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How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

131 points by aestetix 11y ago

afarrell 11y ago
> like saying the word “fútbol” instead of soccer Hispanic folks: Is this in fact a thing that feels alienating to you? If so, would you be willing to explain why? It is the first time I've heard about it so I'd just like to confirm that Conor Friedersdorf is referring to a real thing.
- sho 11y ago
  The author appears to be referring to a previous piece: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of-victimhood-culture/404794/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise...
  - afarrell 11y ago
    Huh. That email exchange is actually a pretty good example of concept creep as applied to the concept of cultural appropriation.
    - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
      So remind me again who invented Football (Soccer) by the offended persons rules those of us form the UK should be offended by the appropriation of Football :-) Sorry of course this is Association football we are talking about and not Rugby :-)
- gaius 11y ago
  Football is the British English word for soccer, a game that is played with your foot on the ball obviously. I've never heard of anyone finding "futbol" to be cultural appropriation of that.
- pessimizer 11y ago
  I'm not Hispanic, and don't care at all about soccer, but I imagine it would be aggravating as hell. I'm black, and when white people call me bro, or start speaking in dialect - I honestly start to hate them. For cultural reasons, when a lot of white Americans are talking about getting fighting and getting angry, or partying and having fun, relaxing and being lazy, flirting or getting laid, or one-upping people or hustling for money, they drop into a black dialect (and an entire stereotypical affect) for a moment. Even upper-middle class black people do it sometimes - Oprah is famous for it. I spoke like that growing up on the South Side of Chicago, my grandparents speak like that, and many of the people I love speak like that. People are dropping into dialect because, deep down, they think of black people as a bunch of violent, lazy, partying, horny grifters - and find it very amusing and black of themselves when they experience anger, laziness, joy, sexual arousal, or pride at their own craftiness. This is the reason why most pop music is delivered in black dialect. It reminds me of what they think of me, and my family, although they would never acknowledge it to me, and many wouldn't acknowledge it to themselves. To be clear, I'm not a fan of oversensitivity and preciousness, or "microaggressions" or cultural studies departments, or theory-theory psychology in general, which I think is just secular religion. But someone dropping into dialect when they talk to you is not all that subtle. I could see Hispanic people feeling stereotyped by soccer stuff. Soccer is English, it's called "football" in English, so what's this urge to drop into Spanish dialect all of a sudden? Do you drop into dialect when you talk to your white friends? If you do, why? edit: And I don't mean to imply that white people don't get treated like this - I hear people drop into an Italian-American affect a lot when they're talking about being criminals, or being rapey.
  - existencebox 11y ago
    Honest question, since I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to ask this, but I'm curious where that line sits for you? To provide context while answering something you asked, I grew up in philly. I went to a city high school. I have (and most of the other white kids I associated with have) some parts of a philly accent, which I'm very aware I revert to when I, as you say, start partying/relaxing, but in my case it's because I'm relaxing the forced inflection of my speech, and my more natural way of talking comes out. The same thing happens if I talk to someone with a similar east coast manner of speech out of a natural desire to express similarity and establish comfort with the conversation partner. (to answer your, I imagine somewhat rhetorical, question about "do you drop into dialect... white friends", since the above is a thing sans-race) I can tell you authoritatively, although you may not believe me (or say I should stop anyway, which would beg other questions on my part), that there's no "deep opinion" of black culture or speech in that, in fact, the highschool was unfortunately VERY self segregating and most of the white kids didn't have enough interaction to form deep opinions. (which is part of why I'd be curious to ask now about the accent thing, since I know that ALL of the kids there, race aside, picked it up to some degree but it was never something that was discussed, since we just... didn't really talk.) I say this largely in the hope, if we ever talk and I accidentally let that show, that you would think better of me for it and not start to hate :) (the world already has plenty of that, as you point out from the insinuations you identify)
- mooseburger 11y ago
  I'm Puerto Rican. I've never heard of someone being offended at an American saying futbol. Then again, we say soccer over here, unlike all other Spanish speaking nations. As for myself, I just think it would be silly to hear. I assume an American who does that would merely be trying to be accommodating.
- spriggan3 11y ago
  Most of the world calls soccer Football so this is yet again an american only issue. I can't believe someone would be "triggered" by such a silly thing, it's like some people are actively seeking outrage for a reason I don't know. To get popular on social medias? and get many likes on Twitter? to feel like they are victim of racism every second? or just to get attention, I really don't understand.
- gus_massa 11y ago
  Hi from Argentina! The land of Maradona and Messi, but not Pele. I find strange and slightly annoying that they say "soccer" instead of "football", but I consider that a part of the strange quirks of en-us, like calling "America" to "USA" or writing "January 1st" instead of "1st of January". But I'd nerved consider any of that like a type of offense or micro/macro aggression. All that paragraph is very suspicious. For example, the reactions to the tequila sombreros and the Trump chalk signs were exaggerated by the press coverage: http://www.snopes.com/bowdoin-mini-sombrero-controversy/ http://www.snopes.com/bowdoin-mini-sombrero-controversy/ http://www.snopes.com/emory-students-trump-graffiti/ http://www.snopes.com/emory-students-trump-graffiti/
petewailes 11y ago
I suspect a large part of this is down to 1. People defaulting to the nuclear option constantly, in their reactions, and 2. People not wanting to accept that some issues are complex, and that a blanket approach doesn't work. The latter of these is the real issue. People love being outraged over the lack of women in STEM fields, and how those that are are treated, but few people talk about the lack of men in teaching it nursing roles. The former is seen as "a problem" and the latter isn't. I'd argue that both are issues, but one is something that political groups get behind and the other isn't. As a different example, you could look at the issue of badger culls it fox hunting in the UK. The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute. It's the infantilism of understanding; people wanting things to be black and white and easy to understand, where pretty much everything contentious, when you dig, is complex. I suspect a lot of the blame for this is a combination of the short article and news industries, giving people the feeling of being informed without any of the substance to back it up, and the increasing politicisation of issues, where people hold views for reasons more tribal than rational. Once you start believing that issues are simple, it's easy to fit everything into that framework and to wander round being outraged or offended or insulted by things. Because you can read into life whatever you want.
- estefan 11y ago
  The problem is that we're meant to believe everyone's opinions are equally valid. Empirically, it seems to me, some people are just manifestly stupid and/or incompetent.
  - manyxcxi 11y ago
    > some people are just manifestly stupid and/or incompetent Some are. Even more are just plain incorrect for all the many reasons human beings are incorrect. At least in the states, we've spent the last 30 years making people believe that simply because you feel it is so, it must be. That's got to be a huge factor in the degradation of discourse in the same time period- if instead of coming from the classical position of some attempted mutual understanding, people are essentially following their own religion of self. If what I feel is always correct, then you disagreeing with me means that you are wrong. Thus, I can't listen to you anymore or even attempt to see where you're coming from. This leads to the same types of responses you see when you are saying things that might make someone doubt their religion. You get the hyperbolic, emotional, even physical responses that go nowhere. Now look at the outbreak of safe spaces, refusing to let people speak that have a non-popular opinion, etc.
Shivetya 11y ago
a tyranny of the minority backed up by politicians, government appointees, and judges, all who realize their power by separating people into groups to play off each other. Each new victim class further increases the power of government, the loss of privacy, and worse the loss of community and seeds of distrust and anger are set to drive people into different camps. when the individual becomes so important that community suffers we have our priorities wrong.
- ska 11y ago
  This seems a bit off base to me. For at at least some of the cases discussed in the article, there is nothing minority about it at all. For example, the social pressure to disallow children's independence is by far the majority position now, as far as I can see. The "free range kids" folks and similar represent a minority that gets a lot of social disapprobation for wanting their kids to have the same sort of freedoms that were common place 25 years ago. Vague and unsupported concerns about "safety" are usually hand waved about. What you say may be in play for some of these issues, but I suspect it is far too blunt a tool to truly explain much of it.
  - throwanem 11y ago
    Do you mean "opprobrium"? Approbation is praise.
    - ska 11y ago
      indeed I did mean disapprobation, thanks!
- apalmer 11y ago
  This seems to be a commonly expressed concept, the idea that in large this phenomenon is strongly either caused or encouraged by a 'conspiracy' of the government.
  - yarou 11y ago
    How about multinational corporations that answer to nobody and are staffed by the top psychologists in the world to subtly manipulate the masses? Is that a "conspiracy" in your eyes or merely reality?
imgabe 11y ago
There seems to be a spectrum between whether you consider your feelings mutable and the world absolute or whether your feelings are absolute and the world needs to change to accommodate them. The ever-expanding harm movement leans heavily towards the latter. If something makes you feel bad, then it must inherently be bad and must be changed. There doesn't seem to be any consideration that maybe it's your feelings that need to change, or even any acknowledgement that you can change how you feel about something. It's definitely not always one or other other, but to be constantly at the mercy of whatever circumstances happen to exist at the moment seems like a very difficult way to live one's life.
ansible 11y ago
They talk about the influence of academics, and yet we (as a people) seem to successfully ignore things like global warming... I don't know if that explains it. We have, indeed, become a nation of wimps, with little common sense. We fear now, much more than we used to. When I was a kid, we feared the red menace (Communism), but that didn't stop us from moving forward, or adhering to our ideals. Our independent spirit as a people. I don't understand what is happening to us, but I think what they are talking about in the article is a reaction to the shift in public attitudes, not the cause of it.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  McCarthyism happened during a red scare. Fortunately things moved forward, but things weren't very ideal for a minute there.
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  >Our independent spirit as a people. Except for those pesky blacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
  - benbenolson 11y ago
    Geez, this is exactly what the commenter is talking about. Nobody brought race into this, and everyone knows about the racist history of America. Your comment was off-topic and did not further the conversation in any meaningful way, except set a tone of condescension towards this person's generation. Stop it.
- arprocter 11y ago
  It makes me wonder if lacking bigger problems to focus on dealing with (competing with the Soviets, overthrowing the Axis powers) is the reason people create these non-issues to fight about instead
yarou 11y ago
We are headed to a dystopian state so quickly it's not even remotely funny anymore. The only thing I will say is resist them - resist the status quo and fight back against authority. We can fight back with tools like cryptocurrency, or even secure messaging apps like Signal (and though end-to-end encryption is heavily criticized on here, it's a start). We can collectively become hackers that dismantle the corrupt institutions that have become so heavily entrenched in our society by engaging in these small initiatives.
vinceguidry 11y ago
I look at this as a sign of society evolving. Subtle emotional traumas exist, micro-aggressions exist. Way more things are harmful to children than we are really aware of. Mental health issues scale smoothly from 'nonexistent' to 'makes you completely nonfunctional' and can't be easily separated from 'ordinary' personality. Society was not-so-blissfully unaware of these aspects of life, this is the process of coming to awareness. You overreact out of confusion at first, but eventually you figure it out and move on to the next lesson. It's how society works, you think they didn't have breathless articles in the '50's bemoaning both the fears of the day and the overreactions to those fears?
- aklemm 11y ago
  I try to take your view day-to-day, but ultimately, it seems like we've veered well into overreaction territory rather than simply conscientious reactions to dangers.
- codingdave 11y ago
  I thought the article laid out nice examples where the "evolving" can be good in some ways, but harmful in others. I know teenagers who have never been left alone. I know people graduating high school who have never independently taken care of themselves. And even on an independence scale, when I was 18, my friends and I could pretty much survive on our own in wilderness situations just fine, and we did - heading into the woods and mountains to explore almost every day. Nowadays that would get you on reality TV shows. Sure, things are safer now... As long as we all stick inside the little boxes society provides for us. But that is not always what is actually best for us.
- weberc2 11y ago
  The more concerning thing is that these words have broadened in definition such that when someone is accused of being prejudiced, people think KKK and not "someone who committed a microaggression". Further, these sensitivities disproportionately affect certain groups; we're very concerned about microaggressions toward certain groups, but hate toward other groups seems to be on the increase.
pron 11y ago
I think this has much to do with the US infatuation with, and fear of, litigation (as well as the relationship between expert witnesses and the court system) as any psychological phenomenon. In other words, I think the explanation is sociological more than psychological.
coldcode 11y ago
Because we have so many lawyers.
- Splines 11y ago
  Expanding your point further, because I agree with you in that the CYA mentality is everywhere. Whenever I see news about something bad happening, inevitably it turns into a blame game. What did someone not do? The case of the mom getting arrested (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arrested-for-letting-a-9-year-old-play-at-the-park-alone/374436/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arrested...) infuriates me. The person who called the police (and, really, everyone involved "up the chain") was faced with a decision: A.) Do nothing B.) Call the police (escalate upwards in authority) C.) Do something else, like find a safer place for the child to be, if you truly believe the park to be dangerous. A is free, but comes with the non-zero cost of being "the person who did nothing" when something bad happens to the girl (unlikely, but possible). B is cheap (you need to hang around for the police and all that entails), but is an easy way to attain the moral high ground. C is expensive and really you'd be no better off than if you did B. These three options exist for everyone involved, and they escalated upwards until they found someone who had enough power to do C cheaply enough that they didn't need to do B. That involved taking the child away. Passing the buck upwards is easy to do and seldom will someone come after you for it. I don't have a good answer for how this can be solved, because I can't say with good conscience that it is never the right thing to do - there are obvious cases where it is. I also find the amusing that my thoughts on "how would I make this right?" lead to "that mother should sue the state for lost wages or something". Clearly we have too many lawyers.
lr4444lr 11y ago
This article is a bit muddled in several issues. Important and not mentioned, though by no means authoritative, is the enduring "negative liberty" principle and its enormous impact on the American ethos from its founding. An big reason a lot of this "concept creep" makes us uncomfortable is that the "right to be free from harm or negligence causing harm" is coming into diametric opposition with other people's right of expression, movement, and property. For an article that goes so far as to evoke Aristotle, I'm surprised no mention of Locke or JS Mill was made.
alanwatts 11y ago
This is hardly a phenomenon that is limited to the arbitrary boundaries of the US. This "sensitivity" in my estimation is due to the new found interconnectedness of consciousness via the internet. As Marshall McLuhan wrote many decades ago: "The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums." "The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations." Go look at YouTube comments and you'll see what he meant. Never before has the world, with all its highly variable levels of intelligence, ignorance, and ideologies, been thrust into a "room" together and "forced" to listen to other opinions like it has with the internet. "In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner."
spriggan3 11y ago
Interesting article .... until the Bush blaming at the end which totally irrelevant to the matter. Both parties are equally to blame for playing identity politics and encouraging the "us vs them" mentality in US.
nabla9 11y ago
First writers started to use leaving the toilet seat up as a plot device to generate drama in sitcoms. Then others started to write light hearted articles in women magazines telling women how to deal with man who leaves toilet seat up. Now we have number of people who think it's something that can be reason to have a heated argument. My theory is that we are living in society where people take cues on how to deal with everyday issues from media, social media and written word instead of their community and social environment. We look at the Rorschach inkblot and there is always some group who knows how it makes you feel and how those feelings are responsibility of others if you are willing to listen. Our culture is becoming neurotic. edit: Google n-gram viewer for "toilet seat up": https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=+toilet+seat+up&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctoilet%20seat%20up%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=+toilet+seat+u...
- wccrawford 11y ago
  I will never forget having this argument and her reason being, "I might accidentally sit on it with the seat up." Yeah, that's gross and disconcerting, I'm sure. My response was that it was her responsibility to make sure she didn't sit on anything gross, and she should be looking where she's sitting anyhow. My solution was to put the lid down with the seat. This is cleaner, looks nicer, stops the flush from spewing grossness into the room, and does not solve her problem at all. Yeah, I was a little petty about it. Of course, then I got complaints about the lid being down. I refused to budge on my position, and eventually she stopped trying to argue about it. My take on the whole situation is that as we solved some really big problems, people needed a reason to complain or feel afraid. We went from worrying about dying constantly to worrying about getting a cold or totally treatable diseases. We're unable to stop worrying about something, and so things get blown out of proportion. We're obsessed with preventing everything that's viewed as negative.
oli5679 11y ago
Individualistic, freedom/harm based moral thinking is far from ubiquitous. This can lead to libertarian leaning people (like me and many members of Hacker News) mischaracterising the world-view of many conservatives/liberals who have different moral beliefs to us and having discussions with them which are not constructive. Johnathan Haidt has some interesting ideas on the topic. The idea that many people value stability/group loyalty/ideas of sanctity is often missed by many responses to moral issues on this site when people correctly state 'I can't see who is being harmed here' or 'I'm uncomfortable with people's freedom being restricted' in response to the day's moral issue. Ultimately, many/most people have a bunch of sacred beliefs/narratives that they do not objectively challenge when faced with new evidence (instead they act like defence lawyers trying to reframe/discredit the information).
xlm1717 11y ago
Excellent piece here. Does a great job of demonstrating "concept creep" from both liberal and conservative ideologies, and of describing how we got to this situation in the first place. The bullet points towards the end summarize the article perfectly: >“by applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective elements into them, concept creep may release a flood of unjustified accusations and litigation, as well as excessive and disproportionate enforcement regimes.” >“...concept creep can produce a kind of semantic dilution. If a concept expands to encompass less extreme phenomena... then its prototypical meaning is likely to shift... If trauma, for example, ceases to refer exclusively to terrifying events that are outside normal human experience, and is applied to less severe and more prevalent stresses, it will come to be seen in a more benign light.” >“...by increasing the range of people who are defined as moral patients—people worthy of moral concern, based on their perceived capacity to suffer and be harmed—it risks reducing the range of people who see themselves as capable of moral agency.” There is a tendency “for more and more people to see themselves as victims who are defined by their suffering, vulnerability, and innocence...The flip-side of this expanding sense of victimhood would be a typecast assortment of moral villains: abusers, bullies, bigots, and traumatizers.” >Expanding mental disorder “can pathologize normal experiences, generate over-diagnosis and over-treatment, and engender a sense of diminished agency.” Of all these, I find the tendency towards victimhood particularly troubling. We're seeing a generation of kids growing up blaming everyone but themselves for their problems, and demanding that someone else change to solve their problems instead of learning the resiliency needed to survive and thrive. Couple that with the tribalism of said victims setting one group against the other, and we're setting ourselves up for civil unrest in the near future.

131 points by aestetix 11y ago

> like saying the word “fútbol” instead of soccer Hispanic folks: Is this in fact a thing that feels alienating to you? If so, would you be willing to explain why? It is the first time I've heard about it so I'd just like to confirm that Conor Friedersdorf is referring to a real thing.

sho 11y ago
The author appears to be referring to a previous piece: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of-victimhood-culture/404794/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise...
- afarrell 11y ago
  Huh. That email exchange is actually a pretty good example of concept creep as applied to the concept of cultural appropriation.
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    So remind me again who invented Football (Soccer) by the offended persons rules those of us form the UK should be offended by the appropriation of Football :-) Sorry of course this is Association football we are talking about and not Rugby :-)
gaius 11y ago
Football is the British English word for soccer, a game that is played with your foot on the ball obviously. I've never heard of anyone finding "futbol" to be cultural appropriation of that.
pessimizer 11y ago
I'm not Hispanic, and don't care at all about soccer, but I imagine it would be aggravating as hell. I'm black, and when white people call me bro, or start speaking in dialect - I honestly start to hate them. For cultural reasons, when a lot of white Americans are talking about getting fighting and getting angry, or partying and having fun, relaxing and being lazy, flirting or getting laid, or one-upping people or hustling for money, they drop into a black dialect (and an entire stereotypical affect) for a moment. Even upper-middle class black people do it sometimes - Oprah is famous for it. I spoke like that growing up on the South Side of Chicago, my grandparents speak like that, and many of the people I love speak like that. People are dropping into dialect because, deep down, they think of black people as a bunch of violent, lazy, partying, horny grifters - and find it very amusing and black of themselves when they experience anger, laziness, joy, sexual arousal, or pride at their own craftiness. This is the reason why most pop music is delivered in black dialect. It reminds me of what they think of me, and my family, although they would never acknowledge it to me, and many wouldn't acknowledge it to themselves. To be clear, I'm not a fan of oversensitivity and preciousness, or "microaggressions" or cultural studies departments, or theory-theory psychology in general, which I think is just secular religion. But someone dropping into dialect when they talk to you is not all that subtle. I could see Hispanic people feeling stereotyped by soccer stuff. Soccer is English, it's called "football" in English, so what's this urge to drop into Spanish dialect all of a sudden? Do you drop into dialect when you talk to your white friends? If you do, why? edit: And I don't mean to imply that white people don't get treated like this - I hear people drop into an Italian-American affect a lot when they're talking about being criminals, or being rapey.
- existencebox 11y ago
  Honest question, since I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to ask this, but I'm curious where that line sits for you? To provide context while answering something you asked, I grew up in philly. I went to a city high school. I have (and most of the other white kids I associated with have) some parts of a philly accent, which I'm very aware I revert to when I, as you say, start partying/relaxing, but in my case it's because I'm relaxing the forced inflection of my speech, and my more natural way of talking comes out. The same thing happens if I talk to someone with a similar east coast manner of speech out of a natural desire to express similarity and establish comfort with the conversation partner. (to answer your, I imagine somewhat rhetorical, question about "do you drop into dialect... white friends", since the above is a thing sans-race) I can tell you authoritatively, although you may not believe me (or say I should stop anyway, which would beg other questions on my part), that there's no "deep opinion" of black culture or speech in that, in fact, the highschool was unfortunately VERY self segregating and most of the white kids didn't have enough interaction to form deep opinions. (which is part of why I'd be curious to ask now about the accent thing, since I know that ALL of the kids there, race aside, picked it up to some degree but it was never something that was discussed, since we just... didn't really talk.) I say this largely in the hope, if we ever talk and I accidentally let that show, that you would think better of me for it and not start to hate :) (the world already has plenty of that, as you point out from the insinuations you identify)
mooseburger 11y ago
I'm Puerto Rican. I've never heard of someone being offended at an American saying futbol. Then again, we say soccer over here, unlike all other Spanish speaking nations. As for myself, I just think it would be silly to hear. I assume an American who does that would merely be trying to be accommodating.
spriggan3 11y ago
Most of the world calls soccer Football so this is yet again an american only issue. I can't believe someone would be "triggered" by such a silly thing, it's like some people are actively seeking outrage for a reason I don't know. To get popular on social medias? and get many likes on Twitter? to feel like they are victim of racism every second? or just to get attention, I really don't understand.
gus_massa 11y ago
Hi from Argentina! The land of Maradona and Messi, but not Pele. I find strange and slightly annoying that they say "soccer" instead of "football", but I consider that a part of the strange quirks of en-us, like calling "America" to "USA" or writing "January 1st" instead of "1st of January". But I'd nerved consider any of that like a type of offense or micro/macro aggression. All that paragraph is very suspicious. For example, the reactions to the tequila sombreros and the Trump chalk signs were exaggerated by the press coverage: http://www.snopes.com/bowdoin-mini-sombrero-controversy/ http://www.snopes.com/bowdoin-mini-sombrero-controversy/ http://www.snopes.com/emory-students-trump-graffiti/ http://www.snopes.com/emory-students-trump-graffiti/

petewailes 11y ago

I suspect a large part of this is down to 1. People defaulting to the nuclear option constantly, in their reactions, and 2. People not wanting to accept that some issues are complex, and that a blanket approach doesn't work. The latter of these is the real issue. People love being outraged over the lack of women in STEM fields, and how those that are are treated, but few people talk about the lack of men in teaching it nursing roles. The former is seen as "a problem" and the latter isn't. I'd argue that both are issues, but one is something that political groups get behind and the other isn't. As a different example, you could look at the issue of badger culls it fox hunting in the UK. The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute. It's the infantilism of understanding; people wanting things to be black and white and easy to understand, where pretty much everything contentious, when you dig, is complex. I suspect a lot of the blame for this is a combination of the short article and news industries, giving people the feeling of being informed without any of the substance to back it up, and the increasing politicisation of issues, where people hold views for reasons more tribal than rational. Once you start believing that issues are simple, it's easy to fit everything into that framework and to wander round being outraged or offended or insulted by things. Because you can read into life whatever you want.

estefan 11y ago
The problem is that we're meant to believe everyone's opinions are equally valid. Empirically, it seems to me, some people are just manifestly stupid and/or incompetent.
- manyxcxi 11y ago
  > some people are just manifestly stupid and/or incompetent Some are. Even more are just plain incorrect for all the many reasons human beings are incorrect. At least in the states, we've spent the last 30 years making people believe that simply because you feel it is so, it must be. That's got to be a huge factor in the degradation of discourse in the same time period- if instead of coming from the classical position of some attempted mutual understanding, people are essentially following their own religion of self. If what I feel is always correct, then you disagreeing with me means that you are wrong. Thus, I can't listen to you anymore or even attempt to see where you're coming from. This leads to the same types of responses you see when you are saying things that might make someone doubt their religion. You get the hyperbolic, emotional, even physical responses that go nowhere. Now look at the outbreak of safe spaces, refusing to let people speak that have a non-popular opinion, etc.

Shivetya 11y ago

a tyranny of the minority backed up by politicians, government appointees, and judges, all who realize their power by separating people into groups to play off each other. Each new victim class further increases the power of government, the loss of privacy, and worse the loss of community and seeds of distrust and anger are set to drive people into different camps. when the individual becomes so important that community suffers we have our priorities wrong.

ska 11y ago
This seems a bit off base to me. For at at least some of the cases discussed in the article, there is nothing minority about it at all. For example, the social pressure to disallow children's independence is by far the majority position now, as far as I can see. The "free range kids" folks and similar represent a minority that gets a lot of social disapprobation for wanting their kids to have the same sort of freedoms that were common place 25 years ago. Vague and unsupported concerns about "safety" are usually hand waved about. What you say may be in play for some of these issues, but I suspect it is far too blunt a tool to truly explain much of it.
- throwanem 11y ago
  Do you mean "opprobrium"? Approbation is praise.
  - ska 11y ago
    indeed I did mean disapprobation, thanks!
apalmer 11y ago
This seems to be a commonly expressed concept, the idea that in large this phenomenon is strongly either caused or encouraged by a 'conspiracy' of the government.
- yarou 11y ago
  How about multinational corporations that answer to nobody and are staffed by the top psychologists in the world to subtly manipulate the masses? Is that a "conspiracy" in your eyes or merely reality?

imgabe 11y ago

There seems to be a spectrum between whether you consider your feelings mutable and the world absolute or whether your feelings are absolute and the world needs to change to accommodate them. The ever-expanding harm movement leans heavily towards the latter. If something makes you feel bad, then it must inherently be bad and must be changed. There doesn't seem to be any consideration that maybe it's your feelings that need to change, or even any acknowledgement that you can change how you feel about something. It's definitely not always one or other other, but to be constantly at the mercy of whatever circumstances happen to exist at the moment seems like a very difficult way to live one's life.

ansible 11y ago

They talk about the influence of academics, and yet we (as a people) seem to successfully ignore things like global warming... I don't know if that explains it. We have, indeed, become a nation of wimps, with little common sense. We fear now, much more than we used to. When I was a kid, we feared the red menace (Communism), but that didn't stop us from moving forward, or adhering to our ideals. Our independent spirit as a people. I don't understand what is happening to us, but I think what they are talking about in the article is a reaction to the shift in public attitudes, not the cause of it.

maxerickson 11y ago
McCarthyism happened during a red scare. Fortunately things moved forward, but things weren't very ideal for a minute there.
Kristine1975 11y ago
>Our independent spirit as a people. Except for those pesky blacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
- benbenolson 11y ago
  Geez, this is exactly what the commenter is talking about. Nobody brought race into this, and everyone knows about the racist history of America. Your comment was off-topic and did not further the conversation in any meaningful way, except set a tone of condescension towards this person's generation. Stop it.
arprocter 11y ago
It makes me wonder if lacking bigger problems to focus on dealing with (competing with the Soviets, overthrowing the Axis powers) is the reason people create these non-issues to fight about instead

yarou 11y ago

We are headed to a dystopian state so quickly it's not even remotely funny anymore. The only thing I will say is resist them - resist the status quo and fight back against authority. We can fight back with tools like cryptocurrency, or even secure messaging apps like Signal (and though end-to-end encryption is heavily criticized on here, it's a start). We can collectively become hackers that dismantle the corrupt institutions that have become so heavily entrenched in our society by engaging in these small initiatives.

vinceguidry 11y ago

I look at this as a sign of society evolving. Subtle emotional traumas exist, micro-aggressions exist. Way more things are harmful to children than we are really aware of. Mental health issues scale smoothly from 'nonexistent' to 'makes you completely nonfunctional' and can't be easily separated from 'ordinary' personality. Society was not-so-blissfully unaware of these aspects of life, this is the process of coming to awareness. You overreact out of confusion at first, but eventually you figure it out and move on to the next lesson. It's how society works, you think they didn't have breathless articles in the '50's bemoaning both the fears of the day and the overreactions to those fears?

aklemm 11y ago
I try to take your view day-to-day, but ultimately, it seems like we've veered well into overreaction territory rather than simply conscientious reactions to dangers.
codingdave 11y ago
I thought the article laid out nice examples where the "evolving" can be good in some ways, but harmful in others. I know teenagers who have never been left alone. I know people graduating high school who have never independently taken care of themselves. And even on an independence scale, when I was 18, my friends and I could pretty much survive on our own in wilderness situations just fine, and we did - heading into the woods and mountains to explore almost every day. Nowadays that would get you on reality TV shows. Sure, things are safer now... As long as we all stick inside the little boxes society provides for us. But that is not always what is actually best for us.
weberc2 11y ago
The more concerning thing is that these words have broadened in definition such that when someone is accused of being prejudiced, people think KKK and not "someone who committed a microaggression". Further, these sensitivities disproportionately affect certain groups; we're very concerned about microaggressions toward certain groups, but hate toward other groups seems to be on the increase.

pron 11y ago

I think this has much to do with the US infatuation with, and fear of, litigation (as well as the relationship between expert witnesses and the court system) as any psychological phenomenon. In other words, I think the explanation is sociological more than psychological.

coldcode 11y ago

Because we have so many lawyers.

Splines 11y ago
Expanding your point further, because I agree with you in that the CYA mentality is everywhere. Whenever I see news about something bad happening, inevitably it turns into a blame game. What did someone not do? The case of the mom getting arrested (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arrested-for-letting-a-9-year-old-play-at-the-park-alone/374436/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arrested...) infuriates me. The person who called the police (and, really, everyone involved "up the chain") was faced with a decision: A.) Do nothing B.) Call the police (escalate upwards in authority) C.) Do something else, like find a safer place for the child to be, if you truly believe the park to be dangerous. A is free, but comes with the non-zero cost of being "the person who did nothing" when something bad happens to the girl (unlikely, but possible). B is cheap (you need to hang around for the police and all that entails), but is an easy way to attain the moral high ground. C is expensive and really you'd be no better off than if you did B. These three options exist for everyone involved, and they escalated upwards until they found someone who had enough power to do C cheaply enough that they didn't need to do B. That involved taking the child away. Passing the buck upwards is easy to do and seldom will someone come after you for it. I don't have a good answer for how this can be solved, because I can't say with good conscience that it is never the right thing to do - there are obvious cases where it is. I also find the amusing that my thoughts on "how would I make this right?" lead to "that mother should sue the state for lost wages or something". Clearly we have too many lawyers.

lr4444lr 11y ago

This article is a bit muddled in several issues. Important and not mentioned, though by no means authoritative, is the enduring "negative liberty" principle and its enormous impact on the American ethos from its founding. An big reason a lot of this "concept creep" makes us uncomfortable is that the "right to be free from harm or negligence causing harm" is coming into diametric opposition with other people's right of expression, movement, and property. For an article that goes so far as to evoke Aristotle, I'm surprised no mention of Locke or JS Mill was made.

alanwatts 11y ago

This is hardly a phenomenon that is limited to the arbitrary boundaries of the US. This "sensitivity" in my estimation is due to the new found interconnectedness of consciousness via the internet. As Marshall McLuhan wrote many decades ago: "The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums." "The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations." Go look at YouTube comments and you'll see what he meant. Never before has the world, with all its highly variable levels of intelligence, ignorance, and ideologies, been thrust into a "room" together and "forced" to listen to other opinions like it has with the internet. "In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner."

spriggan3 11y ago

Interesting article .... until the Bush blaming at the end which totally irrelevant to the matter. Both parties are equally to blame for playing identity politics and encouraging the "us vs them" mentality in US.

nabla9 11y ago

First writers started to use leaving the toilet seat up as a plot device to generate drama in sitcoms. Then others started to write light hearted articles in women magazines telling women how to deal with man who leaves toilet seat up. Now we have number of people who think it's something that can be reason to have a heated argument. My theory is that we are living in society where people take cues on how to deal with everyday issues from media, social media and written word instead of their community and social environment. We look at the Rorschach inkblot and there is always some group who knows how it makes you feel and how those feelings are responsibility of others if you are willing to listen. Our culture is becoming neurotic. edit: Google n-gram viewer for "toilet seat up": https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=+toilet+seat+up&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctoilet%20seat%20up%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=+toilet+seat+u...

wccrawford 11y ago
I will never forget having this argument and her reason being, "I might accidentally sit on it with the seat up." Yeah, that's gross and disconcerting, I'm sure. My response was that it was her responsibility to make sure she didn't sit on anything gross, and she should be looking where she's sitting anyhow. My solution was to put the lid down with the seat. This is cleaner, looks nicer, stops the flush from spewing grossness into the room, and does not solve her problem at all. Yeah, I was a little petty about it. Of course, then I got complaints about the lid being down. I refused to budge on my position, and eventually she stopped trying to argue about it. My take on the whole situation is that as we solved some really big problems, people needed a reason to complain or feel afraid. We went from worrying about dying constantly to worrying about getting a cold or totally treatable diseases. We're unable to stop worrying about something, and so things get blown out of proportion. We're obsessed with preventing everything that's viewed as negative.

oli5679 11y ago

Individualistic, freedom/harm based moral thinking is far from ubiquitous. This can lead to libertarian leaning people (like me and many members of Hacker News) mischaracterising the world-view of many conservatives/liberals who have different moral beliefs to us and having discussions with them which are not constructive. Johnathan Haidt has some interesting ideas on the topic. The idea that many people value stability/group loyalty/ideas of sanctity is often missed by many responses to moral issues on this site when people correctly state 'I can't see who is being harmed here' or 'I'm uncomfortable with people's freedom being restricted' in response to the day's moral issue. Ultimately, many/most people have a bunch of sacred beliefs/narratives that they do not objectively challenge when faced with new evidence (instead they act like defence lawyers trying to reframe/discredit the information).

xlm1717 11y ago

Excellent piece here. Does a great job of demonstrating "concept creep" from both liberal and conservative ideologies, and of describing how we got to this situation in the first place. The bullet points towards the end summarize the article perfectly: >“by applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective elements into them, concept creep may release a flood of unjustified accusations and litigation, as well as excessive and disproportionate enforcement regimes.” >“...concept creep can produce a kind of semantic dilution. If a concept expands to encompass less extreme phenomena... then its prototypical meaning is likely to shift... If trauma, for example, ceases to refer exclusively to terrifying events that are outside normal human experience, and is applied to less severe and more prevalent stresses, it will come to be seen in a more benign light.” >“...by increasing the range of people who are defined as moral patients—people worthy of moral concern, based on their perceived capacity to suffer and be harmed—it risks reducing the range of people who see themselves as capable of moral agency.” There is a tendency “for more and more people to see themselves as victims who are defined by their suffering, vulnerability, and innocence...The flip-side of this expanding sense of victimhood would be a typecast assortment of moral villains: abusers, bullies, bigots, and traumatizers.” >Expanding mental disorder “can pathologize normal experiences, generate over-diagnosis and over-treatment, and engender a sense of diminished agency.” Of all these, I find the tendency towards victimhood particularly troubling. We're seeing a generation of kids growing up blaming everyone but themselves for their problems, and demanding that someone else change to solve their problems instead of learning the resiliency needed to survive and thrive. Couple that with the tribalism of said victims setting one group against the other, and we're setting ourselves up for civil unrest in the near future.