Murtaza 's Reviews > The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

Like any other living thing on earth human beings are adaptive. To be strong, they need a Darwinian fitness environment that exposes them to calculated levels of stress. On a physical level, we all accept that the stress of exercise at an appropriate level makes us stronger. But something similar applies to our psychological lives. Some level of adversity and discomfort is not just desirable but necessary to make people mentally and spiritually strong enough to face the vicissitudes and challenges of existence. Without struggles and hardship, which, whether we try to avoid them or not، at some point are inevitable in life, we will be unable to become well-rounded people.

As the authors contend, a younger generation is now coming of age which, reared in certain institutions, has been raised on an unhealthy expectation of insulation from discomfort. They are likely to become the new elites of society and have an attitude unfamiliar to older generations, as well as people from lower classes (the majority of people). The habits of mind being inculcated to them are ones of catastrophic thinking, emotional reasoning and Manichean moral frameworks. Rather than as a political disagreement, even a fierce disagreement, the presence of unwelcome ideas is being medicalized and described as a threat to people's physical safety and mental well-being. Even wrong words, regardless of intent, are considered as somehow "violent" in and of themselves.

To put it another way people are being encouraged by certain institutions to be as psychologically weak as possible. The authors identify three "Great Untruths" being taught to many young people: that bad experiences make you weaker, that life can be described simply as a battle between oppressor and oppressed classes and that emotional reasoning is something positive. This is bad advice and something like teaching millions of people to do the opposite of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on themselves. It is inculcating ideas of intense victimhood even in materially privileged people and teaching them at this is a normal way to feel, while also make them hyper-sensitive to perceived signs of disrespect. These attitudes are now slowly trickling down through elite cultural production and also undergoing "concept creep" in which old definitional categories of negative social phenomena are slowly and steadily expanding to a wider range of behaviors without anyone knowing where the boundaries are really located. Needless to say this is not a recipe for creating a happy and well-adjusted society.

There are certain expressions of language and sociological behaviors among the generation that came just after millennials that are difficult for me to comprehend. This book helped me understand them a bit better. There is also a fascinating (and somewhat disturbing) intellectual lineage going back to the critical theory scholar Herbert Marcuse and an essay he wrote titled "Repressive Tolerance" in the 1960s that seems to inform much cultural left-wing discourse today and that also receives some attention here. Some of the sections about "campus culture" left me wondering whether previous generations of university students were not also similarly culturally alien to those older than them, but simply aged into more sensible views later in life. This had long been my assumption, though I'm admittedly unsure of the mechanics. In any case, this book helped me understand several things like that which were culturally unfamiliar to me. It is soberly written, reasonable and non-polemic despite its provocative title.