There are three Great Untruths that have begun to coalesce into a cult of “safetyism” in the United States. These untruths fly in the face of ancient wisdom and modern research, and have proven harmful to the individuals and groups who have imbibed them. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt team up to illuminate these untruths and their deleterious effects, as well as suggest some remedies.

A vaccine inoculates the body against specific pathogens by presenting the pathogen in a weakened form. The body can defeat it readily and is then prepared to defend itself effectively against future invasions. With vaccinations, children are not shielded from all germs everywhere, but exposed to them in a controlled fashion. Our growing obsession with hygiene has actually deprived children of opportunities for their immune systems to develop. As a result, children’s bodies are overreacting to substances that aren’t actually threats. Allergies come from these over-sanitation practices, which is why allergy rates tend to be higher in cleaner, wealthier nations.

What is true of physical health is true of emotional and psychological health as well. Parents and schools are doing all they can to protect children from every conceivable risk. This ultimately handicaps children and trains them to experience deep fear in situations that pose no real dangers to them.

Most people tend to misunderstand the nature of risk. The assumption that past experiences sufficiently equip us for future challenges is naive. In complex systems like society or even individual lives, we inevitably encounter entirely new challenges. Contrary to the Great Untruth that what doesn’t kill us makes us weaker, it is avoiding risks at all cost that makes us weaker.

As embodied, conscious creatures, our bodies and minds require stressors (within reason) to develop. Children are not fragile. They are often called “resilient,” but even this doesn’t capture things well. A plastic cup can take a beating from a young child and still hold water, but that doesn’t mean the knocks are beneficial to the cup. By contrast, complex systems (e.g., children) are “antifragile,” meaning that they cannot only take a hit, but require a few to learn, adjust, and become stronger. Many well-intentioned parents and educators are unwittingly interfering with and stunting antifragility in children by overprotecting them. This will lead to children ill-equipped to navigate ever-evolving challenges when they’re older and need to push through difficulties themselves.

In the twentieth century, the word “safety” connoted physical safety. Seat belts were installed in cars and legislation mandated the use of car seats. Journalists blow the whistle on corrupt practices and poisonous products. Homes have been “childproofed.” Child death rates are in sharp decline—due in part to these changes. Obviously, these are important developments.

In the twenty-first century, there has been an observable “concept creep,” as “safety” has come to include not just physical safety but “emotional safety.” Take Oberlin College, for instance. In 2014, the college asked professors to utilize trigger warnings as a display of care for student safety. Since Oberlin, there have been a slew of universities mandating trigger warnings and erecting “safe spaces” to prevent students from being emotionally compromised.

Another creeping concept that has done more harm than good is that of trauma. The psychologist used to be consulted to determine trauma. What constitutes trauma by popular definition today is any experience, physical or emotional, that the "experiencer" considers harmful. The standard is extremely subjective.

What is interesting is that avoiding triggers and insisting on trigger warnings hinders—rather than helps—the healing process. The goal of most treatments is to incapacitate triggers through controlled exposure to situations comparable to traumatic episodes. Avoidance only perpetuates PTSD.

The obsession with safety became most evident in 2013. Millennials have gotten a bad rap, but Millennials are no longer college-age; it was students from Generation Z or iGen that entered university that year. IGen is a reference to children growing up in the age of internet (post-1995). Among iGen, anxiety, depression, and suicide rates are skyrocketing, and many researchers believe it’s connected to the rise of social media and its accessibility.

It’s prudent to buckle up and avoid dark back alleys late at night, but to avoid people with differing opinions? It’s neither wise nor realistic.

Whenever philosophical and religious traditions spanning the globe and for millennia repeatedly confirm an insight into the human condition, we should take note. One such insight is the unreliability of feelings. The Stoics in ancient Greece understood this clearly, as did Buddha, Shakespeare, Milton, and many others who speak of how our feelings can make life a heaven or a hell. The second Great Untruth, that you should always trust your feelings, cuts against the grain of ancient wisdom.

Consider Boethius, a philosopher and politician in ancient Rome whose illustrious career was cut short when he was jailed and sentenced to death in 524. While in prison, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, a conversation with “Lady Philosophy.” Their dialogue was essentially a cognitive behavioral therapy session, in which she helped him reframe his experiences, thereby imbuing them with new meaning and short-circuiting the emotional paths to self-pity, resentment, and fretfulness.

The summative lesson from the internal dialogue with Lady Philosophy that Boethius comes to accept is that “nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.” Emotional reasoning serves a purpose in motivating and protecting us, but it will often do so at the expense of reality. It’s a common cognitive distortion.

One of the most disconcerting displays of unfettered emotional reason on college campuses is the protests and riots aimed at pressuring administrations to withdraw invitations to guest speakers. Since 2000, 46 percent of the nearly 400 attempts at disinvitation have been successful.

As the academy becomes increasingly left-leaning (the liberal to conservative ratio among professors has shifted from 2:1 in 1996 to 5:1 in 2011), disinvitation events tend to target conservative speakers. AT UC Davis, students rioted to protest the invitation of self-proclaimed troll Milo Yiannopoulos.   

As with the safetyism uptick from 2013 onward, there was a radical change across the continent at that same time regarding exposure to views considered intolerant or offensive. A recent poll of university students found that 58 percent of them believed that it was important not to be exposed to ideas that were offensive or intolerant.

A refusal to hear different views and to interpret actions and words in the most offensive, least charitable light points to emotional reasoning ruling the roost. In the spirit of ancient wisdom and modern psychological findings, it is best for individuals and societies when each person conducts an internal dialogue that keeps things in perspective and converses with people of differing opinions.

If a student (or a majority of students and faculty) finds a speaker’s views objectionable, are those sufficient grounds for disinviting the lecturer? It comes down to a question of education’s purpose. Former University of Chicago president Hanna Holborn Gray once remarked that education is not intended to make people comfortable, but to make them think.

Humans have a tribal mindset. This is part of our evolutionary conditioning. It’s not destiny, however. Identity politics is a manifestation of our tribal instinct. Though a contentious term, identity politics merely refers to political organization around group characteristics like skin color, ethnicity, or sexuality—rather than ideology or political party. In and of itself, identity politics does not deserve the noxious connotations it has developed.

We must differentiate between two different forms of identity politics: common-humanity identity politics and common-enemy politics. The former brings everyone along for the ride, appealing to what we have in common. The latter tends to divide and obsess over differences, pointing out moral failure or even intrinsic inferiority in the other. This usually devolves into scapegoat politics that looks for an antagonist to rail against. It exploits the tribal mindset by framing discussions in terms of us versus them. The most extreme example of common-enemy identity mobilization would be Hitler’s Third Reich and the Jews.

In December 2017, a Latino student at Texas State University wrote an opinion piece titled, “Your DNA is an Abomination.” It opened with the remark that of all the white people he’s known, maybe a dozen have been “decent” people. He writes that he looks forward to the end of “whiteness,” which will mean “liberation for all.” He concludes with the remark that “I hate you because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die.”

The genocide hoped for here is cultural rather than literal, but it fits into the Marxist framework of political analysis that views group dynamics in terms of power relations. With this as a lens, there is necessarily an oppressor and an oppressed, a “them” and an “us.” It’s a popular approach in most universities.

This thinking explicitly encourages evaluating people’s levels of privilege and implicitly encourages a toxic oppressor-oppressed dualism that assumes one group is wielding wrongfully-obtained power over another group. With this tribal dynamic at play, verbal and nonverbal cues, both intentional and unintentional, are interpreted in the least positive light. Tools for assessing microaggressions and privilege may be well-intentioned, but they don’t make for charitable exchange. What is more, internal dissent in these “tribes” is rare. There is a pressure to ascribe to majority-opinions or be ostracized. The gradual molding to fit everyone into prepackaged ideologies is antithetical to the university environment. Students should be encouraged to think for themselves, as individuals, and have the freedom to do so.

The three Great Untruths discussed in this book meet three requirements: they contradict ancient wisdom, fly in the face of psychological research, and are demonstrably harmful to the individuals and communities who espouse them. The untruths of fragility, emotional reasoning, and us versus them check all the boxes. How did we get here? There are a number of contributing factors that have combined to generate a perfect storm of safetyism.

One thread is the polarization cycle that has escalated since the 1980s. This pathos-driven polarization has led to an ever-deepening hatred and mistrust of the “other” political party. Other threads include social media-fueled anxiety and depression, fretful helicopter parenting, declining play, mounting pressure on children to be walking CVs, and bureaucratized safety measures that hamper more than help—these have all coalesced to create a culture of safetyism. It’s left children brittle instead of strengthened.

Raising wiser kids means the “concerted cultivation” model of parenting common to the middle class has to be checked. The paranoid, overprotective parenting that doesn’t allow children to take small risks, earn independence, or learn some independence is disastrous for the development of antifragile systems. We should heed the old adage, “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

Remember that children are always learning and growing; assume that they are more competent and up for new challenges this month than the month before. Allow your kids to take small risks, even if there’s a chance of scrapes and bruises along the way. Learn about the Free-Range Kids movement that is beginning to take hold in the United States, which encourages parents to send kids on quests with siblings and trusted friends, perhaps to the store or the park down the road. Teach them that it’s all right to ask for directions from strangers, but they should never walk off with one. It may seem difficult to believe, but crime rates are the lowest they’ve been in over 50 years. Give kids the option of walking or riding their bikes to school, assuming distance and crime rates in those areas are not excessive. Send kids to camps in the woods or take them on trips where they will be unplugged from technology for weeks at a time.

Modeling and training children in the art of “productive disagreement” is another way to foster antifragility and negotiation skills in kids. Some grow up in families where conflicts are avoided at all costs, but there are ways to debate things that are healthy for child development.

To counter the related Untruth of Emotional Reasoning, cognitive behavioral techniques are vital. The Buddha rightly pointed out that not even an enemy can harm you like your own thoughts can. Children (and some adults) often default to emotional reasoning, which can be dangerous. Teaching children mindfulness and the importance of properly framing their experiences helps them gain a sense of proportion rather than hyperbolizing thoughts.

To curb tribalistic us versus them tendencies, give the benefit of the doubt and encourage others to do the same. After surviving a Soviet labor camp in Siberia and exile from Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concluded that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” He recognized that he was as capable of corruption and dealing out destruction as the people who sent him to Siberia. The experience bred in him a deep humility. Such realizations undercut any sense of moral superiority.

Pay attention to how your school handles identity politics. Do they advocate common-humanity identity politics or common-enemy identity politics?

We don’t just need wiser students. We also need wiser universities. This involves returning to the question of the university’s telos, or purpose. If you look at the mottos and credos of universities, they reference truth, light, and knowledge. The Marxist influence has shifted the focus from truth to social change in many universities, but, as activist and former Northwestern University professor Alice Dreger points out, the pursuit of truth must always precede the pursuit of social justice. If it does not, students and professors alike will begin to reject or ignore inconvenient data that challenges pet ideologies.

The pursuit of truth must once again become central to the university’s telos. To bring this back into focus, universities can explicitly commit to the Chicago Statement, a document that affirms the necessity for free speech and free inquiry in a university setting. It denounces the suppression of debate and denigration of others—even if the majority of students and faculty deem the ideas voiced “offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.” It’s up to individual members of the community to deliberate and determine for themselves what they believe about those ideas. University is a setting for contesting ideas—not suppressing them. About 40 universities have endorsed the document, including Princeton, Columbia, and University of Chicago.

University administrations must commit to a policy of not responding to or being intimidated by riots and outrage. If a university president is forthright and public about the value of free speech and academic freedom, and reiterates that commitment at the start of each year, a different tone is set. Obviously, this doesn’t excuse threats and harassment, but whatever forms of speech the First Amendment protects should be upheld in the university setting.

For admissions, universities could also prioritize students who can demonstrate that they are capable of living independently. In other parts of the world, a gap year is common between high school and university. Some graduates travel or do a year of volunteer work or several years of military service. Universities have considerable influence in shaping new expectations for incoming classes. They could prioritize students who are open to new ideas and to honestly evaluating their own, and look for students from schools that promote intellectual virtues like open-mindedness and humility. These virtues must be cultivated well-before college admissions, so K-12 schools have a significant role to play in this process.

University administrations should encourage not just ethnic or racial diversity, but viewpoint diversity. Diversity is on the rise by some metrics, but political diversity is decreasing as a growing majority of students and professors lean to the left.

Finally, explicit denouncements of the three Great Untruths will set a tone for constructive debate. Hearing that these deep-seated beliefs about fragility, emotional reasoning, and us versus them thinking don’t reflect the human experience, established psychological findings, and that embracing such beliefs harm them and their communities will only help prepare students for life.