I begin this fourth essay in our Resilience series with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words from Self-Reliance.

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.  Accept the place that divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events…we must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny, not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.”

Emerson’s self-reliance was neither selfish nor solipsistic.  He knew that all of us have a destiny in our own social realms; to find it, we must transcend fear and cowardice.  Once we do, we become “majors” who leave our protected corner to bravely guide a revolution that is definable by the actions we take to hold off chaos and darkness.  The courage of our revolution is driven by self-trust from which we can resiliently submit to highest purpose, connect completely with one another, and bring our genius to the world.

Emerson was a quintessential American responding to what he saw as a trend of resilience deficiency in people of his time.  His transcendentalism was not an ethereal philosophy; rather, a gritty cry into democracy for everyone to join the values of tolerance and truth.  As I’ve done in the previous three essays in this series, I will speak to the American experience here, but I know that much of what I explore exists elsewhere.  I also believe our culture is resilient in many ways today, yet this comment from a school principal and a discussion that follows reveal something else, too:

“When I was growing up, my parents assumed life would not come easy for me,” Javier, 42, told me.  “I wasn’t allowed entertainment until I did all my work.  My mom, dad, and Nana (my grandmother who also raised me) rarely let me give up or whine (well, not too much!), because they wanted me to succeed.  I feel like we’re living in a different world now,” Javier continued.  “I don’t think it’s just some families, but American culture right now is also keeping us from raising resilient children.  I know this is a huge statement, but I wonder what you think.  Is ‘American Culture’, whatever that really is, creating too little resilience in kids?”

 

The Uncomfortable Phenomenon

 

Javier came up to talk with me after my keynote at our 2019 Summer Training Institute.  His assistant principal, Emily, a woman around the same age, joined us moments later.  A conversation that began with them spread to others in the space we held near the book table.

“It used to be you had to earn an accolade,” Emily said. “I don’t know if it’s because of my family background, Korean American, but kids had to do the hard work and take the failures along the way.  Today, though, I think children are told they will succeed no matter what they do.  They are provided trophies for merely participating.  They are being rescued from being ‘uncomfortable’ not just in some situations but in too many.”

Before I could ask her to specify, Javier echoed her point.   “How can adults telling children they will succeed at anything help children in the long run?  How can trying to rescue everyone from ‘feeling uncomfortable’ build grit?  My life in an immigrant family (Mexican, Colombian, American) was not easy nor comfortable a lot of the time, but the hard times made me stronger and clearer as a person.”

“But we’re not talking about sexual abuse, obviously,” Emily said.  “That kind of ‘uncomfortable’ is important to recognize.  What Javier and I object to—and your keynote got us talking with each other about this at lunch–is the use of word ‘uncomfortable’ in other settings like on college campuses.”

“I read your book The Minds of Girls,” Javier agreed.  “Emmie and I think the ‘uncomfortable’ phenomenon hurts families, corporations, colleges much more than people realize.”

 

“Uncomfortable” as Lens into Culture

 

In three previous essays in this series, we explored the science of resilience (on www.gurianinstitute.com click the News page to find these essays).  We looked at how the human brain needs opposing force to build its psychological immune system; how, when we provide challenge and resistance to our growing children, resilience grows, and thus, the likelihood of present and future success and happiness.  We looked at imperfect ways that previous nurturing systems promoted obstacles, disturbances, and discomfort during childhood; we noted that some parents and others abused children in the past, but most did not.   Things have changed in some good ways from past family, school, and college life, we noted, but also, in some ways, our children are now set up for lack of resilience, immaturity as adults, and psychological and physical problems in the long term.

“To me, college campuses are an epicenter of this change,” a new voice in our gathering, a teacher around 35 years-old, Candice, said.   “At my alma mater, a speaker was cancelled last week because the administration thought he might make some of the students uncomfortable.”  She lifted quotes marks into the air.  “He probably would do that for a few students, but his information and perspective were important for college age kids to learn, and the fact is, most of the students wouldn’t have been uncomfortable at all.  Cancelling him out might have protected someone from discomfort but robbed the whole student body of new and challenging thinking.”

Seven people had now gathered.  Standing next to Candice, Latisha, an engineer in her late thirties, agreed with her friend.  “That’s how selective ‘discomfort’ is today, right?  If I say I might become uncomfortable, my discomfort is more important than anything else going on.  The ‘microaggressions’ industry has emerged around the idea that a microaggression is a form of violence, of trauma.  My division at work just paid $30,000.00 to a speaker who talked about this.  To me, whichever political spectrum you belong to, ‘discomfort’ is a word controlling too many resources by inflating itself into trauma.”

Another woman in her sixties, Erin, told us she was an attorney.  “I see this all the time.  Raising ‘discomfort’ and ‘uncomfortable’ to ‘trauma’ trivializes and distracts us from real trauma. I know we need to elevate it to argue over the law sometimes, but I don’t like it for kids.  I think we should throw out ‘discomfort’ for pretty much everything except for sexual abuse or harassment.”  She got some head nods on that and continued, “Before we cancel someone, we should make the potentially uncomfortable person show us how they are experiencing actual trauma.  They generally won’t be able to, so I think they should go back to engaging in social interactions and reasonable debate rather than isolating ourselves and our kids from challenges.”

By now we had more than a dozen people gathered.  A newcomer to the discussion, a man who did not share his name or profession, said, “I think that’s right:  We should assume every workplace, home, or school has some discomfort in it and keep going forward.  We shouldn’t assume people are fragile victims and other people should be blamed as oppressors.   Oppression is real and we all know it but that’s not what we mean here–being uncomfortable isn’t oppression.”

A new woman, Celia, said, “But let me play devil’s advocate:  you mentioned sexual abuse, so let’s say the speaker at the college is going to talk about sexual abuse.  Let’s say that discussion could trigger a woman (or man) in the audience who has experienced sexual abuse or rape trauma?  Doesn’t the administration of the university have to take into account that person’s potential feelings of past trauma being triggered?”  She looked over to the attorney, who did not answer right away as another person said, “Which is why the admin sets up a safe room, you mean?”

“A safe room, yes, or maybe even cancel the speaker, since we’re saying sexual discomfort should be avoided.”

Emily, who began this conversation with Javier, answered immediately.

“If the speaker is a pedophile or an Asian hater or Anti-Semite or racist or something like that, they should not be invited or they should get cancelled, but beyond that, No, not even in this case, because to me, discomfort is not a feeling to protect people from (unless it is actually from being abused) because feeling uncomfortable helps people deal with hard things.  I mean, like, if you’ve experienced abuse trauma your memory might get triggered by the feeling of discomfort, but that’s a good thing.”

“That’s sounds harsh,” another person said.

“Is it, really?  Say the lecturer references rape:  shouldn’t the person who feels triggered by a memory use the triggering as motivation to get counseling?  I have been traumatized but I don’t want to avoid anything that might make me uncomfortable.  I want to embrace discomfort.  Help me out, Michael, you talked about this in your lecture,” she turned to me.

In my keynote, I mentioned The Stone Boys, my novel about two teen boys who had been sexually abused, became friends later, then battle toward different destinies.  I wrote the book because of my own sexual abuse trauma as a boy and because I wanted others to talk about male sexual abuse openly so that we can better protect our children.

“Yes,” I said now, “my childhood trauma does get triggered sometimes in me at times, but as a survivor I agree with you that this kind of triggering—the kind that should be an opportunity for a person to keep working through their trauma–is a good thing, not a bad thing.  The feelings of pain signal me to reach out to my counselor, friends, and family.”

“I agree,” the attorney said.  “We have all had trauma and we respond differently at different times.  We feel sad or angry or paralyzed or we deny the trauma or just keep trying to make good choices through the trauma.  The thing we should not do is isolate ourselves so that we don’t feel discomfort.”

“I think you’re saying,” a new voice, Tyrell, summarized, “it’s good not bad that a speaker or professor reminds someone in college of their own past trauma, or that they were a victim?  Even this discomfort is potentially a good thing.  So the concept of free speech should still be very important.”

“In most cases, yes,” I responded.  “We shouldn’t try to remove opportunities for resilience building that may feel uncomfortable but also guide us to push beyond our own previous victimization.   When we remove, cancel, isolate others from us because they might make us uncomfortable, we are setting up an unhealthy future for everyone.”

Tyrell chuckled.  “This approach is just the opposite of the culture wars we’re seeing right now in corporations, college campuses, and in lots of schools.”

The group in full nodded agreement to that.

 

The Science of Resilience Resistance

 

Emerson would have loved this discussion.  These dozen people were “citizen scientists” analyzing culture from their own worldviews like Emerson did.  They agreed with a common perspective about trauma, violence, discomfort, victimization, identity-building, and resilience, thus this discussion did not get heated like some of its kind can do.  While these people represented only a small sample size and their science was limited, they held a perspective they thought “revolutionary” in our present academic and social media culture.

In the 2022 film Cyrano, (based on Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac) Roxanne says to Christian: “I cannot love a man who hides from his own nature.”  She wants her lover to face challenges, and choose feelings regarding love for her that are part and parcel of his being.  An empowered young woman, Roxanne also sets this same high-resilience standard for herself.

The group of people at our Summer Institute, like Roxanne, wanted our college students to discover their “true nature.”  They wanted Emerson’s self-reliance for these young people.  They sensed that true nature might remain undiscovered in culture-models that take away discomfort and, thus, rob the self of the “revolutionary” identity that can only be understood by adults resilient enough to choose it.

As we looked at how to nurture resilience in the third essay in this series, I promised to expand “resilience and resistance” beyond the sciences of immunology to include climate science.  Let’s do that now because it helps us understand how resilience-building can actually be removed from a system, at first subtly then obviously, and to the detriment of young people.

First, to define our terms: whether in immunological or in climate science, resilience denotes the ability of the organism or system to sustain itself beyond disturbance (for the body, a Covid virus, for an ecosystem, a drought or storm).  In immunological science, resistance connotes the body’s ability to function without significant internal trauma while under the stress of the disease.  I used myself as an example in our third essay:  when I was exposed to Covid the second time, I had immunity to a destructive dose because 1) I had experienced the virus previously and gained natural immunity from the virus itself; 2) I also obtained acquired immunity by being vaccinated and boosted, and 3) it is possible I have good genes for avoiding long haul Covid (gene research is being done right now on Covid and human genetics, so we can’t say anything for certain on this third option, yet).  Whatever the source, I became resilient in the face of Covid and resistant to significant Covid issues.

The Covid example represents the traditional immunological approach to resilience and resistance.  In urban climate science, we find another approach.  To learn more about the climate science I refer to here, check out “Shamsuddin, S., “Resilience resistance: the challenges and implications of urban resilience implementation,” Cities Journal, Vol 103, August 2020,  www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275119314210.)

Dr. Shamsuddin explains:

“In urban systems, resilience resistance refers to the process in which governance systems—through normal, everyday operations—develop barriers or hurdles to achieving resilience.  The barriers can take many forms, including organizational and psychological. These barriers…can erode the commitment of policymakers and leaders; lower the motivation of personnel charged with implementing policies; reduce the capacity of government agencies and non-governmental organizations to respond to needs; slow or impede progress toward policy goals; and ultimately reduce the capacity of cities to improve urban resilience.”

Dr. Shamsuddin continues, “One reason resilience resistance is a concern is that, like antibiotic resistance, it can lead to system wide problems.  Resilience resistance has the potential to affect the entire operations of an organization, including agenda setting, initiation, information gathering, decision making, and implementation.  Consequently, resistance can potentially reduce resilience to all types of threats, scales, or timeframes.”

Dr. Shasuddin notes six signs of resilience resistance:  fatigue, complacency, overconfidence, apathy, obstruction, and despondency.

 

The Neuroscience of Emotion-Reaction

 

With that model of resilience resistance in mind, let’s look at the prototypical college campus our group discussed.  You decide whether it might fit this model of resilience resistance.  I believe it does; first, because it allows students and others to claim to the governance system that “uncomfortable” means “violence,” which compels the governance system alter its every day operations to keep people away from potential triggering and trauma.

Second, while the governance system creates and inculcates new policies and practices to remove the discomfort, it also removes potential sources of resilience-building in students’ lives before they can ever happen.

Third, this means that emotion-choice-making (in which an individual chooses between feelings to ground his/her deliberate, reflective confrontation and reasonable action) is also removed from a child’s development as students are institutionally isolated from maturing situations.

Fourth, the “victim” stereotype and the “villain” scapegoat spread throughout the system; stereotypes and scapegoats do not nor have ever led to resilience building.  The system gradually reduces its choices at its most inchoate level by focusing its choice-making away from diversity and variety toward limited emotional options for students (generally fight/flight, rage/rejection).

Finally, fatigue, complacency, overconfidence, apathy, obstruction, and despondency set in for college students: obstruction and then overconfidence among those who have wielded the cancel knife institutionally; fatigue and despondency among those who are distressed by “victim” and “villain” but have no other option but to play along with the stereotypes and scapegoats; complacency and apathy among students who isolate to make sure they don’t get cancelled themselves, or dropout of the resilience resistant environment.

 

The Brain as Choice Maker

 

Your child’s–and your own–brain is at its best as a discernment system–a choice-maker.  Confronted with a thousand possibilities for feeling and thinking per day, the brain makes decisions and choices.   This neural process involves body, skin, and sense in interactions with the environment whose signals move through our sensory registers.  These register circuits in the brain help signals toward emotive centers in the mid-brain and decision-making centers in the frontal cortex; then, signals move down through the brain stem for action once the decisions have been made.

This choice-making, this discernment of reality is action of self-in-reality utilizing feeling life, choice, action, and language to make make human beings “more” than animal, i.e., human.   For optimal brain growth, the brain wants to follow its emotion choice-making process not only in everyday sensory experience but while feeling empathy, love, discomfort, and more.  The brain does not want to isolate or self-isolate unless it is living in constant fear.   It prefers self-reliance and resilience as protective measures.   It wants our nurturing environments–homes, schools, colleges, workplaces–to give us opportunity for the development of the brain’s protective measures and choice-making.

Neuroscientist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary of Hunter College has used college students to study the process.  Inducing discomfort and anxiety in them, he and his colleagues studied dopamine flow in their brains.   When students (and all of us) become uncomfortable, our brain kicks into mild anxiety mode with then stimulates dopamine (our reward chemical) into various parts of the brain.  The reward chemistry grows from the discomfort and stimulates us–the college students in his studies–to make decisions and choices that are functional and freeing.  In his fascinating book, Future Tense:  Why Anxiety is Good for You (Harper, 2022), Dr. Dennis-Tiwary provides a deep look into the brain’s emotion choice-making capability.  “We need to develop a new mindset about this misunderstood emotion,” he concludes.  “Anxiety can’t do its job unless it makes us uncomfortable.”  Our discomfort, too, makes us truly human.

This is true even in trauma situations, Dr. Dennis-Tiwary notes.   He suggests we take a moment to recall a time when we’ve been hurt or harmed.  Do you remember initial feelings like pain and even numbness, then perhaps your brain chose to set the trauma aside (denial) to let body/mind continue working, performing, serving others; and/or it chose to fight back against the person who hurt you (if a person did).  Then sometime later, you may have chosen to bring others–friends, family, physician, counselors–to help you heal and/or manage your trauma.  Throughout your trauma process, you might notice, the most empowering thing was your own power of choice—your own decision-making.   Your anxiety and discomfort–unless they became a severe anxiety disorder, which fits a more severe category of long-term internal experience–released dopamine in your brain as you problem-solved, forgave, thought things through, and acted toward healthy life.

 

Taking Options Away Creates Resilience Resistance

 

In listening to everyone in the small circle at the conference, I kept coming back to the difference between breaking the law (e.g., hate speech or sexual abuse/harassment) and “offending” someone.  I thought about comics and comedians; it used to be that if someone was offended by something a comedian said (Don Rickles, Chris Rock, Wanda Sykes, and many others comes to mind), that feeling of offense was chosen by the offended person.  The offended person had to manage those feelings to sift for gold in the offense, or dismiss the feeling of offense with an internal, “Oh well, I don’t fit that quip so I’m going to just smile and be resilient.”  Meanwhile, comedy flourished as it should flourish–a dopamine joy of laughter and social commentary.

The “I choose to be offended” approach to comedy existed in a time when “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me” was the social rule of the day.   We knew (better put, perhaps) this truth:  “Words might hurt, but I can choose whether to be hurt by them, and I can inspire myself to choose how to empower the self out of the hurt.”   Free speech was always considered an American right everywhere, including on college campuses.   Words were not trauma or violence.  Now, they are.  Words are now violence, they are trauma, a false equation to those of us who hope for resilience-building in ourselves, our children, and others.  One of our group said, “I know real trauma, and words are just not trauma.”  This person (and our whole group perhaps) would be seen as throwbacks in many parts of academe today.

Yet, despite that exceptions can always be noted for hate speech or clearly debasing words like k-ke or the n-word, isn’t it true from a neurochemical viewpoint that if words are going to derail you, that’s on you?  Don’t the college student who is offended by words need to realize the discomfort is a gift?  Another group member said, “If you’re offended, that’s on you–it’s not usually on the one who offended you.   If you’re offended, you have to meet the challenge, not blame or hide.”  Dr. Dennis-Tiwary’s research corroborates this concept by studying the utility of the discomfort and anxiety the offended person feels.  Once we see those feelings–and the journey of choices made in and through those feelings as a good thing for the brain–don’t we come back to the “throwback” position:  that being offended at a comedy club or a university is useful, good, and collaborative in the psyche of resilient self-development?

I think we do.  And I think we realize the danger of child isolation from the complexity of resilience-building.  We realize that a student living in 1) constant fear of others’ words/thoughts and 2) a default rage/blame defense setting supported by an institution should be anathema to child development.  We decide (I hope) to study colleges and academe as a whole; to see where they have become resilience resistant institutions that try to remove the potential to feel “offense” or “discomfort” or “microaggression.”   We study how that “support” of the student discourages choice-making in the brain thus deleting a whole matrix of resilience from child development.

 

Bullying Response as a Case Study in Resilience Resistance

 

How do you feel about all this?  You make choices based on your feelings.  You have the right to do so.  Your emerging adult children have that right.

Where is the the line you would draw in the sand between discomfort and real trauma, real violence?  This line will likely show real danger to you or your child on one side, then everything else that is not dangerous even if someone claims it is (though potentially uncomfortable) on the other.

When President Biden held a press conference about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (February 24, 2022), he looked into the camera and said, “We must stand up to bullies.”  Throughout the press conference, he detailed exactly how America would stand up to the bully Vladimir Putin.  As have many presidents over the decades, he listed choices we would make to handle a bully and spoke aloud what nearly everyone who is bullied feels while being bullied:  “I want to fight back.”

To find our line in the sand, let’s transfer Biden’s “fighting back” to the choice-making, maturation, and resilience-building in contemporary child development.  Children who are bullied have been taught for two generations not to fight back; instead, to seek adult help in managing the bullying; to build restorative justice; and to engage in anti-bullying campaigns.  These are all important and worthy.  But, too, in the world of children, not fighting back often leads to more bullying, more child isolation, more life for the child in constant fear.  One of the child’s best choices, to fight back, is considered wrong, dysfunctional, not a good option.

Those of us who were raised in previous generations remember a different American culture, one with greater focus on the “go ahead and fight back” tool for self-reliance and resilience-building (though fighting back on school grounds was not allowed unless supervised).  As a creature of this previous generation (I am 64), I see the present “it’s wrong to fight back” concept as emblematic of the resilience resistance we have built into child development systems over the last two generations.  Part of my reasoning is personal.  I was a bullied child—beaten up, called names, demeaned, and beaten up again.  In my era, we did not have restorative justice yet but I was taught, as kids are now, to get adult help if bullied and to join with friends who might help insulate me from being bullied.

But I was also taught to fight back.  Being free to fight back was a necessity for me given my low social status, physical weakness, and low self-esteem that all, often, made me a target of bullying no matter what adults or friends I begged to protect me.

An example:  When I was in seventh grade (1971), our family lived in Laramie, Wyoming.  I was bullied there by an older boy and his friends who did not like me as a Jew.  In one incident, the three boys pinned me down behind the bleachers and used pliers on my nose to see if they could stretch my “Jew-nose” even longer.  By any standards, I think we can agree this constituted significant bullying with an ethnic and religious hate element.  Because fighting back was considered a good option in Laramie at that time, our gym coach and the vice principal of the school brought me and the lead bully into the boys’ locker room one Friday afternoon.  The men told us to “duke it out,” which we did.  I got a black eye and bruised cheeks, but hit the other boy in the stomach so hard so many times he vomited.

This scenario would be illegal today and I am not suggesting it as school policy.  I use it to ask you to choose where the line is for you.  It did not encourage institutional resilience resistance–my choice-making was supported by the school; I was given an environment in which to fight safely; in this environment, I proved myself worthy, strong, and resilient.  After this fight, the bully stopped bullying me.  Within a week, he and I became cordial to one another–not best friends by any means, but no longer bully/bullied.

These gains accrued not from isolating the bully and me from one another nor from encouraging rage in either of us institutionally.  There was no twitter mob in which to conceal my fear while raging. There was no possibility of apathy or complacency either:  the bully was confronted up close, in real life, in real time.  I did not experience fatigue or obstruction:  choices about my own emotions had to be made within the context of my relationships with others, and I made them.  Once they were made, they became part of my true self.

Remembering this incident of boyhood, I taught my daughters (born 1990 and 1993) to get adult help if bullied, to talk to adults about it, to practice restorative justice, and to do all the things taught in the school’s anti-bullying curriculum, but I also taught them to fight back (though not on school grounds).  Gail and I took them to karate practice twice a week where they learned to survive and thrive.   In their Millennial childhoods “fighting back” was mainly verbal, but our daughters gained empowerment and resilience from knowing they were physically capable of proactive aggression if bullied–and would be supported in that resilience by their caregivers.

While anti-bullying programs and curricula used today are generally quite good for schools and children, they also include the resilience resistant academic construct that makes prosocial aggression like “fighting back” no longer healthy resilience-building but a line-cross into forbidden violence.   As such, while some resilience for the bullied children does occur in our present system, a lot of resilience does not.   Absent fighting back as a good option for the victim, some bullies keep bullying, and just as bad, many of our bullied children wonder what life could be like if they had the right to choose to fight back the way the president of a country can.

 

Regressive Social Norms That Mitigate Resilience (Norms We Think of As Progressive)

 

Each of us must struggle in childhood and adulthood; these struggles in large part will refine our true nature. Why shouldn’t we help our young people struggle as well as they can?

Where is the line for you?

Should our young people enhance victim identities or be challenged to make the complex choices between emotions that promote their self-reliance?

In some ways, our children’s America is a better America than Emerson’s or my own boyhood’s society, but in other crucial ways, doesn’t it languish in obstructionism, fatigue, apathy?  Our group at the conference wondered how we got here:   How did our parts of our culture, like academe, become resilience-resistant; become “not free”?  We joined together to identify key social norms developed in academe–and spread from there throughout our culture–that are regressive not progressive though we might talk about them as progressive.

From my viewpoint, they are regressive because they predate our human understanding of the kind of developmental neuroscience I have looked at with you in my work.  For me, neuroscience is a useful still point of the turning wheel.  What does not fit that science, ought to be looked at very carefully.

Regressive social norms often do not fit with good science.  Some of them are known to you already perhaps, appearing in The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Penguin, 2019).  Let me add this one from a neuroscience perspective:  emotion-choiceless-ness.   This regressive norm can be described by four institutional beliefs looped as infinite regression into a young person’s self.

Institutional Belief 1:  There are identities, groups, and “paradigms” (scapegoats) that overwhelm students so much, students/children can’t create their own feelings in response.  Rather, feelings are forced on children by the scapegoats.  Political labels usually denote who these scapegoats are-Left, Right, Progressives,Conservatives, Racists, White Supremacists, the Patriarchy, etc.

Institutional Belief 2: As children bullied and victimized in these oppressive systems, college students do not possess agency of self-reliant emotion, thought, or action because the force is too huge; instead, they need to have a sanitized environment in which they can isolate themselves from the scapegoats/stereotypes.

Institutional Belief 3:  To gain this institutional protection, identity must be elevated in the self via blame and shame of the “other” (group, person, stereotype, scapegoat).  Blaming and shaming is necessary because everyone is either victim or villain; better to be the former than the latter.

Institutional Belief 4:  Objective standards do not exist anymore for choice-making about what is harmful.  Any discomfort should be considered violence and/or anything the child claims to be harmful is harmful, including and especially the “discomfort” and “offense” forced upon the self by the omnipresent scapegoat.

Number 4 leads back to number 1 and everything starts again in a loop.

Unfortunately, once the scapegoat is established, individual emotion-choice–the root of actual social change–is not required; only required are projection of the scapegoat and blame of the oppression paradigm.  While racism exists, hate exists, systemic inequity exist and must be tackled, the regressive use of psychological projection of scapegoats–a utility the field of psychology has determined mainly useless to psychological growth–dominates academe.   Take the speaker on sexual abuse who was cancelled from the college:  tacit or explicit blame of that speaker led to antisepsis of the college environment.  Self-reliance and resilience in our young people were not assumed nor expected by the student or the college.  The academic search for truth and “true nature” did not matter.  The college hyper-cleaned itself to save its constantly victimized children.

But when we step away and think about this clearly, we realize these young adults at the college did not need saving, they were not victims, they were not oppressed.   Further, we realize:  “Wait a minute, even if they are, they need opportunities to make discerning, reasonable, useful, and mature choices.  This is true for minority students in race relations and women in systems and any student who has experienced oppression and harm due to family type, neighborhood, religion, ethnicity, race, sex, gender, or social class.   The regression of a 20 year old to a child who is being constantly hurt by words is not a useful regression if our goal as a society is to raise and educate a mature adult.”

 

A Brief History of Antiseptic Education and Its Stereotypes and Scapegoats

 

Again, to be fair:  a certain amount of antisepsis is necessary to fight discriminatory unfairness.  We need laws against hate speech.  We need protection against significant trauma.  But the location of the regression loop at the center of resilience resistance system is not about illegal discrimination or trauma.  To more deeply understand how “discomfort” became systematized as harm, trauma, and violence, let me track the intellectual development of the regression loop.   I will do this briefly, I promise, but it is worth tracking because we can’t dismantle it if we can’t see its formation.

Before Freud, Jung, Adler, and other modern psychologists, human beings understood individual and group psyches to be compelled by drives, urges, sins, and tendencies that were themselves influenced by God, gods, angels, demons, illnesses and (once courtly love became popular) our own lover.   And in these ancestral pasts, thought and emotion choices were also assumed.  In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argued that “possessing character” meant choosing between your feelings so that you could do what is right.  Feeling-life was directly linked to our character’s choices and actions, and character, choice, and action grew from objective moral standards for action.

Plato and Aristotle debated the hows and whys but both saw that the trained human brain could withstand “immoral feelings and temptations,” redirect “angers and dark humors.”  Even when hurt, Aristotle taught, minds can choose to “live in service of others.”  Even when battered by forces outside our control, Plato argued, we must choose “enterprise and hard work” and “quell urges of laziness and indolence.”  Fast forward to the late 19th and early 20th century, Freud, Jung and other moderns added “the core self” to our lexicon, and storytellers and poets had by now added “true nature” to “soul” and “psyche,” but personal character responsible for choices between feelings and actions remained intact for academics and people everywhere.

Things changed about a century ago as restricted emotion-choice in stereotype/scapegoat and oppressor/victim loops first appeared in the blossoming field of modern psychology.   This early transition began 1) to shift our language from “character” and “true nature” to “personality” and “identity” as primary markers of the psyche, as 2) psychologists discovered how a patient’s acute childhood sufferings (lack of attachment, abuse trauma, adverse childhood experiences) could be powerful drivers of issues in the adult’s psyche.   As modern psychology brought early attachment theory, disease theory, and treatment theories to bear on trauma and suffering, more people got more important help; new treatments worked in part because the field of psychology noticed how personal identity could be damaged (victimized) by family oppression.

Still, even in the 1960s and early 1970s, the goal of building resilience in children/adults remained the primary goal of psychotherapy.   The field of psychology as a whole did not try to be a resilience resistant institution.  Just the opposite.  Via therapy, patients were supposed to gain insight into their neuroses, negative feelings, and behavior patterns–some of which began in their own childhoods–so that they could make choices about those feelings.  Psychologists (though imperfectly to be sure) taught patients to plumb the unconscious mind where, regaining some agency via insight and therapy, they could become a more functional adult, spouse, co-worker, parent, person, citizen.  Rarely in early psychotherapy did the practitioner tell the patient to spend a lot of time on prolonged blame of others, stereotyping and scapegoating, and shaming of others.  As every practitioner knows, blame does little good and shaming is generally a projection of the shaming psyche anyway.  Thus, for most of the history of psychology itself and modern psychology in particular, self as victim existed but as a temporary stopping place, not a destination.

 

The Safe Place

 

Throughout the last 100 years of psychotherapy, “out there” and “in here” were (and are) known as different worlds.  One is unsafe, the other safe.   The field of psychology borrowed “safe space” from priest’s confessionals and shaman’s holy places from Freud onward.  Practitioners realized that the uniqueness of the safe space to the religious relationship gave it its effectiveness.  In the real world, chaos reigned; in the small, safe, antiseptic place (confession booth, sweat lodge, therapist’s office) the patient could gather new resilience with which to face suffering and joy in the unsafe world.

The field of psychology not only borrowed “safe space” but codified it as “safe place to be vulnerable.”  During the counseling hour, safety is crucial to a patient’s vulnerability and healing.   From safe self-disclosure in a safe space comes re-internalization of choice-making functions that allow the patient to return to the complex and unsafe world “out there” more empowered, more able.  As a mental health counselor for 32 years, I can attest to how important “safe place” is for clients.   I can also attest that it is not used to target away students, clients, or patients away from but toward resilience building.

I know this not only as a professional but as a patient.  I began psychotherapy at ten years old then was placed again with counselors at sixteen then continued therapy through college in the 1970s and beyond.  Whether as patient or practitioner, I knew “safe space” as “in here,” “in this office.”  Freud, Jung, Adler, and most practitioners forward from there do not have the cultural expectation that every social environment, especially schools and college, should be antiseptically protected “safe” places like a therapy or priest’s office.  The world is a potentially unsafe place we must gird ourselves for in the safe space by learning how to make choices about feelings, emotions, and thoughts “in here” in order to function better “out there.”

 

The Big Change:  Oppression Sociology

 

The shift from understanding safe space as “in here” to projecting the need for every institution or environment to become like a safe therapeutic space crept up on us gradually.  It took hold about thirty years ago and has expanded since.   Both early modern psychology and the field of sociology I’ll look at now did not use the neuroscience we now have.   They intuited the neuroscience of resilience (what we’ve analyzed in the first three essays in this series) but did use brain scans to look at it.   Freud, Jung, Skinner, Adler, Mary Whitton Calkins, Mary Ainsworth, and others  studied small groups of their patients, their college students, and other children to perceive brain patterns that they then extrapolated to families, schools, business, state, nation, culture, and world.

As these guesses were being made (many of them good ones) and over the decades in various fields beyond psychology–e.g. philosophy, economics, anthropology–language was changing even more:  “identity” all but replaced “character” as “true self.”  Even more, whispers that “identity groups” were crucial elements in human life and progress began to appear.  More whispers about “victim”  and “oppression” in culture groups were heard on college campuses and throughout the culture.  Emotion-choice-making was still a primary act of maturity and resilience, but the whispers grew.

They turned to roars about 30 – 50 years ago, mainly via two influences:   feminist psychology and academic sociology.   The latter spread quicker than the former but the former caught up relatively quickly and became a fused academic field:  feminist sociology.  By the 1970s and beyond, women becvame a victimized identity group that had been and still was oppressed by the patriarchy (“males, men, white males, boys, masculinity”).  These victim (women) and villain (men) identities became “the true self” of women and men, despite that they are stereotypes and scapegoating.  Simultaneously, the Civil Rights movement used the feminist sociology model in a revolutionary way to identify racism and racial inequity.  Feminist and racial sociology helped create empathic responses for women and minorities; they were crucial social justice tools in the 20th century, and still are.  Mobilization of billions of people toward social revolution might not have occurred without these identities of scapegoat and victim.

But the tragic downside to this kind of sociology is becoming clear to us today as our academic culture is now entrenched in oppression sociology–a regressive academic framework that removes emotion-choice-making from where it should be:  primary in the human psyche.  Use of a safe place to regain resilience and empowerment is muddied by the expectation that every space–government, workplaces, schools, policy making institutions, media, family remove all discomfort–not just chaos, abuse, trauma, but useful, essential discomfort from the path of the child or adult.

 

The New Learned Helplessness

 

The result is resilience resistance as people project scapegoat and victim everywhere.  Oppression sociology requires institutions to sanitize millions of social interactions; quickly, individuals move from resilience-building bonding/socialization to fear-based withdrawal, knee jerk limbic rage, and repressive social fatigue.  Choices between emotions especially among our young people do not get made.   Millions of people walk on eggshells to avoid saying something that will be seen as oppressive or traumatic but is merely a useful discomfort about which self and soul can make reasonable choices.  Mental and social health decline as hate, fear, and isolation encompass people’s lives; meanwhile, we don’t understand that we are buying into, the social stereotyping and scapegoating that remove millions of decisions and feelings from our developing psyches.  Ironically, oppression sociology creates the very thing psychology warns us against:  learned helplessness.

Our conference group’s objection to overuse of oppression sociology constituted both a macro objection and a micro objection to this learned helplessness.  At the macro level, we did not believe the sociological framework that everyone (who is not a white male) is a victim.  We knew this framework is untrue, divisive, freedom-destructive, and resilient resistant.  At the micro level, we did not believe that a word or sentence “that might push a person’s buttons” ought to be sanitized out of human life.  Most interactions, we knew, do not involve oppression nor should we approach them with helplessness.   Rather, they involve opportunities for maturation and resilience-building.

 

“Should We Have Emotion-Choice?” A Jew’s Perspective

 

I came to our discussion at the conference as a social scientist but also as a Jew who has always been cautious about overusing oppression sociology.   To continue my argument in this essay please permit me to use a part of my own identity.   To be Jewish, a Chaim Potok wrote in Wanderings, “is to see the world through the dark lens of the Holocaust.”   Jews are tacit students of oppression from early in childhood.  We know that real oppression can remove individual choice-making when the dominant group engages in unjust, harsh, or cruel activities that perpetuate helplessness and powerlessness.   The academic discipline of oppression sociology helps Jews name the insidious ways that previous (and present) oppressors use beliefs, labels, experiences, stereotypes, scapegoats, and conditions to imperil Jews and others.

Meanwhile, while not speaking for all Jews by any means, I also believe one reason Jews have succeeded resiliently throughout a dangerous history is that we have not attached our personal identities to antisepsis from discomfort.  We have not lingered long on self as victim nor focused long on scapegoating oppressors.  We have tended to focus more on how, when, and where we can make our own emotion choices.  Perhaps because of our upbringing in the Hebrew Bible, where scapegoating is condemned, Jews are suspicious of scapegoating in society.  Perhaps, too, because Jews are raised with an Old Testament focus on liberation and freedom, we do not linger long in victim-powerlessness but, rather, focus on the journey of freedom.

As I’ve watched oppression sociology take hold of academe, government, and the media, I have often asked myself what my own resilience-building would have been like if I went to college now–Michael Gurian the victim whose primary focus should be on requiring my institutions to weaponize blame and shame against others who were not Jewish, sanitize interactions at the college for the sake of my potential fragility as a Jewish identity or person, and police (an impossible task) every deed or word out of social life that “might offend me,” “might offend the Jew,” “might offend anyone.”  Would I be the resilient adult I am now?

I don’t think so.

My college life took place mainly at Gonzaga University in the 1970s, a Jesuit university that valued free speech, discernment, and debate.  Oppression sociology was beginning to gain traction back then, but it was not a dominant framework yet.  For my philosophy major, I needed to learn German–not fluently, but enough to read the German philosophers in their original language.  This need clashed with a Jewish boyhood in which I’d been raised to believe Germany was an enslaving, “dark,” and suspect culture.  Learning German meant constant discomfort as I learned the rhythms, music, idea of my oppressor.  When I first began my study of German, I told my girlfriend this was “a small hell.”

The hell felt literal in Berlin, 1985.  I was 27 then, finished with graduate coursework in English, and researching and writing overseas.  While in Germany, I went to the concentration camps in which my relatives were exterminated.  Weeping on a bench at Dachau, I felt the hell in my guts that my therapist in college had called “ethnic PTSD.”   Pain and grief, fear and terror, sadness and despair all emerged to overwhelm me at various times.  I walked away from Dachau then came back.  I made a lot of the choices, especially for forgiveness, that perhaps any Jew of my generation and older (if not younger, too) recognizes internally.

Looking back now, I can freely say, “Thank God for the discomfort.  Thank God for the inner battle against oppression, the transcendence of the oppression framework, too, and the development of a more holistic analysis of self, identity, and life itself.”  Confronting, thinking, discerning, persevering through the muck grew my soul.

And in fact, from “my enemy” I learned who I was, and what reality is as Kant taught me there can be no healthy freedom without order but also no healthy order without freedom.  Hegel: it is civilization-destructive to hold one’s position in either thesis or antithesis without synthesis.  From Husserl:  we must discover shared reality in the world of phenomenon before spreading out into imagined realities.  From Heidegger:  dualism can be unified into a whole but will not remain whole unless existentially grounded inside each of us.

From learning German philosophies without hate, and confronting the Germany that murdered my ancestral family not as scapegoat but as teacher, I learned resilience.   Had my college professors, friends, debate opponents, and others hyper-sanitized my environments; had they not pushed me to feel the discomfort I felt as a young adult and pursue the feelings of discomfort in order to use them for healing and personal development, I would perhaps still believe in the need for oppression sociology to dominate colleges and culture.  But life lived beyond the victim/villain stereotypes and scapegoats became my real life, an empowered life I could help pass on to my empowered daughters, a true self that is well aware of personal identity and the power of oppression, but not fatigued by them.

Do you choose what you feel?  Do you choose when to feel something?  Do you choose how to reveal your feeling to others?  Are you able to act reasonably and cogently when you feel something?  These resilience-developing questions ought to be asked of all of us from very young, and asked especially on college campuses of our young people.  Their answers might blend with an identity group at times, but if they solely depend on scapegoats and villains, they will draw a line in the sand that is not real and these children we love will not become the gritty, mature, strong servant leaders we want them to be.

 

The Fourth Major Change We Must Make in American Childhood:  Teach Our Children to Embrace, Not Avoid, Discomfort

 

Denying injustice is cowardice, but projecting it on the just creates an inverse relationship with true social change.

Before his passing, Civil Rights Activist and U.S. Representative John Lewis (1940-2020) said, “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

“Good trouble, necessary trouble”…what a beautiful phrase.   The empowered, self-reliant, resilient person builds the real and necessary internal power to make good trouble where needed and avoid bad and unnecessary trouble where unneeded.  This self-reliant person focuses on real and abiding trauma as inspiration for necessary trouble; the rest of the time, this person makes allies rather than enemies.

Resilience like this cannot be nurtured in social media where stereotypes, scapegoats, identity groups, and tribes limit our emotion-choices to rage, isolation, or complacency via algorithm.   It should be nurtured in our colleges.   Salman Rushdie, who knew a lot about being cancelled, has put it this way:  “The university is the place where young people should be challenged every day.  It is a place where everything they know should be put into question, so that they can think and learn and grow up.  And the idea that they should be protected from ideas that they might not like is the opposite of what a university should be.”

Our discussion group at the conference wished that growth and maturation could again become central to a university’s mission.  We remembered academe from our own emerging adulthood when we fought for Civil Rights, women’s rights, and empathy for the oppressed and every idea mattered for debate and resilience-building.  We stood together talking and hoping it would become okay again–in fact, important–for a college instructor to say, “I understand that you feel uncomfortable; how will you change yourself?” or “Remember, in most cases, the onus for choice and change is on you who is offended; it’s not on the person who offended you unless that person is flagrantly illegal or inappropriate.”  Or “What will you decide–will you make me or social media rescue you, or will you feel, choose, and act with healthy self-reliance?”

Our group hoped children could live their college life as a clear rite-of-passage again.  We hoped colleges would take a severe inventory of where they are now.  I hope specifically that administrators, faculty, and students will assess to what extent oppression sociology is driving coursework, student relationships, and other influences.  Colleges must be safe places from rape, date rape, violence, and trauma, always.  But meanwhile, they must make most “discomfort” a good thing again; otherwise, I think their inventory will show them to be regressive institutions existing in the illusion of progressiveness.

In her essay “Last Year, I was a Bryn Mawr Girl, now I’m at Hilldale,” college student Jane Kitchen tells the story of her journey out of an antiseptic college environment into one that allowed her to grow up.  While over-protected but also, thus, unable to speak up at Bryn Mawr because she was not politically correct–at Hilldale she was challenged individually and emotionally.  At Hilldale, too, she was able to look back at Bryn Mawr and understand the antisepsis theory, oppression sociology, and resilience resistance that were dominant there.  Bryn Mawr was like purgatory, Kitchen realized, in which young people became loudly mute rather than tolerant self-expressing adults who developed their own voice.  “My advice to upcoming high school seniors is this,” her essay concludes:  “Real growth isn’t about your GPA or the letters after your name, it’s about choosing discomfort and challenge.”