The Coddling of the American Mind: Haidt/Lukianoff

So I'm here today with author Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Greg is president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Jonathan Haidt is an eminent social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. They have co-authored a new book called The Coddling of the American Mind, which is an elaborated version of a famous Atlantic Monthly essay they published a while back. So today we're here to talk about their new book and about the state of the universities and I suppose society at large.

So thanks, guys, very much for joining me today. I thought maybe we'd start talking about the book. Do you guys want to provide some background? Maybe you could talk about the Atlantic Monthly essay and what led up to the book, and then we'll get into the details. Sure, sure. Over to Greg.

Well, um, so it all started in 2007 when I was lucky enough to have a full-on medical level depression—really, really bad. I talk about it in some sort of detail in the book. I realize it's actually at a level which I don't even— I realize I wrote about it with details that my wife doesn't know, my family doesn't. Um, there's a weird privacy thing that sometimes happens when you're talking, you know, dictating into a computer that you kind of like, "This is just between me and the computer." And now I realize it's probably the most public thing I'll ever write. But the thing that saved me, the thing that ultimately helped me deal with my depressions in general was cognitive behavioral therapy.

In a sense, it's sort of like applied stoicism. You just look at your own thoughts; you talk back to the really exaggerated ones; you label them as cognitive distortions. These include things like generalization, catastrophizing, binary thinking—thinking everything has to be all good or all bad. I'm actually particularly guilty of these, and amazingly, if you just actually learn what these distortions are and practice every day to sort of talk back to the more anxious or depressed voices in your own head, it's an incredibly effective treatment for depression and anxiety. It changed—absolutely changed my life.

Meanwhile, as this was changing my life, I was still working—as the president of FIRE, I defend free speech and due process and academic freedom on campus. I was looking around at what administrators were doing and saying to myself, "Wow, it's actually kind of like the administrators are saying, 'Oh, by the way, do engage in cognitive distortions. Do engage in binary thinking. Do over-generalize.' And most of all, catastrophize all the time."

I remember thinking something with the effect of, "Well, thank goodness the students don't seem to really be buying it." And that's what changed in 2013-2014. Um, prior to 2013-2014, since I started in 2001, the worst constituency for free speech on campus was actually administrators. The best, most reliable fans of free speech you could run into on campus were generally the students themselves.

Then, sometime around 2013-2014, we saw, you know, suddenly they were demanding everything from trigger warnings to microaggression policies to disinvitations for speakers—both on the left and the right on the spectrum. It seemed like, we said, it seemed to happen almost overnight. When I went to talk to John about it— we'd become friends through a mutual friend—and I said, "It's almost like I'm talking about my whole theory that we're teaching a generation the habits of anxious and depressed people from cognitive behavioral therapy." John got really excited about the idea and asked if I wanted to write about it. And I was already a fan of John's work, so I was like, "Absolutely, yeah."

I thought that his insight into what had changed was absolutely brilliant. I had just begun to notice this in my own teaching. I've been teaching since 1995 at the University of Virginia originally, and it was seemingly overnight, right around 2014, these new ideas. You know, students, of course, are political; they protest; they object to things. But what was new—Greg put his finger on it—what was new was the idea that these words are going to harm me, not just offend me, not just be unjust—harm me. We have to protect. It was this idea that students are fragile and need protection, and the protection should come from administrators, from adults. That's what was new and disturbing.

When you guys talked in the book about concept creep, you know, and the over-generalization of the idea of trauma, one of the things that's really struck me as interesting about the safe space movements and the microaggression policies and all of that is that it does run so contrary to what every clinician worth his or her salt knows about treating anxiety or depression. One of the real perverse side effects of that kind of thinking, especially when it's conjoined with a viewpoint that divides the world into victim and victimizer, is that you can take any one person and maybe generate 20 group identities for them, and you can find at least one identity along which they're privileged. And that means that not only can you ignore them as a consequence of them speaking only on behalf of their power, but you have a valid reason for persecuting them.

It's exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. As long as I could find one dimension along which you were an oppressor, then you were done. Wow. And, yeah, great grandson, right?

They were the best example of that. We were peasants who made good. In any other country, our search—and that's where my family comes from—in any other country, you know, my family's story would have been because we went from being serfs to being lawyers and judges within a single generation. My grandfather was in Kyiv Polytechnic studying to be a professor when World War I broke out. And, of course, people like me—success stories in any other country—we were shot in the back of the head by the millions.

Right. Well, and you were actually the working-class success stories because when was serfdom eradicated in Russia?

1861. Right. So people were basically slaves up to that point, and some people made very rapid leaps in status within a single generation or two, and those were the kulaks that were eradicated by the Soviets after World War I. Then that, of course, that's what led to the huge starvation and massive starvations of the late 1920s and 1930s and early 1930s. So it was a complete catastrophe.

All right, so you put together a bunch of symptoms. You know, you said, "Well, microaggression theory—I'm no admirer of Daryl Wing Sue. Yes, I think that—I read his book. I thought it was absolutely appalling in all possible manners." Um, there's the kind of oppression theory and intersectionality, the idea that we're in a patriarchal tyranny. And then one of the things that you pointed out at the beginning of this interview was the unknown effect of social comparison with these new social technologies, social media technologies.

Right, because we really lay vulnerable to these new technologies. We have no idea what effect they have on adults, let alone young people. And so do you think that is actually making young people feel that the world is a more dangerous place and requiring them to seek protection?

Oh, yes. We think that's a big part of it. The objective facts about mortality, crime, physical safety are that life gets safer and safer. Death rates go down. So, you know, Steve Pinker and many others have chronicled the decline of violence. But we react to the world not as it is; we react to the world as we perceive it through the filters that we're given. And if—if you remember the old—the movie from the 1980s or 90s—it was Bowling for Columbine. No boys, but, uh, Michael Moore's movie Bowling for Columbine, where he traces out why Americans are so paranoid compared to Canadians, let's say. And he blames it all on cable TV putting stories of crime in our face.

All right, so I think there's a lot of truth to that. Now imagine social media channeling not just stories of crime, but whichever side you're on politically, you now get filtered through all of the stupid things that any person says in our country of 330 million people every day. Someone on the left says something incredibly stupid and offensive, and every day somebody on the right says something, you know, and there's a video.

And so if you're being—so if you're rewarded for forwarding outrage—things that outrage your side, you're rewarded for forwarding that. And we're all forwarding it. We're all drowning in outrage stories. And one of the things that sells—that sells in terms of getting retweets is stories of aggression or violence or racism or whatever it is. People trampling on your side's sacred values. So if you're exposed constantly to stories of, you know, if you're on the left, you're exposed to stories of right-wing Nazis and you think that half the country is Nazi, this is gonna have a big effect on your perceptions even if the reality is social progress. Even if the reality is increasing safety.

So we do think that the reason why so many things are going haywire, not just in America but in many countries, um, is the internet and social media all hitting us at the same time. Globalization is the other factor—a little more distant—but I think they're intersecting, interacting in all kinds of interesting ways that we don't yet understand.

We talked about polarization on the right and on the left, and one of the things that struck me—maybe I'm wrong about this—is that I've been particularly concerned about the rise of the radical left. And that's probably because I've been immersed in a university milieu. And as you already pointed out, the left is overrepresented, at least among the social scientists and the humanities. And I suspect as well the administration in the universities. And then I see as well people being concerned about the rise of the radical right, but I certainly don't see the radical right as posing a threat in the universities. And I can't see what sort of threat the radical right is posing because I can't get numbers, right?

So, like, there are lots of stories about alt-right types and about neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but they seem—I mean, there was a white supremacist rally in Washington about a month and a half ago, and I think they got 16 people on a bus on the white supremacist side and several thousand counter-protesters.

And so I'm wondering to what degree the radical right is—like, I don't know where they are exactly, so do you have thoughts about that?

Yeah, definitely! In my work, I talk about this as being the most recent trend, and we talk about this in the book. And it's not necessarily the radical right, but we've seen some of the—what I've talked about is kind of like we have this sort of echo chamber on the left at the universities, and there is a sort of an echo chamber on the right as well. And those two have been sort of colliding with each other.

We've definitely seen an uptick in FIRE of liberal professors getting in trouble for what they say on the internet, what they say on Twitter, or Facebook, or, you know, going on Fox News, for example. And we talk about a couple examples of that in the book. Now, this is so recent that we're not going to have real data on it, but it definitely is a noticeable change for those of us who work on the front lines.

Yeah, so it's important to look at the timing here because we hear this a lot, too. You know, whenever we talk about something, people will point out, "Well, what about the alt-right? What about the Nazis?" When we started this—when Greg first noticed what was going on in 2013-2014, and then our article came out in 2015, the right had nothing to do with it. Nobody had heard of the alt-right practically. They weren't trolling on campus.

So whatever the origins of the problem on campus, it is not a reaction to the right. Now, in 2016, the—you know, the alt-right got a lot more attention, and they got much more sophisticated at trolling. And as I read a little bit about trolling in The New York Times began to cover it, it became really clear—all you need is a few people with a— you know, kind of a perverse sense of humor and a few anonymous internet accounts, and they can provoke a gigantic reaction from the group that they want to provoke.

And so I think in 2016, we saw the right, and into 2017, that's when we start actually seeing the cases of right-wing movements to get professors fired. There's some really nasty stuff coming out of various sites on the right flooding people's inboxes with rape threats and death threats and racist rants. So there's a lot of nasty stuff coming from the right towards professors in 2017 and since then. It wasn't happening as far as—it wasn't anything new. It wasn't really part of the story early on, so we covered this in chapter six—the polarization cycle.

The problem, we believe, is not originally from the right, although now they are part of the polarization cycle. Right, so you can conjure a specter out of the darkness in that manner.

I mean, one of the things I've seen on YouTube and the other commentary sources that I've been monitoring is a real increase in anti-Semitic comments.

Oh, yeah. And it's hard to tell, of course. It's hard to quantify that, but they're appallingly common on YouTube and on Twitter as well. And some of them are coded. You know, I think it's commonplace now to put your comment in three brackets, which indicates an anti-Semitic origin or emphasis. And so that's very pernicious, but again we have no idea how many people are actually engaging in this, and it's a very difficult thing to come to terms with because when I look at the United States, I think, and more power to you, that your political dialogue is actually quite balanced. There's a fair bit of power on the left, and there's a fair bit of power on the right.

The radical left seems to be overrepresented in universities, and that's something that's unique. I can't get a handle on the white supremacists and Nazi types. I mean, I think Nazis are vanishingly rare. I really believe that the white supremacist types as well. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not growing and isn't being cultivated in some sense.

That's right. But then the question is how much should we react to it? So I'm Jewish. My mother told me when I was growing up that America is the promised land for the Jews—it's not Israel. You know, we always talk about Israel as the promised land. I was raised to believe that America is the promised land for the Jews. Sure, there was some anti-Semitism. My parents, they moved to Scarsdale, New York, and they could not join certain country clubs. Big deal! They were Jewish clubs; there were Wasp clubs. That's the way things were. It wasn't perfect, but compared to what? Compared to the rest of the world, thank God my grandparents got off the boat in New York and didn't go on to Buenos Aires or any place else that was settled originally by the Spanish.

So America is not an anti-Semitic country. Now what do we make of the fact that now we're seeing all this anti-Semitic stuff? What I make of it is that there are a few who are organizing and doing this. Am I triggered by it? No, because I grew up where occasionally you'd come across a swastika scratched into the bathroom stall. You'd find the F-word. You'd find obscenities. You'd find a drawing of a penis and you'd see a swastika, and my reaction was, you know, "Yuck" or "bad," and then I would go on with my day. It wasn't a trigger.

But if we teach kids now, if you find something on the internet, be triggered. And of course you will always find something on the internet. I will say that, and this is just anecdotal, but my—I speak a lot of times in California, and some of the sort of anti-Israel bleeding into anti-Semitism is something that I've seen really dramatic performance. It's almost as if it's become stylish to be so anti-Israel you're almost anti-Semitic at least in certain circles. And I spoke—now like the British Labor Party, for example.

For example, yeah. So I spoke at the 50th anniversary of the start of the free speech movement way back in 2014. I spoke in Berkeley, and I'll be damned if my speech was not in a room with a lot of anti-Semites in it. There was even a guy who was trying to address this saying, "Oh, and people want to call us anti-Semitic, and that's so wrong." And then he finished that sentence by saying, "But it's undeniable that the poison hand of Zionism destroys everything it touches." And I was like, "Okay, okay. I think I can understand why they're calling you that."

So I definitely—I don't think it's in people's heads that this uptick is real, but I've noticed it most pronounced, for some reason, in California.

Okay, so here's an idea too. So you know, one of the things that happened in Germany in the 1920s was a polarization process, right? Obviously much more severe than the one that we're going through. But I wonder if when the political spectrum polarizes, ethnocentrism of a certain sort rises and drives something like anti-Semitism. So maybe because maybe when the left and the right are relatively close together, people aren't so obsessed with their group identities, or the extreme types aren't. But then when the polarization process starts, everybody locks harder into the group identities, and then anyone who's, I don't know, if it's anyone who's an outsider is viewed with excess suspicion.

But see, because the situation with Jewish people is complicated too, because they're often successful. So I don't know if it's some perverse interaction between ethnocentrism and resentment for the successful that's driving anti-Semitism during polarization processes. I'm trying to get a finger or get a—you know, trying to put my finger on it.

I think what you're reaching for here is this phenomenon that you suddenly see these bursts of intolerance. What triggers them? And here I turn to Karen Stenner, a political scientist who didn't work at Princeton; now she lives in Australia. But she wrote this brilliant book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, published in 2005. And what she says in there is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It's a dynamic in which some people, about 20 or 30 percent of the population, when they perceive that society is coming apart—that is, you know, I study morality—we need a sense of shared moral order. There are times when we feel that the moral order is secure, violations are punished, everything's fine. There are other times when we feel things are coming apart, it's chaos, it's babble.

When that's happening, people who have this predisposition to authoritarianism, it's like there's a button on their head that gets pushed, and they then become intolerant against all outsiders. And so she does experiments where she gives a story about, you know, maybe it's Mexican immigration, but it turns out that that then makes, you know, if you present it in a threatening way, as Donald Trump does, that doesn't just turn people against Mexicans, it turns them against LGBT Americans.

So it's a general dynamic of stamp out dissent, stamp out the outsiders, get back to the purity of our group. So when we have times of increasing prosperity, when we have peace, when there's a sense of progress—the pie is growing—there is some sense that we have something in common. Then things get much calmer. But a number of events, you know, financial crises may have contributed to the sense that there is not a growing pie. But I think, again, social media has made it so that if you are prone to this, and then you sign up to any group that is concerned about immigration or anything else, you will now be surging—you will be flooded with really powerful videos designed to press that button over and over and over again. And before you know it, America goes from having, you know, 50 Nazis to having 500, maybe even 5,000. It's not 5 million. I really don't think there are five—you know, whatever. It's not like two or three percent of the country are Nazis, so we've got to somehow learn to get used to the fact that we've got to somehow get back to judging by sort of the average or the overall rather than the individual extremes, because now we'll be faced with the individual extremes forever.

Yeah, and also while we're recommending books, Amy Chua's Political Tribes talks a lot about this too, and it's really a really interesting stimulating read.

Well, partly what I've been trying to do in my lectures—so I'm traveling around lecturing to people and doing this to some degree on YouTube as well—is to emphasize the existence of the common center. For me, that's a return to classic liberal and, to some degree, classic conservative values. I mean, some intermingling of those. So some emphasis on traditional phenomena like monogamous marriage, but also the idea of the sovereignty of the individual as part of that common landscape that unites us. And that seems to be quite useful.

Although I would go—let's keep going on. I think this is a very important point, that if you go down the identitarian path, there is no clear endpoint. Nobody can point to where this will end in a good way. So what's so interesting—and here's one of the most encouraging signs—is that just in 2018, we are seeing an explosion of books written by people who are not straight white males who are saying identity politics practiced in this way is a dead end.

We need to really emphasize what we have in common. So I'll just read you—I’ve just started collecting a file. I'll put this online someplace soon. Here are some of the really interesting things coming out just recently: Amy Chua's book Political Tribes, as Greg mentioned; Francis Fukuyama has a new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, that just came out last week; Anthony Abbe has been writing brilliantly about identity politics; Jonathan Rauch, who is gay—I guess he's conservative—but he's been writing again very about Amy Chua and about other reasons why identity politics is a dead end; John McWhorter has been writing brilliantly about how anti-racism has become a religion; how we need to stop focusing on that in that way.

In Britain, there are a number of people of Caribbean origin who have been writing about this. I just had dinner last week with Irshad Manji, who has a book coming up, Don't Label Me, so this is wonderful that we're seeing all of these people. Just about all of them identify as being on the left. None of them are straight white males, and they're all saying we need to rethink this.

So we're thrilled because in our book, in chapter three, we distinguish between common humanity identity politics—which is what Martin Luther King did and many of the civil rights leaders—which, yes, you need to demand rights for groups that don't have them, but you do it by appealing to our common humanity versus common enemy identity politics, which is what intersectionality tends to devolve into. It doesn't have to be, but it often is bastardized into, "Let's all unite against them."

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, in Canada, we've been pursuing a multicultural policy, and our Prime Minister was famous for saying that Canada has no identity, which I think is an absolute catastrophe of an idea. I mean, if you think about the multicultural landscape of the planet, it certainly produces wars along with diversity. So the question is how do you bring people from different communities into a universal community and maintain peace?

It seems to me that you do that essentially by concentrating on the sovereignty of the individual as the fundamental marker for human identity rather than the group. And I was thinking about intersectionality, which I think, by the way, is a painfully obvious idea. You know, the idea that you could be classified among many group dimensions and that there's social status consequences to all of those and that they interact. But I think intersectionality is actually the discovery of the fatal flaw of identity politics because if you fragment people down—if you allow their group identities to multiply and interact—then you get to the point where each individual is a unique nexus of group identities, and I actually think that that's what Western culture discovered over the last several thousand years: that the logical endpoint is the individual.

And if you take everyone's advantages and disadvantages into account optimally, then what you do is you treat them as individuals like there isn't anyone else like them in some sense—except in terms of their common, say, divine value or something approximating that.

That's right. If you followed it to its logical conclusion, then the worst aspects of identitarianism would vanish because, as you say, everybody ultimately becomes a group of one. Unfortunately, of the 20 or 30 dimensions on which one could categorize people, it's really only three that matter: it's straight white males—that's really where it's at.

So, well, that's worth digging into, you know, because that's actually illustrative, I would say to some degree, of the actual motivations. It's like there are all these identities, and hypothetically there's nothing to distinguish them in terms of primacy, even in terms of their effect, say, on socioeconomic outcomes. So then it seems to me to be a victim-victimizer narrative that's driving the idea that it's straight white males that in some sense have the phenomenal upper hand, which is another thing I don't really buy. I mean, most of the dangerous jobs are done by men, and so in terms of who has power and wealth, you know, straight white men—I mean, I think we can plead guilty to that, that the world is not perfectly equal across all categories. We certainly can't just be bad, but I think what we're seeing now in very sharp relief since the Sarah Jeong controversy in The New York Times recently is this red wine.

I think it was Brent Weinstein who said a year or two ago, "There are some people who see inequality and want to end it. There are other people who see inequality and want to reverse it." At the time, I thought, "Well, that's interesting. I wonder if that's true." But I think the Sarah Jeong controversy, where The New York Times hired a young Korean-American person to join the op-ed editorial page, and it was discovered that she had all these nasty anti-white tweets—and the fact that there was a discussion debate, like, many people would say, "Oh, by definition, there's no such thing as anti-white racism."

It's okay to say terrible things about white people. It's okay—here's the key thing: it's okay to look at someone and, based on the way they look, dislike them and treat them badly. And if you think that's okay, then this is the problem. This is common enemy identity politics because we think that's horrible. We shouldn't be judging people based on their race. Then that's—you're probably a supporter of common humanity identity politics, as we are.

I actually would like to slightly push back against the idea that it's just straight white men anymore. I felt like—I always feel like, unfortunately, sort of like the Stanford-Palo Alto-San Francisco Bay Area is unfortunately way ahead on these trends. And I think one of the reasons why you are seeing pushback from a lot of members of minority members as well is partially because, for a long time, at least among the friends I know who really believe in this almost like a religious kind of way, they're extremely guilty about simply being cisgender, as in non-transgender.

You'll see sort of this call-out culture applied to black straight black men, for example. So I do think that we've been falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole where people are realizing, "Wow, so this is just a permanent situation of guilt and shame about an identity that I have no control over. That can't possibly be right."

Well, the other thing we should point out too is that even if you do make allowances for the fact that, let's say, on average, straight white men are doing rel or have done relatively well economically, it's also very much worth pointing out that it's a tiny minority of straight white men who have been doing spectacularly well. You know, so you have a Pareto distribution problem within each—within each ethnic identity group.

And so to say that because, on average, the socioeconomic status of a given group is higher than the status of another group, all the people who are members of that group are disproportionately benefiting is actually a rather—I would say a rather motivated and resentful analysis because it is always a tiny proportion of people in a group that are doing spectacularly well.

And then you have to do something else, which is you have to look at that proportion that are doing spectacularly well and you have to decide about how many of them are doing well because they actually deserve it and how many of them are doing well because they're inappropriate rent seekers.

And I would say because our culture is pretty damn functional and because we do generate a lot of wealth along with the inequality that there's a fair number of people who are doing disproportionately well who are doing that by benefiting everyone else, and we're not very careful about making those sorts of distinctions and they're actually crucial.

That's right. So that's what we do. So in chapter 11, we go into social justice, and many people have claimed social justice is a meaningless term. It's thrown around in certain ways. People can't define it. But after digging into it, we decided that it actually is meaningful. But we have to break it down into its component parts, and so we go into what is the psychology of justice.

And if you focus on distributive justice, are people getting what they deserve based on their inputs? Everybody recognizes when people are being cheated. That they're, you know, like in America now—a lot of low-wage workers—the companies have found ways to skimp on benefits and pay, so that is a violation of distributive fairness. People recognize that that is wrong.

If that is disproportionately affecting one race, or if people are being cheated because they are members of any identity group, that is a violation, I would say, of social justice or of justice applied to identity groups that we think is a very important concept. Similarly, procedural justice—if the criminal justice system ends up, for whatever reason, giving better representation to some groups than others, or treating people differently at any point, that is a violation of justice, which can plausibly be called a violation of social justice.

What we push back against is the shift in recent years to this obsessive emphasis on outcomes. It's what most of the social justice argument seems to be on campuses. You just say, "Look, men are overrepresented, you know, among coders." Well, they're not overrepresented among all other functions at Google and Apple. If you look everywhere else in the company, they're, you know, it's 50-50 or very close. It's only in certain job classifications where there's a disparity, and so people take that as ipso facto proof of systemic sexism.

And what we really push back hard on is saying that's lazy, that's unfair, that's inaccurate—that's an invitation. Those disparities are an invitation to look closer. If you see that the pipeline is 50-50, but the outcome is, well then you've got a strong case.

But if the pipeline from grad programs in computer science is exactly the same as the representation among coders at Google and Apple, well, you know, you have to do something to show that people are being treated differently. So we think there's a lot of bad thinking done in the service of prosecuting one's political agenda within the culture war and that a lot of people don't know how to stand up to it.

And one thing that I find interesting that this should become a blasphemous argument is personal preference—particularly when people talk about genders. I mean, if you've ever actually read, for example, the speech that got Larry Summers in so much trouble, his final conclusion is—it's probably mostly that a lot of these jobs are not. These are not—a lot of these theoretical physical things—they don't have a lot of appeal to women. He basically—he comes down on preference, some reason saying that there might actually be a reason why, you know, veterinary science is overwhelmingly limited and some of these mathematical fields are overwhelmingly men.

It might have something to do with that—some small difference in what people actually like doing. Somehow the funny thing too is the biggest—the London Times just did an article this week on two papers that came out, and it was quite an interesting article because one of the papers came out showing once again that the personality differences between men and women are largest in the most egalitarian societies.

And they actually get quite large by psychological standards in countries like Holland and in the Scandinavian countries, which are the most egalitarian countries. But the biggest difference between men and women—and also one that grows in more egalitarian countries—is in interest, and that that difference is more than a standard deviation. It's like one and a half standard deviations. And so it's more than enough to account for the disparity between male engineers and—sorry—female engineers and male nurses. And the fact that it grows as societies become more egalitarian is actually a death blow to social constructionist theory.

That's right! So let's go into this in a bit of detail because I think this is a really helpful area where I think we have a good idea what's going on and we can see why it's so hard to find the truth here.

So when I taught at UVA, I had a lecture on sex and gender, and I went into sex differences, and the clear finding for many decades is that if you look at differences in ability between men and women, they are very few and far between. Men are better at spatial rotation; women on some measures are a little better at social skills and at language. So there are some differences, but they're few and far between.

If you look at the differences in what kids like and what they choose to do when there's no adult watching, they're huge! Little boys and girls play radically differently. My wife and I once gave up my triplet nephews and they were four years old. We gave them a bag of plastic dinosaurs, and the two boys grabbed the dinosaurs, and they started battling—they're bashing them together. And the girl takes two dinosaurs and she says, "Don't ever leave me, Mommy. I won't leave you, baby."

So, right? But the point is girls and boys play really differently, and if they're supervised by adults, the differences get smaller. Whereas if you let kids play on their own, the differences get bigger. Differences in interest are huge, and that's a crucial finding.

Yeah, that's right. Jordan, I'd like to ask you: why do you think this is treated so much like a heretical blasphemous thought that must be immediately shot down?

There's merely—I think that—I think that you zeroed in on the proper issue before when you talked about the equity doctrine. Now, one of the things I've been trying to figure out is how we know when the left goes too far. Now we know when the right goes too far when they start making ethno-nationalist claims of superiority and something like that, and claiming that all the good things should happen to one ethnic or racial group. Okay, now you're outside the domain of reasonable political discourse at that point.

Now, obviously, the same thing can happen on the left, but when it happens, it’s not so obvious. There’s no smoking pistol, but I think an emphasis on equity, which is code word for equality of outcome, is actually the smoking pistol if you had to pick one.

No, okay. I would disagree with you on that. That can't be a smoking pistol—emphasizing equity can't be a smoking pistol. What I think we mean by smoking pistol is when someone makes an argument in good faith trying to understand some phenomenon in the world, and they suffer social consequences.

That's the smoking pistol. And that's why I think—maybe we might be talking about two slightly different things. I'm trying to figure out where the tipping point is in thought on the left that makes things spiral out of control. And you guys talked about the equality of outcome doctrine as the wrong approach. First of all, it doesn't allow for multivariate analysis, right, which is a big problem. So it oversimplifies things radically.

If there's a difference in outcome, then ipso facto there's a victim-victimizer narrative driving it or reality driving it. And I think that the fundamental problem on the radical left is exactly that. And that's the reason that they don't like the literature on gender differences because you can point to gender differences in outcome, and you can use them as proof for the oppressive nature of society.

But if you look into it and you find out that that's actually not proof—that some of the differences, even some of the differences in outcome, are being driven by things like biological differences in interest—then it radically weakens that central axiomatic claim of fundamental oppression.

And so that's viewed as an existential threat by people for whom that's the cardinal presupposition. That's how it looks to me. I think that is correct because I am struck, you know, since writing The Righteous Mind, I always like to analyze things in terms of what's sacred—what do people think—what organizes them; they circle around it; that binds them together. There are a lot of things that people hold sacred, you know, on all sides. But I am struck by the fact that in the academy, it's not just questioning sacred values of any sort; it's specifically questioning diversity policies that seems to be the most dangerous thing to do.

And that does fit with what you said that it's like there's a big project that we're all engaged in and we're working hard against the enemy, and we're fighting the fight. If one of us steps out and says, "Well, actually, maybe we're wrong on this point," bang! We got to shoot him. We can't. Got to shoot him.

Yeah, that would be proportionate. That probability would be proportionate to the centrality of the axiom. That’s exactly—I think the central axiom here that’s causing all the trouble is the insistence that the best way to—well, two insistences. One is that the best way to characterize Western society is as an oppressive patriarchy.

That's right. Yes. And the second is that the best way to characterize people is by their group. And those two things interact. And so the gender data is particularly a horrifying, I would say, to people who hold those axioms because you can—

For two reasons. One is because the gender differences actually exist, and they do account for differences in outcomes. But even worse—and this is a catastrophe, I think—for the social constructionists is that, as you put egalitarian social policies into play, the very differences that you hate get bigger.

And that needs to be said a thousand times because it really is—it’s a fatal blow to the social constructionist egalitarians and even to the concepts they’re using. Because one thing we could also ask is, well, if it turns out that men and women are as different in egalitarian societies as boys and girls are in their unsupervised play—which I think is a reasonable analog—then we're going to have differences in outcomes that are going to be magnified by the very policies that the egalitarians are putting in place. Yeah.

And then we also might ask too: is inner truly—in the society that we want to set up, maybe wouldn't we want it to be the case that people's free choice would determine their occupational outcomes? And then we have to put up with a certain degree of inequality of outcome and think in a complex way about it.

I wanted to get back just to the point where we were talking about sacredness and one of the stories we talk about in the book is one that I know you're very well familiar with: the Rebecca Tuvel story, which she wrote a paper I'm talking about—you know, an academic paper talking about, you know, well, if we accept transsexuality, what implications does that have for someone like Rachel Dolezal who actually wants to decide whether she claimed that she was black but she wasn't? Is she allowed to do that?

We—John and I have really tried to sort of like be very reasonable as possible, aggressively reasonable. But in that one, we liken it to Emil Durkheim’s definitions of witch hunts because it really, unfortunately, really fit because you not only do you have this kind of like, you know, normal, interesting intellectual exercises of an academic article making an interesting point; she is treated absolutely like a blasphemer, and so badly that people are signing letters condemning her while at the same time emailing saying, "Oh, this is really terrible what happened to you."

And it's just absolutely bizarre. It's a scary situation. That's why I said that the smoking gun that proves that there's a problem is when there are social consequences to making a good faith argument. If you're out in the public square, if you’re in the comments section on YouTube, of course, people are trying to destroy you. What we're trying to do in universities is this really unique and important thing, which is create an environment in which people are expected to challenge each other.

We're not supposed to be there to be agreeable. And it all makes sense. It's all okay because it’s in the surface of finding truth. And as soon as people who are taking part in that process are shamed, punished, excluded, their calls to expel them or punish them, as soon as that happens, we have more of a sort of like, you know, East German mindset where people are not thinking about what's true; they're thinking about, you know, what will avoid getting me in trouble? What am I allowed to say?

Am I allowed to say and, of course, it’s made worse by the fact of what will get me incredible praise for being throwing myself as a true believer? Yeah, but a tremendous amount of it, though, is motivated by the desire to avoid being shunned and treated as the violator of a taboo because that—and that's exactly what's happening—is that there are new taboos.

So then part of the question might be too: why is there such an insistence that the culture we live in is a patriarchal tyranny? Which is also a collapse of complexity, right? I mean, obviously, our culture has its flaws. It tends towards rigidity and tyranny like all cultures do. But comparatively speaking, as we've talked about before, by world standards today or by world standards historically, it's a pretty damn free and productive culture.

But we have this tremendous emphasis on the idea that it's fundamentally a patriarchal tyranny, and that if you question that, then you're treated as a taboo violator. So then the question is, well, what the hell is driving this insistence that it’s a patriarchal tyranny? With Kate Millet, you know, you see who originated at least in part patriarchy theory. You see that she had a very—she had an alcoholic and abusive father.

And so I think that's quite interesting because I think there are psychological dynamics here at work. I wonder to what degree the people who are pushing this theory have had very disturbed interpersonal relationships—gendered relationships—and that that's what would you say driving the collapse of their political viewpoint into a single dimension—a single oversimplified dimension.

You see that sort of oversimplified thinking when you look at psychopathological complexes, you know, like with women with eating disorders in particular. Well, men too, but that's rarer—everything collapses to a single dimension of evaluation, something like, "Thin equals beautiful" or "Thin equals good," and then that drives everything.

And so—and then I also think, maybe is— is this also a challenge to cultural tradition? An actual intellectual challenge to say, "Well, we think that your way of operating within the culture is too tyrannical." And we're going to throw everything we can at you in an attempt to make you prove that that's not true, but I can't get any further underneath it than that.

Let's talk about that. So you're a clinical psychologist, so I think your first impulse is, "Let's look to the person's formative experiences." Why do they think this way? I'm a social psychologist, so I think in terms of if there's some new or some interesting social movement, what are the social forces and pressures on them that led them to think this way?

I also read a lot and think a lot about evolution. I like to think—and this is what first drew me to you—you wouldn't be when I met in 1994; we both loved Carl Jung. And I love Jung's idea of archetypes interpreted from an evolutionary point of view. Yeah, like why do we dream about dragons? Why do so many cultures have dragons?

Well, actually, you know, our ancestors, you know, 60 million years ago, actually were in a world of dinosaur—that's a pretty cool idea. I don't know if it's right. Anyway, human beings have a tendency to think in a Manichaean style. It's effortless. It's default for us to divide the world up into good and evil, and that's why the third great untruth in our book is the untruth of "us versus them." Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Yeah, it's very easy. It's not hard to teach this to people. So we think that is innate as a possibility, and then the question is, why are some movements now teaching this, and why is it making more progress in some areas of the university now than it was 10 or 20 years ago?

So I think that—to answer your question, if you're engaged in a radical program—radical means you want to tear things down; you want radical change—you need to demonize the country, the structure you want to tear down. You need to say that America is the worst. America is a paragon of racism and sexism, and of course we have our problems. You know, most of us think that things have been getting steadily better since the 19th century.

But you're committed to saying that America is the worst. So there was an interesting study published a few months ago—you probably heard about this—that ranked America as, like, the 12th worst country on earth for women. It was behind, you know, Eritrea and Sudan and North Korea. You know, it was one of the worst places on earth to be a woman. And, you know, just on the smell test, you know, really?

Like, you know, I don't want to go into why that's so wrong. But the methodology it was— it was judged by—I can't remember what it was, but it's by—obviously, it was in the judgment of human rights activists or something like that.

American human rights activists—there are not weighing up statistics on how women fare around the world. They're being asked what are the worst countries for women. And if you're engaged in the project of critiquing America, you're motivated to say that America is the worst.

And that's what you can explain that ranking. Well, at minimum, it justifies your continued activism. And if that's what you've staked your career on, then that's also necessary. I also think that's one of the things that's driving all the things that we're talking about is that we've produced a committed activist class that has been heavily subsidized for 30 years, and they're always in need of reasons to justify their continued existence.

I mean, as we all are, of course. But this is a situation where that's become dangerous—the committed activist class. I think this is important also to focus on for a moment because in discussions of this, we're all supposed to praise the students’ political activity. We're all supposed to praise activism.

You know, Pepsi tried that disastrous commercial of just like, you know, random beautiful people being activists because if you have a bullhorn, bullhorn—that's political activity—that's Kylie Jenner! Okay, that's all right! That's right, right, right.

Yeah, I think there is an idea among young people—this is I think more true on the left—that to be political is to be protesting. Yeah, just telling me like, why is it that the right, when they're upset about something, they go and they get people elected to the school board and they change the rules? Like, the right, I think, is more pragmatic in its politics; the left is more expressive.

And I think this is the point that Mark Lilla has been really well. And so ultimately, it ends up backfiring. But I think the respect that we accord to activism—pure and simple, I think that should be rethought.

And yeah, I think so. Universities are might be about to do that. One president of a major university in this region recently said something like to the effect that universities are becoming ungovernable. Now, there are a lot of reasons for that. They face a lot of pressures, but the student activism, the fact that it could be at anything, it's not like it's addressed at injustice; it’s addressed at like something in the dining hall—something spitting that a student.

It's because there are protests about almost anything. I think many administrators are realizing, "What have we done? What kind of Frankenstein monster have we created by incentivizing and praising this kind of activism?" I've been talking to politicians in Canada about the possibility of making a distinction between education and activism and political activism.

So, you know, in Canada, if you're a charitable organization, you can't engage in political activism. Now, it's very difficult to distinguish, right, between what might constitute education and what might constitute activism. But the idea that there's something intrinsically moral and noble about complaining about the evil people in the world is definitely something that, you know, in literature—in the humanities—used to be the antidote to that to some degree.

Because one of the things that characterizes great literature as opposed to second-rate literature is that if the literature's great, the battle between good and evil occurs in the hearts of each protagonist, right? It's a psychological issue and not a sociological issue.

Exactly! I'm turning here to the—and we already talked about Solzhenitsyn, one of our three opening quotes—the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, right? And that is what we should be teaching students—to complexify situations to the extent that we teach them no, it’s simple.

If you know the category, you know their moral valence, and you know they're bad. And the extent to which we're teaching students to think in this way, we are harming them. We are setting them up for failure; we are ill-preparing them for citizenship in a democracy, and we are harming the future of our country. And I probably have a little bit of insight into this as a First Amendment lawyer—as someone who spent a lot of time defending the rights of protesters.

And I've dealt with very many protesters who are protesting utterly sensible things that I'm like absolutely, more power to you. But also, I've talked to other people who I felt like were tilting at windmills.

Or, I mean, I one time represented a group that was—or helped represent a group that believed that the U.S. should have no navy. And I remember sort of talking about—so it's not that you think we should spend less on military, but that we should literally have no navy.

And that was the argument. I would ask some of my activist friends in San Francisco, some of them were doing, I think, you know, absolute lords work, particularly with criminal justice and that kind of stuff—who are just the best people I ever met. But in other cases I’d see sort of activists sort of groups that were—for example, I opposed the second Iraq war, but I had friends who also opposed it who would immediately go into—and 9/11 was a conspiracy to allow for the—and I’m like, “Why? Why are you moving it to like that next argument where you're going to lose more people?”

And the perception was that we have to keep the temperature at boiling point; we have to keep it at 212, or else people will lose interest. And I actually said Pinker is actually more correct on this—is that we're actually creating, partially through some of some of the post-modernist thoughts that you critique, we're creating a situation in which actually progress is more or less hopeless, and all you can really do is shout about it, which actually makes people more cynical and does less to achieve your goals.

Whereas, as Pinker likes to point out, if we actually look at, well, what did we do that actually works and try to keep doing that, that's probably a better bet for how you keep actual progress going.

Well, the perverse thing there too is that I believe this to be true. John, you mentioned that there's been a variety of books coming out. Maybe I could get that list and post them in the description of this YouTube video—that might be useful. But there's also a whole string of books that's been published lately, including Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now, showing that the rate of economic progress around the world, especially with regard to lifting the abjectly poor out of poverty, is increasing at an unparalleled rate.

And that might be a secondary benefit to the collapse of communism since 1989. A lot of things are driving it, but certainly some of it is the spread of ideas of individual sovereignty and the use of free-market policies by developing countries. Just as we see the landscape for the poor around the world to be radically improved, we're in this process in the West of criticizing our fundamental principles to the point where we're driving a dangerous level of polarization.

And so that's a very perverse and strange situation and difficult to contend with.

So, all right; let’s switch a bit here. Okay, so while we see the problem—the problem is that we're still sketching it out and trying to articulate it, but it's something like the rise of a victim-victimizer culture that might be driven by young people's increasing sense of vulnerability as a consequence of the unexamined effects of social media, the polarization driven by a tendency for a dying media to come to concentrate on extremism, the domination of the intellectual discourse in the universities by the left and the radical left—all these things are playing together and causing a certain amount of trouble, like the rise of this excessive safety culture that has negative psychological consequences.

All right, that's all dangerous. What in the world do we do about it? Jonathan, you have the Heterodox Academy, so that's something you've put into practice that was designed to increase viewpoint diversity. Do you think that's—what’s your sense of that? What’s the consequence of that?

Yeah, so the problem is, you know, as you said, as we say in the book, there are six different separate contributing factors all coming together. The solution is not easy. Let’s break it down into what do we need to do to get our universities functioning better and what do we need to do to raise kids who are more resilient and more able to deal with difference.

Let’s focus on those two. So let's start with the universities. So I co-founded Heterodox Academy, if you go to heterodoxacademy.org, with Nick Rosenkranz, a law scholar, and Chris Martin, a grad student in sociology, and then a bunch of other social psychologists because we were concerned that this is just a faculty initiative and discussions among professors of psychology and research in psychology were showing signs that certain hypotheses wouldn’t be investigated, other interpretations were favored. We were seeing signs, and almost all of us were on the left or center.

There are only two conservative social psychologists I know of. We were concerned about research quality. That’s all it was. And so we ended up putting up this site. It went live on about September 10, 2015—totally unrelated to that, Greg and I had been writing the Atlantic article. Totally separate track—and then all hell broke loose at Halloween in 2015. It became clear this isn’t just a faculty issue; the problem on campus is a culture issue in which this new form of student activism, this new form of student belief in fragility is affecting how we do our research, how we educate.

So all the problems are interrelated. But to focus on the faculty issue, what we’re doing at Heterodox Academy originally, when I was running it, I thought the issue was, well, we have no political diversity. We need to get more—we need to encourage more conservatives and libertarians to get PhDs, and then we need to help them get jobs. That’s what I thought originally.

But over time, the problem has morphed, and it’s become clear we do actually have some diversity in every field. Not everybody is on the left. A lot of people are in the center or libertarian, or they say I can’t be put in a box.

And what we have to do is encourage those people to feel that they can speak up, they can question dominant ideas, they can be a little subversive. We have to make it so they’re not afraid of social consequences for speaking up. So that’s the way that I was thinking about it.

Now, in January, I turned over Heterodox Academy to an amazing woman, Deborah Maszick. She’s a professor at Harvey Mudd College. She is leaving that job to run Heterodox Academy full time. Deb studies relationships. She’s a great teacher. She is moving the organization to focus more on helping campuses recreate that climate that we all know and love.

I mean, you know, I love being a professor; I love universities. Deb is focusing on how do we prepare students. And so we’ve talked a lot about this in the book: What do you do at orientation? What are the norms you make clear about speech and free speech? Of course, we need to do training in diversity and inclusion and sexual violence—all that stuff.

But how many schools train for free speech? Yeah, pretty much none of them. And the fact that we don't mention any of these deep thought philosophies or concepts—the deep philosophical underpinnings of academic freedom, freedom of speech—but there's just so much we can complain about. Students not knowing them, but nobody’s actually talking about that, for sure.

Well, and it’s been really interesting, on this lecture tour, to find out how receptive people are to exactly that kind of message. You know, and I've been beating the drum, let's say, for more conscious understanding of the relationship between meaning and personal responsibility because one of the things we also teach students is that the proper focus for them is the violation of their intrinsic rights, as if the upholding of those rights is going to provide them with a sustaining meaning in life.

But I don't believe that that's true. I think that what’s more true is that most people find a sustaining meaning by adopting a fairly heavy burden of personal responsibility, partly for themselves and partly for their family and partly for the broader community. And that that just seems to have dropped out of the public discourse in its entirety.

And then also what could be taught to incoming students is this clinical doctrine that we've been describing, which is, well, how do you make yourself stronger? Well, you expose yourself voluntarily to challenges that are outside of your domain of current competence—and that often involves confronting things that you think are frightening. But that you might also think are disgusting because that's what happens with obsessive-compulsive disorder treatment.

And, you know, disgust obviously runs, uh, motivates some of this political polarization.

That's right! And somebody alerted me—somebody, a civil rights scholar, told me about how the marchers in the 60s, how they trained. And here they are going into, you know, staging protests, going in, doing sit-ins, facing real violence, and some of them were actually killed. The way they prepared for it was others would shout racist slurs at them; they would be prepared for it. They would expose themselves to the worst.

And then when the worst happened, at least it was less painful than had they not encountered it. So again, over and over again we see: Is your goal to toughen yourself up? Is your goal to become stronger and more able to deal with the world as it is? Or is your goal to demand that somebody make the world other than it is?

Yeah, which is the more reliable path to success in life? Yeah. I mean, both John and I, you know, as the president of FIRE and both through Heterodox, we're both trying to also figure out ways to get to people well before they set foot on a college campus.

Now certainly I think it's kind of unforgivable that most universities don't teach about some of these deep philosophies and concepts in orientation, but you should already be learning about some of these ideas when you're in high school.

So one thing that John did that I'm totally jealous of is they did a graphic novel version of part of chapter two of On Liberty about freedom of speech as a great way to tell a generation of students about—and I also just love On Liberty, particularly about freedom of speech as a lawyer because I'm like, this guy, man, can this guy argue like that!

Being able to defend the decision to defend blasphemy, to go up against blasphemy prohibitions in 1859, but then manage to say, "And by the way, you know who suffered under blasphemy laws?" Socrates—yes, and guess who enforced them? Marcus Aurelius—also one of your heroes. And it's like, "Oh, you just won the case." You are a world-class arguer.

Yeah, so let me suggest that viewers go to Amazon and look up All Minus One, or you can go to HeterodoxAcademy.org, where you can get a free version of the PDF or you can—we have a $3 Kindle version of it as well as the printed art book. Great! Let’s put that in the description as well!

Great! So, yeah, so every—so high school—any high school that wants to teach about free speech, assign this. It’s extremely readable by high school students. It's just chapter two cut by fifty percent and Mills' metaphors are illustrated.

Yeah! Okay! Okay! Well, so the free speech issue too. So, I mean, one of the concepts that I've been wrestling with is, you know, we have to produce hierarchies in order to accomplish tasks collectively. And we have to accomplish tasks because there’s suffering to address and real problems to solve. So we're going to produce hierarchies, and hopefully, the hierarchies are predicated on merit in relationship to the solution of the problem.

And so the right-winger types are more inclined to support hierarchical structures because of their psychological predisposition, and the left-wingers are more likely to be concerned about the fact that the hierarchies inevitably dispossess, because they’ll produce unequal distribution of resources.

Okay, so then you can imagine that the political landscape is a battleground—a permanent battleground—between those who stand for the hierarchies and note that they have their utility but are perhaps blind to their proclivity to become tyrannical, and those who are more sensitive to the claims of the dispossessed and worried about the proclivity of tyranny of hierarchies to become predicated on nothing but power, right?

Okay, now at some points the hierarchy is going to be weak and need to be strengthened, and at other points there has to be more clamor on the side of the dispossessed. And the reason you have free speech, as far as I'm concerned, is because it's the mechanism that keeps those two opponent processes balanced.

It's a core element of a free society because it's actually the process by which the society maintains and improves itself across time. It's not just another value among many values. Oh! Sorry, there's just two points that I always feel like I need to make about that.

One, the Founding Fathers were really good evolutionary psychologists, and one thing that I love about working in constitutional law is just how both pessimistic and optimistic it was at the same time about human nature. Those very tensions were the tensions that, you know, Alexander Hamilton and Madison were so concerned about: how do you balance out these natural human human nature?

Whereas today, you know, what we're supposed to claim—there isn't any such thing as human nature. The other thing is I have a slightly different philosophy on freedom of speech. It’s actually much simpler than a lot of the sort of like, the more sort of, platonic ideal of truth, which is simply that it's always valuable to know what people really think.

And as simple as that sounds, it does mean that when people say "Well, you certainly shouldn't be listening to conspiracy theorists and what they have to say about stuff," and I'm like, if it's a popular conspiracy, shouldn't you have some clue about like what some chunk of the population actually thinks about things? And I think that we—that understanding what people you despise actually think and believe is always of value because the project itself is a project of human knowledge—knowing human beings as they actually are, not as we wish they were.

Well, it’s even self-protective to use that terminology. It’s like, if I want to know what you're going to do, and I do, especially if I happen to be near you or have to interact with you repeatedly, if I know what you think, then I can understand how you're going to act. And if I don't know how you think, partly because you're not allowed to express it, then you're an opaque mystery to me.

And the probability that we're going to engage in conflict goes up tremendously. So, I mean, there are multiple reasons for protecting the sanctity, let’s say, of free speech. Now, one of the things that really distresses me about the postmodern/slash neo-Marxist philosophy is that there isn't any room in that philosophy for the idea of free speech.

You know, this is something I've come to understand more deeply over the last two years. When you're talking to someone from that theoretical perspective, they can't engage in a discussion about free speech because it doesn't fit into their worldview. Because all there is—not sovereign individuals engaging in a discussion about the nature of reality—there's avatars of their power group unconsciously making claims on behalf of their privilege.

And that there's never free speech there because you're not a free agent; you're not even a real entity as an individual. And that’s a far more pernicious assault on free speech than mere objection to it as a right wing—as something that's been hijacked by the right wing to validate their powers, you know, their particular privilege.

So let's talk about this because this is one of the main arguments that we get back is, um, free speech is just a way for the powerful to retain their power. Yeah, it didn't help our causes, certainly, like Greg's cause when the Nazis started having rallies for free speech.

Like, that’s really not what you want, but so great. What’s your response when people say, “free speech is just helps the powerful”?

It drives me nuts because it's a fundamental misunderstanding of history and government and political philosophy, and I've had this argument with Stanley Fish, and it seemed like a total shock to him. I’m sure he thought of it before, but you don't need a special protection of an individual right in a democracy for the majority.

You first of all, that's great—rich people and powerful people under any system of government—well, rich people—themselves under communism, you know, don't do so well. Once they take over, you know, like the KGB people can make themselves totally rich. But rich and powerful people are always going to be fine if you set up a democracy.

The majority is always—if there's a consistent majority, the majority is always going to be fine. You only need a special protection of freedom of speech for minority points of view. I know, I know! It's absolutely amazing that that’s not absolutely basic, and John Rauch, it was really interesting—you know, Rauch has a lot of arguments on this that are so interesting because he says it’s like, listen, if you've reached the point where there's enough of the people who are worried about your well-being that they're willing to pass a law in a majoritarian country to get you protected, it probably means the real dark days are behind you.

And one of the things that we've talked about, me and Rauch, is that if we passed an anti-hate speech law, say in the late 1960s, it would have frozen in place kind of attitudes about homosexuality.

Which you, you know, as a gay man, very concerned about. And I think we would have ended up with a law that looked a lot more like what you see in Russia that actually ends up being used against gay people than there’s a progressive law that we hope it would be. But time and time again, the idea that you—like, by the way, I’m gonna—I keep on trying to put this out just in a very practical way.

It’s like, so you want laws that define—that allow the government to stop hateful speech, and you want Trump to have those powers? And somehow this is right? That's the—there's an old military doctrine, which is whatever weapon you design, your enemies will have in 15 years.

And if you start putting restrictions on something like free speech as benefit to your ideological position and you don't imagine that you might be outmaneuvered in their use by your enemies, then you're not sufficiently awake! Right? So, and I did a lecture a year and a half ago which was a left-wing case for free speech, and I just thought that was self-evident for the reasons that you put forward, which is, well, the powerful—you can use left-wing terminology here—the powerful have an a priori monopoly on speech, obviously.

And so you want to put protections in place so that the dispossessed, who you hypothetically champion, get a chance to put their viewpoint forward. And it’s really—it’s quite a mystery that that's not merely axiomatically obvious now.

Well, you know, if Nazis are calling for free speech, if the easy thing to do is say, "Okay, well then it must be bad!" Yes! Well, okay, so tell me, let's go back to the book. So how—you said earlier when we talked before the interview that it had been on the New York Times bestseller list and it seems to be selling well. What are you hoping—what do you see happening as a consequence of your essay in The Atlantic and as a consequence of the book?

And what do you hope will happen, like, say, over the next year, if we’re going to be optimistic about where we're headed? What's going to happen?

Yeah, so I have felt for the last two years that we're kind of in an emperor's new clothes situation where most people who are paying attention, most people are involved in universities or in education realize there's something wrong, but they don't understand what it is. And nobody wants to appear insensitive. People don't want to stand up and critique if it seems that you're pushing back against historically marginalized groups in particular.

So there's been lots of university administrators. We've spoken to a lot of college presidents that, overwhelmingly what I would call liberal left—not illiberal— I don't know of any college presidents who are illiberal, but they're often afraid to stand up for what you—I’m sure you did. You met somebody from Evergreen State University.

Oh! I’m sorry—I could take Evergreen! That’s right! So there’s been a lot of desire to change, a lot of desire to restore some sense of order and community on campus that we can do our work and do our teaching. And but what I'm hopeful that our book will do is give everyone a common set of concepts and sort of a look into how this thing plays out if you don't do anything to stop it going down this rabbit hole.

My hope for the book is that the parenting stuff is all new. A lot of people have been following what’s going on on campus, but they don’t realize this is now happening in high schools and earlier. So my hope is that every school principal—from elementary school through high school—and then every college president will get a copy of the book in the mail or given to them by a donor.

And so, okay, Jordan, Jordan's large audience—I hope that you will buy a copy of the book and give it to the principal of your kids' elementary school. And certainly, maybe we can put that in the description as well. It makes a great gift to the people who are educating your children!

Right! I’ll write that down right now.

Yeah, and reaching parents out—that’s always the first constituency we talk about because, you know, we hear from parents over and over again, as parent and as parents ourselves. There's this kind of like—there's a sense that something's really going wrong in K-12 education. Certainly, there's something going wrong in just the process of parenting where most of people feel kind of—well, it seems like a lot of parents feel sort of helpless because they don’t—they have that pluralistic ignorance problem.

They don’t know that everybody else, you know, are having the same problems. And as soon as you actually get the conversation starting, we can get to parents—we have a real fighting chance.

Okay, okay! All right, well, um, what—and what do you think? Like, are you optimistic or pessimistic about where this is going at the moment?

Yes, no kidding! That's exactly it! A headache—a little bit of both! Yeah, I'm very pessimistic about the national situation. I think polarization is going to get worse for a while.

Um, and so I think we have to think about how do we adapt our institutions to life in an increasingly polarized country? So, you know, if you know—if politics is dominating everything and it's getting nastier and nastier, it would be great if, when you go into a restaurant, you don't have to think about, “Is this a Democrat restaurant?” or “Republican restaurant?”

When you go in to buy a pair of sneakers, you don't have to think about, “Is this a Democrat pair of sneakers or Republican pair of sneakers?” So we may be going to the root to everything is polarized. Everything's political. That would be terrible. If universities succumb to that, if this is a Democrat university or, you know, a Republican university, that would be terrible.

So I think, on the national level, I'm very pessimistic, but I think that there is enough recognition that this—that we're all exhausted, and this is going out of control. But I think we will have a look—it'll be possible to get a constituency to say, “Our elementary schools, our middle schools, our high schools, and universities—they have work to do!”

We need to reform what we're doing in ways that are better for the kids. We all love our kids. We all want our kids to be resilient. So I like Greg. I'm very optimistic that the trend towards overprotective parenting, which has just been continuing on and on—I’m very optimistic that that will reverse once people see those graphs, once people—and you talk to parents of teenagers—even if their kid isn't depressed, seven of their kid's friends are depressed or anxious.

Yeah, well, okay! So let me ask you about that a little bit. And maybe we’ll end with this. I've been trying to figure out why this overprotectiveness epidemic has emerged. So I took the social psychological route of analysis instead of the psychological because I do know you should look at situational factors before you look at personality factors, let’s say, generally speaking.

Well here are some demographic trends: fewer kids, so maybe parents don't make their kids resilient. Maybe siblings do, you know, because there's a lot of—there's a lot of status competition between siblings. If you're special or unresilient, your siblings are going to have a field day with you.

And so, you know, maybe we can't raise kids that are resilient unless they have three brothers and sisters or something like that. That makes a lot of sense!

But my recollection when—was it, so, uh, what was it, uh, the guy who wrote Birth Order? What was that book? Uh, 1990s? My recollection is that the effects of birth order are actually very small. And so whether you're first or last—whether you're an only child or not—so research going back very far, those effects are pretty small.

So, I would not put this big change on the fact of declining families because you don't have siblings.

Rather declining families means there just aren’t that many kids in the neighborhood. Yeah, right?

Well, that's the other issue! Sure! Sure! Okay, so then next thing—next thing might be older parents. You know, we don't know how optimally stupid you should be when you're a parent. And it might be that you might need to be somewhat narcissistically entranced with your own life to ignore your children enough to allow them to develop independent resilience.

You know, and if you're—if now, let's say you don’t have a child until you're, well, let’s say 40—you only have