The Left Is Now an Honor/Shame Culture
7th October 2018
… the beginnings of the answer can be found in The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. This excellent work identifies three great untruths that the current generation of college students have bought into.
- The Untruth of Fragility: whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
- The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: always trust your feelings
- The Untruth of Us vs. Them: my enemies are always evil
They provide a thorough analysis of why these untruths have been embraced specifically by the so-called “Generation Z” (children born after 1995). But for present purposes, the most relevant part of their explanation is a change of culture. They argue that sometime in the last several decades America transformed from a culture of dignity to a culture of victimhood.