Thread by @wesyang

Haidt: helicoptering, anti bullying initiatives, and social media psychologically weakened the millennial generation.

Middle schools must discourage use of Instagram.

In Haidt’s view, “anti-bullying” in practice turned into adults hovering over kids and not allowing them to deal with conflict on their own, thus leaving a generation bereft of that crucial social skill and inuring them to demand that authority figures resolve conflict for them

This is an area where I do think discussion of “the marginalized” is merited as there is a differential impact on different sorts of people (including studious, introverted kids) of the free range approach; it’s about striking a certain balance

It just seems very hard in practice not to oscillate from one extreme to the other; letting obstreperous boys run free can mean routine brutality while regimes run by people determined to stamp that out can become — are becoming — repressive in their own way

Such that the gaps in achievement and discipline between boys and girls are getting enormous. On the Rogan show, you get a glimpse of what it would take to close the gap: some tough male authority figures who frame learning as “cool shit”

If you compare the guys on the Rogan show to the “politically incorrect” media of the 1980s and 1990s, you can measure how far the men of Rogan’s generation have evolved in terms of not being racist, sexist pricks while still being dudes...there’s just no comparison

But for many, just being dudes is problematic in itself

Like Asian kids who grew up with Tiger Parents a lot of shy, weak, bullied boys grow up to proclaim that the adversity they experienced made them tough and was the best thing to happen to them, while others have a lifelong fixation on the trauma they experienced

One of the most interesting things to listen to on Clubhouse is rooms of black men and women having intra-gender struggle sessions in which the women deploy therapeutic trauma language and the men are all like “I’m just taking it all in...tryna listen and learn...”

The comedy of the Sopranos was hearing white ethnic Italian Americans gentrifying in the suburbs and adopting bourgeois therapeutic concepts and vocabulary (even as they continue murdering mafia rivals)

The spread of therapyspeak within a gentrifying black comedy needs its own show. But you can hear a spontaneous version of it on CH

I am too old to have experienced the anti-bullying culture but these testimonials of those who saw anti-bullying bent into a form of bullying are interesting

Oscillating to extremes

https://twitter.com/nytechmum/status/1375460665431851008

I wonder if the British public schools are reforming the notorious culture of bullying central to the character formation of their upper class...it must be an extremely amusing story as therapy, abuse, trauma, and equity narratives are crammed in all at once....

My personal view is there’s a curve where things get better and then you see diminishing marginal returns, and then the attempt to squeeze out more gains means cannibalizing healthy institutions (prohibiting competition or play itself) and you risk volatile non-linear effects

Good thread on suppression of play instinct by safety concerns

https://twitter.com/playful121/status/1375468156043501571

There may not be a good substitute for repackaging the older values and practices (self-governance, freedom) into some bureaucratic rubric and jargon and reinject them into the system as part of an internal reform movement