On kids, parents and truckers
Have we reached a turning point that undoes the damage from social media in the last 15 years?
Executive Summary: To paraphrase Ray Dalio from the short video earlier this week, if ‘children are a product of the state and parents’, what kind of world have we created when you add the ugly step sibling of social media? Could the truckers in Canada and the sentiment around the world they represent be the turning point that undoes more than a decade of harm and safe spaces for our kids? I think yes.
Fun Facts: Ben’s new clubs arrived yesterday and he literally slept with them. Anyone think he’s excited for golf season? Nothing is better than passion and work ethic in kids to face adversity and be better.
Suggested Reading:
Jonathon Haidt and Gregory Lukianoff. The Coddling of the American Mind.
Bari Weiss. We Got Here Because of Cowardice.
John Stewart Mill. On Liberty, chapter 2
While writing the post yesterday, my parents were front of mind which, in a pay it forward kind of way, made me think of my own kids and the world they are growing up in.
In the book, “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Gregory Lukianoff and Jonathon Haidt, they look and increased levels of depression, anxiety and the rise of “safe spaces” in college and like me, asked what happened. They posit that children born after 1995 transitioned from a culture of “that which doesn’t kill you makes to stronger” to one of “that which doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” in part because families were richer and dotted on their kids and in part because “Have You Seen This Child?” on milk cartons exposed parents to a fear of abduction that statistically wasn’t reasonable. Then, enter social media and Facebook in 2006. By 2010, smart phones were broadly available and 10-14 year old children in the height of their development were being exposed to something no one had seen before and couldn’t predict the results.
By 2013, these protected, sheltered and online present kids entered college and the authors tie an event on the Yale campus in 2015 at Halloween to the creation of what we now know as “cancel culture.” An email was sent to students by the school that urged all students to wear culturally sensitive costumes, a email similar to those that has started appearing on college campuses in 2010. Apparently not. There is a reason that Justin Trudeau got in trouble for “black face” more than once. And here I thought that was just smart and didn’t need
A professor of psychology, Nicolas Christakis, responded to the email
If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.
Can your even imagine?! Neither could the 740 students that signed an open letter to the school because they saw his comment as downplaying racial sensitivity issues. In a subsequent op-Ed for the Yale Herald, student Jencey Paz closed her essay with:
I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.
Instead, at Yale, the school administrators backed the students and to show sensitivity to his “deep disturbance” Yale’s president Peter Salovey met with a group of 50 students and summarized the meeting by writing:
I do not want anyone in our community to feel alone, disrespected, or unsafe. We must all work together to ensure no one does.
The students won, rationality exited the building and cancel culture was born with safe spaces and feelings displacing debate, discussion, respect and intentions.
In the background, kids were getting more depressed and the protection from Any slight at all was yielding unintended results and while causality and correlation are hard to prove, here’s an insightful chart that shows rates of self harm but the same kids (10-14 year old girls in this case) that were entering college at the same time as the “Yale incident.”
In 2022, these examples are everywhere. Fire alarms pulled while speakers give talks. Ben Shapiro needed a huge security detail for his speech at Berkeley, and a Georgetown professor stands at risk of losing his job offer for the audacity of saying that “only considering a black woman for the Supreme Court might result in a lesser candidate than “may the best person win.”
Which brings me back to my parents and the way I was raised. I walked myself to school from the time I was 6. A friend and I picked a fight with the bully in the school yard when he was stealing lunches because he was bigger than everyone. My friend grabbed him, we wrestled him down and I fed him grass (tragically, I lost touch with that friend after grade 3 and he committed suicide in grade 11 so growing up has always been hard). The bully also didn’t stop bullying, that is until a girl rolled the piano at school over his finger. He never stole a lunch again. No charges. No parental interventions that I was aware of. Just free play and taking care of other kids in a “Lord of the Flies” kind of way.
Today, with parents and teachers supervising constantly, the skill is no long how to diffuse the situation and occasionally get punched in the face, instead it is how best to make your case to an outside authority so they will back you and punish your opponent.
I have boys which is distinctly different than girls. Boys bullying is being punched in the face and beaten up in the shower. Girls bullying is relationship based on undermining each other. With social media and “snap chat filters,” it happens 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Children entering college from 2014-2021 are, arguably, fragile.
But the 2020 COVID kids of today may different than those previous. Their parents are more aware of the harms of social media. Phones are kept out of rooms at night. Online gaming with headsets and taunting and trash talking and no one gets hurt. And in the last 2 years kids have seen first hand “rules for thee and not for me.”
They have watched hypocrisy, watched their vaccinated and unvaccinated friends get COVID and recover (and thus understand what a “control group” in a study actually is) and they’ve watched as their acne get bad at school before going home and sitting in restaurants at night with parents who are only safe without a mask because they are sitting down…. Yeah. That makes sense.
For both Ben and Andrew, their resilience and resistance to arbitrary rules has never been higher. They are tough to bully, tough to make quit, and their strength is only accelerating. I credit sports. I credit independence and a philosophy of “nobody cares it’s your birthday.” But of late, I credit politicians for proving to the kids of today that they don’t have anyone’s best interests at heart, except their own.
Which brings me to the truckers in Canada. These national anthem singing, bouncy castle jumping, citizens of a generally socialist and “greater good” society, have had enough. They didn’t bring guns. They self police. There has been no looting. They clear the road for emergency vehicles. And it’s -20 C outside and they stay. They represent everything that citizens around the world are waking up to: that “you do you” is a much better code to live by than “we’re with the government, we’re here to help.”
And the perfect character foil to “these people” is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is representing politicians and bureaucrats everywhere. Today, he debates in Parliment why the War Measures Act (I mean Emergency measures) should be implemented in Canada for only the second time ever. The powers the government would grant itself? The ability to freeze the accounts of people who donated money to the crowdfunding site, for example. They can suspend the rule of law and due process to “maintain order. “ and where were they during the BLM riots? Oh, yeah. I forgot. Here is a two a minute video from Justin’s father, Pierre, in 1970. What society do you support? Billions around the world are asking themselves that exact question.
In John Stewart Mill’s essays ‘On Liberty’ from 1863, he defends the importance of debate and discussion over quelling and censorship, like we are seeing on college campuses everywhere.
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is rob- bing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
But it is not the minds of heretics that are deteriorated most, by the ban placed on all inquiry which does not end in the orthodox conclusions. The great- est harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy.
Could it be that the kids are waking up? Perhaps. But I know the thing my kid sleeps with isn’t his phone, it’s his new golf clubs. And if golf doesn’t work out, maybe he’ll become a trucker.
Great piece David ! And congrats to Ben on the new sticks, can’t wait for an update once he puts them in play.