The Coddling of the American Mind – Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

The Coddling of the American Mind – Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.

Untruths That Spread Throughout The Culture

 

Three great untruths are spreading throughout college campuses, high schools and many homes. These untruths are rarely taught explicitly. Instead, they are conveyed to people by the rules, practices, and norms imposed on them, often with the best intentions.

The Charity principle

The principle in philosophy and rhetoric is that one should interpret other people’s statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst way possible.

When you think that your feelings are real, you may believe that other people have worse intentions than they really do. This could cause you to see harmful behaviour in places that don’t exist.

Paranoid Parenting

Parents have become overly concerned with the safety of their children. This has led to less free play, less independence and more fear instilled in children, which may increase the desire for safety provided by third parties for young adults.

Keeping children safe is important, yet trying to eliminate all risks in a child’s life can severely stunt their development, sense of independence, and ability to confront adversity.

Your Unguarded Thoughts Can Harm You

Teach your children Cognitive Behaviour Therapy so they can learn to recognize and moderate the hallmarks of emotional and motivated reasoning.

 

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being

Give people the benefit of the doubt.

Practice the virtue of intellectual humility.

Nine Common Cognitive Distortions

Many colleges encourage students to indulge in these cognitive distortions:

Help Schools Oppose The Great Untruths

The antidote to the increasing fragility

A Loss Of Professorial Diversity Decreases The Quality Of Scholarly Research

University professors are generally left-leaning in their politics, yet the percentage of professors who lean left has increased in recent years. 

A more uniform group of people will cause a decline in the quality of scholarly research. Because they share a similar view, they won’t be as rigorous in potential counterarguments or the quality of their work.

Limit and refine device time

Children are “anti-fragile”

Children are “anti-fragile”

 

The term anti-fragile describes things that have the capacity to not only tolerate stress but to flourish and grow as a result of it.

Everybody will face completely unexpected events. When we have limited exposure to unexpected events, we will likely find navigating them difficult. 

When our brain and cognitive processes encounter unexpected events, they learn to adapt and grow, making them more likely to navigate uncertainty successfully.

Parents and educators should help children learn and grow by letting them face risks and stressors, not shielding them from them.

From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either.

Dignity culture vs. victimhood culture

The “dignity culture” is increasingly giving way to “victimhood culture.”

Dignity culture is characterised by assumed dignity and worth regardless of what people think of you. People are expected to have enough self-control to think little of irritations, slights, minor conflicts and even direct insults as threats to their dignity that should be met with a response.

Victimhood Culture

People and groups try to cultivate an image of victims who deserve assistance. They are highly sensitive to slights and tend to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties.

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