How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm (2016)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Equivalently, does it mean that if we expose ourselves to macro-harms, we will be immunized against harms lower down the scale? Is the endgame a Spartan, ultra-violent survival of the toughest?
Or is there a point in the middle where the right amount of harm is tolerated, or even encouraged? How will we know when we have reached that point?
I suspect it will occur when people stop parenting each other and when people stop deliberately concerning themselves with the disagreeable opinions of others (negative attention seeking).
As per them, so long as the mind can segregate experiences as desirable and undesirable, it will continue to crave the desirable ones and reject undesirable ones.
If all the recent experiences are desirable, then there will be further segregation within the desirable ones till the undesirable bucket is again full (and vice versa).
This gels well with anecdotal experiences of craving for something like financial independence only to feel once some one gets it that it is either not sufficient or craving for the opposite happens.
So if we go by these theories, the center will never be reached. The pendulum shall just swing-by from one end to the other with the middle being really short lived.
On the other hand there are people who never recover and are never the same again.
For the most part, yes, it's called building resilience[1]. The hard part is that people view adversity relative to their own experiences, and don't want to be told that they need to "suck it up" when their ride is a few minutes late, or the waiter got their meal wrong. A coddled person will truly believe that their minor inconveniences are very difficult events, and there isn't a way to force them to build resilience, so they might end up being coddled even more just so they'll be quite.
I think people are living in a constant state of fear, which causes them to seek out the sympathy and support of as many people as possible.
But why are people so much more afraid now, when by every objective measure, things are safer than they've ever been?
I think it comes down to news media. When was the last time you read a news report about something negative you personally could affect and change for the better? I can't remember the last time I did. And yet we're immersed in these news stories ALL the time.
Two generations ago, if something made it into your awareness at all, it was probably local enough that you could help. You and a few people you knew could mitigate the bad thing.
But now? Now there's no sense of agency. There's just this constant hum of information about terrible things you're personally powerless against.
Of course people are afraid. If any one of those apparently constant threats ever comes anywhere near them, they have no experience that might convince them they could overcome it. From that perspective, their only hope is that they'll have the sympathies of as many people as possible so maybe SOMEONE who CAN help will rescue them.
That's why people stack lists of their victim credentials and highlight other people's privileges. They're afraid of things that probably won't ever even actually happen to them, and want to be sure they have everyone's sympathy just in case.
But since things are generally actually quite safe, the list of distinguishing victimizations creeps into smaller and smaller harms in a race to be the most aggrieved, sympathy-deserving victim of them all.
Maybe it just seems like it to us as a result of being overexposed to media (both social and mass), but perceptions drawn from media are very rarely (if ever) reflective of the actual reality. A few outlying observations do not automatically imply this entire generation is more (or less) sensitive than the generation before.
The new mediocre ruling class uses criminally charged language ("harm", "suffering", "effect on people", "consequences"). There are "reporting" links everywhere. Reporting others is encouraged like in the German Democratic Republic.
All this has changed drastically if you compare it to 10 years ago. The question you ask is interesting though: Are younger people being used in the social justice power games played by Boomer and Gen X administrators? That would be similar to white consultants lecturing about people of color to boost their incomes.
I think it is a bit of both. Helicopter parenting has made teenagers more fragile and your friendly administrator sees an opportunity to administrate and get power and cash.
In the GDR, the state went large ways to distance themselves from facism and the anti-semitism of the past, while in reality, the jews weren't treated in a reasonable ways, couldn't get their property back and such nuisances.
My mom was a teacher in the GDR, and she made the mistake of asking "How are the jews in the GDR doing now?".
I am a German person having lived in the US and Canada for some time. And for physical safety interesting observations are that German playgrounds would probably be considered too harmful to get approval in the US, whereas electricity / wiring in houses and especially the 110 V power outlets seem really neglectful to my German eyes, like an accident waiting to happen.
But, German kids survive German playgrounds and American children are not all electrocuted by 110V power outlets.
Another interesting angle to look at this is the legal system. When I first came to the US I was really astonished to see TV ads not only for attorneys, but also for attorneys looking for participants in class-action law suits. So from an economical perspective, civil live can be 'mined' for cases worth pursuing by the attorneyship. I am not ruling out that Germany might have examples with similar dynamics but definitely its not as strong, the compensation payments lower and the possibilities for an attorney to make a huge profit from a case much lower. I think case-law might also make it easier for new classes of 'harm' to surface in courts. After a couple of of occasions, you have precedents whereas in a country with civil law you might have courts refuse a liability if there was no basis for it in the civil law.
Overall, I do think that the notion of psychological harm shouldn't be neglected. Its easy to ridicule it citing cases like "Statue in underpants". Institutions would do best I think, if they established internal processes that would resolve problems gracefully and stop harm early on before having it escalated to the courts.
The issue of "dangerous" is much more subjective. That one is going to take a little while longer to play out. After all, what is wrong with increased sensitivity to "harm"? Then the next step becomes "what do we do to correct or mitigate the harm?"
The effects of eliminating all hierarchy in education might be good? Hiring based on demographics rather than qualifications might be good? Who knows?
Perhaps when policy becomes linked to the new notions of "harm" is the point when it becomes dangerous?
It's the wild growth of certain sorts of sensitivities that certain sorts of people are finding a problem. Nobody remembers the "good old days" as a time of hedonism, where everybody did their own thing, where beliefs and behaviors weren't policed, and couldn't result in you being ostracized socially. In the good old days, you could not only get canceled, you could get lynched.
There are countless examples of this kind of behaviour across all of society now. Writing this off with a racist strawman argument that you just invented sounds like a bad faith response to me. Which honestly is one of the tactics (purposefully taking the least generous interpretation) that is so popular among the silence-is-violence crowd.
Today's generation grew up sheltered, stayed at home more and was much less exposed to random groups of kids like we did back in the day, having to deal with a general population on playgrounds, soccer fields, sports clubs and mandatory military service. At the same time conflicts can reach you at home if you only look at your phone.
Therefore, everything that happens is always private and personal, and can therefore be objectively harmful. I too experience the cringe, but this generation will reshape society to their needs, however arduous the process may be.
Once there are real and immediate dangers, most people will not stress out about micro things.
It’s still rare but I am starting to notice a growing work culture in some exceedingly few companies towards intentional confrontation. That movement stresses honesty over sensitivity for the sake expediency and conflict reduction.
There's a spectrum with sensitivity on one side and pure blunt honesty on the other, and the most expedient communication requires knowing where on the spectrum to be for a particular audience. Too far in either direction is counterproductive.
Even then, it’s not clear that testosterone levels are correlated with any specific behaviors or that the correlation goes the way we intuitively think it does. The anger and aggression can actually cause people to be more sensitive and react disproportionately to any perceived harm. See also roid rage, the prevalence of steroid use among police officers, and their propensity to provoke confrontation.
"because men (and women, for that matter) are doing less exercise period."
"Even then, it’s not clear that testosterone levels are correlated with any specific behaviors or that the correlation goes the way we intuitively think it does. The anger and aggression can actually cause people to be more sensitive and react disproportionately to any perceived harm."
Once people give their minds over to them, they cannot conceive that others are not fearful or disgusted.
People in such a state of mind view others who are not fearful or disgusted as a threat, even after taking measures themselves to mitigate any threat.