts of self defense.”
30% of undergraduate students surveyed agreed with this statement: “If someone is using hate speech or making racially charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views.”40 If that sounds reasonable to you, just think about what the statement implies after concept creep and emotional reasoning expand the meaning of “hate speech” and “racially charged.”
In her 2016 book, The War on Cops, Mac Donald argued that Black Lives Matter protests made the police more hesitant to enter and actively engage in minority neighborhoods, thereby leaving the people in those neighborhoods less protected and more vulnerable to crime.
The students continued: “If engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist.” This sentence includes fortune-telling, as the students predict what Mac Donald would say.
