The Coddling of the American Mind (Jonathan Haidt/Lukianoff) 2018

The De-intellectualization of the Intellectual Process

Many in the academy are teaching students to think in terms of the cognitive distortions (that they themselves may experience). Problems are made to be seen as more threatening, which makes them harder to solve; thus, injustice exists, but one must be able to first see what is, and what its implications actually are. These include catastrophizing and omniscience-in-opinions as always being correct.  People are not learning to interpret things charitably, to give other people the benefit of the doubt, opening up “a range of constructive responses.”  “When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.”] -Pauli Murray.  “Teaching students to use the least generous interpretations possible is likely to engender precisely the feelings of marginalization and oppression that almost everyone wants to eliminate.... foster[ing] an external locus of control.”  “...internal locus of control leads to greater health, happiness, effort expended, success in school, and success at work.”  As does Sowell, points to the popular de-intellectualization of the intellectual process, rooted in a Marxist “the point is to change the World,” teaching people not how to think, but what to think.  Points out “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.”  Thus each successive generation being pointing out by the former generation for being little ninnies, a la “When I was a boy!”  Also points out the need for “physical and mental challenges and stressors” elsewise “we deteriorate”.  Thus, overprotection can do more harm than good.  “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.”  Aaron T Beck saw that depressive’s irrational negative beliefs caused powerful negative feelings, thus driving bad reasoning, finding evidence for the negative beliefs, in a bad feedback loop.  If we are all too sensitive to speech, we cannot receive “valuable feedback” and are not interesting in “engaging with people across lines of difference.”  Thus, something like CBT itself could be considered a “microaggression.”  “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that” -MLK (and similarly Buddha).  The human mind readily thinks in terms of “us vs. Them" and thus we should do everything we can to turn up our common humanity feelings.  “When we dehumanize and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.” Mandela.  “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed.  Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been” -Marcus Aurelius.  “One is not supposed to say that a dominant culture is superior to a nondominant one in any way.  But anthropologists generally agree that cultures and subcultures instill different goals, skills, and virtues in their members, and it can’t possibly be true that all cultures prepare children equally well for success in all other cultures.  If we want to improve outcomes for immigrants and the poor in a free-market, service-oriented capitalist economy such as ours... it would be useful to talk about bourgeois culture.”  Social media exploits human vulnerabilities to drive engagement.  “Studies of mental illness have long shown that girls have higher rates of depression and anxiety than boys do.” Boys are more physically aggressive, girls are more relationally aggressive, trying to hurt rival relationships, reputations, and social status; thus, different ways of harming others through aggression, but no difference of aggression between men and women. “Applying labels to people can create what is called a looping effect: it can change the behavior of the person being labeled and become a self-fulfilling prophecy... If depression becomes part of your identity, then over time you’ll develop corresponding schemas about yourself and your prospects... mak[ing] it harder for you to marshal the energy and focus to take on challenges that... would weaken the grip of depression... lowering the bar... in applying mental health labels may increase the number of people who suffer.”  “Mammals that are deprived of play won’t develop to their full capacity.”  “I’m Tibetan, I’m Buddhist, and I’m the Dalai Lama, but if I emphasize these differences it sets me apart and raises barriers with other people.  What we need to do is pay more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people.”