The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

This is quite a good book about the “safe space” concept, mostly at universities. It’s very similar to The Parasitic Mind or The Constitution of Knowledge.

It fights back against three “untruths”:

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker (it doesn’t)
2. Always trust your feelings (don’t)
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people (it’s way more complicated than that)

They do a little cherry-picking of liberal weirdness on the fringes. They go deep, for example, into the insanity that gripped Evergreen State College in 2017, which I don’t think is representative of the mainstream Left.

The basic idea is that we’re making the next generation weaker by trying to protect them from everything. We’re not only unnecessarily obsessed with their physical safety, but now also with their emotional safety.

I enjoyed the book, but the authors were preaching to the choir quite a bit.

Book Info