The Coddling of the American Mind

I interrupt my regularly scheduled programming to bring this report on my reading of The Coddling of the American Mind. 

I'm still reading Cynical Theories. I swear. Or at least that is what I tell myself. It's rough. It's heavy. It's hard. I still think it's important but boy howdy is reading that book a lot of work. 

I didn't read TCOTAM, I listened to the audiobook. As such, I didn't take notes, except mentally. But I thought it was such a fantastic book that it warranted a blog post, even though it will be less extensive without the notes and without being able to easily leaf back through a chapter. As a reminder, these blog posts are mostly for me, an exercise in processing and remembering the things I read. And listen to, I guess. 

The authors of The Coddling of the American Mind assert that three great untruths have become widely accepted and even promoted, albeit unintentionally. These untruths teach thinking patterns that harm mental health, relationships, political discourse, science and universities. They are as follows. 

1) What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. This is seen in widespread "safetyism" and the demand for "safe spaces" at the expense of free speech. This untruth leads to concept creep that allows people to assert that "speech is violence". By allowing this thought pattern, young people are taught that they are fragile. Speech will harm them, they can't handle being faced with opposition, they are justified in using violence to stop speech they vehemently disagree with. This encourages victimhood culture and cancel culture.  The opposite of this untruth, the wisdom that the authors advocate for is "anti-fragility". Anti-fragility is a term coined by Nassim Taleb and it refers to the fact that trials teach us and make us stronger. Being exposed to and grappling with opinions that differ from your own sharpen your understanding and refine your positions to be more defensible and more in line with truth. Obviously no one is advocating for beating and abusing your children so they grow up strong. What the authors do advocate for is letting your children test their limits. Let them experience different view points. Teach them that they are stronger than they think, not that playing victim is the way to get ahead. Let them learn to solve their own problems. 

2) Always trust your feelings. It's the prevailing wisdom in many ways that you should follow your heart. Your truth. You should validate feelings. That if you offended someone inadvertently, you are a racist/bigot/whatever in spite of your intention because their feelings were hurt and feelings are real. Now, the authors are careful to not dismiss feelings or invalidate them. But imagine that you have been experiencing depression. It's getting pretty bad so you decide to visit a therapist and ask for help. Your therapist tells you that the reason you are feeling this way is that your life is terrible and will always be terrible. You feel unloved because you are unloved and your feeling that you are unlovable is real, no one could ever love you. You tell your therapist that you feel the world would be better off without you and, in an effort to validate your feelings, she agrees. Feelings are real, but they DO NOT always reflect reality. Feelings must be challenged and examined. The book talks rather extensively about cognitive behavioral therapy, a proven and successful treatment that teaches people to do just that. In CBT people are trained to question their emotions and learn to recognize cognitive distortions that separate their feelings from reality. Unfortunately, many good intentions to validate emotions instill in people the opposite skill, rewarding wild and blatant cognitive distortions and destructive thought patterns with victimhood points or virtue signaling points, thereby teaching moral dependency. 

3) Life is a battle between good people and bad people. The human brain is hardwired for tribalism due to our evolutionary history, so it's easy to fall prey to this untruth, either through carelessness or through manipulation from a third party. Confirmation bias serves to strengthen our idea that we are right and they are wrong. I think we can all see this in the political polarization we are experiencing. I do not identify with either the right or the left, I am a libertarian. It's funny how many times I've been called "far right" or "a Trump supporter" or a "MAGA moron." So many people think that, since I disagree with them so strongly, I am an "other". I simply must fit into this neat box they have constructed for people not on their team. I am sure the same would happen with republicans calling me a left wing lunatic or whatever if more republicans were in power for me to criticize, for the record. The point is, we have a tendency to see things in black and white. This is a cognitive distortion. Many examples in the book are given, but an interesting trend was the "if you're not for us, you're against us" mentality. If you allow this speaker on campus you have POC blood on your hands! or some such claim. Modern identity politics only serves to solidify the divisions that encourage us vs. them thinking. This untruth leads to self censorship, cancel culture, virtue signaling, and placing partisanship over truth in academia. It is imperative that we learn that good and evil exist in all people. We need to learn to grapple with ideas instead of ad hominem attacks. 

In the many examples of the widespread nature of these three great untruths, the authors focus on nine cognitive distortions, or patterns of destructive thinking. There are more than nine, but the others are mentioned only briefly so I'll only write about nine. 

1) Mind reading. Assuming that you know what others are thinking without sufficient evidence. They said "x" so they hate this group of people. 

2) Fortune Telling. You predict the future negatively. I liked this quote by someone named Macauley that was shared in the book. "We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason....On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" 

3) Catastrophizing. Making every problem or obstacle the end of the world, making mountains out of molehills.

4) Labeling. Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others. I'm a failure. He's a terrible person. 

5) Discounting postitives. The good things that you or others do are insufficient. They are either bare minimum requirements so they deserve no recognition, or they are trivial. 

6) Negative filtering. Focusing exclusively on the negative. Democrats never do anything good. 

7) Overgeneralizing. You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single event. I can't do anything right. 

8) Dichotomous thinking. Us vs. them, with us or against us, black vs. white. Viewing people and events in all or nothing terms. ACAB. 

9) Emotional reasoning. I feel depressed, therefore my marriage isn't working out. 

Many fascinating examples of these thought patterns being fostered and rewarded were given in the book. As I don't have notes and don't want to get the details wrong, I won't give specifics. Many of them involved universities and student protesters inhibiting free speech or getting professors or administrators fired for the offense of a poor choice of words or daring to hold an unacceptable opinion. Clearly not a great way for universities to function, as it endangers institutional disconformation--the process by which debates and challenging opinions with countering data helps professors, scientists, and academics tease truth from their cognitive bias. I think it would be very valuable for people to know and be able to recognize and call out these cognitive distortions in order to combat weak arguments and emotional manipulation. 

The third section of the book discusses possible causes of the three great untruths taking hold. They include political division, increased rates of depression and anxiety, increase screen time and social media, paranoid parenting, the decline of free and unsupervised play, the bureaucracy of power, and the quest for justice. Each is given its own chapter and backed up by data. I want to expand on the last one a bit. Political events that happen between certain ages in your life have a greater affect on your political worldview. The book discusses a long list of important political events that have shaped Gen Z's political worldview and explains their focus on and passion for social justice. At the beginning of this chapter, I bristled a bit, and thought about Tomas Sowell's The Quest for Cosmic Justice. However, I thought the authors did a great job at teasing out what justice is worth fighting for, and how to do that in a way that is based on truth rather than feeling. They applaud some of their causes while critiquing many of their methods. They suggest better methods, and caution against drawing conclusions too quickly regarding the root cause of perceived inequalities. 

The final section discusses what we--parents and universities in particular --can do to combat these untruths in order to "prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child," improve political discourse, and move toward a truth seeking, rather than narrative asserting society. Lots of good suggestions, but I think even consistently. 

Thought this was a great book. Very fair and balanced, very well supported with interesting studies, data, and relevant events. I thought it was an important and timely subject, something that many would benefit from learning about, and I thought it was presented in an interesting and well organized way. Highly recommend. 

This is neither here nor there, but I'm sorry for my make-shift m dashes. This laptop doesn't make them the way my old laptop did and I can't figure out how to anymore. I'm saddened and embarrassed by this, and I apologize.