I recently came across a book called The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, which contains a startling insight into the origins of cancel culture.
One of the authors overcame depression using something called Cognitive Belief Therapy (CBT). The theory behind CBT is that people who are depressed or anxious often engage in destructive forms of cognitive distortion, including:
- Emotional reasoning
- Catastrophizing
- Overgeneralizing
- Dichotomous thinking
- Mind reading
- Labeling
- Negative filtering
- Discounting positives
- Blaming
(You can find descriptions of these at the bottom of this post.)
CBT works by encouraging these people to notice when they’re indulging in these distortions, then stop and ask whether the things they’re thinking are actually true. That’s pretty much the whole show. And it appears to be quite effective.
Anyway, after going through CBT, the author noticed that modern education, beginning with kindergarten and continuing through college, actually teaches students to engage in the same cognitive distortions that CBT is designed to overcome.
To put that a different way: if you set out to intentionally create a culture of people who are self-absorbed, let feelings drown out reason, crave safety and comfort at the expense of everything else, and become anxious and depressed and emotionally unhinged when they feel even slightly unsafe or uncomfortable about anything… well, you would establish compulsory schooling, and run the schools exactly the way we’re running them now.
Here are the author’s descriptions, with examples, of the cognitive distortions listed above:
EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”