Chapter 1: The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker
2009, Preschool Mandatory Orientation (Virginia example)
-the most important rule was: No Nuts
-there was an absolute prohibition on bringing anything containing nuts into the building
-peanuts are legumes, not nuts, but some kids have allergies to tree nuts so along with peanuts and peanut butter, all nuts and nut products were banned
-to be extra safe, the school also banned anything produced in a factory that processes nuts, so dried fruit and other snacks were prohibited too
-the list of prohibited substances just continued to grow
As a parent I asked:
“If we know about the kids’ actual allergies, I’m sure we’ll all do everything we can to avoid risk. But if there’s no kid in the class with such an allergy, then maybe we can lighten up a bit and instead of banning all those things, just ban peanuts?”
-the teacher was visibly annoyed and reprimanded the question so that no other parent could chime in
-her point was don’t make any parent feel uncomfortable, regardless of whether anyone in the class is affected, these are the school’s rules
The ban on nuts:
-peanut allergies were rare among American children until the mid-1990s
-by 2008, the rate of peanut allergies tripled
-why such a sudden increase to peanut allergies
-the surge can be traced back to when parents and teachers had started protecting children from exposure to peanuts back in the 1990s
-reasearch: regular eating of peanut-containing products during infancy will elicit a protective immune response instead of an allergic immune reaction
2015 Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP) Study:
-640 infants (4-11 months) chosen because they already had a high risk of developing a peanut allergy as they had severe eczema or tested positive for another allergy
-half the parents followed the standard advice for high-risk kids, which was to avoid all exposure to peanuts and peanut products
-half the parents were given a supply of a snack made from peanut butter and puffed corn to be given to the infants 3 times a week
-when the kids turned five years old, they were tested for an allergic reaction to peanuts
Results:
-17% of children who were protected from peanuts developed a peanut allergy
-3% of children exposed to peanut products developed a peanut allergy
-the advice of avoiding consuming allergenic foods was incorrect so can explain the rise of peanut and other food allergies
***the immune system is a miracle of evolutionary engineering
-it is designed to learn rapidly from early experience
-the immune system is a complex adaptive system
-it is a dynamic system able to adapt in and evolve with a changing environment
-it requires exposure to a range of foods, bacteria, and even parasites in order to develop its ability to mount an immune response to real threats (bacterium-strep throat) while ignoring non-threats (peanut proteins)
Vaccinations:
-these use the same logic
-childhood vaccines make us healthier not by reducing threats in the world, but banning germs in schools
-by exposing children to those threats in small doses, gives children’s immune systems the opportunity to learn how to fend off similar threats in the future
“Thanks to hygiene, antibiotics and too little outdoor play, children don’t get exposed to microbes as they once did. This may lead them to develop immune systems that overreact to substances that aren’t actually threatening—causing allergies. In the same way, by shielding children from every possible risk, we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren’t risky at all and isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master” (Psychologist Alison Gopnik).
The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
-of course, some things that don’t kill you can still leave you permanently damaged and diminished
-But, teaching kids that failures, insults, and painful experiences will do lasting damage is harmful in and of itself
-humans need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate
Antifragility:
-Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, states that most of us think about risk in the wrong way
-wrote the book, Antifragile” to explain how systems and people can survive the inevitable black swans of life
-in complex systems, it is virtually inevitable that unforeseen problems will arise, yet we persist in trying to calculate risk based on past experiences
-life has a way of creating completely unexpected events
-Taleb likens the appearance of a black swan as the unexpected event based on past experiences where we assume all swans are white
-this can apply to things like the immune system that grows stronger in response to black swan
Taleb:
-China teacups are fragile: they break easily and cannot heal themselves so you have to handle them gently and keep them away from toddlers
-plastic cups are resilient: they can withstand shocks, so parents give them to their toddlers because they can survive repeated falls to the floor
-Taleb says “resilience” is an overused word and start recognizing that some things are antifragile
-antifragile important systems can be economic, political, and immune systems
-our systems require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow
-systems that are antifragile become weak, rigid, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously
Ex. spending a month in bed leads to muscle atrophy because it is deprived of stressors
-neurotically over protective parents do more harm
Ex. the wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire
-you don’t want your children to be candles but fire wishing for more wind
-the foolishness of overprotection is apparent as soon as you understand the concept of antifragility
-risks and stressors are natural, unavoidable parts of life
-parents and teachers should be helping kids develop their innate abilities to grow and learn from such experiences
“Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”
***today, we’re trying to clear away anything that might upset children
“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 their protective umbrella.”
-there is a modern obsession with protecting young people from “feeling unsafe”
-this mindset causes adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide
The Rise of Safetyism:
-in the twentieth century, the word “safety” generally meant physical safety
Ex. states passed laws making the use of car seats mandatory for children
Ex. homes and day care centers childproofed choking hazards and sharp objects were removed
-now in the twenty-first century, on college campuses, the meaning of “safety” underwent a process of “concept creep” and expanded to include “emotional safety”
Ex. 2014, Oberlin College posted guidelines for faculty, urging them to use trigger warnings to “show students that you care about their safety”
-the college was making it clear that faculty must show students that you care about their feelings
-the conflation of safety and feelings included the use of each student’s preferred gender pronoun
EX. zhe, they, etc… for students who don’t want to be referred to as he or she
-these musts are not because this was respectful or appropriately sensitive but because a professor who uses an incorrect pronoun “prevents” or impairs their safety in a classroom
-students have been told that they can request gender-neutral pronouns and then a professor fails to use one, students may be disappointed or upset
***But are these students really unsafe?
***Are students in any danger in the classroom if a professor uses the wrong pronoun?
-professors should be mindful of their students’ feelings, but not in the way where they are judged that their speech is seen in terms of safety and danger
Concept Creep(2016 article by Australian psychologist Nick Haslam):
-how terms change through time
EX. 1980’s terms: abuse, bullying, trauma, and prejudice
-the scope of these words expanded in two directions
-crept “downward” means it applies to less severe situations
-crept “outward” means to encompass new but conceptually related phenomena
Ex. trauma
-psychiatrists used the word “trauma” only to describe a physical agent causing physical damage such as a traumatic brain injury
-1980, revision, recognized “post-traumatic stress disorder” as a mental disorder
-this was the first type of traumatic injury that isn’t physical
-PTSD is caused by an extraordinary and terrifying experience, and the criteria for a traumatic event that warrants a diagnosis of PTSD was strict
-to qualify, an event would have to “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and be “outside the range of usual human experience.”
-the event was not based on a subjective standard
-it had to be something that would cause most people to have a severe reaction
Ex. War, Rape, and Torture
Ex. Divorce didn’t qualify as it was simply bereavement
Ex. Death of a spouse due to natural causes was bereavement (this is a normal part of life)
-these experiences are sad and painful, but the pain is not the same thing as trauma
-these experiences can benefit from counseling, but generally recover from such losses without any therapeutic interventions
-even most people who do have traumatic experiences recover completely without intervention
2000s:
“the concept of “trauma” in the therapeutic community included anything “experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful” with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”
***the subjective experience of “harm” became definitional in assessing trauma
-the word “trauma” became widely used not just used by health professionals, but their clients and patients, including an increasing number of college students
-this shift to this subjective standard is now up to anyone who decides what should be counted as trauma, bullying, or abuse
-if I felt like any of these to you, then trust your feelings
-tf a person reports an event as traumatic, bullying, or abusive based on subjective evidence it is now taken as sufficient evidence
-if there is a rapidly growing number of students being diagnosed with a mental disorder then there is a rapidly growing need for the campus community to protect them
****Subjective assessment = sufficient evidence
Safe Spaces:
-very few Americans has ever heard of “safe spaces” in an academic sense until March of 2015
Brown University
-students were preparing for an upcoming debate between two feminist authors: Wendy McElroy and Jessica Valenti
-the topic “rape culture” the concept that “prevailing social attitudes have the effects of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse”
-Proponent Valenti: agreed that misogyny is endemic to American culture, and in such a world, sexual assault is considered a lesser crime
-the #MeToo era agreed that sexual abuse is far too common
Question: Does this make for a rape culture?
-McElroy: disputes the claim that America is a rape culture
-to illustrate her argument, she contrasts the United States with countries in which rape is endemic and tolerated
Ex. Afghanistan: “women are married against their will, they are murdered for men’s honor, they are raped, and when they are raped they are arrested for it, and they are shunned by their family afterwards
Ex. McElroy recounts her personal experience of being being badly beaten and brutally raped as as a teenager by her boyfried that left her blind in one eye
-she believes that it is untrue and unhelpful to tell American women they they live in a rape culture
Question: If some Brown students believe that American is a rape culture then should McElroy be allowed to challenge their beliefs or would that challenge put them in danger?
Answer: one student explained, “bringing in a speaker like McElroy could serve to invalidate people’s experiences.”
-the logic seems to be that some Brown students believe that America is a rape culture
-this belief is based in part on their own lived experience of sexual assault
-so, McElroy tells them that America is not a rape culture
-those listening could take her stance as her saying that their personal experiences are “invalid” as grounds for the assertion that America is a rape culture
-that could be painful to hear, but should college students interpret emotional pain as a sign they they are in danger is the question
So, this is an example to concept creep and the expansion of “safety” to include emotion comfort
Why?
-the student quoted above and others attempted to get McElroy disinvited from the debate in order to protect her peers from such “damage”
-the effort failed, but the Brown president, Christina Paxson, announced she disagreed with McElroy so there would be no debate but a talk about rape culture-so students would not hear about how America is a rape culture without being confronted by different views
***Protective: even though students chose to attend the main debate they could still be “triggered” by the presence of McElroy on campus and (on the assumption that students are fragile rather than antifragile) retraumatized
-the student quoted above worked with other students to create a “safe space” where anyone who felt triggered could recuperate and get help
-the room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets, and a video of frolicking puppies
-included were the students and staff trained to deal with trauma
***the threat wasn’t just the reactivation of painful personal memories; it was the threat to a student’s beliefs
-one student who sought out the safe space stated, “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs”
***Many Americans can not understand why college students need to keep themselves “safe” from ideas
-can’t they just not go to the debate in the first place
The fragile-student model:
-this is a belief that many college students are fragile
-then it makes sense that all members of the community should work together to protect those students from reminders of past trauma
-the Brown community should come together to demand that the president (or somebody) prevent the threatening speaker from setting foot on the campus
-if you see students as candles then you want to make the campus a wind-free zone
-if the president won’t protect students then students must come together to care for one another to create the campus a safe space
***young adults are not flickering candle flames
-they are antifragile and that is true even if victims of violence and those suffering from PTSD
“Post-traumatic growth” shows that most people report becoming stronger, or better in some way, after suffering through a traumatic experience.
-not to say that we should not try to protect young people from trauma, but
“It does mean that the culture of safetyism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and of the dynamics of trauma and recovery.”
***Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it
“Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome PTSD. These therapies involve gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes.” (Harvard’s Department of Psychology)
-cognitive behavioral therapists treat trauma patients by exposing them to the things they find upsetting (starting in small ways like imagining or looking at pictures)
-they activate their fear and helping them habituate (grow accustomed) to the stimuli
-the reactivation of anxiety is so important to recovery that therapists advise their patients to avoid using antianxiety medication while undertaking exposure therapy
***well-meaning friends and professors work together to hide potential reminders of painful experiences
“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 systemically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”
-Safetyism: safety is good, of course, keeping others safe from home is virtuous, but virtues can become vices when carried to extremes
-Safetyism: refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns
-Safety: trumps everything else, not matter how unlikely or trivial the potential danger
***when children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay “emotionally safe” while protecting them from every imaginable danger
- just set them up for a feedback loop:
kids become more fragile and less resilient:
which signals the adults that they need more protection;
which makes the kids even more fragile and less resilient
-the end result is a widespread backfiring effect in which the “cure” turns out to be a primary cause of the disease
iGen and Safetyism:
-the preoccupation with safetyism is clearest in the generation that began to enter college in 2013
-the Internet Generation (iGen) coined by Jean Twenge are those born in and after 1995
-others use Generation Z, but Twenge points out that the iGen suffers from far higher rates of suicide
-something changed the childhood experience of kids born in the the late 1990s
-the rapid growth of social media in the years after the iPhone was introduced in 2007
-by 2011, most teens could check in on social media status every few minutes and they did
Points:
1-iGen are “obsessed with safety” that they define as “emotional safety”
-their focus on “emotional safety” leads many of them to believe that “one should be safe not just from car accidents and sexual assault but from people who disagree with them”
2-safe spaces and trigger warnings started to spread when iGen began arriving on campus around 2013
-the demands of safety and censorship accelerated rapidly over the next four years as the last of the Millennials graduated
-they were replaced with iGen
-there has been a shift in the very different attitudes toward speech and safety that has spread across universities as the Millennials were leaving
***today’s college students were raised by parents and teachers who had children’s best interests at heart but who often did not give them the freedom to develop their antifragility
The Sum:
-children, like complex adaptive systems, are antifragile
-children must be exposed to challenges and stressors or they will fail to mature into strong capable adults
-concepts sometimes creep like trauma and safety
-trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages—even college students
-safetyism is the cult of safety–an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns
-safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making the more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims
***Words and Ideas put them in danger