The Coddling of the American Mind. How good intentions and Bad Ideas are setting up a generation for failure by Greg Lukianoff Jonathan Haidt.

This is an extraordinary book. It is an analysis of the problems in US university campuses, of progressive, unsafe ideas, how and why they might have started, and how they can be improved.

The authors define 3 Untruths which are imposed on young people and which are at the root of their unrealistic ideologies and mental problems:

The Untruth of Fragility 

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning 

The Untruth of Us versus Them 

The authors propose 6 explanatory threads:

1.The rising of Political Polarisation and cross party animosity of US politic 

2.Rising levels of teen anxiety and depression 

3.Changes in Parenting Practices 

4.The Loss of Free Play and unsupervised risk-taking 

5.The growth of campus bureaucracy and expansion of its protective mission 6.Increasing passion for justice, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires.

My take: US mid-class iGen kids (born 1995 and after) were raised in ultra-safe environments, not allowed free play or to take risks, made to believe that they were never safe, always fragile and in need of parental supervision. Add to that the negative effects of social media, which these kids started using in their teens and the lack of face to face socialisation.

When they started college, around 2013, the time when all these problems started, they brought with them their believes and so the ideology expanded. For them, words are violence. Problematic ideas need to be cancelled or else, they resort to what they call self-defence which in fact is real violence. Anyway there is much more in the book. Read it if you are interested.