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February 1 - March 13, 2025
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.”
The playing field is not level; life is not fair. But college is quite possibly the best environment on earth in which to come face-to-face with people and ideas that are potentially offensive or even downright hostile. It is the ultimate mental gymnasium, full of advanced equipment, skilled trainers, and therapists standing by, just in case.
We adapt to our new and improved circumstances and then lower the bar for what we count as intolerable levels of discomfort and risk.
the hygiene hypothesis,9 the leading explanation for why allergy rates generally go up as countries get wealthier and cleaner—another
He notes that wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. He advises us not to be like candles and not to turn our children into candles: “You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”
The modern obsession with protecting young people from “feeling unsafe” is, we believe, one of the (several) causes of the rapid rise in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide,
should college students interpret emotional pain as a sign that they are in danger?
Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for
Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health
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.
Their focus on “emotional safety” leads many of them to believe that, as Twenge describes, “one should be safe not just from car accidents and sexual assault but from people who disagree with you.”
we are proposing that today’s college students were raised by parents and teachers who had children’s best interests at heart but who often did not give them the freedom to develop their antifragility.
feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable.
the “cognitive triad” of depression: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.”
Over time, a good college education should improve the critical thinking skills of all students.
But it is not a good idea to start by assuming the worst about people and reading their actions as uncharitably
A faux pas does not make someone an evil person or an aggressor.
“Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”
discomfort is not danger.
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.
“Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”
Tajfel found that no matter how trivial or “minimal” he made the distinctions between the groups, people tended to distribute whatever was offered in favor of their in-group members.
When the “tribe switch”30 is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,”31 which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us” and “them.”
When a community succeeds in turning down everyone’s tribal circuits, there is more room for individuals to construct lives of their own choosing; there is more freedom for a creative mixing of people and ideas.
Marxist approaches to social and political analysis. It’s a set of approaches in which things are analyzed primarily in terms of power. Groups struggle for power. Within this paradigm, when power is perceived to be held by one group over others, there is a moral polarity: the groups seen as powerful are bad, while the groups seen as oppressed are good.
The end goal of a Marcusean revolution is not equality but a reversal of power.
Girls and women, she claims, are effectively a “colonized population.” They make up a majority of all students but are forced to live and learn within ideas and institutions structured by white men.
But does that mean that women and people of color should think of themselves as “colonized populations” today? Would doing so empower them, or would it encourage an external locus of control? Would it make them more or less likely to engage with their teachers and readings, work hard, and benefit from their time in school?
If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity.
“call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offenses committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders.
Life in a call-out culture requires constant vigilance, fear, and self-censorship.
(Virtue signaling refers to the things people say and do to advertise that they are virtuous. This helps them stay within the good graces of their team.)
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.
Eady identifies four features of the culture: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism.
Call-out cultures are detrimental to students’ education and bad for their mental health. Call-out cultures and us-versus-them thinking are incompatible with the educational and research missions of universities,
When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them. NELSON MANDELA1
the word “violence” is taking on new meanings for some students. This is another example of concept creep.
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.”
No one should have to pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life—along with civic life—dies without the free exchange of ideas.
The most common justification is that hate speech is violence, and some students believe it is therefore legitimate to use violence to shut down hate speech.
But students make a serious mistake when they interpret words—even words spoken with hatred—as violence.
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.
Marcus Aurelius advised, “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”89
The Stoics understood that words don’t cause stress directly; they can only provoke stress and suffering in a person who has interpreted those words as posing a threat. You can choose whether to interpret a visiting speaker as harmful.
even as we work to lessen hatred and heal divisions, all of us must learn to ignore some of the things we see and just carry on with our day.
don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.
Speech is not violence. Treating it as such is an interpretive choice, and it is a choice that increases pain and suffering while preventing other, more effective responses, including the Stoic response (cultivating nonreactivity) and the antifragile response suggested by Van Jones: “Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity.”
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. ERIC HOFFER,
He said that we have access to a set of emotions that we experience only when we are part of a collective—feelings like “collective effervescence,” which Durkheim described as social “electricity” generated when a group gathers and achieves a state of union.
it is the function of religious rituals to pull people up to the higher collective level, bind them to the group, and then return them to daily life with their group identity and loyalty strengthened.
