MM#460--Rebuild Resilience: Free Speech, Real Play, And The End Of Emotional Vetoes

0:07 Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser. Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. As always, let's open it up with our beginning quote of the day. Something is going badly wrong for American teenagers. As we can see in the statistics on depression, anxiety, and suicide.

0:49 Something is going very wrong on many college campuses, as we can see in the growth of the call-out culture, and the rise in efforts to disinvite and shout down visiting speakers, and then changing norms about speech, including a recent tendency to evaluate speech in terms of safety and danger. This new culture of safetyism and vindictive protectiveness is bad for students and certainly bad for universities. What can we do to change course? And that is a quote from the book by Jonathan Hyatt and Greg Lukinoff, written in 2018: The Coddling of the American Mind, how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.

1:43 And something is indeed gone badly wrong for American teenagers. For probably the last four generations, they've been taught bad history in Howard Zinn's horrific high school textbook that essentially blames America for almost every ill in the world. You can see that playing out on college campuses and in 20 and 30 year olds now. But we're also seeing a spike now in depression, anxiety, and suicide, and especially on the cancel culture on college campuses.

2:26 Where tragically we lost Charlie Kirk. So if you are watching the Super Bowl this weekend, be sure to tune in to the TPUSA halftime show because that is probably the only show that'll celebrate America at the Super Bowl. But I digress. Today I want to react to this quote that ties these trends together. And I want to do so from a conservative perspective because it seems like it's the only perspective that gives any objectivity to what is going on. So let's walk through what this means, why it's happening, and how we can change direction.

3:10 So the quote from the book says something has gone badly wrong for American teenagers, and that's not just nostalgia for a simpler time. What we're watching is the rising rates of reported sadness and hope, hopelessness among teens, more suicidal thoughts and self-harm, a growing sense that young people feel overwhelmed by ordinary life. This is not simply a problem of more diagnosis or better awareness. This is a downstream effect from deep cultural shifts. How we raise kids, how we structure their lives, how we teach them to interpret discomfort. In other words, if you change childhood, you change mental health, and we have changed childhood dramatically.

3:59 Now there's a new culture of safetyism and vindictive protected protectiveness, if I can say that. And that is this idea of safetyism, uh, emotional safety, never feeling upset or offended or challenged. And that is now celebrated as the highest value. And it's not just keeping kids from real danger. It's to the point where we're keeping them from anything that might hurt their feelings. Now, to some that sounds compassionate, but it quietly flips an older understanding of how you form a person.

4:44 The old model was life is hard, the world won't always bend to your wishes. So we're going to help you grow stronger. The new model is you're fragile, the world's dangerous, and so we must rearrange reality around your feelings. That's terrible. We should say human beings, especially kids and young adults, are more like muscles than glass. They grow through stress, effort, and challenge. Remove those, you don't get safety, you get fragility. So if you solve every conflict for kids, if you remove unstructured and unsupervised play, if you treat every negative emotion as an emergency, a five-alarm fire, if you teach kids that words are violence and disagreement is trauma, frankly, that's not love.

5:38 You're not preparing them for life. You're setting them up to be perpetually anxious and dependent on institutions to shield them. So if we go back to our quote and talk about the growth of a call out culture and the rise in efforts to disinvite and shout down visiting speakers, changing norms about speech, including the recent tendency to evaluate speech in terms of safety and danger, we saw that on every campus, every liberal campus. And the tragic thing is we saw that with Charlie Kirk.

6:19 He told the truth and he was assassinated for telling the truth. This safetyism mutates into something more aggressive, vindictive, protectiveness. Instead of saying, if I disagree with you, I'll debate you or ignore you. Students are encouraged explicitly or implicitly sometimes to say if I find you offensive, you shouldn't be allowed to speak here at all. We know where that ends. That ends at the end of the gun, at the at the end of a barrel of a gun. So then we see shout downs of speakers, campaigns to disinvite guests, demands for investigations over controversial opinions, bureaucracies built to police harmful words and ideas.

7:14 The core purpose of a university a campus that cannot tolerate offensive ideas is like a gym that can't tolerate heavyweights. The job and core purpose of a university is to stretch minds, not to swaddle them. When speech is evaluated first in terms of safety instead of truth or coherence, everything becomes about feelings and power, not argument and evidence. The loudest and most offended group wins. That's not education. That's soft authoritarianism with better branding.

7:59 So how do we get here? Well, certainly a few things stand out. Overprotective parenting. We took away a lot of the free range and risk taking and problem solving parts of childhood. Kids grow up less practiced in handling fear and conflict and failure. When families and churches and civics groups are weakened, kids lose the deep sources of identity, duty, and meaning. They become fragile and hyperfocused on emotional validation at every whim. Certainly smartphones and social media are a new phenomena.

8:40 Instead of grounded in face to face like or face to face conversations, teens are curated into a high pressure group of online worlds. Comparison, outrage, performance. It all happens twenty-four-seven. That certainly is gasoline on the fire of anxiety. We got a therapeutic ideology in education, schools and universities increasingly frame just normal conflict and disagreement in a language of trauma and harm. Students are taught to scan for danger in words and ideas. Put all this together, we get a generation, and we're seeing this now, that feels more anxious and less equipped.

9:25 They arrive at institutions that validate their fragility and weaponize it through policies and norms. So the way forward is less about new programs, more about recovering. What works? What is the old wisdom that works? Give kids more unstructured and unsupervised play. Let them experience conflict and failure with guidance and not constant rescue. No helicopter parents here. Teach them that feeling bad is not the same as being harmed.

10:08 Simple example. Parents and teachers can coach from the sidelines and let kids try to solve it themselves. Certainly, if it breaks out in a fight, you should interrupt it. But we need to stop policing every sentence. Certainly universities are the ones that have been the moral failure. Publicly they should commit to robust free speech principles, especially after the Charlie Kirk assassination. Disciplined shutdowns and disruptions while protecting peaceful protest and counter speech.

10:52 They sh certainly should shrink the administrative apparatuses that is devoted to policing expression. I mean, the message to students is, or at least it should be clear, you don't have a right not to be offended. You only have a right to speak and listen and argue and walk away. It's a university, it's a thousand-year-old institution that we have allowed to go soft. Certainly you can't fix a generation with just freshman orientation, but at the heart of it all, Charlie Kirk got it right. Got to strengthen families through policies and norms that support stability and parental presence.

11:38 Got to give religious and civic groups room to form character. Because duty and self-control and courage and service all matter. Think of a church or community program that offers teenagers a rite of passage built around service projects and physical challenges and mentoring. That's certainly the opposite of safetyism. It says if you're capable, you're needed. And we may just need to be blunt here. We're starting to see finally schools saying, put your smartphone away for the whole day. You get it on your way to school, you can use it, and then you can use it at lunch, and you can use it when you're out of school.

12:22 Certainly, parents should delay smartphones and social media for younger teens. We should set home norms, phones out of bedrooms at night, device-free meals, regular offline activities. Tech isn't evil. We're not saying that, but if it becomes the default environment of a teenager's life, we should not be surprised by the rise of anxiety and fragility. So in today's mojo minute, we should learn from the mistakes we've made in teaching bad history with Howard Zinn over the last four decades and reaping what we've sowed.

13:02 And we should certainly learn from the last decade of this quote of a new culture of safetyism. We gotta turn this around, especially for our kids. They can endure discomfort.

13:43 They carry the responsibility. And when we train young Americans to see themselves as fragile and the world as dangerous, we undermine them in every turn. We undermine the foundation of our country. And as we approach the 250th anniversary, that is something we cannot do. We got to change course. That means choosing strength over safetyism, formation over therapy, speak, free speech over the emotional veto. Means raising kids not to be shielded from life, but to be ready for it. Gotta build character in kids, and as adults, we got to be the example of good character.

14:25 As always, let's keep fighting the good fight. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo.