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This is a book about wisdom and its opposite.
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.
Greg is a First Amendment lawyer.
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.
The playing field is not level; life is not fair.
college is quite possibly the best environment on earth in which to come face-to-face with people and ideas
It is the ultimate mental gymnasium,
In that article, we argued that many parents, K-12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression. We suggested that students were beginning to react to words, books, and visiting speakers with fear and anger because they had been taught to exaggerate danger, use dichotomous (or binary) thinking, amplify their first emotional responses,
students to have open discussions in which they could practice the essential skills of critical thinking and civil disagreement.
Our piece became one of the five most-viewed articles of all time on The Atlantic’s website, and President Obama even referred to it in a speech a few weeks later, when he praised the value of viewpoint diversity and said that students should not be “coddled and protected from different points of view.”12
what people choose to do in their heads will determine how those real problems affect them.
“Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”
diagnosis of PTSD were (and are) strict: to qualify, an event would have to “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and be “outside the range of usual human experience.”
Cognitive behavioral therapists treat trauma patients by exposing them to the things they find upsetting (at first in small ways, such as imagining them or looking at pictures), activating their fear, and helping them habituate (grow accustomed) to the stimuli.
She calls those born in and after 1995 “iGen,” short for “internet Generation.”
(Others use the term “Generation Z.”) Twenge shows that iGen suffers from far higher rates of anxiety and depression than did Millennials at the same age—and higher rates of suicide.
nearly all of what goes on in our minds is outside of our direct control,
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.
their paths through life that are thoroughly disempowering.
EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.” CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.” OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.” DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing
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MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.” LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.” NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.” DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are
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giving one another the benefit of the doubt and interpreting everyone’s actions in ways that elicit the least amount of emotional reactivity?
“Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”
CBT is a method anyone can learn for identifying common cognitive distortions and then changing their habitual patterns of thinking.
Emotional reasoning is among the most common of all cognitive distortions;
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.
the principle of charity
The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism.
In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information
Part of Dr. King’s genius was that he appealed to the shared morals and identities
He repeatedly used the metaphor of family, referring to people of all races and religions as “brothers” and “sisters.”
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend”35 and “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”36 (Compare King’s words to these from Buddha: “For hate is not conquered by hate; hate is conquered by love. This is a law eternal.”)37
we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity.
see the way that social media amplifies the cruelty and “virtue signaling” that are recurrent features of call-out culture.
the night of February 1, 2017, the University of California’s Berkeley campus exploded into violence. An estimated 1,500 protesters surrounded the building where Milo Yiannopoulos, a young, British, gay Trump supporter, was scheduled to speak.
call themselves “antifascists,” or “Antifa.”
This was, after all, the very place where the campus free speech movement started. In 1964, when left-leaning students demanded the right to advocate for political causes and hear controversial political speakers,
The marchers also violently clashed with Antifa counterprotesters.63 And a white supremacist who idolized Adolf Hitler64 stopped his car in front of a group of counterprotesters, backed up, and then sped forward, slamming into them, sending people into the air, badly injuring at least nineteen peaceful counterprotesters, and killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, a paralegal described by friends as “a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised who was often moved to tears by the world’s injustices.”
one voice was conspicuously absent from the conversation: President Trump’s.
he said that there were “very fine people on both sides.”67
University life—along with civic life—dies without the free exchange of ideas.
We teach people not what to think, but how to think.
to not let others control your mind and your cortisol levels.
I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong.
Speech is not violence. Treating it as such is an interpretive choice,
One of the strongest personality correlates of left-wing politics is the trait of openness to experience, a trait that describes people who crave new ideas and experiences and who tend to be interested in changing traditional arrangements.
How professors described their own politics. The left-right ratio has increased rapidly since the mid-1990s.
The Evergreen State College, a small public college an hour’s drive south of Seattle,
listed as one of the ten most liberal colleges in the country.
