Jeannie Suk’s New Yorker essay described the difficulties of teaching rape law in the age of trigger warnings. Some students, she wrote, have pressured their professors to avoid teaching the subject in order to protect themselves and their classmates from potential distress. Suk compares this to trying to teach “a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood.”
However, there is a deeper problem with trigger warnings. According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power outage may panic and think she is going to die. That frightening experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia. If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators.
But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a process known as exposure therapy. You might start by asking the woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance—standing in a building lobby, perhaps—until her apprehension begins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she’s standing in the lobby—if the fear is not “reinforced”—then she will begin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous. (This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.) Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer, and on later days to push the call button, and eventually to step in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can get rewired again to associate a previously feared situation with safety or normalcy.
The article is a massively long read, and most of the material you can extrapolate yourself if you read this site often. The only new thing is Haidt has coined the term “vindictive protectiveness” to describe the left’s vindictive attempts to punish those who violate their little safety bubble.
Some things Haidt is still behind on. Political polarization is a direct result of the same mechanism producing micro-aggressions and trigger warnings. The left cannot face reality, and that trait is increasing in scale and scope. On the other side, reality is getting worse, and that is driving conservatives to want everyone to face it so we can right this ship before it sinks. Combined, you have political polarization.
Haidt has not yet realized r/K Selection is the ghost in the machine responsible for everything, or more likely, if he has, he is not about to mention it and endure the inevitable shitstorm that would begin. The left’s reality-blindness is not a mistake, or a defect, or a disease – it is an evolved adaptation designed to help produce the r-strategy. It is a feature in the human machine, not a bug, and sudden resource shortage, mixed with a little Darwinian Selection will fix it naturally.
The article did contain this little ditty, which used properly could be of immense usefulness:
Common Cognitive Distortions
A partial list from Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn’s Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders (2012).
1. Mind reading. You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
2. Fortune-telling. You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”
3. Catastrophizing.You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
4. Labeling. You assign global negative traits to yourself and others. “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
5. Discounting positives. You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
6. Negative filtering. You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
7. Overgeneralizing. You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
8. Dichotomous thinking. You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
9. Blaming. You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”
10. What if? You keep asking a series of questions about “what if” something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. “Yeah, but what if I get anxious?,” or “What if I can’t catch my breath?”
11. Emotional reasoning. You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
12. Inability to disconfirm. You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought I’m unlovable, you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. “That’s not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors.”
Haidt cites these as common roots of the mental debility that leads to leftist/SJW fragility. I do not see this as fundamental enough of a description of the very root cause, to convey the type of deeper understanding I prefer to convey. So don’t try to use it to understand the disorder. For that the simple amygdala paradigm is far superior.
However if these are aspects of it in some regard, they can be used to exacerbate it. Leftist mental problems arise from amygdala over-activity, therefore these are psychological means of inducing crippling levels of amygdala hyperactivity in the mentally damaged. Use these to mold your amygdala hijacks. Over emphasize the negative, frame the slightly bad in terms of black and white, direct blame to look past the sale of the bad, fortune-tell the worst possible outcome and then catastrophize it as the worst possible outcome, and so on. And all along, see that amygdala spinning up like a gyroscope. Examples follow:
1. Mind reading. Everyone thinks you are a loser.
2. Fortune-telling. You are going to fail, there is no point in fighting it.
3. Catastrophizing. “Holy crap your situation is the worst possible position I could imagine anyone being in!”
4. Labeling. Your position sucks, you are a loser, you ideology is faggy.
5. Discounting positives. That good thing is meaningless. This, that, and the other are all horrible by comparison!
6. Negative filtering. You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.” I didn’t even need to rewrite this one for liberals.
7. Overgeneralizing. Nothing is going your way. Everything is falling apart for you. Donald… J… Trump.
8. Dichotomous thinking. You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. You will never get everything you want, so you will always lose.
9. Blaming. You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. We’re doing this to you, and there is nothing you can do about it!
10. What if? You keep asking a series of questions about “what if” something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. “What if things went wrong here? What if things went wrong there?” Probably best if mixed with fortune telling.
11. Emotional reasoning. You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. My favorite – “I can’t imagine how frustrating this all is for you! You must be so pissed off all the time! I know I would be, if I had it as bad as you!”
12. Inability to disconfirm. You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought I’m unlovable, you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. “That’s not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors.” This is so perfect I wouldn’t even reword it.
The takeaway of the entire article, and what everyone who reads it should tweet whenever in a twitter war with SJWs, is that [ Leftist researcher Jonathan Haidt recommends SJWs and Feminists do Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for their mental illness ]. The effect that should have on the special snowflakes will be priceless.
If you are reading this site, in some places you are only two or three years ahead of the curve, in others you are decades ahead of the curve, but you are always ahead of the regular imbeciles elsewhere when it comes to understanding the why behind modern events. And often you are years ahead of even the cutting edge researchers in the field.
You will see this material elsewhere, but only once the rest of the world catches up.
[…] Flashback – Jonathan Haidt on Trigger Warnings And Microaggressions […]
Hmm … interesting premise. However, such straightforward language can also risk dispelling the power of the cognitive distortions and restoring them to sanity.