If you’ve ever wondered about the ‘seed-bed’ of today’s cancel culture, with its intolerant ideologies (e.g., gender ideology), Jonathan Haidt has some insight….
Thanks for finding this old talk, Steve. I had forgotten about it. The next para explains why there is so much anti-Israel sentiment on elite college campuses:https://t.co/F2UQ3rzWBJpic.twitter.com/StBg1jVJGk
The article, titled “The Age of Outrage,” written by Jonathan Haidt, explores the current socio-political climate in the United States, particularly focusing on the heightened polarization and “outrage” permeating the country and its universities. Haidt employs the concept of “the fine-tuned universe” from cosmology to draw a parallel with the delicate balance required to maintain a stable, liberal democracy, particularly in a diverse and secular society. He suggests that certain “settings” or conditions must be finely adjusted to facilitate stable political life, a concept he extends to label as “the fine-tuned liberal democracy.”
In thinking about the evolution of human beings, he emphasizes our tribal nature and inclination towards group living and intergroup conflict. He suggests that while we can live in large, multi-ethnic secular liberal democracies, it requires a careful balance to maintain stability. Haidt also explores the concept of intersectionality in modern identity politics, critiquing it for its tendency to categorize and create an “us vs. them” mentality, which he views as antithetical to the unity and common purpose needed in a liberal democracy. He contrasts this with the identity politics of the civil rights era, which he perceives as having been more integrative and unifying.
Haidt identifies several factors that have contributed to the current state of polarization, including the absence of common enemies, changes in media consumption, increased diversity and immigration, and shifts in political and academic climates. He particularly criticizes the new identity politics and intersectionality taught in universities, arguing that it fosters a divisive and combative environment that is contrary to the foundational principles of the United States.
Feel free to explore the article directly for a deeper understanding: The Age of Outrage.
31–yes 31–Harvard organizations have declared that the murders, rapes, kidnappings, and other atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent people are in no way the fault of Hamas, but are rather entirely the fault of … Israel. Something is deeply, deeply wrong in academia.
An excellent article by Jonathan Haidt helps us understand why our girls in particular have felt so alienated from the world around them and most importantly their own bodies.
I was first alerted to this disturbing cultural trend after reading Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage.” She painstakingly documented the sudden enormous increase in predominantly middle to upper middle-class white female adolescents who were identifying as other than their birth sex. This was occurring largely in liberal or progressive households.
According to Haidt’s research, in 2013, students on college campuses began pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech.
Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) noticed that these students were using cognitive distortions that were similar to those associated with depression. As a person who battles depression himself, he knew something about these distortions.
Here’s how his friend Haidt put it:
Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.
Because of what CBT taught Greg, he hypothesized that colleges supporting these distortions, rather than teaching critical thinking, could cause students to become depressed.
This idea was further developed in the book “The Coddling of the American Mind” which he co-wrote with Haidt.
In 2020, a study found that young liberal women reported higher rates of mental health conditions compared to other groups. Some explanations for this trend suggest that technology and social media, rather than politics, might be the main cause. Another theory is that depressed individuals tend to view reality negatively, and progressive institutional leaders may have inadvertently taught young progressives to catastrophize events to get what they want.
This focus on victimization and external locus of control (a belief that external factors control your life) could contribute to higher rates of depression and decreased sense of agency.
Phone-Based Childhood
In his substack article Haidt discusses how a phone-based childhood may contribute to passivity and mental health issues, particularly among liberal girls.
He suggests two main reasons for this phenomenon.
First, liberal girls use social media more than other groups, which can lead to reduced face-to-face interaction and contribute to poor mental health.
Second, the messages consumed by liberal girls on social media might be more damaging to their mental health than those consumed by other groups.
The article also points out that Gen Z as a whole has developed a more external locus of control, which means they believe their lives are more influenced by external factors rather than their own actions.
Liberal Gen Z individuals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating, as well.
Haidt also suggests that the loss of “play-based childhood” in the 1990s, when parents stopped letting their children play and explore unsupervised, might have contributed to this shift in locus of control.
And finally Haidt’s article explores the role of the social media platform Tumblr in shaping disempowering beliefs, particularly around identity, fragility, and victimhood. The podcast series “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” highlights how Tumblr’s culture war between young progressive women and right-leaning young men contributed to today’s cancel culture and may have influenced the development of distorted ways of thinking.
So, What Should We Do?
In his conclusion, Haidt argues that around 2013, many young people, particularly liberal women, embraced three Great Untruths, which caused an increase in anxiety and depression.
The Great Untruths are:
1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker 2. Always trust your feelings 3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).
Haidt suggests that universities and progressive institutions have adopted these Untruths, leading to reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that exacerbates mental health issues.
And he proposes two policy changes to address this issue:
1). Universities and schools should stop performing reverse CBT through programs based on the Great Untruths. Instead, they should focus on evidence-based practices that promote mental health and well-being.
2). The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18, treating social media and other addictive apps like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. This would require parental consent for minors to sign contracts or open accounts, helping protect them from harmful content and potential mental health consequences.
In their 2018 book The Rise of Victimhood Culture, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning describe how honour and dignity cultures are giving way to a moral code which elevates the oppressed. Call-outs and cancellations, they explain, are status-raising tactics, in which people claim to have been harmed by problematic views and to have suffered micro-aggressions in order to don the mantle of victimhood.
The spread of victimhood culture has helped popularise novel gender identities (non-binary, agender) and sexual orientations (aroace, pansexual) since they allow people to claim membership of oppressed groups without experiencing any actual hardship. It is also driving the self-diagnosis of mental illnesses, from quotidian conditions such as anxiety and depression, to boutique ones such as multiple-personality disorder or a novel form of Tourette’s transmitted by TikTok.
More generally, this is a culture that encourages young people to regard themselves as traumatised. According to Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, US schools and universities have started to promote three pernicious falsehoods: that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; that feelings are a good guide to reality and action; and that life is a battle between good people and evil ones.
These dysfunctional beliefs, which Haidt dubs “anti-cognitive behavioural therapy”, promote mental fragility. They encourage people to feel fearful of ordinary words and to regard censorship as virtuous. The logic goes like this: being dis-agreed with makes you a victim; victims are good; people saying things you disagree with therefore deserve to be silenced and punished. This is the culture of “crybullying”: using claims of victimhood to harass others.
Why do we give veto power to the weakest, most immature members of society? Why are they allowed to control what can and cannot be discussed? Or which words may and may not be spoken? What if they are not merely weak, or immature, but delusional?
When it comes to Gender Ideology we must love without submitting to bullying blackmail. And the denial of reality.
Adults. Resist. Lovingly. But resist. With integrity.
