The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a must read. It challenges. There are things to be argued over. There are things to be implemented. Lukianoff and Haidt present much needed material to challenge the deep divisions of our current society.
The three great “untruths” they address are these:
1. The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker
2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings
3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battled Between Good People and Evil People
They address them primarily in the university setting, which is their world as scholars and professors. They also address how to tackle these issues in the lives of young children and give them a true head start into becoming better citizens again.
We are NOT fragile. We should understand that as humans we are resilient and can take “hits.” We are able to recover and be better.
We need to learn from data and truth and take command of our emotions. Lukianoff especially offers help as he was in clinical depression and found tremendous help in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
There are not purely good people and purely evil people. We’re all a mixture. We are ALL a mixture. Evil has every opportunity to dwell in us as the “righteous” ones with our supposed pure ideology as it does anywhere else and to make enemies and outright call them evil is tragic.
We need this book to be in broader discussion and application. It would be a welcome respite from our current cultural ugliness.
View all my reviews
Apprentice 2 Jesus 