Saturday, April 22, 2017

Generation Brainwashed

Heather Mac Donald is back, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Recently attacked at Claremont-McKenna College in California for trying to deliver a speech, she famously defended herself in the City Journal. I dutifully reported on it here.

Today MacDonald argues that Generation Snowflake is not really suffering from helicopter parenting, as some have suggested, but is suffering from ideology. In my less elegant terms I would say that they have been brainwashed to within an inch of their minds.

In truth, the one does not really preclude the other. Children rendered vulnerable for not having had Tiger Moms are ruthless indoctrinated by an educational establishment that wants them to sacrifice their lives for the cause of social justice.

While we are at it, we should also ask how many of these students, suffering from anomie, were brought up in broken homes, in homes where their mothers were not around, in homes where their fathers were treated poorly.

Since I and everyone else has been saying it, too many of today’s college students are acting like junior Red Guards and Brown Shirts—that is practitioners of the art of the pogrom. They are unwilling to listen to any idea that does not echo whatever they hear in their occupied minds. Mac Donald refuses to give all the blame to their parents, who are not, after all, agents of indoctrination:

This soft totalitarianism is routinely misdiagnosed as primarily a psychological disorder. Young “snowflakes,” the thinking goes, have been overprotected by helicopter parents, and now are unprepared for the trivial conflicts of ordinary life.

She continues that we cannot explain it all as a function of emotional well-being. There is more to it that psychological injury, thus to an anomie that seeks to heal itself by joining in with a cause that is greater than itself:

“The Coddling of the American Mind,” a 2015 article in the Atlantic, was the most influential treatment of the psychological explanation. The movement to penalize certain ideas is “largely about emotional well-being,” argued Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Jonathan Haidt of New York University. The authors took activists’ claims of psychological injury at face value and proposed that freshmen orientations teach students cognitive behavioral therapy so as to preserve their mental health in the face of differing opinions.

Mac Donald argues that if it were all caused by overly involved parents then straight white men would also be looking for safe spaces. But then, she adds that this cohort has been so thoroughly demonized that it does not have the right to do so. If it is suffering, it cannot overcome the pain by signing on to the Revolution:

But if risk-averse child-rearing is the source of the problem, why aren’t heterosexual white male students demanding “safe spaces”? They had the same kind of parents as the outraged young women who claim to be under lethal assault from the patriarchy. And they are the targets of a pervasive discourse that portrays them as the root of all evil. Unlike any other group on a college campus, they are stigmatized with impunity, blamed for everything from “rape culture” to racial oppression.

Might we not suggest that this group has been cowed into submission? After all, these students have been labeled as the root of all evil, thus, as needing to be punished for the horrors they have visited on the human race. Among those horrors, and yes, I know I am repeating myself, are liberal democracy, free enterprise, the Industrial Revolution, the Common Law, modern science… and, let’s not forget, defeating fascism, Nazism and Communism.

As I have opined, the denizens of radical extremes will never forgive us:


Amazingly, Mac Donald continues, members of self-proclaimed oppressed groups believe that the Western canon threatens their very existence. It sounds slightly hysterical and over-the-top. That’s because it is:

Students have been led to believe they are at personal risk from circumambient bigotry. After the February riots at Berkeley against Mr. Yiannopoulos, a columnist in the student newspaper justified his participation in the anarchy: “I can only fight tooth and nail for the right to exist.” Another opined that physical attacks against supporters of Mr. Yiannopoulos and President Trump were “not acts of violence. They were acts of self-defense.”

And also:

In November 2015, a Columbia sophomore announced on Facebook that his “health and life” were threatened by a Core Curriculum course taught by a white professor.


… racist, patriarchal texts taught by white professors who most likely are unaware of the various forms of impact that CC texts have on people of color.”

Because if your group did not contribute as much as the dreaded white males, the only reason must be that prejudice and oppression prevented them from doing so.  These snowflakes ought to try to contribute to the Western canon, rather than use it as a whipping boy to cover up the deficiencies of members of other ethnic groups.

The problem, if I may again repeat myself, is that these schools have been accepting too many students who cannot do the work, who have been selected to fulfill diversity quotas. The same schools have been hiring professors for the same reasons, but not only to fulfill diversity quotas but to ensure ideological conformity. How many of these professors would even know how to teach the canon? It's surely better to blame Western civ than to show that one cannot teach it.

Mac Donald is correct to say that a good dose of meritocratic admissions and hiring standards would go a long way toward solving these problems, but that does not seem likely to happen at any time in the near future:



James said...

Oddly enough this article reminded me of "French Values", which of course art is at the foremost:;_ylu=X3oDMTEyNWJzZ2dhBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDQjM4NTdfMQRzZWMDc3I-/RV=2/RE=1492897559/RO=10/

Ares Olympus said...

It does seem fair to me to consider that failed family structures is a part of this, but family structures have always been failing, but we are failing differently now, in a time of relative abundance where problems can be left neglected for years and decades while we have the illusion of progress.

I don't like the word "brainwashing", implying some self-interested intention to deceive, but more generally that young brains are like sponges, and can absorb almost anything put in front of it with very little self-reflection. And so this failing happens in two ways - both by neglect and by intent, and I think we're more harmed by the neglect side of "brainwashing" than intent, and then the ideological narratives arise afterwards to try to explain what they see, rather than being the cause.

And calling young people "snowflakes" seems unnecessarily contemptuous, basically an opposite tyranny in the frame of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But at least Nassim Nicholas Taleb's concept of antifragility is surely vital to bring to the table, seeing that many things grow stronger when exposed to stress and challenge, and humans are like that too. But some things do kill us, and some things do break our spirit to the degree that we can become the very self-blinded bullies that we once hated.

Today I found this blog, from last fall, but it talks about the personality of PC, seeing two components, egalitarianism and authoritarianism. Its worth a read. My quick take is that the first PC (egalitarianism, trying to show equal consideration for all) gets hijacked by the emotions of the second who need absolute control to feel safe.



Anonymous said...


But Amy Chua's daughter Sofia is a total Proggy SJW type.

She joined the ROTC to spread homo agenda around the world.

Anonymous said...


But many parents are agents. This is especially true of highly educated parents who raise their kids ideologically. Having no religion, virtue vanity is their religion. They take their kids to massive homo parades from young age. Kids grow up worshiping homos as holy.

Also, Progs use their children as political shields. Last refuge of a scoundrel is politicizing children.

Another thing about PC. They believe in a vulgarized form of 'cultural hegemony'. They believe EVERYTHING -- sitcoms, cartoons, advertising, yearbooks, brochures, etc -- should be used as propaganda tools.

Get a load of this: