so i'm here today with author greg
lucianov and jonathan hype
greg is president of fire the foundation
for individual rights and education and
jonathan height is a
an eminent social psychologist and
professor of ethical leadership at new
york university's stern school of
business
they have co-authored a new book called
the coddling of the american mind which
is an elaborated version of a famous
atlantic monthly essay they published a
while back and so today we're here to
talk about their new book and about the
state of the universities and i suppose
society at large so
thanks guys very much for joining me
today
so i thought maybe we'd start talking
about the book so do you guys want to
provide some background
uh maybe you could talk about the
atlantic monthly essay and what led up
to the book and then we'll get into the
details
sure sure about that over to greg
well um so it all started in 2007 when i
was lucky enough to have a full-on
medical level depression
um really really bad i talk about it in
some sort of detail in the uh in the
book i realize it's actually at a level
which i don't even i realize i wrote
about it with details that my wife
doesn't know my family doesn't um
there's a weird privacy thing that
sometimes happens when you're talking
you know dictating into a computer that
you kind of like this just between me
and the computer and now i realize it's
probably the most public thing
i'll ever write
but the thing that saved me the thing
that ultimately helped me deal with my
depressions in general was cognitive
behavioral therapy um in a sense it's
sort of like applied stoicism you just
look at your own uh thoughts you talk
back to the really exaggerated ones you
label them as cognitive distortions
these include things like generalization
catastrophizing binary thinking thinking
everything has to be they're all good or
all bad i'm actually particularly guilty
of these and amazingly if you just
actually learn what these distortions
are and practice every day to sort of
talk back to sort of the more anxious or
depressed voices in your own head it's
an incredibly effective treatment for
depression anxiety and it changed
absolutely changed my life
meanwhile as this is changing my life i
i'm still work i'm still the president
of fire which means i defend free speech
and uh due process and academic freedom
on campus
and um
i was what and while i was learning all
of these
intellectual habits all these ways to
sort of talk yourself down i was looking
around at what administrators were doing
and asked and saying to myself wow it's
actually kind of like the administrators
are saying oh by the way do engage in
cognitive distortions do engage in
binary thinking do over-generalize and
most of all catastrophize all the time
and i remember thinking something with
the effect of well thank goodness the
students don't seem to really be buying
it
and that's what changed in 2013 2014 um
prior to 2013 2014 since i started in
2001
the worst constituency for free speech
on campus was actually administrators
the best most reliable fans of free
speech you could run into on campus were
generally the students themselves and
then sometime around 2013 2014 we saw uh
you know suddenly they were demanding
you know everything from trigger
warnings to microaggression policies to
disinvitations for even people but both
on the left and the right on the
spectrum and it seemed like we said it
seemed to happen almost overnight and
this uh
and when i i went to talk to uh uh john
about it uh we we'd become friends
through a mutual friend and i said it's
almost i talked about my whole theory
that we're teaching a generation the the
habits of anxious and depressed people
from cognitive behavioral therapy john
got really excited about the idea and
asked if i wanted to write about it and
i was already a fan of john's work so i
was like absolutely
yeah so i thought that his insight
into what had changed was absolutely
brilliant i had just begun to notice
this in my own teaching i've been
teaching since 1995 at the university of
virginia originally um and it was it was
seemingly overnight right around 2014
these new ideas you know students of
course are political they protest they
object to things but what was new greg
put his finger on it what was new was
the idea that these words are going to
harm me not just offend me not just be
unjust
harm me we have to protect it was this
idea that students are fragile and need
protection and
the protection should come from
administrators from adults that's what
was new and disturbing and when you guys
talked in the book about concept creep
you know and the and the over
generalization of the idea of trauma
and you know one of the things that's
really struck me as interesting about
the safe space movements and the
microaggression policies and all of that
is that it does run so contrary to what
every clinician worth his or her salt
knows about treating anxiety or
depression
and
it's
one of so so that's kind of a remarkable
uh phenomenon in itself is that
what we know clinically has been
absolutely inverted by people who are
hypothetically agitating on the part of
students mental health and it's not as
if the mental health community has
stood up on mass and denounced this
so and i also don't i don't understand
that i also don't understand how we got
here you guys talk in the book a little
bit about
your
little bit of you hypothesize a little
bit about the internet generation right
and those are the kids born after 1995.
you don't put the finger on the
millennials but
but let's talk a little bit about why
you think things changed in 2013 and
2014. yeah sure let me just first say
your point about um about how this is
not this whole
these these new ideas are not clinically
supported uh something that we suggest
in the book we don't know we don't know
the degree to which this is going on
to what extent is this a sincere desire
for protection and a sincere belief that
students are fragile and to what extent
is it the pursuing of a of a political
agenda and and making political points
and using mental health as a cover i i
think both are operative and so and it
may depend on the context um so why do
you um why do you think the first one is
operative like i because this runs so
contrary to everything that's known
about the actual protection of mental
health i'm very skeptical about
attributing
um positive motivation to it like it
seems to me that it's fundamentally
driven by resentment well it's
so uh so you're absolutely right that
the psychological community does not
support this but yet has not stood up
very vocally to condemn it so i i we are
hopeful that psychologists and
psychiatrists everyone we spoke to
agreed that and strongly yeah that's
right that
exactly the worst thing to do for
someone who suffers from ptsd is to
sweep clean their daily life of
reminders thereby denying them the
chance to to deal to habituate to
de-decondition
the uh the power of these quote triggers
in the real world yeah well it's worse
in some sense too because one of the
things you do
when you expose people who have anxiety
disorders to the things they're anxious
about is not make them less anxious but
make them more courageous
right and that's why it generalizes
because the psychoanalysts thought that
exposure would just mean the fears would
pop up somewhere else but they don't and
it's because people learn that there's
more to them than they thought and then
when you protect them not only do you
not expose them which is a big problem
but you also teach them to generalize
the idea of their weakness which is a
really terrible thing to do to people so
you couldn't invent a more
counterproductive mental health movement
and instituted on campuses if you set
out to design it and that that's
something that we always try to
emphasize and one of the things that
made it so interesting uh for for for us
to look at was uh the one thing because
you know there are anti-free speech
movements coming from students uh in the
relatively recent past the late 80s and
early 90s for example um but the thing
that was so striking was that they were
medicalizing all of these claims and i
was like you know of course i'm sitting
there going like that doesn't sound
right i talked to john he was like that
doesn't sound right and we interviewed
for the original article maybe seven
different uh clinical psychologists cbt
experts uh you know for example and the
thing i keep on trying though i i keep
on explaining it is it's as if we're
turning up what could be a minor
aversion into something more like a
phobia because we're giving it so much
more power and the worst thing of all
that we're doing uh so much of our
campuses we're turning into a schema
we're turning the idea that i'm fragile
and that i'm broken into um uh into a a
a permanent sort of self-definition so
that's why i do think that there's
there's sort of a mixed motive thing
going on here i think that we have a
self-fulfilling prophecy going on to
some degree because i do think that that
some of this kind of hopeless ideology
is actually genuinely harming students
actually making them more
anxious and depressed and of course it's
really incompatible with how you have a
free open economy you also cite
statistics to that end so one of the
things you guys concentrate on in the
book is is statistics indicating that
there has in fact been there is evidence
of a decline in mental health over the
last what is it about the last decade
uh since around 20 uh 2009 to 2012 is
when things that's the elbow that's
where things begin to to arc up and then
they go steadily up uh um to about 2015
2016 we don't know if they're still
going up or if they're plateauing uh but
this is worth going into a little bit of
detail because it was just an article in
the new york times um richard friedman
psychiatrist wrote an article something
about how oh the idea of a waving of an
increase in anxiety is a myth he said
he said it's just based on one or two
you know there's been some a couple of
self-report studies in which students
say that they're more anxious and he
dismissed that and said don't worry
america your kids aren't becoming more
anxious
so we thought we we dug into this in
detail we did not want to catastrophize
we did not want to moment a moral panic
so we didn't want to say you know oh my
god the sky is falling kids are are
depressed and anxious so we looked into
this in great detail
and we were here so we were looking for
this data in our atlantic article and it
wasn't there uh that is that there were
anecdotes everywhere people were saying
the mental health centers are swamped so
there were plenty reports from mental
health centers but isn't this just
because
kids these days are more comfortable
seeking treatment that's why the mental
health centers are swapped maybe there's
no real increase
so in our atlantic article we could not
make a strong case we left it very
speculative
but just two years later when gene
tweggy's book came out igen and she
brought in data from four national uh
nationally representative surveys
showing that it really is an increase
now again those were almost all
self-report
what convinced us what convinced us that
it's real uh is that there was a there
was a major study done published in
journal of american medical association
looking at hospital admission data so
they broke it down by gender and you
always have to look male female separate
um they broke it down by sex and by age
group within teenagers and for all of
the age groups for
of the girls teenage girls hospital
admissions for self-harm for cutting
yourself taking poison this is non-fatal
um it's flat flat flat and then right
around 2011 2012 2013 it starts going up
and up and up and of course the rate is
lowest for 11 to 13 year old girls
they're less likely to do this but the
increase was the largest
and twenty says that
social media all the social comparison
seems to be hardest on the youngest
girls
so the self-harm data confirms this is
behavioral data this is not self-report
and then the real kicker unfortunately
is suicide if you look at the suicide
statistics they show the same pattern as
the self-reported depression data which
is um if you look at the first decade of
the century so 2001 to 2010 take the
average uh number of kids who killed
themselves successfully commit suicide
the rate for boys from that decade uh
through 2015 2016 those two years of
data goes up and up and up up 25
which is gigantic there's been an
enormous increase in boys suicide the
increase for girls is 70
7-0
so boys the rate is higher for boys
because girls make many more attempts
but boys
methods so so the increase is actually
fairly parallel but as a percentage it's
much higher for girls social media at
least this is twenty's argument and we
think there's some some validity to it
twangy's argument is that the spread of
uh of iphones and social media has
brought boys in to play video games they
play a lot of video games but those
aren't actually that harmful
it's the social comparison sites it's uh
um
instagram and and other things where
girls are comparing their lives to other
girls
and feeling left out that we think we
don't know for sure but that we think is
the most powerful reason why the girls
rates have increased so much
oh sorry john's been very
dated too because even since 2007 if you
just pick 2007 we're talking about a
doubling in terms of suicide for growth
yeah but but the 2007 that was the that
was the lowest year okay so if you just
so it's that's why it's best to not take
2007. it's best to just take the average
it just bounces around there's no trend
in the first decade
okay so we could hypothesize perhaps
that there's something approximating a
positive feedback loop going on here so
imagine because i'm i'm trying to figure
out why things have got out of control
say since 2013 it's like there's been a
tipping point and so i'm going to offer
a few ideas and you guys can tell me
what you think okay so
let's think of four or five reasons
so i think there's an increase in
political perceived political
polarization and maybe real political
polarization because the mainstream
media
mainstream media is dying and as it dies
it gets it gets more attracted to
click-bait journalism and exaggerates
the degree of extremism on both sides
and that's a consequence of a
technological revolution that the threat
that they're under from
from
from internet media sources so that's
one
the next one would be
the
un
opposed rise of the post-modern marxist
doctrines that characterize disciplines
particularly like women's studies now
you guys talked about um
a woman who
generated um
intersectionality theory kimberly
crenshaw and i've been looking into kate
millet who established patriarchy theory
or one of the people who established it
and she was a radical lesbian for
political reasons and had an alcoholic
and abusive father so i think that's
quite interesting and i think that these
theories fransha and and and millet's
theories were basically ignored by
serious scholars in the in the act
academic world but they've spread and
have had a disproportionate effect on
the universities and they're combined
with a kind of marxist viewpoint that
divides the world into victimizer and
victim
and then maybe we have the what you just
added go ahead you've already given us
two big theories let's talk about that
but it's on the political polarization
absolutely we have a whole chapter
on that the way to think about this is
universities are complicated
institutions nested within a broader
society
and they're changing and the broader
society is changing and so we document
how the rise in political polarization
and here the thing to focus on is not
polarization of attitudes about abortion
or things like that
it's how much do you hate the other side
that has been going up steadily since
the 1990s and so if you have a
left-right battle it's getting more and
more intense at the same time as the
professoria is going from leaning left
to being much further on the left so we
document this in the book
that the overall left right ratio for a
variety of reasons went from uh two to
one overall including everybody two to
one in the early nineties to five to one
left right ratio by 2010 so if you have
a more politically purified institution
at a time when the electromagnetic
forces of cross-partisan hatred are
ginning up then yes you have a more
politicized institution so there's a lot
going on there it's not unique to the
left it just so happens that
universities have been polarizing left
other institutions polarized right if
you believe in diversity if you believe
that diversity makes people think better
because it challenges thoughts then a
loss of political diversity is harmful
and it's a contributor and it's not just
the uh echo chambers that we create on
the internet although although social
media does sort of pat you on the back
for having the stick of an echo chamber
as possible i'm definitely you know a
big proponent of sort of the big sort
hypothesis um and certainly lived this
experience that um we increasingly live
in in more politically homogeneous
communities now big sword of course
talks about us living in more
politically homogenous counties but
charles murray and others have done
research about how we actually live in
even more politically homogeneous city
blocks that actually we are sort of
self-sorting tyler cowan talks about
this too and of course if you have sort
of a social circle where you practically
never run into anybody who disagrees
with you the all the different sort of
like uh tribalism experiments they've
done polarization experiments they've
done over the years um
shows that you tend to sort of spiral
off into the distance so that's one of
the reasons why i think of this is what
we call in the book a problem of
progress that if you think about the
idea that we can live in communities
that reflect our values going back you
know ronald hart was saying it's the
1970s that sounds lovely that sounds
great great i could live in communities
reflect my values but if you've ever
lived in a community that reflects just
one political point of view and
virtually none of the other it does have
a tendency to become a virtue signaling
contest more than an actual place where
you discuss ideas
okay so now let's move on to the
postmodernism
so i think you and i both agree that
that post-modernism marxism uh that
these are lenses that tend to amplify
conflict these are somehow involved i
think you and i may disagree a bit on
the dynamics here at the extent of it so
i'll just lay out the way that i think
about it
these ideas this way of looking at
things even these ideas of of trigger
warnings matrices of oppression those
ideas existed in feminist circles going
all the way back to the 90s
as a professor at nyu and previously at
uva i have not seen that
post-modernism or marxism are in any way
spreading across the disciplines they've
always been there in a few disciplines
there's a lot of of marxist analysis and
sociology i have not noticed that
spreading at all among the professoria
or across disciplines i think what has
happened
is that social media the internet
especially social media has knocked down
the compartments a good society needs a
lot of compartments needs a lot of walls
where different norms and different
practices flourish that you can do
different jobs
i think social media is knocked down the
walls so that certain ideas that maybe
some students get from their gender
studies or anthropology or sociology
classes
those ideas can spread among the
students
and they're often not even really the
accurate ideas it's a sort of a
bastardized version uh
modified in ways that i don't really
even understand that can spread around
this is how you can get bad
psychological ideas bad political ideas
um spreading around among the students
that's what's been most striking to us
is that this is really the change is
really student-led it's a generational
thing um you can blame faculty in
certain departments for you can
certainly disagree with their ideas but
it's not that there's this conspiracy
that's as far as we can tell a
conspiracy among the professors to take
over maybe you'll disagree with that we
see it or i see it as more student-led
well i did want to have one point here
though and it's something i talk a lot
about john and i talk a lot about but it
didn't actually quite make it into the
book um and what we've dubbed it is the
perfect rhetorical fortress and what we
mean by that is if you look at the ways
like i went to stanford for law school i
worked for the aclu of northern
california and i saw this sort of
happening even in the early 90s that one
of the things that some of these
post-modernist theories particularly
privileged theory allow is a a
way a matter of arguing in which you
never ever have to get to the substance
of the argument so in even in the late
90s those rhetorical fortress had a lot
of levels of protection you you didn't
have to listen to anybody if they were
conservative who was almost taken for
granted which i'm now deeply ashamed of
um you didn't have to uh and now if you
add to it you don't have to listen to
anybody if they have privilege and by
the way what hundred percent of people
actually do
um
that means you can choose to listen to
whomever the hell you want because
it's only optional you have an option of
you either dismiss marx uh as being a
white pillage male or you can listen to
them but any time you run into someone
who disagrees with you you have several
sort of tools at your disposal um that's
very important about various issues
the major
magic
was that we're white males defending our
privilege almost nobody engaged with the
substance of the argument
yes well
um if all arguments boil down to the
power claims of competing identity
groups then there is no such thing as
substance and i think that actually fits
quite nicely with certain strains of
post-modern thinking that have a
tendency to deny any knowledge of any
real world and to presume that
everything is not only interpretation
but interpretation based on
uh
power claims for competing groups and
the intersectionality theory you know i
just finished writing the preface to the
new version of the 50th anniversary
version of the gulag archipelago
yes it was quite something and
i was trying to
synthesize solzhenitsyn's arguments
about why the russian revolution went so
badly south immediately after it began
and
it's it's very interesting to think
about it from this intersectionality
perspective because as you guys just
pointed out
it's it's not an unreasonable
proposition that people have a multi
multiple group identities
now
perhaps there's some use in considering
that because you can think of the ways
that people have different advantages
and disadvantages but one of the real
pernicious uh side effects of that kind
of thinking especially when it's
conjoined with
a viewpoint that divides the world into
victim and victimizer is that you can
take any one person and maybe generate
20 group identities for them and you can
find at least one identity along which
they're privileged and that means that
not only can you ignore them as a
consequence of them speaking only on
behalf of their power but you have a
valid reason for persecuting them and
that's exactly what happened in the
soviet union as long as i could find one
dimension along which you were an
oppressor
then you were done
wow and yeah great grandson
right right well they were the best
example of that we were peasants who
made good in in any other country were
searched and uh that's where my family
comes from and in any other country you
know my family's story would have been
because we went from being serfs to
being lawyers and judges within a single
generation and my grandfather was in
kiev polytechnic studying to be your
professor when world war one uh you know
broke out and of course people like me
uh success stories in any other country
we were shot in the back of the head by
the millions
right right well and you were actually
the working-class success stories
because
when was when was serfdom eradicated in
in in russia uh 1861
right right so people were basically
slaves up to that point and some people
made very rapid uh leaps in status
within a single generation or two and
those were the kulaks that were
eradicated by the by the soviets after
world war one
then that of course that's what led to
the huge starvation and massive
starvations of of the 19 late 1920s and
1930 and early 1930s so it was a
complete catastrophe
so
all right so we you you put together a
bunch of symptoms you know you said well
microaggression theory i'm no admirer of
daryl it's daryl wing sue
yes i think that that i read his book i
thought it was absolutely appalling in
all in all possible manners um
there's the
the kind of oppression theory and
intersectionality the idea that we're in
a patriarchal tyranny and then
one of the things that you pointed out
at the beginning of this interview was
the unknown effect of social comparison
with these new social technologies
social media technologies right because
we're really at a we're really laid
vulnerable to these new technologies
because we have no idea what effect they
have on adults
let alone young people
and so do you think that is actually
making young people feel that the world
is a more dangerous place and and
requiring them to to seek protection oh
yes we think that's a big part of it the
objective facts about mortality crime
physical safety are that life gets safer
and safer death rates go down um
so you know steve pinker and many others
have chronicled the decline of violence
um but
we react to the world not as it is we
react to the world as we perceive it
through the filters that we're given
and if if you remember the old the movie
from the 1980s or 90s it was the bowling
for columbine no boys
but uh michael moore's movie bowling for
columbine where he traces out why
americans are so
paranoid compared to canadians let's say
and he
blames it all on cable tv putting
stories of crime in our face all right
so i think there's a lot of truth to
that
now imagine social media
channeling not just stories of crime but
whichever side you're on politically you
now get filtered through of all of the
stupid things that any person says in
our country of 330 million people
every day someone on the left says
something incredibly stupid and
offensive and every day somebody on the
right says something's you know and
there's a video and so if you're being
so
if you're rewarded for forwarding
outrage things that outrage your side
you're rewarded for forwarding that and
we're all forwarding it um we're all
drowning in outrage stories and one of
the things that that sells or that sells
in terms of getting retweets
is stories of aggression or violence or
racism or whatever it is people
trampling on your side's sacred values
so if you're exposed constantly to
stories of you know if you're up if
you're on the left you're exposed to
stories of right
nazis and you think that uh uh you know
half the country is nazi um
this is gonna have a big effect on your
perceptions even if even if the reality
is social progress even if the reality
is increasing safety so we do think that
um the reason why so many things are
going haywire not just in america but in
many countries um is
the internet and social media all
hitting us at the same time
globalization is the other factor a
little more distant but i think they're
intersect intersecting interacting in
all kinds of interesting ways that we
don't yet understand
we talked about polarization on the
right and on the left and one of the
things that struck me and maybe i'm
wrong about this is that i've been
particularly concerned about
the rise of the radical left and that's
probably because i've been immersed in a
university milieu
and as you already pointed out the left
is over represented at least among the
social scientists and the humanities and
i suspect as well the administration in
the universities
and then i see as well people being
concerned about the rise of the radical
right but i certainly don't see the
radical right as posing a threat in the
universities and i can't see what sort
of threat the radical right is posing
because i can't get numbers right so
like there are lots of stories about
alt-right types and about neo-nazis and
white supremacists but they seem i mean
there was a white supremacist rally in
washington about a month and a half ago
and i think they got 16 people on a bus
on the white supremacist side and
several thousand counter protesters and
so
i i'm wondering to what degree the
radical right is uh
like i don't know where they are exactly
so do you have thoughts about that
yeah definitely in my work um i talk
about this as being the most recent
trend and we talk about this in the book
and it's not necessarily the radical
right um but uh we've seen some of the
uh what i've talked about is kind of
like we have this sort of effort chamber
on the left at the universities and
there is a sort of an echo chamber on
the right as well and those two have
been uh sort of colliding with each
other with each other so we've
definitely seen an uptick in fire of
liberal professors getting in trouble
for
what they say on the internet what they
say on twitter or facebook or you know
going on fox news for example and we
talk about a couple um examples of that
in the book now this is so recent that
we're not going to have real data on it
but it definitely is a noticeable change
for those of us who work on the front
lines yeah so it's important to look at
the timing here because we hear this a
lot too you know whenever we talk about
something people will point out well
what about the alt-right and what about
the nazis um
and when when we started this when greg
first noticed what was going on in 2013
2014 and then our article came out 2015
the right had nothing to do with it
nobody had heard of the alt-right
practically uh they weren't trolling on
campus so whatever the origins of the
problem on campus it is not a reaction
to the right now in 2016
um the you know the alt-right got a lot
more attention and they got much more
sophisticated at trolling and as i read
a little bit about trolling in the new
york times began to cover it it became
really clear um
all you need is a few people with a you
know kind of a perverse sense of humor
and a few anonymous internet accounts
and they can provoke a gigantic reaction
from the group that they want to provoke
and so i think in 2016 we saw the right
and into 2017 that's when we start
actually seeing the cases of right-wing
movements to get professors fired um
there's a some really nasty stuff coming
out of various sites on the right
flooding people's inboxes with rape
threats and death threats and racist
rants so there's a lot of nasty stuff
coming from the right towards professors
in 2017 and since then it wasn't
happening as far as it wasn't anything
new it wasn't really part of the story
early on so we covered this in chapter
six the polarization cycle uh the
problem we believe is not originally uh
from from the right although now they
are part of the polarization cycle right
so you can conjure a specter out of the
darkness in that manner i mean one of
the things i've seen on youtube and and
the other uh commentary sources that
i've been monitoring is a
real increase in anti-semitic comments
oh yeah
and it's hard to tell of course it's
hard to quantify that but um they're
appallingly common um on on youtube and
and on twitter as well
um and some of them are coded you know i
think it's it's
commonplace now to put your comment in
three brackets
which indicates a an anti-semitic origin
or uh emphasis and so that's very
pernicious but again we have no idea how
many people are actually engaging in
this and it's a very difficult thing to
to
come to terms with because like when i
look at the united states i think
and more power to you that your
political dialogue is actually quite
balanced there's a fair bit of power on
the left and there's a fair bit of power
on the right
um the radical left seems to be
overrepresented in universities and
that's something that's unique
i can't get a handle on the white
supremacists and nazi types i mean i
think nazis are vanishingly rare i
really believe that the white
supremacist types as well but but that
doesn't necessarily mean that it's not
growing it isn't being cultivated in
some sense that's right but then the
question is how much should we react to
it so so i'm jewish
my mother told me when i was growing up
that america is the promised land for
the jews it's not israel you know we
always talk about israel as the promised
land
i was raised to believe that america is
the promised land for the jews uh sure
there was some anti-semitism my parents
they moved to scarsdale new york and
they were they could not join certain
country clubs big deal they were jewish
clubs there were wasp clubs that's the
way things were it was it wasn't perfect
but compared to what compared to the
rest of the world thank god my
grandparents got off the boat in new
york and didn't go on to buenos aires or
any any place else that was settled
originally by the spanish um so america
is not an anti-semitic country now what
do we make of the fact that now we're
seeing all this anti-semitic stuff what
i make of it is that there are a few
who are organizing and doing
this and am i triggered by it no i i
because i grew up where occasionally
you'd come across a swastika like
scratched into the bathroom stall you'd
find the f word you'd find obscenities
you'd find a drawing of a penis and
you'd see a swastika and my reaction was
you know yuck or bad and then i would go
on with my day
it wasn't a trigger
but if we teach kids now if you find
something on the internet be triggered
and of course you will always find
something on the internet i i i will say
that and this is just anecdotal but my i
speak a lot of times in california um
and some of the the sort of anti-israel
bleeding into uh anti-semitism is
something that i've i've seen
really dramatic performance it's almost
as if it's become stylish to be
so anti-israel you're almost
anti-semitic at least certain circles
and i spoke it now like the british
labor party for example for example yeah
so the 50 i spoke at the 50th
anniversary of the start of the free
speech movement way back in 2014 i spoke
in berkeley and i'll be damned if my
speech was not in a room with a lot of
anti-semites in it and there was even a
guy who was trying to address this
saying like oh and people want to call
us anti-semitic and that's so wrong and
then he finished that sentence we're
saying but it's undeniable that the
poison hand of zionism destroys
everything it touches and i was like
okay okay that's that's uh
i think i can understand why they're
calling you that so i i definitely i
don't think it's in people's heads that
that this uh this uptick is is real but
i i've noticed it most pronounced for
some reason uh in california okay so
here's a idea too so
you know
one of the things that happened in
germany in the 1920s was a polarization
process right
obviously much more severe than the one
that we're going through
but i wonder
if when the political spectrum polarizes
that
ethnocentrism of a certain sort rises
and drives something like anti-semitism
so maybe because maybe
when the left and the right are
relatively close together people aren't
so obsessed with their group identities
or the extreme types aren't but then
when the polarization process starts
everybody locks harder into the group
identities and then anyone who's
uh
i don't know if it's anyone who's an
outsider is viewed with excess suspicion
but see because
the situation with with jewish people is
complicated too because they're often
successful
so i don't know if it's some perverse
interaction between ethnocentrism and
resentment for the for the successful
that's that drives anti-semitism during
polarization processes i'm trying to get
get a finger or get a you know trying to
put my finger on it i think what you're
what you're reaching for here is this
phenomena that you suddenly see these
bursts of intolerance what triggers them
and here i turned to karen stenner a
political scientist didn't work at
princeton now she lives in australia but
she wrote this brilliant book the
authoritarian dynamic published in 2005
and
what she says in there is that
authoritarianism is not a stable
personality trait it's a dynamic in
which some people about 20 or 30 percent
of the population
um
when they perceive
that society is coming apart that is
you know i study morality we need a
sense of shared moral order there are
times when we feel that the moral order
is secure
violations are punished everything's
fine
there are other times when we feel
things are coming apart it's chaos it's
babble
when that's happening
people who have this predisposition to
authoritarianism it's like there's a
button on their head that gets pushed
and they then become intolerant against
all outsiders and so she does
experiments where she gives a story
about you know maybe it's mexican
immigration but it turns that that then
makes
you know if you present in a threatening
way as donald trump does
that doesn't just turn people against
mexicans it turns them against lgbt
americans so it's a general
dynamic of stamp out dissent stamp out
the outsiders get back to the purity of
our group
so when we have times of increasing um
prosperity when we have peace when
there's a sense of progress the pie is
growing um there is some sense that we
are we have something in common then
things get much calmer
but a number of events uh you know
financial crisis may have contributed
the sense that there is not a growing
pie
but i think again social media has made
it so that if you are prone to this
and then you sign up to any group that
is concerned uh about immigration or
anything else you will now be surren you
will become flooding into you
really powerful videos designed to press
that button over and over and over again
and before you know it america goes from
having you know 50 nazis to having 500
maybe even 5 000. it's not 5 million i
really don't think there are five you
know whatever it's not like two or three
percent of the country are nazis
so so we've got to somehow learn to get
used to the fact
that
we've got to somehow get back to judging
by sort of the average or the overall
rather than the individual extremes
because now we will be faced with the
individual extremes forever yeah
and also while we're recommending books
amy chu as political tribes talks a lot
about this too and it's really a really
interesting stimulating read
well partly what i've been trying to do
in my lectures so i'm traveling around
lecturing to people and doing this to
some degree on youtube as well is to
emphasize the existence of the common
center
for me that's a return to classic
liberal and to some degree classic
conservative values i mean some
intermingling of those so some emphasis
on traditional
um
well traditional phenomena like
like monogamous marriage but also the
idea of the sovereignty of the
individual as part of that common
landscape that unites us and that seems
to be quite useful
um
although i would
go let's keep going on i think this is a
very important point um that
if you go down the identitarian path
there is no clear endpoint nobody can
point to where this will end in a good
way
um
so what's what's so interesting and
here's one of the most encouraging signs
uh is that just in 2018 we are seeing an
explosion of books written by people who
are not straight white males who are
saying
identity politics practiced in this way
is a dead end we need to we need to
really emphasize what we have in common
so i'll just read you i've just started
collecting a file i'll put this online
someplace soon here are some of the
books here's some of the really
interesting things coming out just
recently
amy chua's book political tribes as greg
mentioned uh francis fukuyama has a new
book identity the demand for dignity and
the politics of resentment just came out
last week uh anthony abby has been
writing brilliantly about identity
politics uh jonathan rouch uh is gay i
guess he's conservative but he's uh he's
been writing again very uh about
amy chewin about other reasons why
identity politics is a dead end uh john
mcwhorter uh has been writing
brilliantly about how uh anti-racism has
become a religion uh how we need to you
need to get you know stop focusing on uh
on that in that way um in britain there
are a number of of uh
people of caribbean origin have been
writing about this i just had dinner
last week with irshad manji has a book
coming up don't label me so this is
wonderful that we're seeing all of these
people just about all of them identify
as being on the left
none of them are straight white males
and they're all saying we need to
rethink this
so we're thrilled because in our book in
chapter three we distinguish between
common humanity identity politics which
is what martin luther king did and many
of the civil rights leaders which yes
you need to demand rights for groups
that don't have them but you do it by
appealing to our common humanity versus
common enemy identity politics which is
what intersectionality tends to devolve
into it doesn't have to be but it often
is bastardized into let's all unite
against them yeah
yeah well you know in canada we've been
pursuing a multicultural policy and our
prime minister was famous for saying
that canada has no identity which i
think is an absolute catastrophe of an
idea i mean if you think about the
multicultural landscape of the planet
it certainly produces wars along with
diversity so the question is how do you
bring people from different communities
into a universal community and maintain
peace
and it seems to me that you do that
essentially by concentrating on the
sovereignty of the individual as the
fundamental marker for human identity
rather than
rather than the group and i was thinking
about intersectionality um which i think
by the way is a painfully obvious idea
you know the idea that you could be
classified among many group dimensions
and and that there's social status uh
consequences to all of those and that
they interact um
but i think
intersectionality is actually the
discovery of the fatal flaw of identity
politics because if you fragment people
down
if you allow their group identities to
multiply and interact then you get to
the point where each individual is a
unique nexus of group identities and i
actually think that that's what western
culture discovered
over the last several thousand years
that the logical end point is the
individual and if you take everyone's
advantages and disadvantages into
account optimally then what you do is
you treat them as individuals like there
isn't anyone else like them in some
sense except in terms of their common
say divine value or something
approximating that
that's right if you followed it to its
logical conclusion then the worst
aspects of identitarianism would vanish
because as you say everybody ultimately
becomes a group of one
unfortunately of the 20 or 30 dimensions
on which one could categorize people
it's really only three that matter it's
straight white males that's really where
it's at so well that's worth digging
into
you know because that that's actually
illustrative i would say to some degree
of the actual motivations
it's like there is all these identities
and hypothetically there's nothing to
distinguish them in terms of primacy
even in terms of their effect say on
socioeconomic outcome so then it seems
to me to be a victim victimizer
narrative that's driving the idea that
it's straight white males that in some
sense have the have the phenomenal upper
hand which is another thing i don't
really buy i mean most of the dangerous
jobs are done by men and so
in terms of who's you know in terms of
who has power and wealth you know
straight white men i mean i think we can
plead guilty to that that the world is
not perfectly equal across all
categories
we certainly can't just be bad um but i
think what we're seeing now in very
sharp relief since the sarah john
controversy in the new york times
recently is this red wine i think it was
brent weinstein said a year or two ago
there there are some people who see
inequality
and want to end it
there are other people who see
inequality and want to reverse it
at the time i thought well that's
interesting i wonder if that's true but
i think the sarah john controversy where
the new york times hired a young
korean-american uh person to join the
op-ed the editorial page
and it was discovered that she had all
these nasty anti-white uh anti-white
tweets and the fact that there was a
discussion debate like many people fit
would say oh by definition there's no
such thing as anti-white racism it's
okay to say terrible things about white
people it's okay here's the key thing
it's okay to look at someone and based
on the way they look dislike them and
treat them badly
and if you think that's okay
then
this is the problem this is common enemy
identity politics because we think
that's horrible we shouldn't be judging
people based on their race then that's
you're probably a supporter of common
humanity identity politics as we are i i
i actually would like to slightly push
back against the idea that it's just
straight white met men anymore i felt
like i always feel like unfortunately
sort of like the stamford palo alto
uh you know san francisco bay area is
unfortunately way ahead on these trends
and i think one of the reasons why you
are seeing pushback from a lot of
members of minority members as well is
partially because for a long time at
least among the friends i know who
really believe in this and almost like a
religious kind of way um they're
they're extremely guilty about simply
being cisgender as in non-transgender um
that you you'll you'll see sort of this
call-out culture applied to
uh black straight black men for example
so i do think that we we've been falling
deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole
where people are realizing wow so this
is just a permanent situation
of guilt and shame about an identity
that i have no control over that can't
possibly be right
well the other thing we should point out
too is that even if you do make
allowances for the fact that let's say
uh on average straight white men are
doing rel or have done relatively well
economically it's also very much worth
pointing out
that it's a tiny minority of straight
white men who have been doing
spectacularly well you know so you have
a pareto distribution problem within
each with with each within each ethnic
identity group
and so to say that because
on average the socioeconomic status of a
given group is higher than
the status of another group all the
people who are members of that group are
disproportionately benefiting is
actually a rather uh in
i would say a rather motivated and
resentful analysis
because it is always a tiny proportion
of people in a group that are doing
spectacularly well and then
then you have to do something else which
is you have to look at that proportion
that are doing spectacularly well
and you have to decide
about how many of them are doing well
because they actually deserve it and how
many of them are doing well because
they're inappropriate rent seekers and i
would say because our culture is pretty
damn functional and because we do
generate a lot of wealth along with the
inequality that
there's a fair number of people who are
doing disproportionately well who are
doing that by benefiting everyone else
and we're not very careful about making
those sorts of distinctions and they're
actually crucial
that's right so that's what we do so in
chapter 11 we we go into social justice
and
many people uh have claimed social
justice is a meaningless term it's
thrown around in certain ways people
can't define it um but after digging
into it we decided
that it actually is meaningful but we
have to we have to break it down into
its component parts and so we go into
what is the psychology of justice
and if you focus on distributive justice
are people getting what they deserve
based on their inputs everybody
recognizes when people are being cheated
that they're you know like
in america now a lot of low-wage workers
the companies have found ways to skimp
on benefits and
pay so that is a violation of
distributive fairness people recognize
that that is wrong
if that is disproportionately affecting
one race or if people are being cheated
because they are members of any identity
group that is a violation i would say of
social justice or of justice
applied to identity groups
that we think is a very important
concept
similarly procedural justice if the
criminal justice system ends up for
whatever reason giving better
representation to some groups than
others or uh treating people differently
at any point that is a violation of
justice which can plausibly call a
violation of social justice what we push
back against is the shift in recent
years to this obsessive emphasis on
outcomes
it's what most of the social justice
argument seems to be on campuses you
just say look men are overrepresented
you know among coders well they're not
overrepresented among all other
functions at google and apple if you
look everywhere else in the company
they're you know it's 50 50 or very
close it's only in certain job
classifications where there's a
disparity and so people take that as
ipso facto proof of systemic sexism and
what we really push back hard on
is saying that's lazy that's unfair
that's inaccurate
that's an invitation those disparities
are an invitation to look closer and if
you see that the pipeline is 50 50 but
the outcome is well then you've got a
strong case but if the pipeline from
grad programs and computer science is
exactly the same as the representation
among coders at google and apple well
you know you have to do something to
show that people are being treated
differently so we think there's a lot of
bad thinking done in the service of
prosecuting one's political agenda
within the culture war um and that a lot
of people don't know how to stand up to
it and one thing that i find interesting
that this should become a blasphemous
argument is personal preference
particularly when people talk about
genders i mean the if you've ever
actually read um for example the speech
they got larry summers in so much
trouble
his final conclusion is it's probably
mostly that uh these are not
a lot of these jobs are not um are jobs
that a lot of the
theoretical physical things they don't
have a lot of appeal to women he he
basically he comes down on preference
some reason saying that there might
actually be a reason why you know
veterinary science is overwhelmingly
limited and some of some of these uh you
know mathematical fields are
overwhelmingly men it might have
something to do with that uh some you
know some small difference in what
people actually like doing somehow
the funny thing too is so the biggest
the london times just did an article
this week on two papers that came out
it was quite an interesting article
because one of the papers came out
showing once again that the personality
differences between men and women are
largest in the most egalitarian
societies and they actually get quite
large by psychological standards in
countries like holland and in or the
netherlands and also in the scandinavian
countries which are the most egalitarian
countries
but the biggest difference between men
and women and also one that grows in
more egalitarian countries is in
interest and that that difference is
more than a standard deviation it's like
one and a half standard deviations and
so it's more than enough to count
account for the disparity between male
engineers and and
our sorry female engineers and male
nurses
and the fact that it grows as societies
become more egalitarian is actually a
death blow to social constructionist
theory that's right so let's go into
this in a bit of detail because i think
this is this is a really helpful area
where i think we have a good idea what's
going on and we can see why it's so hard
to find find the truth here um
so
when i taught at uva i had a lecture on
on sex and gender and i went into sex
differences
and the clear finding for many decades
is that if you look at differences in
ability between men and women they're
very few and far between
men are better at spatial rotation women
on some measures are a little better at
social skills and at language so there
are some differences but they're few and
far between if you look at the
differences in what kids like and what
they choose to do when there's no adult
watching they're huge little boys and
girls play radically differently my my
wife and i we
we once gave up my triplet nephews and
they were four year old four years old
we gave them a bag of plastic dinosaurs
and the two boys grabbed the dinosaurs
and they start battling they're bashing
them together
and the girl takes two dinosaurs and she
says don't ever leave me mommy i won't
leave you baby
so right but the point is girls and boys
play really differently and if you if
they're supervised by adults the
differences get smaller whereas if you
let
kids play on their own the differences
get bigger differences in interest are
huge and that's a crucial finding yeah
that's right
jordan i'd like to ask you what why did
why is this why do you think this is
treated so much like a heretical
blasphemous thought that must be
immediately shot down there's merely
i think that i think that you zeroed in
on the proper issue before when you
talked about the equity doctrine now one
of the things i've been trying to figure
out
is
how we know when the left goes too far
now we know when the right goes too far
when they start making ethno-nationalist
claims of superiority it's something
like that and and claiming that all the
good things should happen to one ethnic
or racial group okay no we're you're
outside the domain of reasonable
political discourse at that point now
obviously the same thing can happen on
the left but when it happens is not so
obvious there's no smoking pistol but i
think emphasis on equity which is code
word for equality of outcome is actually
the smoking pistol if you had to pick
one
no okay i would disagree with you on
that that can't be a smoking pistol
emphasizing equity can't be a smoking
pistol what i think we mean by smoking
pistol is when someone makes an argument
in good faith trying to understand some
phenomenon in the world and they suffer
social consequences that's the smoking
pistol and that's why
okay i think maybe we might be talking
about two slightly different things i'm
i'm trying maybe not i'm i'm trying to
figure out
where the
where the tipping point is
in thought on the left it makes things
spiral out of control
and you guys talked about
the equality of outcome doctrine as
as the wrong first of all it doesn't
allow for multivariate analysis right
which is a big problem so it
oversimplifies things radically if
there's a difference in outcome then
ipso facto there's a victim victimizer
uh narrative driving it or reality
driving it
and i think that
the
the the fundamental problem
on the radical left is exactly that and
that's the reason that they don't like
the
literature on gender differences because
you can point to gender differences in
outcome and you can use them as proof
for the oppressive nature of society but
if you look into it and you find out
that that's actually not proof that some
of the differences even some of the
differences in outcome are being driven
by things like biological difference in
interest then it radically weakens that
central axiomatic claim of fundamental
oppression and so that's viewed as an
existential threat by people for whom
that's the cardinal presupposition
that's how it looks to me
i think that is correct because i am
struck you know i since since writing
the righteous mind i always like to
analyze things in terms of what's sacred
what do people think what organizes them
they circle around it that binds them
together
there are a lot of things that people
hold sacred you know on all sides
but i am struck by the fact that in the
academy it's not just questioning sacred
values of any sort it's specifically
questioning diversity policies that
seems to be the most dangerous thing to
do and that does fit with what you said
that it's like there's a big project
that we're all engaged in and we're
working hard against the enemy and we're
fighting the fight and if one of us
steps out and says well actually maybe
we're wrong on this point bang we got to
shoot him we can't
got to shoot him yeah that would be
proportion that probability would be
proportionate to the centrality of the
axiom that's exactly i think the central
axiom here that's that's it's causing
all the trouble is the insistence that
the best way to well two insistences one
is that the best way to characterize
western society is as an oppressive
patriarchy
that's right yes and and the second is
that the best way to characterize people
is by their group and those two things
interact and so
uh the gender data is particularly a
horrifying i would say to people who
hold those axioms because you can well
for two reasons one is because the
gender differences actually exist and
they do account for differences in
outcomes but even worse and this is a
catastrophe i think for the social
constructionists is that
as you put egalitarian social policies
into play
that the very differences that you hate
get bigger
and that's and this needs to be said a
thousand times because it really is it's
it's a fatal blow to the social
constructionist egalitarians
and even to the concepts they're using
because one thing we could also ask is
like well if it turns out that men and
women are as different in egalitarian
societies as boys and girls are in their
unsupervised play
which i think is a reasonable analog
then we're going to have differences in
outcomes that are going to be magnified
by the very policies that the
egalitarians are putting in place
yeah and then we also might ask too is
inner truly uh in the society that we
want to set up
maybe
wouldn't we want it to be the case that
people's free choice would determine
their occupational outcomes and then we
have to put up with a certain degree of
inequality of outcome and think in a
complex way about it
i wanted to get back just to the point
where we were talking about about
sacredness um and what and they're one
of the stories we talk about in the book
is one that i know you're very well
familiar with the rebecca tuvel story
um which she wrote a paper i'm talking
about you know an academic paper talking
about well if we accept transsexuality
what what what implications does that
have for someone like rachel dolezal who
actually what kind of wants to decide
whether what um
she claimed that she was black but she
wasn't is she allowed to do that feels
black inside right
and um and and both john and i are very
we've really tried to sort of like be
very reasonable as possible aggressively
reasonable um but in that in this one we
uh we we liken it to emil durkheim's
definitions of witch hunts because it
really unfortunately really fit because
you not only do you have this kind of
like you know nor like normal
interesting intellectual exercises of an
academic article making an interesting
point um she is treated absolutely like
a blasphemer and so badly that people
are signing letters condemning her while
at the same time emailing saying oh this
is really terrible what happened to you
um and it's just absolutely bizarre it's
scary situation that's why i said that
the smoking gun what proves that there's
a problem is when there are social
consequences to making a good faith
argument
right
if you're out in the public square if
you're in the comments section on
youtube of course people are trying to
destroy you what we're trying to do in
universities is it's really unique and
important thing which is create an
environment in which people are expected
to challenge each other we're not
supposed to be there to be agreeable and
it all makes sense it all it's all okay
because it's in the surface service of
finding truth
and as soon as people who are taking
part in that process are shamed punished
excluded their calls to expel them or
punish them as soon as that happens now
we have more of a sort of like you know
east german mindset where people are not
thinking about what's true they're
thinking about you know what will what
will avoid getting me in trouble what am
i allowed to say am i allowed to say and
of course it's made worse by the fact of
what will get me incredible praise for
being throwing myself as a true believer
yeah but a tremendous amount of it
though is motivated by the desire to
avoid being
shunned and and and treated as the
violator of a taboo because that and
that's exactly what's happening is that
that there are there are new taboos
so then part of the question might be
too
why is there such an insistence that the
culture we live in is a patriarchal
tyranny which is also a collapse of
complexity right i mean obviously our
culture has its flaws
it it tends towards um rigidity and
tyranny like all cultures do but
comparatively speaking as we've talked
about before by by world standards today
or by world standards historically it's
a pretty damn free and and productive
culture
but we have this tremendous emphasis
on the idea that it's fundamentally a
patriarchal tyranny and that if you uh
question that then you're treated as a
taboo violator so then the question is
well what the hell is driving this
insistence that it's a patriarchal
tyranny with with uh kate millet
you know you see who originated at least
in part patriarchy theory you see that
she had a very she had an alcoholic and
abusive father
and so i think that's quite interesting
because i think there are psychological
dynamics here at work i i wonder to what
degree the people who are pushing this
theory
um have had very disturbed interpersonal
relationships gendered relationships and
that that's that's
what would you say
driving the
the collapse of their political
viewpoint into a single dimension like a
single oversimplified dimension you see
that sort of oversimplified thinking
when you look at at
psychopathological complexes you know
like with with uh
with women with eating disorders in
particular well men too but that's rarer
everything collapses to a single uh
single dimension of evaluation something
like thin equals beautiful or thin
equals good
and then that drives everything
and so
and and then i also think maybe is is
this also a challenge to
to
cultural tradition
an actual intellectual challenge say
well we think that your your your way of
of of
of operating within the culture is too
tyrannical and we're going to throw
everything we can at you in an attempt
to make you prove that that's not true
but i can't get any further underneath
it than that
let's talk about that so you're a
clinical psychologist so i think your
first impulse is let's look to the
person's formative experiences why do
they think this way
i'm a social psychologist so i think in
terms of if there's some new or some
interesting social
movement
what are the social forces and pressures
on them that led them to think this way
i also
uh read a lot think a lot about
evolution i like to think and this is
what first drew me to you you wouldn't
be when i met in 1994
we both loved carl jung and i love
jung's idea of archetypes interpreted
from an evolutionary point of view
yeah like why do we dream about dragons
why do so many cultures have dragons
well actually you know our ancestors you
know 60 million years ago actually were
in a world of dinosaur like that's a
pretty cool idea i don't know if it's
right anyway um
human beings have a tendency to think in
a manichaean style it's effortless it's
default for us to divide the world up
into good and evil and that's why the
third great untruth in our book is the
untruth of us versus them life is a
battle between good people and evil
people yeah it's very easy it's not hard
to teach this to people
so uh so we think that is innate as a
possibility and then the question is why
are some movements now
teaching this and why is it making more
progress in in some areas of the
university now than it was 10 or 20
years ago um so i think that to answer
your question if you're engaged in a in
a radical program radical means you want
to tear things down you want radical
change uh you you need to demonize the
country the structure you want to tear
down you need to say that america is the
worst america is a paragon of racism and
sexism and of course we have our
problems you know most of us think that
things have been getting steadily better
since the 19th century um
but you're committed to saying that
america is the worst so there was an
interesting study uh published a few
months ago you probably heard about this
uh it ranked america as like the like
the 12th worst country on earth for
women it was behind you know eritrea and
sudan and you know north korea you know
it was the one of the worst places on
earth to be a woman
and you know just on the smell test you
know really like um
you know i don't want to go into why
that's so wrong but the methodology it
was it was judged by i can't remember
what it was but it's by obviously it was
in the judgment of like human rights
activists or something like that rights
activists are generally many of them and
amer just american human rights
activists
it was something like that
they are not
weighing up statistics on how women fare
around the world they're being asked
what are the worst countries for women
and if you're engaged in the project of
critiquing america you're motivated to
say that america is the worst and that's
what you can explain that ranking well
at minimum it justifies your continued
activism and if that's what you've
staked your career on then that's also
necessary i also think that's one of the
things that's driving
all the things that we're talking about
is that we've produced a committed
activist class that has been heavily
subsidized for 30 years and they're
always in need of reasons to justify
their continued existence i mean as as
we all are of course
but but this is a situation where that's
become dangerous the committed activist
class um i think this is important also
to focus on for a moment um because in
discussions of this we're all supposed
to praise the students political
activity we're all supposed to praise
activism
um and you know pepsi tried that
disastrous commercial of just like you
know random beautiful people being
activists because if you have a bullhorn
bullhorn that's political activity
that's kylie jenner
okay
that's all right that's right right
right right
yeah so i think there is an idea among
young people this is i think more true
on the left that to be political is to
be protesting yeah just telling me like
why is it that the right when they're
upset about something they go and they
get people elected to the school board
and they change the rules like the right
i think is more pragmatic in its
politics the left is more expressive and
i think this is the point that mark
lilla has been really well yeah
um and so ultimately it ends up
backfiring but i think that the the the
the
respect that we accord to activism pure
and simple i think that should be
rethought and yeah i think so yeah
universities are are might be about to
do that uh one president of a major uh
university in this in this region
recently said uh something like to the
effect that universities are becoming
ungovernable now there's a lot of
reasons for that they face a lot of
pressures but the student activism the
fact that it's it's it could be at
anything it's not like addressed at
injustice it's addressed at like
something in the dining hall something
spit that a student it's because there
are protests about almost anything i
think many administrators are realizing
what have we done what kind of
frankenstein monster have we created by
incentivizing and praising this kind of
of of of activism
um
i've been talking to politicians in
canada about the possibility of
making a distinction between education
and activism and political activism so
you know in canada if you're a
charitable organization you can't engage
in political activism
now it's very difficult to distinguish
right between what might constitute
education and what might constitute
activism but the idea that there's
something intrinsically moral and noble
about about
about complaining about the evil people
in the world is definitely something you
know in literature in the humanities
used to be the antidote to that to some
degree because one of the things that
characterizes great literature
as opposed to second great literature is
that if the literature's great the
battle between good and evil occurs in
the hearts of each protagonist right
it's a psychological issue and not a
sociological issue
exactly i'm turning here to the
and we already talked about soldier and
instance of one of our three opening
quotes
the line dividing good and evil cuts
through the heart of every human being
right right and that is what we should
be teaching students to complexify
situations to the extent that we teach
them no it's simple if you know the
category you know their moral valence
and you know they're bad and
the extent that we're teaching students
to think in this way we are harming them
we are setting them up for failure we
are ill-preparing them for citizenship
in a democracy and we are
harming the future of our country and i
probably have a little bit of insight
into this as a as a first amendment
lawyer um as someone who spent a lot of
time defending the rights of protesters
and i've and i've dealt with
you know very many protesters who are
protesting utterly sensible things um
that i'm like absolutely more power to
you but also i've talked to other people
who i felt like were tilting it
windmills or um i i mean i one time
represented a group that was or helped
represent a group that believed that the
us should have no navy um and i remember
sort of talking about so it's not that
you think we should spend less on
military but that we should literally
have no navy and that was the argument
and i would ask some of my activist
friends in in san francisco some of them
were doing i think you know absolute
lords work particularly with criminal
justice and that kind of stuff who are
just the best people ever met but in
other cases i'd see sort of activists
sort of groups that were you know for
example i you know i opposed the uh the
second iraq war um but i had friends who
also opposed it who would immediately go
into uh and 911 was a uh uh was a
conspiracy to allow for the and i'm like
why why are you moving it to like that
next argument where you're going to lose
more people
and the perception was that we have to
keep the temperature at boiling point we
have to keep it at 212 or else um people
will lose interest and i actually said
pinker is actually more correct on this
is that we're actually creating
partially through some of some of the
the post-modernist thoughts that you
critique we're creating a situation in
which actually progress is more or less
hopeless and all you can really do is
shout about it which actually makes
people more cynical and does less to
achieve your your goals whereas as
pinker likes to point out if we actually
look at well what did we do that
actually works and try to keep doing
that that's probably a better bet for
how you keep actual progress going well
the perverse thing there too is that i i
believe this to be true um john you
mentioned that there's been a variety of
books coming out maybe i could get that
list and post them in the description of
this youtube video
that might be useful but there's also a
whole string of books that's been
published lately uh including stephen
tinker's book enlightenment now showing
that the rate of economic progress
around the world especially with regard
to lifting the abjectly poor out of
poverty is
is increasing at an unparalleled rate
and that might be a secondary benefit to
the collapse of communism since 1989 a
lot of things are driving it but
certainly some of it is the spread of
ideas of individual sovereignty and the
use of free market policies by
developing countries just as we see
the the landscape for poor around the
world to be radically improved we're in
this process in the west of criticizing
our fundamental principles to the point
where we're we're driving a dangerous
level of polarization and so that's a
very perverse and strange situation and
difficult to contend with
so all right let's let's switch a bit
here one
okay so
while we see the problem
the problem is that
we're still sketching it out and trying
to articulate it but it's something like
the rise of a a victim victimizer
culture that might be driven by young
people's increasing sense of
vulnerability as a consequence of the
unexamined effects of social media
the the polarization driven by a
tendency for a dying media to come to
concentrate on extremism
uh the domination of the intellectual
discourse in the universities by the
left and the radical left
all these things are playing together
and and they're causing a certain amount
of trouble like the rise of this
excessive safety culture that has
negative psychological consequences all
right that's all dangerous
what in the world do we do about it
jonathan you have the heterodox academy
so so that's that that's something
you've put into practice that was
designed to increase viewpoint diversity
do you think that's what's your sense of
that what what's the consequence of that
yeah so uh so the problem is you know as
you said as we say in the book there's
six different separate contributing
factors all coming together the solution
is not easy let's break it down into
what do we need to do to get our
universities functioning better what do
we need to do to raise kids who are more
resilient and more able to deal with
difference
um let's focus on those two so let's so
let's start with the universities
so uh i co-founded heterodox academy if
you go to hedrocks academy.org um with
nick rosencrantz uh law scholar and
chris martin grad student so in
sociology and then a bunch of other
social psychologists
because we were concerned that this is
just a faculty initiative that
discussions among professors of
psychology and research in psychology
was showing signs that certain
hypotheses wouldn't be investigated
other
interpretations were favored we were
seeing signs and almost all of us were
on the left or center there are there's
only two conservative social
psychologists that i know of um
we were concerned about research quality
that's all it was and so we ended up
putting up this site it went live on
about september 10th 2015.
totally unrelated to that greg and i had
been writing the atlantic article
totally separate track
and then um all hell broke loose at
halloween in 2015 and it became clear
this isn't just a faculty issue
the problem on campus is a culture issue
in which in which student this new form
of student activism this new form of
student that belief in fragility is
affecting how we do our research how we
educate so all the problems are
interrelated uh but to focus on the
faculty issue what we're doing at
heterox academy
originally when i was running it i
thought the issue was well we have no
political diversity we need to get more
we need to encourage more conservatives
and libertarians to get phds and then we
need to help them get jobs that's what i
thought originally
um but over time the problem has morphed
uh and it's become clear we do actually
have some diversity in every field
not everybody is on the left a lot of
people are in the center or libertarian
or they say i can't be put in a box
and what we have to do is encourage
those people to feel that they can speak
up they can question dominant ideas they
can be a little subversive
they we have to make it so they're not
afraid of social consequences for
speaking up so that's the way that i was
thinking about it now uh in janet last
january i turned over head rocks academy
i heard an amazing woman deborah masik
she's a professor at harvey mudd college
she
is leaving that job to run head rocks
academy full time
deb studies relationships she's a great
teacher she is moving the organization
to focus more on helping
helping campuses recreate that climate
that we all know and love i mean
you know we i love being a professor i
love universities um
deb is focusing on how do we prepare
students and so we've talked a lot about
this in the book what do you do at
orientation what are the norms you make
clear about speech and free speech of
course we need to do training in
diversity and inclusion and sexual
violence all that stuff but how many
schools train for free speech yeah
pretty much none of them
and the fact that we don't mention any
of these deep thought philosophies or
concepts though the deep philosophical
underpinnings of academic freedom
freedom of speech but there's just so
much we can complain about students not
knowing them but nobody's actually
talking about that for sure well and
it's been really interesting on this
lecture tour to find out how receptive
people are to exactly that kind of
message you know and i've been
beating the drum let's say
for
um
for more conscious understanding of the
relationship between meaning and
personal responsibility because one of
the things we also teach students is
that
the proper focus for them is
the violation of their intrinsic rights
as if the upholding of those rights is
going to provide them with a sustaining
meaning in life but i don't believe that
that's true i think that
what's what's more true is that most
people find a sustaining meaning by
adopting a fairly heavy burden of
personal responsibility partly for
themselves and partly for their family
and partly for the broader community and
that that that just seems to have
dropped out of the public discourse in
its entirety and then also what could be
taught to incoming students is this
clinical doctrine that we've been
describing which is well how do you make
yourself stronger
well you
expose yourself voluntarily to
challenges that are outside of your
domain of current competence and that
often involves confronting things that
not only that you think are frightening
but that you might also think are
disgusting because that's what happens
with obsessive-compulsive disorder
treatment you know and disgust obviously
runs uh uh motivates some of this
political polarization
that's right
and somebody alerted me somebody a civil
rights scholar uh told me about how the
marchers in the 60s how they trained
and here they are going in to you know
staging protests going in doing sit-ins
facing real violence and some of them
were actually killed the way they
prepared for it was others would shout
racist slurs at them they would be
prepared for it they would expose
themselves to the worst and then when
the worst happened at least it was less
painful than had they not encountered it
so again over and over again we see are
you is your goal to toughen yourself up
is your goal to become stronger and more
able to deal with the world as it is or
is your goal to demand that somebody
make the world other than it is yeah
which is the which is the more reliable
path to success in life yeah i mean both
john and i um you know
as the president of fire
and both roulette grow and through
heterodox we're both trying to also
figure out ways to get to people well
before
they set foot on a college campus now
certainly i think it's kind of
unforgivable that most universities
don't teach about some of these deep
philosophies and concepts in orientation
but you should already be learning about
some of these ideas when you're uh when
you're in um in high school so one thing
that john did that i'm totally jealous
of is they did a a graphic novel version
of uh part of chapter two of on liberty
about freedom of speech um as a
great way to to tell a generation of
students about and i i also just love um
on liberty uh particularly about freedom
of speech as a lawyer because i'm like
this guy man can this guy argue like
that
being able to defend the decision to
defend blasphemy uh to go up against
blasphemy prohibitions in 1859 but then
managed to say and by the way you know
you know who suffered under blasphemy
laws um uh jesus uh and socrates you're
right right and guess who enforced them
marcus aurelius also one of your heroes
and it's like oh you just won the case
you are
you're a world-class arguer yeah so let
me suggest that uh viewers uh go to
amazon and look up all minus one uh or
you can go to headerdocsacademy.org
mill where you can get a free version of
pdf or you can uh we have a three dollar
kindle version of it as well as the
printed art book great let's put that in
the description as well great so yeah so
every so high school any high school
that wants to teach about free speech
assign this it's extremely readable by
high school students it's just chapter
two cut by fifty percent and ill and
mills metaphors are illustrated yeah
okay okay well so the free speech issue
too so
i mean one of the um
one of the concepts that i've been
wrestling with is you know we have to
produce hierarchies in order to
accomplish tasks collectively and we
have to accomplish tasks because they're
suffering to address and real problems
to solve so we're going to produce
hierarchies and hopefully the
hierarchies are predicated on merit in
relationship to the solution of the
problem
and so the right-winger types are more
inclined to support hierarchical
structures because of their
psychological uh predisposition
and the left wingers are more likely to
be concerned about
the fact that the hierarchies inevitably
dispossess because they'll produce
unequal distribution of resources okay
so then you can imagine that the
political
landscape is a battleground a permanent
battleground between
those who stand for the hierarchies and
note that they have their utility but
are perhaps blind to their proclivity to
become tyrannical and those who are more
sensitive to the claims of the
dispossessed and worried about the
proclivity of tyranny of hierarchies to
become um
predicated on nothing but power right
okay now
at some points
the hierarchy is going to be weak and
need to be strengthened and at other
points there has to be more clamor on
the side of the dispossessed and the
reason you have free speech as far as
i'm concerned is because it's the
mechanism that keeps those two to
opponent process pro opponent process
process is balanced
and so it's a core it's the core element
of a free society because it's actually
the process by which the society
maintains and improves itself across
time it's not just another value among
many values
oh sorry
there's just two points
that i always feel like i need to make
about that is one
um
the founding fathers uh were really good
evolutionary psychologists um and one
thing that i love about working in
constitutional law is just how both
pessimistic and optimistic it was at the
same time about human nature those very
tensions
were the tensions that you know
alexander hamilton and madison were so
concerned about like how do you how do
you balance out these natural human
human nature whereas today you know what
we're supposed to claim there isn't
there isn't any such thing as human
nature um the other thing is i have a
slightly different philosophy on on
freedom of speech it's actually much
simpler that than a lot of sort of like
the more sort of like platonic platonic
ideal of truth which is simply that it's
always valuable to know what people
really think
and
as simple as that sounds it does mean
that when people say well you certainly
certainly you shouldn't be listening to
conspiracy theorists and what they what
they have to say about stuff and i'm
like
if it's a popular conspiracy shouldn't
you have some clue about like what some
some chunk of the population actually
thinks about things and i think that
we
uh
that understanding what people you
despise actually think and believe is
always of value because the the project
itself is a project of human knowledge
knowing human beings as they actually
are not as we wish they were well it's
even it's even self-protective to use
that terminology it's like if i want to
know what you're going to do
and i do especially if i happen to be
near you or have to or have to interact
with you repeatedly if i know what you
think then i can understand how you're
going to act and and if i don't know how
you how you think
partly because you're not allowed to
express it then you're an opaque mystery
to me and the probability that we're
going to engage in conflict goes up
tremendously
so i mean there are multiple reasons for
for the for protecting the the sanctity
let's say a free speech
now one of the things that really
distresses me about the
postmodern slash neil marxist philosophy
is that
there isn't any room in that philosophy
for the idea of free speech
you know this is something i've come to
understand more deeply over the last two
years when you're talking to someone
from that theoretical perspective
they can't engage
in the in a discussion about free speech
because it doesn't fit into their
uh world view because all there is there
isn't sovereign individuals engaging in
a discussion about the nature of reality
there's avatars of their power group
unconsciously making claims on behalf of
their privilege
and that there's never free speech there
because you're not a free agent
you're not even a real entity as an
individual and and that's a far more
pernicious assault on free speech than
mere objection to it as you know uh a
right wing as something that's been
hijacked by the right wing to
to validate their powers you know their
their particular privilege so let's talk
about this because this is one of the
main arguments that we get back is um
free speech is just a way for the
powerful to
retain their power yeah it didn't help
our causes certainly like greg's cause
when the nazis started having rallies
for free speech like that's really not
what you want but so great what's what's
your response when people say free
speech is just helps the powerful it
drives me nuts because it's a
fundamental misunderstanding of history
and government and political philosophy
and i've had this argument with um
stanley fish and it seemed like a total
shock to him um
i'm sure he thought of it before but um
you don't need a special protection of
of an individual right um in a democracy
um uh
for the majority you first of all that's
great rich people and powerful people
under any system of government well rich
people some under communism you know
don't do so well um once they take over
but after they take over you know like
the kgb people can make themselves
totally rich but rich and powerful
people are always going to be fine
um if you set up a democracy um the
majority is always
if there's a consistent majority the
majority is always going to be fine you
only need a special protection of
freedom of speech for minority points of
view i know i know it's absolutely
amazing that that's not
absolutely basic and john roush it was
really interesting you know
roush has a lot of arguments on this
that are so interesting because he says
it's like listen if you've reached the
point where there's enough enough of the
people who are worried about your
well-being that they're willing to pass
a law in a majoritarian country to get
you protected it probably means the real
dark days are behind you um and one of
the things that we've talked about me
and roush is that if we passed an
anti-sort of uh hate speech law say in
the late 1960s it would have frozen in
place kind of attitudes about
homosexuality which you you know as a
gay man very concerned about and i think
we would have ended up with a law that
looked a lot more like what you see in
russia that actually ends up being used
against uh gay people that then then
rather be sort of progressive law that
we hope it would be but time and time
again the idea that you like by the way
i'm going to i keep on trying to put
this out just in a very practical way
it's like so you want laws that define
that allow the government to stop
hateful speech and you want trump to
have those powers and somehow this is
right that's the
there's an old military doctrine which
is uh
whatever weapon you design your enemies
will have in 15 years
and
and if you start putting restrictions on
something like free speech
as
as benefit to your ideological position
and you don't imagine that you might be
out maneuvered in their use by your
enemies then you're not sufficiently
awake right so and i did a lecture a
year and a half ago which was a
left-wing case for free speech and i
just thought that was self-evident for
the reasons that you put forward which
is well
the powerful and you can use left-wing
terminology here
the powerful
have an a-prior monopoly on speech
obviously and so you want to put
protections in place so that the
dispossessed who you hypothetically
champion get a chance to put their
viewpoint forward and it's really it's
quite a mystery that that that's
not
merely axiomatically obvious now
yeah well you know if nazis are calling
for free speech
uh if the easy thing to do is say okay
well then it must be bad
yes well okay so tell me let's go back
to the book
so
how you you said earlier when we talked
before the interview that it had been on
the new york times bestseller list
and it seems to be selling well what are
you hoping
what do you see happening as a
consequence of your essay in the
atlantic and and as a consequence of the
book and what do you hope will happen
like say over the next year if we're
going to be optimistic about where we're
headed what's going to happen
yeah so i i have felt for the last two
years that we're kind of in an emperor's
new clothes situation where most people
who are paying attention
most people are involved in universities
or in education
realize there's something wrong but they
don't understand what it is and nobody
wants to appear insensitive
people don't want to stand up and
critique if it seems that you're pushing
back against against historically
marginalized groups in particular so
there's been so university
administrators we've spoken a lot of
college presidents that overwhelmingly
what i would call liberal left not
illiberal i i don't know of any college
presidents who are illiberal but they're
often afraid to stand up for what you
i'm sure you did you met somebody wasn't
going to ever green state university oh
i'm sorry yes that's right evergreen
that's right
yeah that's right
that's right
so there's been a lot of desire to
change a lot of desire to restore some
sense of order and community on campus
that we can do our work and do our
teaching
and but
what i'm hopeful that our book will do
is give everyone a common set of
concepts and and sort of a look into how
this thing plays out if you if you don't
do anything to to stop it going down
this this rabbit hole um
my hope for the book is that the
parenting stuff is all is new that is a
lot of people
have been following what's going on on
campus but they don't realize this is
now happening in high schools and
earlier
so my hope is that every
every school principal from elementary
school through high school and then
every college president
will get a copy of the book in the mail
or given to them by a donor and so okay
jordan jordan's large audience
i hope that you will buy a copy of the
book and give it to the principal of
your kids elementary school and
certainly
maybe we can put that in the description
as well
makes a great gift to the people who are
educating your children right i'll i'll
write that down right now
yeah and reaching parents out that
that's always the first constituency we
talk about because you know we hear from
parents uh over and over again as parent
and as parents ourselves there's this
kind of like um uh
there's a sense that something's really
going wrong in k-12
education certainly there's something
going wrong and just the process of
parenting where most of people feel kind
of well
it seems like a lot of parents feel sort
of helpless because they they don't they
have that pluralistic ignorance problem
they don't know that everybody else
you know are having the same problems
and as soon as you actually get the
conversation starting we can get to
parents we uh we have a real fighting
chance
okay okay okay
all right well um
what and what do you think
like are you optimistic or pessimistic
about where this is going at the moment
yes
no kidding that's exactly headache a
little bit of both yeah i'm very
pessimistic about the national situation
i think polarization is going to get
worse for a while um and so i think we
have to think about how do we adapt our
institutions to life in an increasingly
polarized country so um you know if if
you know if politics is is dominating
everything and it's getting nastier and
nastier it would be great if when you go
into a restaurant you don't have to
think about is this a democrat
restaurant or republican resident
when you go in to buy a pair of sneakers
you don't have to think about is this a
democrat paris sneakers or republican
pair of sneakers so we may be going to
the root to everything is polarized
everything's political that would be
terrible if universities succumb to that
if this is a democrat university or you
know republican that would be terrible
um so i think on the national level i'm
very pessimistic
but i think that there is enough
recognition that this that we're all
exhausted this is this is going out of
control but i think we will have a look
it'll be possible to to get a
constituency to say our elementary
schools our middle schools our high
schools and universities they have work
to do um
we need to reform what we're doing in
ways that are better for the kids we all
love our kids we all want our kids to be
resilient um so i like greg i'm very
optimistic that that the trend towards
overprotective parenting which has just
been continuing on and on i i'm very
optimistic that that will reverse once
people see those graphs once people and
you talk to parents of teenagers even if
their kid isn't depressed seven of their
kids friends are depressed or anxious
yeah
well okay so let me
ask you about that a little bit uh and
maybe we'll end with this um
i've been trying to figure out why this
overprotectiveness epidemic has emerged
and so
i took the social psychological route of
analysis instead of the psychological
because i do know you should look at
situational factors before you look at
in personality factors let's say
generally speaking
well here's some demographic trends
um
fewer kids
so maybe parents don't make their kids
resilient maybe siblings do
you know because there's a lot of
there's a lot of uh uh
what would you call
status competition between siblings and
if you're special or unresilient your
siblings are going to have a field day
with you
and so you know maybe we can't raise
kids that are resilient unless they have
three brothers and sisters or something
like that
that makes a lot of sense but my
recollection when uh was it so uh what
was it uh the guy who wrote birth order
what was that book uh
1990s my recollection is that the
effects of birth order are actually very
small and so whether you're first or
last whether you're an only child or not
so research going back very far those
effects are pretty small so i would not
put this big change on the fact of
declining families because you don't
have siblings rather
declining families means there just
aren't that many kids in the
neighborhood
yeah
right well that's the other issue sure
sure
is more significant okay okay so then
next thing
next thing might be um
older parents
you know we don't know how optimally
stupid you should be when you're when
you're a parent and it might be that you
might need to be somewhat
narcissistically entranced with your own
life to ignore your children enough to
allow them to develop independent
resilience
you know and if you're if now let's say
you don't have a child till you're well
let's say 40
you only have one or two so they're
pretty damn precious and you've been
waiting a long time and now you're more
conservative because you're older
because you will be
and you have endless resources to devote
to this extraordinarily valuable
individual
so
if
if it's if it's the consequence of a
switch in demographics and and and older
parents then it's going to be a harder
thing to
rectify as a consequence of
transformation of attitude
that nick gillespie from reason that's
that's his his major major theory on
this stuff and at the same time you know
i i you have to say some things that
really have changed and definitely what
when i was a kid i grew up first i'm a
first generation american grew up you
know very
very pretty poor um the uh uh but the
the idea that kind of like there's a
sort of like uh the stratification in
the us in terms of income is getting so
dramatic and the way you can get to that
life raft is getting into a princeton or
a stanford or uh or a harvard um that
that's not entirely in
in people's heads and so but
unfortunately the way we thought that
the best way to do that is to build the
sort of rocket ship hyper invested in
you know you have two kids and you you
treat them both like heat seeking
missiles
and you completely eliminate any
autonomy they have over their lives they
get up at six and they're scheduled
until they go to bed um it turns out
that this is visibly um dysfunctional at
the same time it's why we interviewed
julie left guy haynes who wrote a book
called how to raise an adult about how
you know freshmen are showing up at
stanford um depressed partially because
they have no sense of locus of control
right in charge of their life so i think
there is there is electricity
here's a really stunning statistic that
we found in researching the book it's no
surprise that men if you compare if you
go back to the 1950s and 60s look at how
men spend their time and compared to
today it's no surprise that men are
spending more time in child care more
time with their kids that's great we all
think that's great what do you think has
happened to women women were very rarely
working in the 50s and 60s and so look
the number of hours they spent doing
child care involved their children back
then do you think it's gone up or down
since the 50s and 60s now that most
women are working answer up right
spending more time with their kids and
there are very few kids now so you have
mom and dad both spending more time with
their one or two kids who are over
supervising over investing there are not
a lot of kids out in the neighborhood
and investing poorly investing that's
right that's right because we're
investing in oh what annette laro calls
concerted cultivation yep the two the
two okay so here's another here's
another conundrum
so one of the things that struck me is
that a lot of this gender play that you
see gender role play that you see in
among
adolescents now older adolescents and
young adults in universities so the
gender bender and gender fluidity
and i'm calling them games for a reason
they remind me of pretend play
with an insistence by the player that
everyone joins the game and i've been
thinking
well maybe we're seeing a delayed
reaction to the eradication of fantasy
play in early childhood as a consequence
of the introduction of technological
devices
because you know the developmental
psychologists know very well that
children have to engage in a lot of
fantasy play
and then if you introduce technology
that that interferes with that or
supersedes it then the fantasy play
doesn't occur you're playing with
different roles when you're engaged in
fantasy play so i'm also wondering you
know because i noticed even when i had
kids which is now quite a long time ago
often when i took them to the houses of
other people with kids instead of
letting the kids go off and cause a bit
of trouble and then settle into a
spontaneous fantasy play episode they
put on a video
but now that's like 20 times as bad
because
all these kids have access to endless
electronic devices and we don't know
what that's doing to the early childhood
play
and so
well so anyways those are some of the
sociological forces that i thought might
be at work that are driving this hyper
protectiveness and it isn't obvious to
see how to reverse them
um
because they're not happening
consciously in some sense right it's not
like everybody
decided that they were going to hyper
protect their children
yeah but i think social norms are very
powerful
and
if everybody else acts like letting your
kid walk a dog is dangerous you'll be
less likely to let your kid walk the dog
um it should be possible to reverse that
what we're hoping will emerge from this
book in our discussions of the book is
the norm that if you're not letting your
kid out you're harming your kid almost
like a vitamin deficiency yeah i'd like
to know you know it's like a doctor star
if pediatricians and actually
pediatricians just put out a big report
on the importance of play
that kids need a lot more play than
they're getting yep about this is
vitamin p and how much vitamin p did
your kid get today and parents and
vitamin p is not it doesn't count if
you're there with them right i just
think yeah
right now so um so if we start if if
pediatricians start asking how much
vitamin p did you could get last week
and only tell me about the unsupervised
times
doesn't count
so we do that you look at the idea
because you know
so your your point about the shrinking
families is right and that's
irreversible we're never going to go
back to large families uh we have to
adapt to that and if you really want
your kid to be successful you'll back
off that's the idea we have to get
across okay so we could close by
thinking look your your kid's going to
have to encounter the full tragedy of
life as they mature and become adults
and so what you're trying to do
i got
i mean there are all sorts of things you
know so what when nietzsche said what
did doesn't kill you makes you stronger
the principle is true but it's not
literally true so
the research on adverse childhood
experiences and that those are the
serious kind of things and we talk a
fair amount about that we're not
advocating for that kind of for anything
like anything that we that would count
as a
as an ace
but certainly for goodness sakes you
know the ability to get in fights with
with other kids and
and resolve them among themselves
we got rid of that and now we have a
generation that's looking upwards in a
form of moral dependency
whatever
doesn't kill you makes you stronger so
he certainly knew that something didn't
kill you right so it's a matter of
optimal exposure to challenge
you know and and it's by challenging
your kids not by protecting them that
you make them resilient and they need to
be resilient because life is actually
difficult
and so you know one of the things that's
been gratifying to me too is that
during my lectures i've been telling
people that the idea that they're okay
the way they are especially if they're
young is an appalling idea
what they could be concentrating on is
who they could be exactly and
one of the really positive elements to
the notion of optimal challenges that
it's really um
it's encouraging for people to know that
you're willing to let them take a risk
because you have enough faith in their
ability to learn and prevail that that
supersedes the risk that's right that's
right absolutely
all right well
thank you guys very much i appreciated
the discussion uh we'll get this up as
soon as i get it edited which shouldn't
be too long and if you would be so kind
as to send me all the url links you'd
like me to post in the description
then i would be more than happy to do
that
and uh good luck with your the continued
sales of your book and with all your
other endeavors as well and hopefully
uh
good sense will prevail and we can do
something to reverse this polarization
and to and also maybe to
reduce the
safety culture on in the education
system that would really be something
that's my grandmother would have said
yes thank you jordan thank you jordan
okay good to see you both