More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 20 - October 29, 2024
Misoponos, a modern-day oracle who lives in a cave on the north slope of Mount Olympus, where he continues the ancient rites of the cult of Koalemos.
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.
While many propositions are untrue, in order 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.
The culture on many college campuses has become more ideologically uniform, compromising the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers.
Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function.
Or might that framework itself alter a student’s reactions to ancient texts, creating a feeling of threat and a stress response to what otherwise would have been experienced merely as discomfort or dislike?
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.”
vindictive protectiveness
problems of progress.
We adapt to our new and improved circumstances and then lower the bar for what we count as intolerable levels of discomfort and risk.
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 results were stunning. Among the children who had been “protected” from peanuts, 17% had developed a peanut allergy. In the group that had been deliberately exposed to peanut products, only 3% had developed an allergy.
This is the underlying rationale for what is called the hygiene hypothesis,9 the leading explanation for why allergy rates generally go up as countries get wealthier and cleaner—another example of a problem of progress.
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
Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate.
polymath
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.”
conflation of safety and feelings
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?
“post-traumatic stress disorder” as a mental disorder—the first type of traumatic injury that isn’t physical.
By the early 2000s, however, the concept of “trauma” within parts of the therapeutic community had crept down so far that it included anything “experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful . . . with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”
If you see yourself or your fellow students as candles, you’ll want to make your campus a wind-free zone.
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.
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.”36
“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”
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,
OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident.
MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts.
NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives.
Unfortunately, when Sue included “unintentional” slights, and when he defined the slights entirely in terms of the listener’s interpretation, he encouraged people to make such misperceptions.
But it is not a good idea to start by assuming the worst about people and reading their actions as uncharitably as possible.
a student feels a flash of offense as the recipient of such statements, is he better off embracing that feeling and labeling himself a victim of a microaggression, or is he better off asking himself if a more charitable interpretation might be warranted by the facts?
Teaching people to see more aggression in ambiguous interactions, take more offense, feel more negative emotions, and avoid questioning their initial interpretations strikes us as unwise, to say the least.
“In our identitarian age, the bar for offense has been lowered considerably,
More generally, the microaggression concept19 reveals a crucial moral change on campus: the shift from “intent” to “impact.” In moral judgment as it has long been studied by psychologists, intent is essential for assessing guilt.
outcomes was “external” to themselves).25 A great deal of research shows that having an internal locus of control leads to greater health, happiness, effort expended, success in school, and success at work.
As the idea that the mere presence of a speaker on campus can be “dangerous” has spread more widely, efforts to disinvite speakers have become more common.
In 2017, 58% of college students said it is “important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas.”
discomfort is not danger.
When a group forms to protest together, they jointly construct a narrative about what is wrong, who is to blame, and what must be done to make things right. Reality is always more complicated than the narrative, however, and as a result, people are demonized or lionized—often unfairly.
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.
Two students went on a hunger strike, vowing that they would not eat until Spellman was gone.
students had their own mental prototype, a schema with two boxes to fill: victim and oppressor. Everyone is placed into one box or the other.
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.
The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism.
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.
“political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.”
Identity can be mobilized in ways that emphasize an overarching common humanity while making the case that some fellow human beings are denied dignity and rights because they belong to a particular group, or it can be mobilized in ways that amplify our ancient tribalism and bind people together in shared hatred of a group that serves as the unifying common enemy.
