The Joe Walker Podcast - The Three Big Lies Poisoning Young Minds - Jonathan Haidt

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

This is a conversation with renowned moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From Swagman Media, this is the Jolly Swagman Podcast. Here are your hosts, Angus and Joe. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the Jolly Swagman Podcast. I am one of your co-hosts, Joe Walker, and my guest is nothing short of a treasure. Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist and professor at New York University. He's also a personal intellectual hero and the author of two of my favorite books, The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and The Righteous Mind,

Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Each book introduced some groundbreaking and rather timeless ideas, but in this episode we discuss Jonathan's new book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, the book is about how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. Now these ideas began to manifest themselves on university campuses starting around 2013, where we began to notice a trend of political correctness seeping into university life, students asking for triggering material to be removed or censored from their coursework, and speakers with challenging ideas being disinvited or deplatformed from campus. Because we don't discuss these examples as much in our conversation,

I thought I'd share a few with you before we begin, just to give you some context, because examples certainly abound. One instance which John and Greg write about in the book involves Columbia University's core curriculum, which features a course called Masterpieces in Western Literature and Philosophy. It presents the texts of authors like Ovid, Homer, Dante, and Montaigne, and according to Columbia, the course is designed to tackle the most difficult questions about human experience. However, in 2015, four students wrote an essay in the student newspaper arguing that many texts in the course contain, quote, triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom, end quote.

The students called for trigger warnings, which are verbal or written notifications that alert a student that they're about to encounter potentially distressing material, to be placed before each text and for support to be provided to triggered students. Now it's perhaps an indication of civilizational progress that whereas at the same age their grandparents generation were fighting the Nazis and their parents generation were marching for civil rights that these students were preoccupied with demanding protection from histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression in the books they were reading. But this example also

turned out to be somewhat of a canary in the coal mine for the year that was 2015, because things were about to get so much worse. In October, at Claremont McKenna College near Los Angeles, a student named Olivia, whose parents emigrated from Mexico to California before she was born, wrote an essay in a student publication about her feelings of marginalization and exclusion. Olivia had noticed that Latinos were better represented on the blue-collar staff at CMC rather than among its administrative and professional staff. She found this realization painful. She said that there seemed to be a standard or prototypical CMC person and she was

clearly not it. Our campus climate, she wrote, an institutional culture primarily grounded in western white cis-heteronormative upper to upper-upper-middle-class values. She sent this essay out in an email to all CMC staff, and two days later, Mary Spellman, the Dean of Students, replied in a private email. Here's Mary's entire email. Olivia, thank you for writing and sharing this article with me. We have a lot to do as a college and community. Would you be willing to talk with me sometime about these issues?

They are important to me and the staff, and we are working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don't fit our CMC mould. I would love to talk with you more. Best, Dean Spellman. Well, what do you think happened next? You might be forgiven for thinking that Olivia agreed to meet with Dean Spellman and they discussed some of the issues raised in her article. But you'd be wrong. Instead, Olivia interpreted the Dean's use of the word mould in the least charitable way possible. She thought that Spellman was implying that her and other students of colour

don't fit a CMC mould and therefore don't belong. Perhaps Spellman could have chosen her words more tactfully, but racism was clearly not her intent. Nevertheless, two weeks later, Olivia posted Spellman's email on her Facebook page, complete with the comment, I just don't fit that wonderful CMC mould. Feel free to share. Her friends did share the email and the campus erupted in protest. There were marches, demonstrations and even two students hunger striking. You can see all of this in a YouTube video which culminates in a protest being held in the university courtyard. After holding a minute's silence, the speeches begin, one after another. So now we want a formal commitment in front of everyone from our administration to our

proposals. As the emotions build, the protest's leaders summon their dean through bullhorns. Spellman, a slight, blonde, early middle-aged woman, steps forward gingerly. I'm Mary Spellman, I'm the dean of students, and as I said in my email today, I'm committed to changing what's going on on our campus and continuing to be part of the solution to the problems that have been identified here and that have been identified before to me. She lists the diversity and tolerance initiatives that she's pursuing, and once again she

apologizes. And I am part of this as well, and I am sorry. I'm sorry. What would we do to change your heart? How can we change your heart? And I am part of this as well, and I am sorry. I'm sorry. What would we do to change your heart? How can we change your heart? How can we change your heart? How can you change my heart?

My heart doesn't need to be changed. I care deeply about students. How can we change your heart, one of the students bays, as if there's something nefarious hidden at the core of Spellman, and like an inquisitor or the inner party's O'Brien in Orwell's 1984, the students are determined to extract not just a confession, but a sublime conversion before they deliver Spellman to her fate. The students are clearly dissatisfied with Spellman's performance, and a young man of colour steps forward to offer his reply. It's literally your jobs to help us, to take care of us when we don't feel safe and supported on this campus. My experiences haven't been nearly as bad as some of the other people standing up

here, but it still hurts me to know that you clearly don't give a shit. Later in the protest, a student's mother gets up to speak, and to laughter and applause, she berates Spellman for falling asleep during the proceedings, an act interpreted as nothing other than a sign of disrespect. But it's clear from the footage that Spellman wasn't falling asleep. She was trying to hold back, tears. The university didn't fire Spellman, but nor did it support her. Faced with escalating pressure, she resigned her job. At the same time all of this was unfolding, another email in Braulio

was occurring across the other side of the country at Yale University. A lecturer, Erica Christakis, wrote an email questioning whether it was appropriate, as the college dean's office had done, for Yale administrators to give guidance to students about appropriate and inappropriate Halloween costumes. Christakis praised their spirit of avoiding hurt and offense, but she worried that the growing tendency to cultivate vulnerability in students carries unacknowledged costs. She invited the community to reflect on whether, as adults, they could set norms for themselves and handle disagreements interpersonally. Talk to each other, she exhorted them. Free speech and the ability to

tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society. Now, the email sparked an outraged reaction from some students, who interpreted it, inevitably, as an indication that Christakis was in favour of racism. A few days later, a group of approximately 150 students appeared in the courtyard outside Christakis' home, within Silliman College, writing statements in chalk, including, we know where you live. Erica's husband, Nicholas Christakis, who was also the head of college, came down to the courtyard, where the students demanded he apologize for his wife's email. He refused to renounce the email, but instead tried to reason with them, which you can see in another video on YouTube.

I stand behind free speech. Yes, I do. But that sorry doesn't mean anything to us. Even when it's offensive, especially when it's offensive. Even when it denigrates me. see in another video on YouTube. What happened next was nothing short of shocking. A young girl wearing a backpack steps forward to engage Christakis, but it quickly descends into yelling. Stay quiet! For all Silliman students. Do you understand that? As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman.

You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that? No, I don't agree done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that? No, I don't agree with that. Then why the fuck did you accept the position? Who the fuck hired you? I have a different vision. You should step down. If that is what you think about being a master, you should step down. It is not about creating an intellectual space. It is not. Do you understand that? It's about creating a home here.

You should not sleep at night. We're out. We're out. You're disgusting. The video of the shrieking girl went viral. The university president sent out an email acknowledging students' pain, and for her part, Erica resigned while Nicholas took a sabbatical for the rest of the year. I was sufficiently appalled by this whole saga that I emailed Nicholas. He wrote back, Erica and I did our very best in what was, for sure, a very challenging time in our lives, and we are very happy to have it far behind us until we've resumed our more ordinary lives. When I reflect on examples like this, I don't just see young people who've never really experienced life getting, for the first time, a real taste of power. I also see

real fear and a sense that they are facing clear and present threats on campus. I want to make this abundantly clear. Many of them will have faced real prejudice in their lives, whether daily slights or more serious discrimination. And I vehemently oppose injustice in all of its forms. I don't endorse Milo Yiannopoulos or wearing blackface, but just because I don't think those things are desirable doesn't necessarily mean I agree with every aspect of these students' behavior. Because the real question is whether the mindset we're inculcating in our young people, in fairness, people not much younger than me, is to their benefit in the long run. This episode is not so much about the examples of political correctness

gone wrong on campus as it is about the ways of thinking and the parenting practices that have caused them. It is a conversation essentially about just three bad ideas and how they're ruining a generation. Enjoy. Jonathan Haidt, thank you for joining me. My pleasure, Joe. It's great to speak with you and we're going to be talking about your latest book co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind. So let's start from the beginning. Where did the idea for the book come from? The idea came from Greg. Greg runs an organization called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. And since 2000, he had been pushing back against universities in the United States that were trying to restrict student speech. And in 2007, he had a very severe depression. Greg is prone to depression, and he had the most severe one of his life. He nearly killed himself. He did check himself into a hospital, and when he was released, he learned cognitive behavioral therapy. you learn to recognize distortions, all these distortions that minds do when they are anxious

or depressed, catastrophizing, black and white thinking, mind reading, blaming. And he learned to stop doing this. He learned to catch yourself doing these bad, these distorted ways of thinking. And so he goes back to his job and he's working on campus. And suddenly, in 2013, for the first time, it's not the administration, which is pushing for restrictions and limits on speech, it's some students, a subset of students. And when they're justifying their need for trigger warnings, and safe spaces and microaggression training, they're using exactly the distortions that he had learned to stop doing. They're saying, if this speaker comes and speaks, people will die, there will be

trauma. And he's saying, really, from a speech? And so, Greg comes to talk to me because he thinks, if students are using these distortions, that's likely to make them depressed. And since I'm a psychologist and I'd written a book called The Happiness Hypothesis, where I talked about CBT, Greg came to talk to me. I thought his idea was amazing. And we set out to write this article together for The Atlantic. I think our original title was something boring, like Arguing Towards Misery, which is what the article was about. And the editors at The Atlantic came up with the name The Coddling of the American Mind. Now, at that point, I hadn't even read Alan Bloom's book,

The Closing of the American Mind, but it was a catchy title. Greg and I didn't like it because we thought it would be insulting to the very students we're trying to help. So we kind of fought against it, but we could not come up with anything better. So the title stuck, the article came out. It got a lot of readership because a lot of people are beginning to notice these trends. And it was only after the article came out, a month or two later in the fall of 2015, that all hell broke loose with student protests at dozens and dozens of universities, demanding, not so much demanding trigger warnings, those are pretty rare, but with this idea that the university is a dangerous place, which is hostile to students from many,

many groups, and they need protections from words and new policies that basically encoded what we call safetyism, an approach to ideas. It's not about whether they're right or wrong, but whether they're safe or dangerous. So that's the origin of the whole thing. After the article came out, things got so much worse. These things spread so quickly throughout the universities. They're now spreading out into the work world in the United States. And so that's why we decided to put the time in to expand the argument, dig deeper, and write a book.

Again, we wanted a different name. We were going to call it disempowered. But the editors at Penguin Press said, no way, that's boring. And then eventually, again, we couldn't come up with anything better. So we kept the coddling of the American mind. So let's break down these trends a little further. In the book, you and Greg talk about the three great untruths. Can you briefly run us through each of the untruths? Sure. So my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was about 10 ancient ideas. I literally read everything I could find from ancient sources, East and West, that dealt with psychology, human relationships. I categorized 10 ideas that have been recognized in most cultures that leave us writing. And so the first one in the book is what doesn't kill you

makes you weaker. Now, of course, most of your listeners will recognize that the wisdom principle there is Nietzsche's dictum, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. And so we can get into each of these, but in briefest form, each of these three is a direct contradiction of a chapter in the happiness hypothesis. So what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings is the second great untruth. And life is a battle between good people and evil people. And if we can get young people to believe all three of these, it's very likely to make them fail. That is, one who believes all three things will be a bundle of anxiety, doubt, and anger,

will have an external locus of control, will be basically disempowered, will be a very bad person to cooperate with, and it's just unlikely to have a successful life. So we're trying to convince students and those who raise kids and teach, we're trying to convince them, don't reinforce these beliefs. Don't model these beliefs. We should be teaching kids the opposite. So three is a very neat number. Were there any untruths that didn't make the cut? Oh, gosh, let's see.

I can't remember. There was some reorganization. There were a bunch of things we were thinking of. But man, it's all just gotten buried. I mean, trying to write this book in one and a half years without a sabbatical was really hard. I don't remember. I don't remember which other ones we considered. Which of the three untruths do you think are the most harmful for individuals and for society if they're different? Yeah, gosh. Well, let's go through them and see what they, they're all, they have different effects. So what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. That is the one, it's not that the kids are so guilty of that. It's that, it's that the grownups raising kids did this to them. So, okay, I'll make a case that it's, I could probably make a case for all three of them. So I'll make the case that it's the first one. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.

The subtitle of our book is how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. And so it's based on the idea of anti-fragility from Nassim Taleb, that there are many systems that actually need to experience adversity in order to grow strong. And if you deprive them of adversity, if you protect them, they don't have a chance to develop, to fill out. So the immune system is the best example of that. If you protect your kids, if you use all kinds of, you know, if you raise your kid in a bubble, you're not helping him. You're actually crippling the immune system, preventing it from developing.

So I'd say that that's the one that's done the biggest number on our kids. And there's a rise. Oh, my goodness. I have not looked in Australia. We'll get it. There's so much to talk about here. The rise in suicide and anxiety and depression is so sharp in the US, the UK, Canada, and Ireland.

I've looked at those places. And I think there's some trends in Australia, but I better, I shouldn't say that because I'm not certain yet. At any rate, that one has really messed up kids' mental health. The second one, always trust your feelings. That's the central one that you need to learn to challenge in CBT. So that's the one that's most closely linked to depression and anxiety. If young people believe that and they lose the ability to question their initial interpretations, then they're more likely to become depressed and anxious. And the third, life is a battle between good people and evil people. That can actually be

thrilling for young people themselves. It can give their lives a sense of meaning and purpose. But imagine a society that's already becoming more polarized for various historical and political reasons. You then get social media gets more polarized still. And then you get a generation that buys into it even more, that doesn't give people the benefit of the doubt, that assumes the worst, that assumes that everything is bad and oppressive. And so that's, in the long run, that's probably the one that might actually do us in. If in the United States,

we descend into constant political fighting everywhere in every part of our lives, including restaurants and doctor's offices, it'll be because of that third one. So let's drill into the first one a little bit more. You mentioned Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb. And I always thought Anti-Fragile was kind of like a Montaigne-style essay. It was very literary in that the concept of Anti-Fragile was rather metaphorical. It was what you described,

the precise opposite of fragility so not mere robustness but something that actually improves from stresses and he kind of weaves in a lot of different examples to demonstrate that concept so from you mentioned the immune system he talks about like federalist political systems and economies benefiting via entrepreneurship and skin in the game in banking systems, late Roman stoicism, et cetera. So that concept is quite metaphorical in the way Taleb uses it. Do you use it in the book in any sort of quantifiable psychological way, being an academic psychologist? Yes. Yes. So it's not so much a question of quantifiable versus metaphorical. It's, is it a metaphor where we're trying to understand one thing in terms of another,

another domain, that would be a metaphor. Or is it a psychological process? And I think it's exactly a psychological process. Because it's not, you know, anti-fragile isn't exactly the opposite of fragile psychologically, because it's really more anti-fragile, I see, as a description of systems over time. That is, as I remember it, I read an early – so Taleb, he's actually a faculty member here at New York University where I teach. And I had lunch with him like two or three years before that book came out, and I read an early draft of it. My recollection is that it was after the collapse of the banking system, and he's one of the few who predicted it. He could see that the system was so ornate and so untested that if any problems arose, it could all come crashing down. And so after it happens, and I may be wrong about this origin story, but my recollection is, you know, after the global financial crisis, he's thinking about this more general problem of systems that aren't properly stressed, challenged and tested,

so that they don't have a chance to become strong. And I think at the lunch, at my lunch with him, I believe he hadn't yet settled on the word anti-fragile. I think he'd started writing about it, but he just couldn't find a word in the English language. So he made up this word. It's a kind of a strange, clunky word. But once you understand it, you can't do without it. There are not that many systems that are anti-fragile. Most things are either fragile or resilient.

But the systems that are anti-fragile are so important that if you don't, you, you miss so much about the world. So it's not a metaphor. It's a description of systems as they develop, um, that are sort of designed in this case, my concern is systems designed by evolution, um, systems that are designed so that the, the young animal will have experiences in the world, and then certain parameters will be set, certain neural connections will be made. You know, we only have 20,000 genes or so, and these genes make proteins. The genes are not a blueprint for building a brain. The amazing thing about neural development and the evolution of brains is that what evolution gave us is a set of neurons that will grow together with certain initial conditions, but the brain is experience expectant. actually of the same category as antifragile. Neurodevelopmental researchers talk about experience expectant development. And this is very important for our discussion because part of the developmental program for mammals is play. All mammals play. And it's kind of a weird thing. If you're a vole or a rabbit or some animal that is subject to predation, and when you're young, you go running around and hopping around with your litter mates, you can get killed. Why wouldn't

you just huddle in your hole with your mother until you're old enough to reproduce? Why take risks? Well, it turns out that there's no way to build a brain with just a genetic code. There's no way the genetic code could specify how to build a brain. So it just gets the ball rolling. It creates an initial structure. And that initial structure requires a range of experience, which will then set it to be adaptive and to be able to function within that range of experience. All mammals play. All mammals leave a lot of their development until after they're born.

And humans far more than any other species. That's why we are playful for so long and well into our teen years and actually into our adulthood, although we're less playful. So it's not a metaphor at all. It's a description of a developmental process. So what's the evidence that play has actually been diminished in American childhood? There's a lot of different forms of evidence. So the one study we found that is truly quantified is a study done by a sociologist at the University of Michigan, which looked at time-use journals. So there have been a number of studies where researchers ask either kids or parents to fill out time-use journals. How many minutes a day

did your child spend in school or eating or watching TV? And so because a study was done in 1979 that used an extensive set of questions, and then it was repeated in, oh, shoot, it was late, I think 1997 or so, in the late 90s. They were able to compare exactly how American kids, I think this was, you know, controlled for social class, how did they spend their days? And what they found is that the total amount of play went down, but also the kind of play changed. So I think the total amount of play was down between 16 and 26 percent. It depends on which numbers you look at. But it's much more than that because play before video games and the internet, play was much more physical. It was much more outdoors. That's the best kind of play. So we cite research by Peter Gray, a play researcher at Boston College. Running around with your friends,

playing hide and seek, wrestling, play fighting, pretend play. This is what other mammals do. I mean, other than the pretend. Well, even no, even pretend. Most play has an element of pretend. So play was very natural and normal in what our species evolved to do until the 1980s. And then as Americans in particular freak out over the possibility that our children will be abducted, there were two high-profile abductions around 1980 that terrified us. And as we got cable TV and news channels that specialized in scaring us to death, we stopped letting our kids out. We literally stopped letting them outside without an adult watching them. And that was complete by the 90s. And by the early 2000s, Americans could actually be arrested if their kids were found playing outside, because this was thought to be child abuse. Like, really? Your

kids are in a park and there's no grown-up there to watch out? What if they're abducted? You know, it's not that this doesn't happen often, but it does happen. We've all heard about it, so we're all careful. Anyway, the point is, there's a lot of different kinds of evidence that the total play decreased. It moved indoors. A lot more of it involves one child and one computer and no other child and so it's not the healthy kind of play in which you face risk and learn to overcome it in which you encounter conflicts with others and you learn to overcome them it's a kind of play that doesn't seem to confirm any benefits i just want to pick up on something you mentioned there about the exacerbation of media examples of children being abducted and things like that. So obviously those are

availability cascades. But what do you think was driving that in terms of the media's incentives? So I think in America, we have a free market for almost everything that we can. And we have a First Amendment that makes it very difficult for the government to intervene in the media or news environment. And there are many benefits to that. But one problem we're now discovering, I think, is that when television was first developed, and there was a lot of regulation, there were just three television networks. And they were all pretty centrist or center left. And Americans all got their news from the same sources. Around 1980, 81 is when cable TV really took off in the United States. And you had specialized channels. And now the argument for what was called the fair use doctrine. a political opinion expressed on a TV station, because if they did, they had to give equal time to the other side. And so they just avoided it. And once cable TV came along, there was no argument

for that anymore, because, you know, the other side has plenty of ways to get on TV. So once you have this proliferation of stations, some of which are ideological, but that's not actually so relevant here. Once you get news stations that are experimenting with different formulas, I mean, the idea of a news station that's 24 hours a day, you know, I don't remember when CNN came in, but they have to fill that with something. And then there's multiple news stations. And I guess they just discovered that if a child is missing somewhere,

you know, somewhere in Iowa, and they cover it, and they all camp out outside the kid's parents' home, people will tune in and watch the unfolding saga. And I just tweeted out an amazing article by Megan McGardle, a columnist for the Washington Post. I didn't know that the rate of school shootings has actually not increased in the United States. Most people, and I did too, thought we have a wave of school shootings. Kids are right to be scared. You know, all our kids now, they go through lockdown drills. There's elaborate precautions. I'm not saying that's a bad

thing. But it turns out that scaring the kids with this is a bad thing. Because school, you know, in the United States, roughly 10 kids a year die in school from gunshots. And that's been true since the 1990s. The early 90s was actually higher. But the news and now social media put those few cases in our face. So as you say, availability cascades. We're now convinced that our kids are in constant danger. And guess what? If we tell our kids that they're in constant danger, if we tell them don't talk to strangers, if we teach them about stranger danger, if we tell them the world's a dangerous place, people want to kill you, oh, go off to college now. Have a good time. I never let you out of the house because I wanted to protect you. But you're not ready for it, and you don't know how to deal with the world. But go off to college,

and guess what? Some of those kids, not most, but some of those kids act as though their college is a dangerous place place and they need protection. And this is exactly what Greg Lukianoff began to notice in 2013, that kids were asking for protection, not just from criminals and rapists, which is a good thing that, you know, the adults need to protect them from that, but from books, words, speakers, and ideas. I'll put a link up to Tim O'Connor and Cass Sunstein's original paper about availability cascades. Sadly, we don't have time to explain the concept. Let's talk about the second grade on truth, always trust your feelings. I thought maybe we could drill into some fun wisdom

from the classics here, because you sort of draw on two sources uh modern cognitive behavioral therapy but also the wisdom of the ancients and in the book you mentioned the story of boethius could you just briefly tell us that story sure yeah so when i wrote the happiness hypothesis um the so chapter one is on how the mind is divided and parts sometimes conflict. So every culture has that. Chapter two is the basic principle of all pop psychology. And it's there in every wisdom tradition. And it's basically the principle of appraisal. So here's a couple of versions of it. So the Stoics really, really are strong on this.

As Epictetus put it, what really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance. Here's Buddha. Our life is the creation of our mind. Here is Marcus, let's see, let's go to, I got a whole list of these here. Oh, here's Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning. Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to didn't call you back. Maybe it's because they hate you. Maybe it's because they think you're a loser. But maybe it isn't. Why don't you look for some evidence? Let's see. So our minds automatically go for the worst reading if we're depressed and anxious. And so part of maturity, part of wisdom, part of learning how to live in a complicated world in which bad things happen is you have to choose – you can choose your reactions. late Roman Empire, I think the 5th century AD. And he held all kinds of high offices, a very successful nobleman. And he is thrown in jail for, I think, refusing to support her. Or

in some way, he was, the Ostrogoth king got mad at him, throws him into jail, sets his execution date. And Boethius is there awaiting death. And he, you know, he's, of course, is anxious and afraid, and his mind is going through the normal cycles that anyone would in those circumstances. But as a philosopher, he knows that he has some control over his reactions. And he guides himself through a set of insight exercises about how, for example, his family is all still alive and prospering. And wouldn't he trade his life for that? Wouldn't he trade his life to keep his family alive? And guess what? They are still all alive and are doing well. And just with exercises like that, he's able to accept his fate. And this is why we say when we talk about taking something philosophically, what we mean is

that you can do it the way Boethius faced his death, the way Socrates faced his death, the way a Buddhist would face a death sentence. And of course, few of us face a death sentence, but most of us face things that we're scared of, and we can learn to face them philosophically. So here's the pithiest of all. This would be such good advice to young people today from Marcus Aurelius. You don't have to turn this into something. It doesn't have to upset you. Things can't shape our decisions by themselves.

I love that. I also love from Marcus Aurelius, choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been from meditation. tour, the Troll Academy tour. But there's several ways to react to this. One way is to ignore it. And especially in the age of social media, when there are 100 offenses a day, you have to ignore almost everything. Another way would be to engage with it or protest. But yet another way would be to frame it as dangerous, to frame it as though if a talk goes through on campus, I or someone will be harmed, physically harmed. That's a choice. And it's a choice that basically takes part of your nervous system and puts it out in the world. Young people today talk about triggers. The world is full of triggers. Well, what are triggers? A trigger is not a real thing. A trigger is a choice that you

make to put a little bit of your nervous system out there in the world so that if somebody says something or raises an issue, you now suffer. You are triggered. And it's as though you have no agency. You don't get to choose. The world has triggered you. And the Stoics and the Buddhists were there to say, look, the world is tough. Things happen in the world. And it's up to you to decide. Are you going to be triggered? That's your choice. I've got a few other stories about reframing bad experiences.

Maybe you've heard of some of them. Maybe you haven't. But have you heard the story of Thomas Edison's factory blowing up? No, no. Tell me the story. So something catches fire in the factory and it erupts into flames but it's an incredibly colorful conflagration because of all the chemicals in the lab the chemicals yeah and he catches word of this and arrives to the factory and

and the whole town sort of watching and people you know think that he'd be distraught and his son sort of pushes through the crowd to Thomas. And Thomas just turns to him and says, go and get your mother and their friends. They're never going to see a fire like this again. Wow. Wow. I love that. There you go.

That's a man who has the long view of life. And even your own factory burning down, that would have said almost anybody. But for him, it wasn't a trigger. i'm sure he wasn't happy about it but he he'd reached a level of maturity where they didn't destroy him psychologically that's right yeah do you have any others that that was great another one i love is um have you read albert camus essay the myth of sisyphus no i haven't so he talks about it starts with you know the greatest problem in philosophy is why shouldn't any of us kill ourselves? And, you know, given the absurdity of life. And then he goes through these sort of lengthy three chapters on the absurdity of life.

But he finishes with this beautiful chapter, the story of Sisyphus, the king of Corinth, who was condemned for eternity to push a boulder to the top of a mountain only to have it fall back again and begin this again. And he imagines in that hour where consciousness comes flooding in, where Sisyphus is walking back down to the foot of the mountain, he imagines him sort of finding happiness in the absurdity of the situation. And he ultimately concludes that that's how we should think about life, that despite or because of the absurdity, we should, we should rebel against it. Okay. That one, I'm not getting any flashes of inspiration on that.

No, because I strongly disagree with it. That is, you know, if you, is our life like Sisyphus? Well, I'm a big fan of what's called emergent truths. So, you know, there are things in the world that are physical, but there are a lot of things in the world that are what are called anthropocentric truths. They're truths only because of the way people are and the things we make. So like the truths of the market, you know, gold is more valuable than silver. That's not just my imagination that emerges as people interact. And I would say meaning, a sense of meaning in life comes about because we enmesh ourselves with others, because we jointly construct the existence of problems and then we try to solve them. And the arc of human history is such a fast arc upwards of progress and discovery that to say, you know, because I will die and

may not complete my plans, I've left nothing behind like Sisyphus, I think that completely misunderstands the human condition. That assumes there are no emergent truths, that each of us tries to do things and then we die, and therefore it was a failure. No, I think, you know, I think he's missed the way meaning is co-created by people in communities. But of course, I should read the story. I'm sure he's a very deep thinker. I will read it. The other one, of course, I love, which you've probably heard of, is the death of Seneca

when Nero orders him to commit suicide. And he comforts his wife and his daughter, and they're in tears. And he just says to them in that sort of infamous dark humor um don't weep for parts of life all of it calls for tears oh my little little yeah okay yeah so that was the big surprise to me writing the happiness hypothesis um look because you know i think buddhism is very wise psychologically as is stoicism and they're both brilliant traditions But they grow out of times when life was unpredictable and dangerous. And now our lives are so safe, and we can make such long-term plans. quite dark um the early buddhism was quite dark about the importance of non-attachment because and for that reason you know life is suffering and of course there is suffering in life but

more modern buddhism is is more i don't want to quite say upbeat but it's not not quite as not so dark so anyway the uh right so seneca fate ordered to kill himself is another example of stoics able to face difficult things that's it yeah but i don't i don't think I don't think in modern times we should embrace that idea that everything's terrible, everything's suffering, so distance yourself from it. I think we really can grab hold of life, engage, throw ourselves in, and welcome the defeats because those actually do make us stronger, especially when we're young. We do learn from everything. Let's quickly talk about the third grade on truth now. So the idea that life is a battle between good people and evil people. You examine this idea

through identity politics and the identity politics of common humanity versus common enemy. I want to ask you just a couple of specific questions around that. The first one is this. I've heard people interestingly compare identity politics or political correctness to a religion where, for example, like privilege is the original sin, hate speech equals heresy, call outs are witch hunts. How accurate do you think that analogy is? Yeah. So I think there's some truth to it. So my last book, The Righteous Mind, was about moral psychology. And the third part of it is based on the principle that morality binds and blinds. And what that means is that humans have this amazing evolutionary trick.

We're able to cooperate with people, as you and I are doing now. We're able to cooperate with people who are not our kin. And no other animal can do that in large groups unless they're siblings. You know, like bees, ants, wasps, and termites are all ultra-social. Humans are ultra-social too. But we do it, especially early in civilization, we do it mostly via religious practice. That is, every society, as the European explorers went around the world, they found the normal form of human sociality is, you know, hunter-gatherer type. But it always involves dancing around a campfire or a sacred object, worshipping things together.

We make something sacred. We develop rites to worship it together. And as we worship together, especially if we move together and literally circle it, we bind together. And then we have ideas of heresy. So we evolved for religion, for small-scale religion, I believe. We evolved to make things sacred. For a few thousand years, we had some really big religions, and those are not exactly fading out, but now many more people are moving away from big religions, but they can't move away from their religious minds. So people still make things sacred and dance around them, as it were. I think part of what's happening on college campuses and in certain parts of the left

more, but you can find it on the right too, you get fringe sorts of groups that make something sacred and any virtue carried to extremes becomes a vice. So the central insight here that those people have that you're talking about, like John McWhorter has written brilliantly on this. He's a linguist, a Black linguist at Columbia University, and he's been writing just brilliantly about how the new form of identity politics is very much like Christianity. It's very much like a religion in exactly the way that you say. And this is what's made life on campus somewhat

difficult because we're all anti-racist. We're all opposed to racism. But there are some people, and especially in certain departments, we call them the grievance studies. So in certain departments that are organized not so much for scholarship as for activism, they have a form of identity politics that is very much about rooting out evil, accusing people of evil. any institution needs a talos or a purpose and if most of us in the university are acting as though our talos is truth or the discovery of truth um a transmission of truth and knowledge but some among us are saying no no the reason that we're here is to fight racism and everybody is racist and every institution is racist um we have complete we have incoherence we have most people we're working across purposes um so so I don't believe anyone who says, oh, universities are all just hotbeds of, you know, everybody, everybody's a Marxist. Everybody's a, you know, that, that's, that's not true. That's a bad thing. People have to organize for all sorts of things. And chess players can organize and corn growers can organize and have a lobby. And so why can't Black people or LGBT, everybody can organize. So identity politics is necessary. And what we say in the book is, you can either organize using the principle of common humanity, which is, you start by emphasizing

something that we have in common, you draw a circle around the larger group, and then you say, within this group, some of our brothers and sisters are being denied equal access or opportunity or dignity. That's what Martin Luther King did in the United States and many of the other civil rights leaders. That's the approach that Nelson Mandela took after he got out of prison. So this opens people's hearts. It's not that easy. Obviously, there's resistance. But in the long run, this seems to work. The other alternative is to say, let's all unite in our shared hatred of the oppressor or the enemy. And this is pretty effective in terms of uniting your group. And there are times when it might be necessary. So if it truly, which has been trying for decades and decades to remove every vestige of racism that it can find and sexism and homophobia, to take this approach on a college campus is really self-destructive. destructive. People pushing this form of identity politics often win battles. They often get concessions and policies, but they're winning not by persuasion. This is the sad thing. They're winning by bullying people. They're winning by intimidation. And this, I think,

is why, as the big Hidden Tribes report said, if you Google Hidden Tribes, this wonderful report from More in Common in the UK, they found that majorities of every group, black and white, male and female, young and old, majorities of every group dislike political correctness. There's only one subgroup, one of the seven subgroups of American politics, what they call the progressive activists. They like it and think it's a good thing, but they make a lot of enemies. So in the long run, I think their victories are pyrrhic victories, which strengthen the right, which push many people to the right, and which make, in America, we don't vote for what we like, we vote against what we hate.

A lot of people hate political correctness. How bad is this problem of the progressive activists overall? I was listening, as I was telling you before, to your interview with Ezra Klein today, and he made the point that, look, not everyone coming into the world and into society and our companies through these college campuses is thinking in this fragile way. It is a minority of people. So do you think the problem is overblown? So if the claim was most college students have lost their minds and become fragile snowflakes, that would be overblown, false. That's just not the way things are. Most college students are perfectly normal, happy, not depressed and anxious.

They come to college. They want to learn. The problem is that a small group that have this different attitude, what they call the progressive activists, if that's one group and there's other groups, that's viewpoint diversity. That's a good thing. The problem is that when a group becomes dominant and is able to impose its norms on others, that's when a system breaks down, especially a system devoted to truth-seeking. So I think it's a very serious problem for this reason, not because 30% of college students believe this. They don't. It's much smaller than that, that the fragility, the safetyism, and the common enemy approach is what I'm saying.

The problem is that they've developed, this group has developed ways of arguing that are essentially intimidating. So if you talk to college students today, now, this is an important point, not on most college campuses, there's no problem on most campuses. That is, we have 4,500 institutions of higher education in my country. And on most of them, nothing is happening. You don't find this stuff. But at the elite schools that are residential, and this is crucial, these ideas can only flourish when young people are together for four years in a very tight community. Then you can get these new quasi-religious norms. So what I found as I've traveled around the United States talking about the book is that the rise of mental illness, the fragility, the safetyism, that's everywhere. It's a national and it's an international phenomena, probably related to the

spread of social media and other things. But the politicization of it, the weaponization of it, the idea, the use of it to argue for certain restrictive policies, that is mostly in the northeast of my country and the west coast in other words the very politically progressive parts of the country there's nothing wrong with being on the left or being progressive but anyone should want viewpoint diversity because when your team gets to dominate when everybody is on your side you can't get any smarter you you develop arguments that sound good to you and your team, but they're never challenged. This was John Stuart Mill's basic point, that he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

So I think the problem is very widespread at our top schools in the Northeast and the West Coast. And they emerge with the generation that was born in 1995 and after, which we call Gen Z or Gen Zed. I don't know what you say in Australia. And that generation is only, they began graduating from college in 2016, 2017. So they've only been in the workforce for a year or two now. And already we're hearing many more reports of heightened anxiety and heightened sensitivity, many more complaints to HR, to human resources, because, you know, workplaces vary, and sometimes people tell jokes, sometimes they tell off-color jokes. And you could have a discussion about whether we should continue telling off-color jokes or jokes about men and women, which some would perceive as sexist. But it's

the best thing to do if you overhear two people at lunch telling a joke. It's the best thing to do to report them, to report them to HR. So this is the culture clash that is now coming into our workplaces. This new hypersensitive, easily outraged culture is quickly spreading into the corporate world in industries that hire from our elite schools. So it's not in manufacturing companies, but it is in media, the arts, and tech. Those are places where I'm hearing that they're becoming like college campuses. I'd also make the point that the conclusion that this is all overblown and overstated doesn't necessarily follow from the premise that this isn't the majority of people, only a minority of people have this fragile mindset. And the reason it doesn't necessarily flow is to borrow another one of Nassim Taleb's ideas, the minority rule. Exactly.

You got it. An intransigent minority, eventually the majority is just going to concede ground and allow new norms to be established. Yep, that's right. It's not so much that there's been a big change in the average attitude of students, although we had a very productive debate with some critics who said was that the attitudes of the average student have only shifted a little small but intransigent minority can change the behavior of the majority if the minority cares a lot more about these norms and is willing to enforce them which of any universities or maybe more broadly institutions should we look to as models for places that that don't inculcate the great untruths and that hold to a better ideal instead of norms. Yeah. Well, the only school that's really emerged as the public leader on this in the United States is the University of Chicago. I've spoken to where the university

president and the administration has come out and said, we don't do safe spaces. Now, Dean accidentally said, we don't do safe spaces. Now, Dean accidentally said, we don't do safe spaces, period. What he meant to say was our classrooms are not safe spaces. Students, of course, are free to make whatever associations they want on their own time. So the University of Chicago has emerged publicly as the one really pushing more traditional norms of this is a place for debate. The university is a platform. We welcome you to make arguments and contest, but you have to make arguments. Now, there are many other schools that are also trying to go this way. I've spoken to many college presidents who want to go this way,

and I think we're going to see a lot of them really come out publicly in the next year or two. But what I'd say, especially to your Australian listeners, is you have to really look out for the emergence of a set of ideas and a way of arguing. And you'll see it at your, especially at your elite universities. And also you have to look at your elite, I don't know if you call them high schools, but the secondary schools, schools that students are in just before they come to university. And so if you see students arguing, not just about whether ideas are right or wrong, but if they start using terms like safe versus dangerous, you know you're in trouble and this attitude is going to spread and we can predict that depression and anxiety will follow. You also have to look out for the style of argument.

College students need to learn how to do critical thinking, how to make assertions and back those assertions up with evidence, and how to challenge someone else's assertions with evidence and argument. And this new style, what happens with safetyism, is they almost never make actual arguments. It's almost all ad hominem or guilt by association. It's a style suited to the public square where your goal is to destroy your opponent. It's not a style suited to a community of discovery in which you challenge each other with arguments and evidence, and then over the process, you all get smarter. That's the John Stuart Mill process. So what Greg and I have found is that since we've been

writing about this in 2015, almost nobody has said that we're wrong. Almost nobody has actually been able to make an argument or produce evidence that we're wrong. Rather, it's just argument after argument that is ad hominem. We're white men defending our privilege, we're winking at racists, we're encouraging the alt-right. That's all they ever say. And it got so bad that we actually put in a footnote in the book. I think it's in chapter four. We put in a footnote saying, you know, this new form of safetyism, this new culture, it doesn't make arguments on substance. It makes mostly ad hominem arguments. So we put that in and we predict, we said, when a negative review is written, we predict it will mostly just talk

about our white privilege and make ad hominem arguments. And sure enough, there's only been one really bad review was in The Guardian. It was by a woman in comparative literature in the humanities. And if you read that review closely, she never says that we're wrong. It's just guilt by association. My favorite one, she said, we quote, you know, Haydn and Lukyanov quote Solzhenitsyn, as we do. And then she says, do you know who else likes Solzhenitsyn? Who wrote the introduction to a translation of Solzhenitsyn? Jordan Peterson. And like, and this is an argument. Yeah, because, right, because, you know, because Peterson and we both quote Solzhenitsyn, somehow, this is supposed to mean that we're bad. It's ridiculous on many

levels. But this is my point, that if you see this style of hyper-politicized argument that relies on ad hominem and guilt by association, you've got to, people have to call it out, root it out. You should not allow this in your universities or your schools. It's very bad for the students. It's very bad for cooperation. If you want to build a tolerant, inclusive, and diverse community, people have to give each other the benefit of the doubt and work together. This new style of common enemy identity politics guarantees eternal anger and division. It can never lead to a successfully diverse society. That's a great note to finish on. Jonathan, thank you so much. My pleasure, Joe. Good luck to you and your country. Thank you. That brings to a close my conversation with Jonathan Haidt. I hope you enjoyed that, and I hope you can see now why we should avoid at all costs allowing the three great untruths

that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker, that you should always trust your feelings, and that life is a battle between good people and evil people to be instilled in the minds of our young. I also hope that you can think about the obverse of each of the three great untruths and how you can apply them in your own life. Firstly, remember that, as Nietzsche said,

what doesn't kill you does make you stronger, at least up to a point. To borrow Nassim Taleb's metaphor from his book Anti-Fragile, wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. In the same way that exposure to dirt or bacteria can build up your immune system or going to the gym and tearing your muscles brings them back stronger, find ways to seek out and profit from discomfort, not just comfort. There's a great book called Mindset by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck that you should read and she talks about the difference between the fixed and the growth mindset. And even in the most trying times, always remember that as Marcus Aurelius exhorted

us, the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. Display your weaknesses magnificently, flip adversity into advantage and use setbacks and slights and sorry days as fuel for the fire. Secondly, be very skeptical of your feelings. Remember, that's very ancient software you're carrying around in your brain, shaped as it was over millennia. There's a quote of Richard Dawkins that I love in his book, River Out of Eden, that I often contemplate. He says that, and I quote, all organisms that have ever lived, every animal and plant, all bacteria and all fungi, every creeping thing,

and all readers of this book can look back at their ancestors and make the following proud claim. Not a single one of our ancestors died in infancy. They all reached adulthood, and every single one was capable of finding at least one heterosexual partner. Not a single one of our ancestors was felled by an enemy or by a virus or by a misjudged footstep on a cliff edge

before bringing at least one child into the world. Now, your ancestors, all of them, did not survive into reproductive age as they did by being anything other than anxious and paranoid and hyper-alert to every possible threat in the environment. But the world we live in today is orders of magnitude safer, at least if you're listening to this podcast, than anything our ancestors had to deal with. So our hyper-awareness and our sensitivity to stimuli are maladaptive in that sense.

We should be very distrustful of our feelings and our thoughts for that matter. Our brains are like, to use Jonathan Haidt's metaphor from the happiness hypothesis, unruly elephants, and we're the riders struggling to control them. Remember that as Seneca said, he who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary. And finally, remember that nobody is all good and nobody is all bad. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, the line separating good and evil passes right through every human heart.

Or, as Oscar Wilde wrote, every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. If we can hold dear to these three more nuanced truths, I think we can all find happier, more successful, contented, and stable lives. And that is my wish for you as a listener of this podcast. So, thank you very much for listening. Until next week, ciao.