What if you were taught that you’re in constant danger and there isn’t much you can do about it?
It just might make you anxious and depressed.
Greg Lukianoff put it well in a recent post:
[Jonathan] Haidt and I — and more recently a Substacker named Gurwinder Bhogal — have pointed out that the current campus left ideology inherently tells young women in particular that they are unavoidably simultaneously both oppressors and oppressed; that their life is determined by their immutable characteristics; that the planet is doomed; that fascists are everywhere; and that there’s not much that can be done about this other than consciousness-raising and feeling guilt, shame, and despair.
In this DVD extra,
reflects how Gen Zers often view the world:What we began seeing around 2014, 2015, what Greg began seeing, was students coming into these wonderful, safe, open places, places that many of us remember as being like a kid in a candy shop, a college campus, but they'd come in and were like, “Everything is dangerous. Everything is threatening. Everyone's against me.”
Like, really? How are you thinking this?
And what we learned as we did the research for the book is that even though the world has been getting safer and safer, especially since the 1990s when the crime wave ended, rates of violence, rates of of sexual assault and rape, almost everything is going down.
The world was getting better and better as Gen Z was getting older and older, yet somehow, they were told, “Be afraid of strangers. Be very afraid of strangers. The world is dangerous. The world is coming for you.”
The problem begins before young people set foot on campus.
In this clip, Haidt goes on to discuss paranoid parenting, the effects of seeing yourself as a “balloon full of feelings in a world full of pins,” and why parents should abide by the ancient adage: “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”
Check out past DVD Extras:
