Not only is the situation on campus bad for freedom of speech, I think we’re teaching students to engage in cognitive distortion. We’re teaching them to magnify problems, we’re teaching them to personalise problems, we’re teaching them to engage in all-or-nothing thinking. All of these things, research indicates, that if you adopt them as mental habits are going to make you miserable.
Teaching social justice (AKA cultural fascism)in place of reason and critical thinking is like training kids to be anti-intellectual neurotic basket cases rather than educated and cognitively evolved. Social justice teaches hyper sensitivity, self reproach, intolerance and tantrums are acceptable social skills. Political correctness always devalues free/factual thought to a political focus on the least worthy assumptions and by extension, the social justice which grows from it forces society to cater to the lowest common denominator.
It seemed to escape the social justice pedagogues that they wee abandoning reason for neurosis and extinguishing the light for entire generations – the damage these educated savages will do to western culture is becoming evident – it is akin to the sacking or Rome by the barbarians.
If the kids are made miserable by their education maybe they won’t notice a real reason or two to be miserable brought to them by big socialism.
On the other hand at 76 with no grandchildren why should I care?
Exactly!
The modern version of the Komsomnol is being fostered in our schools of higher education. While at the same time Islam with its squelching of free speech is incrementally forcing its way throughout our society.
The education centers today are little more then indoctrination centers being used by Big Brother make the students into mind numbed zombiesneed any more reason for Home Education and keeping them out from the NEA brainwashing
What Occam said.
Dour-faced socialists are a product of this phenomenon. Personalizing all issues measured against leftist narratives produces humourless zombies. While going to University, I read Rand’s novel, ‘We The Living’, published I believe, in 1922, in which she physically described typical (Russian) campus communists that completely mirrored campus communists I observed at the U of A almost 50 years later.
The only alternative to free speech and lots of it is ultimately civil war. Islam, being an opportunistic and savage pathology, advocates for censorship along with their fellow travelers (and future prey) on the left. Reason, logic and critical thinking are not concepts acquired by osmosis but by effort and with the present state of the educational swamp, appear to have become adrift.
One is constantly bombarded, so to speak, with the effect of WW2.
What is not properly taught to kiddies today is the cause.
Political correctness, and where it may lead:
Hitler’s Children
“Every little drop wears away a stone”
Having similar conclusions thrust upon me, from listening to Harper Derangement Syndrome on TV.
Funny how these emotionally charged ranters, with their hatred of Harper never seem to realize that 40% of Canada can still reason and perform basic mathematical tasks.
It seems to escape both the haters and their media promoters that they are openly braying their contempt and hatred of all who support the Conservatives, translation all who think differently to themselves.
Well when you deliberately learn to be blind, ignore human nature and everything your own senses are telling you, possibly the nagging doubts you cannot subdue make you crazy, like the supporters of the NDP and Liberals seem to me.
When government is openly stealing from the productive and overly generous to the helpless, useless and bandits, one has to be irrational to continue to support government.
Unless you benefit from that theft.
So are the supporters of those who offer to rob us, faster and more often, deluded?
Or beneficiaries of this kleptocracy?
Also the irony of the persons attempting to vote strategically,attempting to orchestrate a different outcome than what they see coming out of the popular vote. I guess the concept of democracy is too hard to understand.
How Marxist Heathens fill empty minds of weak minded individuals.
In times of pressure or adversity, qualities and characteristics of a person can change to avoid the scrutiny you would encounter from the group if you were your true self. It is the tendency for all people to attempt to belong to a group, by any means necessary, in order to feel secure and wanted.
“Conformity is displayed particularly well by weak minded individuals who fear loneliness, and when alone feel too afraid to stand up for themselves. It is seen that there are three types of conformity: compliance, internalization and identification.
Compliance is where the person goes along with the group view, but privately disagrees with it. Internalization is where the person comes to accept, and eventually in time believes in the group view. Identification is where the person accepts and believes the group view, because he or she wants to become associated with the group.”
John Chittick – “The only alternative to free speech and lots of it is ultimately civil war.”
So True John – Inclusive democracy, free speech and civil liberty were offered by the scions of the liberal enlightenment as an alternative t0 constant civil strife among mob-like factions – it does hinge on universal tolerance of opinion and people who ypu do not agree with or which may even offend you. The only way your rights are intact is if people you disagree with have their rights respected.
PC/Neo-progressivism/SJW is a throw back to the factional warring of pre democratic eras it proposes to get its political way by stifling free speech, diverse opinion, political dissenr and general non conformity to its narrow dogmas – it has this in common with radical Islamism.
Unless our leaders get a handle on this entire SJW PC derangement syndrome, ther will be civil strife.
Great interview. People like Lukianoff who remain calm in the face of the battle are incredibly important because they start up a dialogue with the soft-progressives who aren’t too far gone, and who are starting to see that the behaviour of some their ideological brethren is problematic.
I don’t think a reasonable, rational approach can ever get philosophically to the root of the problem of the more hardcore toddler-brain SJWs, though, because their bespoke worldview is opposed by design to principled rationality. The sloganistic, emotionally incontinent pseudo-logic at the core of their beliefs is really just a naked interpersonal/institutional power play wrapped in a flag of self-righteousness, so their views aren’t open to debate or reason; to the extent that they have a philosophy, it’s one that fights against the intrusion of examination.
I think that for people who are bloated with inchoate, un-self-aware hatred but also have a deep-rooted need to portray themselves as caring/sharing/loving, the easiest and most thought-free way to come out on the side of eternal glory and to liberate oneself from the pain of self-awareness is to project one’s emotional disturbances onto others in an attempt to cleanse onself of well-earned personal emotional discomfort. All the SJW-types I’ve ever encountered are, without exception, sanctimonious – inexplicably so – holier-than-thou people who see themselves as heroes who ordain themselves as defenders of all who suffer, to the point where every instance of corporeal suffering on earth (including their own, not incidentally) is evidence of their heroism. That’s why they *hate* it — literally, they become enraged and full of hate — whenever rationality rears its ugly head and tosses a spanner into their sanctimony-works: the real world is destructive to their self-image. The calmer and more rational you are, and the more you agree with them on key points in order to walk with them into a more reasonable position, they angrier they get.
One of the first baby-steps in any well-intentioned debate is to try to reach agreement about the definition of the terms being used, but SJWs go to shameless lengths to obliterate and redefine word meaning so that there are no remaining reference points. Whenever you’re trying to reason with someone whose viewpoints amount to a predictable laundry list of every PC talking point, as promulgated by progressive propagandists in the media and academia (and by their not-so-merry band of social enforcers always waiting to spring into action on their great chargers), you’ll run headfirst into the fact that they have changed the meaning of common, useful words in order to obviate any possibility of any agreement or counterargument. In the SJW lexicon, their intolerance of opposing viewpoints is a sign of heroic and forward-thinking tolerance (of the “others” who ain’t you), hatred is a profound love for the victims they are protecting from you and your ilk, mob-like silencing of speakers is part of a courageous fight for the liberty of the violated and vulnerable (“Freedom!!”), inane sloganeering and logical inconsistency is insight into an arcane profundity that the evil heretics don’t “get”, etc., etc.
I don’t think hardcore SJWs are showing cognitive distortion so much as they’re trying to enforce a mental/emotional sanctuary-state in which there’s an enforced absence of cognition, and I don’t think people like that are vulnerable to logic. All one can do is to calmly appeal, as Lukianoff does, to the people who’ve swallowed the hideously time-bound proscriptions of the SJWs by a sort of osmosis — by watching the MSM, for example — without having been exposed to the rational, reasonable, and philosophically ancient argument for free speech.
Uh… I like beer. Outstanding commentary EBD. Nailed it from every angle.