The Danger of Safety-ism

If only experts would stop telling us how mentally ill we all are. 

"Mental Illness a Growing Threat Among Teens" is a headline we read daily. Apparently it's what readers and listeners want to hear; media outlets poll them to find out and then give them what they want. For hits and ratings, mental illness is rated highly, topic-wise. 

The "mental illness among teens" narrative feeds the reluctance of teens to grow up and be self-supporting -- it seems too dangerous. Did Covid lockdowns teach them to shun employment just as they reached adulthood and governments were pouring out free money to help people stay home? It was no training for independence.

Youths no longer drive (climate change), no longer find after-school jobs (prefer online gigs), nor if they go to college, find student housing (rents too high). Do they even become students? Apparently colleges might put them in range of "harm" due to hearing opinions in class that differ from their own. "Anxiety and depression" lurk in every lecture hall and library, where unwelcome ideas might be encountered, and discussion relabled as bullying ... 

(Check out Heterdox Academy for lots of current detail on that: https://heterodoxacademy.org/)

Young people refuse to put their security-blanket smartphones down. For them, if something can't be done by swiping, it won't be done. Scrolling is a soother, the contemporary version of the thing their mothers put into their mouths in toddler-hood. Are today's thirty-somethings still toddlers? Many seem to want the gender-fluidity of toddler-hood; take that away and you're "marginalizing" them. Maybe because you're a privileged white Boomer? 

As small children, these twenty- and thirty-somethings spent a lot of time in daycare centres; maybe the over-exposure to non-family "carers" in early childhood fed into a generational fear of adulthood? You learned in daycare to sing-along with a group, in preparation for singing in secondary school from the correctness song-sheet. Now you might be shamed and cancelled if you deviate from it. 

Better to stay home and watch Zoom (sounds like the childish noise you made with the toys in the daycare centre). The place you were banished from in early childhood (home) now seems your "safe place".

If you can't tolerate working and striving, you won't tolerate novel ideas or diverse thought. In their own day, the baby-boom generation despised the narrow-minded "establishment". Independence mattered, and they were lucky: it was easy to find jobs, afford rent, run an old beater of a car and leave home. They valued free thought, free verse, free love, they marched for Earth Day and Banning the Bomb, started communes, discovered pot, turned vegetarian. Now, they look upon the non-works of grandchildren and despair -- or shake their heads in puzzlement.

Not all youths are hiding in basement lairs of course. Some are excelling at STEM or becoming artists or studying History (learning to take the long view). Maybe it won't matter in the end because everything practical will be done by robots. The robots' intelligence may be artificial but they won't get anxious and depressed while they watch and monitor us through digital surveillance. 

Now that will be real danger.

Exclude the Exclusion Ambassadors ... please!

Some publishers employ "sensitivity readers" (editors) to police language in manuscripts which might make readers "feel unsafe". 

Sensitivity editors' role is actually to make publishers feel safe from attack by woke would-be censors. For that purpose, publishers now hire "Inclusion Ambassadors".

Bret Easton Ellis's latest novel came in for editorial correction* when his publisher's sensitivity readers complained it “was not a ‘positive’ portrayal of homosexuality”. 

Clearly, many classic books are in need of re-writing so that people can feel safe reading them. Readers don't want to be ambushed by the notion that there are more ideas in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

Some books that seriously need to explain their attitude:

Black Beauty, for not supplying a positive portrayal of horse-abusers

War and Peace, for a non-positive portrayal of a Napoleonic war

Far From the Madding Crowd, for being negative about crowds

Animal Farm, for implied criticism of farmers

Wuthering Heights, for insensitivity toward people with fear of heights

Treasure Island, for casting aspersions on pirates

The Mill on the Floss, for stigmatizing people who can't afford dental care

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for not portraying "them" as a young woman or trans person 

Where's our freedom of expression, once it's edited away by publishers? Like Eeyore of Pooh Corner said of a lost thing:  "Somebody must have taken it. How like them."   

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PS: A disclosure -- I've never read Bret Easton Ellis's novels* but I might now, for who can resist an author who says "I do not want to write anything with a fucking cell phone in it"?                                                                                         I'm sure tired of reading stories full of them, with characters who do nothing but talk on them, text with them, scroll through them, take pictures and solve murders with them ... So please, edit phones out, thought-pruners. ...