Mick Hartley

Why, then, are we seeing this growth in "cancel culture"? Why are so many intelligent young people buying into this notion that their mental health is fragile, and they need to be protected from harmful ideas?

Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, has a new article (via Butterflies and Wheels) attempting some kind of explanation. His friend Greg Lukianoff (the other co-author) had learned Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) as a way of dealing with his depression. What seemed to be happening, Lukianoff suggested, was that universities were performing a kind of negative CBT.

In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.

Since then it's only got worse.

It's a longish piece, but the short answer for why is, social media. 

In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:

They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1). 

They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3). 

Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them.

I'm not sure how much further the talk of CBT gets us. In a way it helps to clarify the problem, but you could argue, perhaps, that the use of therapeutic language should be abandoned altogether in the world of education. Universities are there to educate the students, not to solve their personal problems. When university authorities began to see their main duty as the latter rather than the former, that's when the trouble began.

Still….interesting.