THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND (Ted Balaker 2023)

[Chris Knipp]

SAEED IN THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND

TED BALAKER: THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND (2023)

The film can be screened HERE.
See the article HERE.
See the presentation HERE.

A description and self-help solution to the warped social atmosphere in today's colleges

This little film takes on the "Woke" thinking and the "DEI" program and the prevalence of political correctness and cancel culture, all those cultural developments, promoted by students themselves, that have mushroomed in the past decade to make the lives of young Americans (and young people in other countries, not discussed here) dysfunctional, and university campuses sources of depression and anxiety. I learned something to supplement what I have learned from a college professor friend who deals with this current climate, such as that a compliment can be taken as a "microaggression." In other words, good things can turn to bad. It's a disturbing picture. How does this relate to the obvious repression reflected in stifling dissent such as the forcible ending by some universities of pro-Gaza demos? It seems that the new "woke" society is out of wack and it's hit young people hard.

Based on a book in turn based on an Atlantic article, this film explains problems the outgoing college generation known as Gen Z encounter. It uses terms like "microagression" and "ableism." A series of young college students talk to the camera. A white woman who grew up with psychological problems but gets into Stanford, who gets diagnosed as autistic and obsesses over it, thinking "genocide" whenever she hears the phrase "a person with autism." A cheerful black woman - she turns out to be Ugandan immigrant called Kimi who skateboards - had concluded white suprematists were taking over social media and then really freaked out when Trump became President. These young men and women have connected with Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt through their book, The Coddling of the American Mind and support its thesis.

An outspoken, articulate Nigerian called Saeed says he was overwhelmed by how many white people were in his university, a school called Lafayette. Saeed is in search of free thought and an exchange of ideas; a forming one's mind through debate. He grew up muslim and expected debate and discussion and found that lacking here. He felt oppressed and eventually became depressed his freshman year in college. He doesn't say there is repression but that comes out when the PC mob rises up to prevent the conservative personality Ben Shapiro to come on the Stanford Campus and say (on a handbill) "We do not protest because we are too sensitive to hear opinions we don't like."

That statement says it all. This is an American college generation too sensitive to breathe air. And the atmosphere is, naturally, stifling.

Greg Lukianoff enters as a speaker describing his suicide attempt and time in a psych ward. He approached Jonathan Haidt, Haidt tells the camera, because of the solution to depression offered in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, which recommends finding serenity through ancient wisdom. But also Greg was using CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, to recover from his depression. Haidt is likewise author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Greg is a First Amendment lawyer, and is the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is dedicated to defending liberty, freedom of speech, due process, and academic freedom on the country’s college campuses, which are currently under attack.

CGT posits "cognitive distortions," such as "binary thinking" and "Catastrophizing," Lukianoff's work on college campuses showed him current college adminstrations are teaching their students to catastrophize or cognitively distort, to think they are in constant danger and must be protected from any ideas different from theirs. From 2008 to 2013 students "weren't buying" all that, Haidt says. Then from 2013 to 2014 they did. This led to Lukianoff and Haidt's collaboration for their article about the takeover of US campuses by PC thinking, political correctness, woke thought.

Aryaan is an articulate and perceptive Indian student at Alma College, a small school in Michigan, where he describes eagerly soaking up the local way of thinking and then, to take on four jobs to supplement his scholarship, being required to receive training in "diversity, equity, and inclusion," the DEI program. This is an artificial set of rules that tyrannize US campuses today.

Aryan became outspoken in opposition to what he calls the "pseudo psychology and censorship" of DEI and publicized a Harvard Business Review article "Why Diversity Training Doesn't work." This dangerously posits that students can be harmed by words and ideas they don't like, say Lukianoff and Haidt. This assumes humans are fragile when in reality they are "anti-fragile": they are in constant need of being tested and challenged to remain strong. This protectionism is a terrible mistake colleges are currently making en masse. They are teaching false ideas: that people are too sensitive and that their emotions are always right.

In an 'instructional' animated film glimpsed here, "microaggressions" are likened to mosquito bites that accumulate to harm you. It's not conceived that things people say are what you learn to live with or to fight back against. A compliment like "you speak very good English" to a foreign student is taken as a microaggression Even looking at you or moving toward you or away from you can be a microaggression. Kimi describes being exhausted every day with imagined microaggressions. Anything can be a mmicroaggression. Being taught to see them everywhere is making students hypersensitive and ill able to function.

Haidt says something that older Americans are very aware of. American children have been robbed of their childhood (so they arrive at college ill prepared). They need to be freed of supervision and allowed large tracts of free play so they can learn and their brains can develop. Otherwise they will emerge "anxious and fragile." Spending a lot of our time in youth wandering free contributed importantly to my generation's feeling safe in the world on our own later on. But the free range childhood ended, in the 1990's, the authors say.

Related to the childhood protection hampering development are the lager race and gender-based orthodoxies that dominate campus life and contribute to intellectual rigidity and emotional fragility. They undermine the university's core mission of knowledge-seeking in a culture of free and open debate. This is why, the film says, it has gotten worse and there is a wave of depression and an upsurge in suicide rates among young adults in America today.
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I was in 2012 that anxiety, depression, and suicide rates among young adults began to rise dramatically, says the film, and Lukianoff and Haidt's book explored this health crisis. Repression and inexperience are factors. So is exposure to social media at an earlier age - middle school now - which especially causes depression in girls and is more harmful psychologically than the video games boys play. The new incoming classes in colleges are an inexperienced, overprotected generation who often haven't had jobs, had a drink, or even dated. They are immature nd aren't ready to be on their own. We begin to grasp how there can be a mental health crisis affecting an entire generation.

See also "The Three Great Untruths That Are Harming Young Amerricans" in The Big Idea Club. See also "trigger warnings" and the banning of books and subjects on campuses because they could "trigger" distress.

The Coddling of the American Mind, 93 mins., a first "Substack Presents" feature documentary, has had a college screening tour. It will be available digitally on October 17t