The Coddling of the American Mind

“This is a book about the three Great Untruths that seem to have spread widely in recent years:

1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

While many propositions are untrue, in order to be classified as a Great Untruth, an idea must meet three criteria:

1. It contradicts ancient wisdom (ideas found widely in the wisdom literatures of many cultures).
2. It contradicts modern psychological research on well-being.
3. It harms the individuals and communities who embrace it.”

“No one has done a better job of explaining the harm of avoiding stressors, risks, and small doses of pain than Nassim Taleb, the Lebanese-born statistician, stock trader, and polymath who is now a professor of risk engineering at New York University.

In his book Antifragile, Taleb explains how systems and people can survive the inevitable blacks swans of life and, like the immune system, grow stronger in response. Taleb asks us to distinguish three kinds of things. Some, like china teacups, are fragile: they break easily and cannot heal themselves, so you must handle them gently and keep them away from toddlers. Other things are resilient: they can withstand shocks. Parents usually give their toddlers plastic cups precisely because plastic can survive repeated falls to the floor, although the cups do not benefit from such falls. But Taleb asks us to look beyond the overused word ‘resilience’ and recognize that some things are antifragile. Many of the important systems in our economic and political life are like our immune systems: they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow. Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously. He notes that muscles, bones, and children are antifragile.

Just as spending time in bed … leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors. Much of our modern, structured world has been harming with top-down policies and contraptions … which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most [emphasis added].

Taleb opens the book with a poetic image that should speak to all parents. He notes that wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. He advises us not to be like candles and not to turn our children into candles: ‘You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.’”

“The list below shows nine of the most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize in CBT. It is these distorted thought patterns that Greg began to notice on campus, which led him to invite Jon out to lunch, which led to us writing our Atlantic article and, eventually, this book. …

EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. ‘I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.’

CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. ‘It would be terrible if I failed.’

OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. ‘This generally happened to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.’

DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as ‘black-and-white thinking,’ ‘all-or-nothing thinking,’ and ‘binary thinking’): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. ‘I get rejected by everyone,’ or ‘It was a complete waste of time.’

MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. ‘He thinks I’m a loser.’

LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). ‘I’m undesirable,’ or ‘He’s a rotten person.’

NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. ‘Look at all of the people who don’t like me.’

DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. ‘That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,’ or ‘Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.’

BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. ‘She’s to blame for the way I feel now,’ or ‘My parents caused all my problems.’”

“A second and more radical response opens up when you reject the ‘speech is violence’ view: you can use your opponents’ ideas and arguments to make yourself stronger. The progressive activist Van Jones (who was President Barack Obama’s green jobs advisor) endorsed this view in February of 2017 in a conversation at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Politics. When Democratic strategist David Axelrod asked Jones about how progressive students should react when people they find ideologically offensive (such as someone associated with the Trump administration) are invited to speak on campus, Jones began by noting the distinction we described in chapter 1 between physical and emotional ‘safety’:

‘There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on a campus—not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech—‘you are an n-word,’ or whatever—I am perfectly fine with that. But there’s another view that is now I think ascendent, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that ‘I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally. I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like, there’s a problem for everyone else, including the [university’s] administration.’

Jones then delivered some of the best advice for college students we have ever heard. He rejected the Untruth of Fragility and turned safetyism on its head:

I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.

Jones understands antifragility. Jones wants progressive college students to see themselves not as fragile candles but as fire, welcoming the wind by seeking out ideologically different speakers and ideas.”

“Something is going badly wrong for American teenagers, as we can see in the statistics on depression, anxiety, and suicide. Something is going very wrong on many college campuses, as we can see in the growth of call-out culture, in the rise in efforts to disinvite or shout down visiting speakers, and in changing norms about speech, including a recent tendency to evaluate speech in terms of safety and danger. This new culture of safetyism and vindictive protectiveness is bad for students and bad for universities. What can we do to change course?”