“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.” – The Coddling of the American Mind
America’s last great epidemic which began over a century ago, saw deaths and infections matching our current Coronavirus numbers, despite having only a third of the population. For those who survived, the 1920s brought an abundance of riches, before the Great Depression and World War of the 1930s and 1940s took it back. Known fondly as the Greatest Generation, the men and women of the first half of the twentieth century had their brawn tested in ways our generation will never know. The devolution that followed, resulted in a new age of humanity who are but a pale imitation of those who came before.
In Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s 2018 book, “The Coddling of the American Mind”, the authors focus their attention on three great untruths affecting modern-day college campuses and the society at large, leaving its victims anxious, depressed, and suicidal. Increasingly raised by either absentee parents or helicopter moms and dads, today’s freshmen arrive lacking the maturity and savvy of past generations. The end results have been a fragility of identity and an unhealthy fixation with safety, both physical and mental.
Childhood, a time of exploration and independence, once included free play, risk-taking, and alone time. But changes in parenting have resulted not only in the extinction of lawn darts, and bb guns, but a bizarre attempt to remove all potential for pain and suffering from children’s environments. Both excessive indulgence and neglect have made children more sensitive and delicate than ever. We’ve always had an irrational fear of the boogeyman, but the risks we now associate with it, lack proportion.
It was once considered good sense not to make any important decisions at a time of great emotion until rationality returned. Now children are bred to follow their feelings, trained to look for any hint of a slight, and certainly to take any perceived insult personally. Words themselves are considered violence. An over-reliance on one’s feelings has led to undue exaggerations of danger. These irrational beliefs dominate not only college life but have increasingly seeped into the village square.
Add to the mix, the view that social media, especially Twitter, is a microcosm of what the average citizen believes, is a recipe for disaster. Social media platforms produce rare sentiments that can be realistically deemed the consensus of the country but instead are increasingly becoming communities of handpicked individuals where only one opinion is tolerated as dissenting views are slowly removed from the platform. Young people, already damaged by groupthink, spend increasing amounts of personal time with their iPhones, taking to heart everything they see.
Unable to recognize gray areas or to consider nuances in meanings and expressions, everything is now viewed in terms of absolutes. Adversaries are objectively evil. There is only one truth, their truth. Goodness is determined not by individual character or merit, but by group dynamics, black good, white bad. Once a common enemy is identified, their humanity is demolished.
Academics gave credibility to a common enemy theory with the development of critical race theory, the idea that the rule of law and the institutions of society are inherently racist since they were built by mostly white men. To break down this stranglehold they have reimagined struggle sessions, a tool of Communism, to debase and humiliate their enemies. It is bullying aid to intimidate and force insincere confessions for crimes never committed while demanding atonement for sins only they’ve imagined.
Athletic trainers will tell you that the quickest way to regain muscle mass, after a period of atrophy, is to begin resistance training. Americans must follow this advice and begin their own program of resistance to thwart these dangerous ideas. Until we do, we will never regain the mettle displayed by earlier ancestors.
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