flooded into the wider world – often via social media. That’s why we so often hear of some celebrity apologizing for hurting people’s feelings or getting fired for stating a controversial viewpoint. We were once a nation of self-reliant people. Now it seems too many of us have become spineless pansies. As part of his research for The Parasitic Mind , Gaad looked at a variety of university mottos... He found 128 instances of the word “truth”... 46 of the word “wisdom”... 61 of the word “science”... and absolutely ZERO of the words “emotion” or “feeling.”
They’re often attempts to squelch freedom of speech through the threat of violence. When violence is threatened and the intended victim backs down, the violence has effectively been perpetrated on the victim. “Don’t say [blank] or else,” is not an unambiguous proposition... It’s as anti- civilization as the cold-blooded murder of Aaron “Jay” Danielson. As Peterson might put it, the “reality” in which you pay for your political or religious views with your life is not “the most habitable.” I would go a step further, adding that it becomes less and less habitable the longer such conditions prevail... Ask anyone who has been a political prisoner for a decade or two if they’ve contemplated suicide, and you’ll understand exactly what I mean about the inhabitability of a world where speech is answered with violence. The same can be said for the countless folks who survived the violence of the Holocaust or who fled Nazi Germany. Saad offered his own list of the non- negotiable elements of a civilized (he calls it “free and modern”) society in Chapter 3 of The Parasitic Mind ... I posit that the guaranteed right to debate any idea (freedom of speech and thought) coupled with a commitment to reason and science to test competing ideas (the scientific method) are what have made Western Civilization great. The increasingly violent assault on speech is rooted in part on the pervasive primacy of emotion that has infected academia and
The increasingly violent assault on speech is rooted in part on the pervasive primacy of emotion that has infected academia and flooded into the wider world
That’s exactly as it should be! Universities are founded to pursue truth, not to aggrandize (much less protect) students’ emotions. And yet today, universities are worried enough about emotionally triggering students to offer them “safe spaces” where their feelings won’t get hurt. If you wonder what’s going on in academia, that’s it right there...
American Consequences
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