The rule used to be, “If you lose your shit, you’ve lost the game.”
Now it’s the exact opposite: “If you lose your shit and throw a tantrum, you win. Always. Because obviously the person who takes offense and flies into rage over nothing must have moral superiority over people who are calm and rational.”
The old rules are gone now, thanks to the juvenilizing effect of social media — where all 55 year old men pretend to be 13 year old girls. And not just for some perverted sexual goal, but because acting like a 13 year old mean girl is now just sort of how 55 year old men, who should know a damn lot better, have decided it’s appropriate to present themselves.
It’s also due, of course, to relentless conditioning by the left that there is no such thing as an immature emotional outburst that should be restrained, or a minor psychic boo-boo that should be ignored and toughed out.
The left has taught society that internal emotional restraint is not to be valorized any longer; not to be treated as a personal characteristic to be valued and further trained.
The left teaches exactly the opposite — that to restrain one’s pettier, immediate emotional outbursts is to counterfeit one’s True Self, a true self which is apparently a 10 year old with developmental disorders, and that what everyone must do to be #Woke is not merely permit oneself to descend into hysterics but to actively seek out reasons to descend into hysterics as frequently and as derangedly as possible.
This is all just to repeat the central insight of this still-bracing piece from Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “The Coddling of the American Mind”. In this article — sorry that I’ve repeated its premise so many times — Lukianoff discusses a previous phobia he had, and how he went through the process of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to no longer be phobic about it. Basically, CBT taught him to deliberately expose him to small doses of the thing he feared and keep telling himself There’s nothing to fear here, get over it until his sensitivity to that trigger went away.
Lukianoff realized that what is going on on college campuses now — and I would say, in society generally — is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but one pointed in the precise opposite direction. Rather than teaching people to not sweat minor things that might “trigger” them, to desensitize them to those triggers, this malignant version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaches people to panic, throw conniptions, fly into hysterics, and descend into lower-animal rage over minor things.
Rather than training people to de-sensitize them to petty bothers, this malignant version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy trains them to be hyper-sensitive to trivial things.
It’s not merely that we are no longer valorizing — promoting; holding up as an ideal to aspire to — the age-old and well-proven ethic of emotional restraint and mastery of self.
We’re now actively valorizing, promoting, and inculcating the exact opposite — emotional promiscuity and performative hysteria.
Ace, “An Observance of the Decay of Learned Restraint”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2018-08-09.
September 1, 2018
QotD: Raising “taking offence” to be the highest moral ground
Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: Offensensitivity, Psychology, SocialMedia — Nicholas @ 01:00
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