It’s Not All the Snowflakes’ Fault

“As Lukianoff and Haidt put it, young people in the Anglo-Saxon world are ‘trained to be triggered’ from a very young age. Claire Fox (2016) was right to argue that instead of merely blaming ‘generation snowflake’ for today’s intellectual atmosphere, we need to see how students got socialized in these attitudes. ‘Adult society’, she claimed, ‘has fed them a diet of anxieties and provided the language of safety and risk aversion that now threatens liberal values of tolerance and resilience’. When young people look up to us, they don’t see reassurance and conviction anymore; they see risk-averse adults without the self-confidence that the challenges of tomorrow can be met. ‘The erstwhile adult role of reassuring the young and telling them not to over-react is replaced by grown-ups reveling in telling horror stories; if once when children had nightmares, we told them not to worry; now we tell them their nightmares are real life’.”

(from “Identity Politics and Tribalism: The New Culture Wars (Societas Book 74) (English Edition)” by Nikos Sotirakopoulos)

 

 

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