The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

“If students succeeded in creating bubbles of intellectual ‘safety’ in college, they would set themselves up for even greater anxiety and conflict after graduation, when they will certainly encounter many more people with more extreme views.”

The more we strive for perfect safety, the harder it is to venture out into the world and learn its lessons. Children are thus unprepared to deal with people who hold ideas inimical to the ones they have been taught. College and life beyond it are filled with different ideas; it’s a mistake to shield students from such controversy. Instead, they should learn how to listen to and debate with new and uncomfortable ideas.

“[M]any parents, K-12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression.”

Meant to keep students safe, their attitudes of personal fragility, emotional certainty, and us-versus-them paranoia generate distortions that render young people vulnerable to mental instability and deep unhappiness.

“By the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled. Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience. Those older generations may have a point, even though these generational changes reflect real and positive progress.”

Continued progress in Western civilization has provided us with many luxuries. Older generations may see these, not as attributes of success, but as flaws that spoil the children. It’s true that people need to push against difficulties to grow stronger, yet instead of climbing onto the advantages our forebears have brought us and reaching yet higher, we have begun to hide behind those advantages, as if they might blot out entirely the risks we face in life. Our parents and grandparents didn’t work hard to make our lives free from trouble but to provide us with tools to help us to better cope with adversity.

“[Professor Taleb] notes that wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. He advises us not to be like candles and not to turn our children into candles: ‘You want to be the fire and wish for the wind’”

The candle is lovely and elegant but frail; any breeze can blow it out. The open fire is robust and hard to stop. Children should learn the robustness of the big fire, which grows in strength with every strong breeze. For college students, controversy can become a wind that feeds the flame of their curiosity.

“There’s an old saying: ‘Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.’”

An asphalt street, like life, is hard, unyielding, and persistent. Rubber tires on a car, like people, are flexible and adaptive, able to travel anywhere. Thus, our tires are supple and our roads hard, and it would be absurd to have it the other way around. Children ought not to learn that life should be soft for their convenience because life simply isn’t that way; instead, they need to know how to use their own flexible resiliency to navigate smoothly the tough roads of life.

“If we protect children from various classes of potentially upsetting experiences, we make it far more likely that those children will be unable to cope with such events when they leave our protective umbrella.”

The urge to protect our children at any cost is understandable, but doing so prevents them from the sometimes-painful lessons they need to learn if they are to cope with life when they’re out on their own. Perfect safety in childhood leads to tremendous vulnerability later; it’s a strategy that backfires. Elimination of risks makes our kids even less safe.

“It was not for anyone else to decide what counted as trauma, bullying, or abuse; if it felt like that to you, trust your feelings.”

This is an example of the second Great Untruth, that feelings are an accurate gauge of other people’s ill will. Permitting children to indulge in being easily offended will make their lives difficult and lonely when they alienate others over of slights that no one can avoid.

“A culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”

Some pains are physical; some are emotional. Accepting them leads to growth and understanding; confusing them leads to misunderstandings and mental anguish.

“It is not acceptable for a scholar to say, ‘You have shown me convincing evidence that my claim is wrong, but I still feel that my claim is right, so I’m sticking with it.'“

The purpose of the academy is to pursue truth wherever it leads, not to burnish prejudices and condemn dissent. Intellectual pursuits can be painful if they shatter our preconceptions, but to turn away is to miss out on discovery and the growth of wisdom. College isn't for the faint of heart, and students should learn how to be bold, not touchy, in their quest for knowledge.

“We all can be more thoughtful about our own speech, but it is unjust to treat people as if they are bigots when they harbor no ill will. Doing so can discourage them from being receptive to valuable feedback. It may also make them less interested in engaging with people across lines of difference.”

Today’s parents encourage their children to assume that outsiders are a threat and should be treated with suspicion. This spills over into college, where people who hold differing views are presumed to be malevolent. Attacking them may seem wise as a preventative measure, but the only things this will prevent are lively discussions, engaging conversations, and friendships.

“Teaching students to use the least generous interpretations possible is likely to engender precisely the feelings of marginalization and oppression that almost everyone wants to eliminate.”

The irony of micro-aggression theory is that it makes worse, not better, a culture of prejudice. Accusing others of miniature harassments makes them uncomfortable with the accusers, whom they begin to avoid, which reinforces the accusers’ feelings of marginalization, which makes them all the more accusatory, and so on in a downward spiral of social alienation and angry self-righteousness.

“Outside of cultures of safetyism, the word ‘violence’ refers to physical violence [...] However, now that some students, professors, and activists are labeling their opponents’ words as violence, they give themselves permission to engage in ideologically motivated physical violence.”

For fear of uncomfortable ideas, college students have devised a moral belief system that justifies violence against those who are merely controversial. Words are not fists, knives, or bullets, but treating them as such makes an excuse for the more primitive desire to destroy any threats to the dominant group’s power.

“But if some students now think it’s OK to punch a fascist or white supremacist, and if anyone who disagrees with them can be labeled a fascist or white supremacist, well, you can see how this rhetorical move might make people hesitant to voice dissenting views on campus.”

The authors posit: Who would want to have a conversation with someone who cannot stand disagreement and who will accuse dissenters of racism or harassment or whatever the wickedness of the week might be? One of the benefits of college is that it is meant to transcend tribal prejudices while encouraging students to be open-minded in the pursuit of knowledge. That pursuit comes to a crashing halt when people with social power can condemn and punish all ideas that vary from their own.

“Solidarity engenders trust, teamwork, and mutual aid. But it can also foster groupthink, orthodoxy, and a paralyzing fear of challenging the collective. Solidarity can interfere with a group’s efforts to find the truth, and the search for truth can interfere with a group’s solidarity.”

Ultimately, punishing dissent is bad even for the ruling belief system: At the very least, a group that ignores flaws in its own doctrine—especially a group engaged in conflict with others—is a group heading toward a cliff.

“A set of new ideas about speech, violence, and safety has emerged on the far left in recent years, and the debate on campus is largely a debate within the left, pitting (mostly) older progressives, who generally have an expansive notion of free speech, against (mostly) younger progressives, who are more likely to support some limitations on speech in the name of inclusion.”

The old guard fought for the right to speak freely; the new guard wants to censor any ideas of which they disapprove. Even without provocations from right-wing groups, the campus political left has found ways to fight, but with itself, sometimes coming to blows over arcane doctrinal disputes over correct wording or the improper raising of an eyebrow.

“Provoking uncomfortable thoughts is an essential part of a professor’s role, but professors now have reason to worry that provocative educational exercises and lines of questioning could spell the end of their reputations and even careers.”

Professors are right to fear for their careers during an era of intolerance on campus. The whole point of college, however, is to expose young minds to new and challenging ideas. The professors whose jobs are on the line are the very people that make higher education worthwhile. Otherwise parents are spending enormous sums of money to send their children to glorified echo chambers.

“If more students say they feel threatened by certain kinds of speech, then more protections should be offered. Our basic message in this book is that this way of thinking may be wrong; college students are antifragile, not fragile.”

The more they are protected, the weaker students become. On the other hand, the more they are challenged, the stronger they will grow. That an entire generation quails at controversy, when they have the innate ability easily to manage the push and pull of disagreements, bespeaks a cohort of young people whose strength of mind has been neglected.

“Experience is so essential for wiring a large brain that the ‘first draft’ of the brain includes a strong motivation to practice behaviors that will give the brain the right kind of feedback to optimize itself for success in the environment that happens to surround it.”

One of the important discoveries in childhood development is that the brain is designed to adapt to the unique conditions in which it finds itself. The present-day world, with its urban clash of cultures, is filled with just the varieties of experience a growing human mind is designed to tackle. For such minds to stay safe, avoid struggle and controversy, and thereby stunt themselves, is a modern tragedy unfolding before us by the millions.

“[A]s more and more professors shy away from potentially provocative materials and discussion topics, their students miss out on opportunities to develop intellectual antifragility. As a result, they may come to find even more material offensive and require even more protection.”

On-campus intolerance is a vicious circle of avoidance, suffering, and even more avoidance. It is the culmination of the modern parental program of insulating children from difficulty, for when parents finally send them off to college, their coddled children suddenly encounter controversy, and they implode from the emotional overload and thereafter shy away from controversy, making the problem worse. As the book puts it, avoiding emotional triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a cure.

“A university that encourages moral dependence is a university that is likely to experience chronic conflict, which may then lead to more demands for administrative remedies and protections, which may then lead to more moral dependence.”

College administrators, trying to serve a clientele that expects to be coddled, yet trying also to present a curriculum that includes the basic intellectual processes of questioning and debate, find themselves in a quandary: The core principles the college teaches make worse the emotional difficulties experienced by the students. This feedback loop accelerates into protests, demonstrations, and angry defiance from students who want, not to confront challenges, but to be patted on the back for the beliefs they already hold.

“This is why quotas generally produce such strong backlash: they mandate a violation of procedural justice (people are treated differently based on their race, sex, or some other factor) and distributive justice (rewards are not proportional to inputs) to achieve a specific end-state of equal outcomes.”

Most people share an intuitive sense that justice must equalize opportunity, but that outcomes are the responsibility of individuals. Equality of outcome explicitly violates equality of opportunity, as the starting conditions must be rigged to force a particular result. A rigged system also violates people’s sense of procedural justice. Equality of outcomes is from an ethical standpoint, a lose-lose process.

“If professors and students are hesitant to raise alternative explanations for outcome gaps, then theories about those gaps may harden into orthodoxy. Ideas may be accepted not because they are true but because the politically dominant group wants them to be true in order to promote its preferred narrative and preferred set of remedies.”

It’s tempting to assume, given unequal outcomes in a system that supports equal opportunity, that people of privilege are somehow cheating. Once that idea takes hold, any evidence to the contrary is rejected as faked data designed to help cheaters win the race. Voices that support such evidence are subjected to public shaming and attempts to remove them from campus.

“If we mandate inclusion in everything and teach kids that exclusion puts them in danger—that being excluded should make them feel unsafe—then we are making future experiences of exclusion more painful and giving kids the expectation that an act of exclusion warrants calling in an authority figure to make the exclusion stop.”

It’s true that exclusion and ostracism can pose a danger to individuals who have nowhere else to turn. Modern society, however, provides ample opportunities for inclusion—if not in one group, then in another. On the other hand, children trained to fear exclusion as an existential threat, and otherwise to fear new and uncomfortable experiences, will in college have poor ability to confront new and possibly uncomfortable ideas. They will then, as it were, “run to mommy and daddy” by appealing to administrators to make the “threatening” ideas go away.