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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.
The three great untruths
to be classified as a Great Untruth, an idea must meet three criteria: It contradicts ancient wisdom (ideas found widely in the wisdom literatures of many cultures). It contradicts modern psychological research on well-being. It harms the individuals and communities who embrace it.
Great Untruth criteria
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).
The prescription
But gradually, in the twenty-first century, on some college campuses, the meaning of “safety” underwent a process of “concept creep” and expanded to include “emotional safety.”
Beware of concept creep
how might it change Oberlin students—and the nature of class discussions—when the community is told repeatedly that they should judge the speech of others in terms of safety and danger?
Judging speech in terms of safety and danger
Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.
Triggers
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.
Concept Creep safety
However, some activists say that bigotry is only about impact (as they define impact); intent is not even necessary.
Intent vs. Impact
But if you teach students that intention doesn’t matter, and you also encourage students to find more things offensive (leading them to experience more negative impacts), and you also tell them that whoever says or does the things they find offensive are “aggressors” who have committed acts of bigotry against them, then you are probably fostering feelings of victimization, anger, and hopelessness in your students.
Negative feedback
Part of Dr. King’s genius was that he appealed to the shared morals and identities of Americans by using the unifying languages of religion and patriotism.
Successful social movements will use the language of Patriotism or Religion
King’s approach made it clear that his movement would not destroy America; it would repair and reunite it.41
King: repair and reunite
Instead, some theoretical approaches used in universities today may be hyperactivating our ancient tribal tendencies, even if that was not the intention of the professor.
Unintended consequences of intersectionality
Anonymity fosters deindividuation—the loss of an individual sense of self—which lessens self-restraint and increases one’s willingness to go along with the mob.
Deindividuation leads to cruelty
Interpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice, and it is a choice that increases your pain with respect to the lecture while reducing your options for how to respond.
Interpreting speech as violence is counterproductive
The Greek historian Thucydides saw this principle in action over two thousand years ago. Writing about a time of wars and revolutions in the fifth century BCE, he noted that “the ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action.”
Seeing all angles = unfit for leadership
That wave of scholars included many Republicans and many conservatives. The Politics of Professors FIGURE 5.1. How professors described their own politics. The left-right ratio has increased rapidly since the mid-1990s. (Source: Higher Education Research Institute.43 Data is from nationally representative surveys of professors in the United States. Graphed by Sam Abrams.)
Professorship became incredibly lopsided when WWII vets began to retire in the 90s
In Jon’s field, academic psychology, the left-to-right ratio was between two to one and four to one from the 1930s through the mid-1990s, but then it began to shoot upward, reaching seventeen to one by 2016.
17:1 liberal to conservative professorship in psychology
The second point is that this is a book about good intentions gone awry. In all of the six chapters in this part of the book, you’ll read about people primarily acting from good or noble motivations. In most cases, the motive is to help or protect children or people seen as vulnerable or victimized. But as we all know, the road to hell can be paved with good intentions.
Good intentions gone awry
Americans now bear such animosity toward one another that it’s almost as if many are holding up signs saying, “Please tell me something horrible about the other side, I’ll believe anything!”
Polarization
perhaps some of the very things colleges were doing to protect students from words and ideas ended up increasing the demand for mental health services by inadvertently increasing the use of cognitive distortions.
Cognitive disorders on campus
As Twenge puts it, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.”
I gen is more mentally vulnerable
This might explain why college students are suddenly asking for more protection and adult intervention in their affairs and interpersonal conflicts.
IGen is askimg for more adult intervention on campus
boys are more physically aggressive—more likely to shove and hit one another, and they show a greater interest in stories and movies about physical aggression. Girls, in contrast, are more “relationally” aggressive; they try to hurt their rivals’ relationships, reputations, and social status—for example, by using social media to make sure other girls know who is intentionally being left out.33 When you add it all up, there’s no overall sex difference in total aggression, but there’s a large and consistent sex difference in the preferred ways of harming others.
Preferred way of harming by gender
They defined a victimhood culture as having three distinct attributes: First, “individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight”; second, they “have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties”; and third, they “seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”
Victimhood Culture
Most people want individuals to be treated well, and they recoil from cases where individuals are treated unfairly in order to bring about some kind of group-level equality.
Pursuing group-level equality may result in more injustices at individuhal level
Nowadays, when someone points to an outcome gap and makes the claim (implicitly or explicitly) that the gap itself is evidence of systemic injustice, social scientists often just nod along with everyone else in the room.
See Ibram kendi's anti-racism
few parents today teach their children how to argue productively; instead, “we stop siblings from quarreling and we have our own arguments behind closed doors.” But learning how to give and take criticism without being hurt is an essential life skill. When serious thinkers respect someone, they are willing to engage them in a thoughtful argument.
Benefit of argument
Argue as if you’re right, but listen as if you’re wrong (and be willing to change your mind).
Argument rules
Soviet dissident
basic principle of social psychology: the more you separate people and point out differences among them, the more divided and less trusting they will become.16 Conversely, the more you emphasize common goals or interests, shared fate, and common humanity, the more they will see one another as fellow human beings, treat one another well, and come to appreciate one another’s contributions to the community.
SHared humanity=shared humanity, more sympathy
In March 2018, Utah became the first state to pass into law a “free-range parenting” bill—and with unanimous bipartisan support.
Utah :)
