“Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”
Folk Wisdom, origin unknown
I’m a big fan of Malcom Gladwell. I’ve also read the book The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff and liked it very much. So of course, the following video caught my eye.
I’m a huge proponent of combatting ignorance with actual, you know, education. I’m an equally big opponent of compulsion to say or believe any particular thing. If you’ve read here over time, you’ll also know I’m not a fan of social media. Yes, I believe in free speech and I don’t favor anything punitive against the likes of Facebook and Twitter and TikTok (etc.). I’m not shouting them down and calling for boycotts. But I do choose to use my voice to ridicule and belittle them as largely shallow and dangerous to the well-being of Americans and those beyond. Education. I want to add my small voice to the voices of the very executives of these platforms who won’t even allow their children to use them. They know.
The best we can hope for then is to call for the people who use social media to actually free themselves from the false sense of community they get online. There are things in this video which help to articulate the reasoning for this. I’m especially drawn to the fairly firm demarcation and timeline for the rise of our current situation. For just a taste (watch the video for a much deeper analysis): those born in 1995, the first group of children coming of age in the era of the smartphone, correlates near-perfectly with the rise of the intolerance of speech that makes one feel “unsafe.”
Why is this? Perhaps it’s because these people stopped going outside at a certain point in their lives (i.e. once they got smartphones — which just so happened to coincide with their entrances into puberty, a time at which social media can be most formative (and crippling)) and now they feel that they deserve the protection afforded by the bubbles within which they’ve been living. This is truly a step in the wrong direction when it comes to preparing one for the real world in which they will one day find themselves.
I really liked something Lukianoff said near the end of the video — “You’re not safer from a bigot if you don’t know he’s a bigot. You’re not safer from evil if you don’t know where it is.” If you force bad actors underground, you’re not eradicating them. We’ll always have them — this is human nature. You’re just making them more nefarious. He puts a bow on his quote by saying that freedom of speech means “to tell you the uncomfortable truths about the reality around you, not to pretend that we’re better off just not discussing it at the dinner table.”
Stand up and take notice. It is far better to face the evils of the world than to brush them under the carpet and pretend that you’ve succeeded in making the world a safer place.
I admit I haven’t watched the entire video yet. With the recent news of death threats to a judge and his children including disseminating his address and phone number, I am done with the first amendment being used as a weapon. Being civil to your fellow humans is not a weakness.
Fairly certain that death threats are not protected speech. And you’re absolutely right about civility. There is nothing in the video that suggests otherwise. You should watch it.
I will. Surprisingly, death threats are illegal under certain conditions such as if they cross state lines like on twitter, or are witnessed. The threatener has to have the means to carry it out. The rules and penalty are much different depending on who gets threatened
I think we may be coming from slightly different angles anyway, and perhaps the end quote by Lukianoff looks like it tended toward allowing clearly off-kilter, dangerous people say whatever they wish. But I don’t think he favors that at all (while I didn’t help). I mean, face it — the ACLU actually defended Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie. Sadly, the ACLU is a shell of its former self, and now actually leans toward censorship in some cases. And here’s the problem. Who gets to decide? Sure, there may be clear lines, like in communicating death threats. But, doxing? Hmmm… Both sides are doing it. Is it only OK if it’s someone you don’t like who gets doxxed? Social media makes this so much harder, because Nazis in Skokie can be cordoned off.