Review: The Coddling of the American Mind
May 2024
[I read this book in 2019 and wrote the majority of this review then. Many of the issues raised in this book likely got worse during the world-wide Covid pandemic.]
The authors are explicit with their main theme. It is both the first quote on the first page and later stated as "the book’s most important single piece of advice." It is, "Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child." This is the anthem of the book. The authors' concern is our culture is not preparing young people for the road anymore. Instead, many teachers, parents, and bureaucracies are trying to smooth the road for the child. This inadvertently backfires, leaving today's young people ill equipped to handle basic life challenges. Reality cannot be bent to our will and so this leaves people broken, anxious, and depressed. The three sub focuses of the book can all be related back to its main theme. These are called the Three Great Untruths. The authors argue our culture's acceptance and promotion of these untruths has surged since 2015. They attempt to analyze why this is the case.
Despite a strange fake story where the authors consult an ancient sage, the introduction solidly outlines the themes of the book. The Three Great Untruths are:
- What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
- Always trust your feelings
- Life is a battle between good people and bad people
It is significant, especially in our post-truth culture, the authors argue for the objective, universal nature of these untruths. "These Great Untruths are bad for everyone. Anyone who cares about young people, education, or democracy should be concerned about these trends."
First, the writers tackle the idea of fragility, which views children and weak and exaggerates the dangers present around them. This fragility is extended to even include unpleasant ideas, not just physical or emotionally abusive harm. The opposite of this is durability and the idea that some experiences, though challenging, bring you out stronger and more capable on the other side. This is termed antifragile. They argue terms such as "violence" and "harm" have undergone serious and negative scope creep to include concepts foreign to their historical definitions. The authors dub the current trends in thinking: safetyism.
Second, the authors critique emotional thinking. They are concerned conventional wisdom is shifting to embrace cognitive distortions rather than training people to refute them. People are following their own interpretation of events and experiences, without investigating whether these are true. They give nine examples of cognitive distortions:
- Emotional Reasoning: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. "I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out."
- Catastrophizing: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. "It would be terrible if I failed."
- Overgeneralizing: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. "This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things."
- Dichotomous Thinking (aka black-and-white thinking): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. "I get rejected by everyone," or "I was a complete waste of time."
- Mind Reading: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. "He thinks I’m a loser."
- Labeling: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others. "I’m undesirable," or "He’s a rotten person."
- Negative Filtering: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. "Look at all the people who don’t life me."
- Discounting Positives: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. "That’s what wives are supposed to do- so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me," or "Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter."
- Blaming: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. "She’s to blame for the way I feel now," or "My parents caused all my problems."
It seems clear anyone maintaining these sorts of distortions as their primary focus would be negatively impacted indeed. Depression, anxiety, and hopelessness are rational conclusions to this negativity and fatalism. The authors take issue with other trends such as the idea of "microaggressions" - brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional. Since this includes unintentional slights and since these are defined entirely in the listener's interpretation, impact is the only consideration, not intent. The authors point out aggression is neither unintentional or accidental. Microaggressions is a misnomer. It gives commonplace, and possibly accidental acts moral weight leading to justification of moral outrages. This is exactly what the authors point out in several high profile, and absurd, real-life examples. Given the diversity in American society, hundreds of misunderstandings surely occur every day. One of the most practical points in the book is how much better it would be if we taught people how to be polite and avoid giving thoughtless offense, rather than keeping careful watch for hurts and the destructive "call-out" culture on minor slights.
While criticized as narrowly focused on upper middle class college aged students, these principles of thoughtful dialogue have a wide application across time and culture. I've see plenty of examples of these cognitive distortions in literature, politics, debates, and day-to-day arguments. This book raises good points which are definitely being felt by others.