“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we drink little by little the truth that makes us bitter.”
– Denis Diderot
The French philosopher could not have predicted the fragile state of today’s young minds, who have been culturally conditioned, pampered and deceived into rejecting the truth, when he wrote these sobering words in his book in 1821. Rameau's nephewGiven the rise of campus protectionism, speech codes, cancel culture, and the underlying bastion of liberal values, college students today are increasingly immune to inconvenient facts and controversial opinions.
As a result of this, consequences come out.
Society at large is experiencing a non-liberal cultural reorientation that threatens to destroy the foundations of American democracy, for which Enlightenment rationalism, non-color equality, freedom of expression, and constitutional neutrality matter fundamentally. Public and private institutions mindlessly chase the fashionable waves of identity politics, often not because they agree but to please a demanding and dangerous crowd.
On a personal level, many Americans, particularly those raised on left-wing values, are struggling to find meaning and purpose in life.
A US News/Generation Lab survey of 3,649 American college students in March 2024 found that 70 percent of respondents had experienced mental health issues since starting college. Of those, 77 percent were women, 68 percent were Black, 73 percent were white, 70 percent were Hispanic, and 64 percent were Asian American and Pacific Islander.
In his “Second Annual State of Equity in America Forum”, US News & World Report The survey was discussed and a solution strategy was formulated.
Panelists for the topic, titled “How colleges are prioritizing mental health and neurodiversity on campus,” emphasized the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated college students' mental health problems. When asked to elaborate on why the pandemic is considered a starting point, the reporter said US News & World Report responded to:
Our survey did not address this specific question. It mainly focused on whether students were asking for help, what they were asking for help, why they did not ask for help if they needed it, etc.
After quickly reaching a judgment on the devastating effects of the virus, speakers at the “State of Equity” advocated for more mental health resources for “students of color,” “LGBTQIA+ students,” and “neurodivergent young people.” In other words, the “professionals” suggest subdividing or segregating college-going young adults into a proliferation of identity boxes, as if they aren’t already confusing enough, and targeting mental health care based on their arbitrary group labels.
This is crazy in every way.
First of all, focusing on the solution rather than the cause is completely ridiculous. How can any meaningful solution be found without examining the contributing factors?
Mental health among Gen-Z college students has been in crisis even before 2020. However US News Presenting research evidence detailing the psychological impact of the pandemic on children and youth, the data points at best described a short-term trend and determined a correlational relationship. For example, a survey of 3,239 high school and higher education students about COVID-19 and mental health was conducted in April 2020. Similarly, a JAMA Pediatrics analysis about anxiety and depression in 80,000 children and adolescents from 11 countries was released in January 2022.
There is a more plausible explanation for the alarming state of our children’s mental health. They are being relentlessly indoctrinated by an ideology that demonises individual feelings, denies the deeper realities of life, shames based on group labels, and strips away individual agency, all in the name of equality, diversity or justice.
It is a secular religion that is nihilistic, hedonistic, and cynical. We can find a robust literature of studies and essays that demonstrate causal effects and causal mechanisms between the degree to which a young person is occupied by this ideology and his or her level of mental health struggles.
In early 1987, when Allan Bloom's The closure of the American mindset After it was published, critics of our higher education system understood the malaise caused by prioritizing historicism, feminism, and cultural relativism, the intellectual precursors to the full-blown wokeism that pervades college campuses today. Bloom wrote, almost prophetically,
As things stand now, students have a powerful image of what the ideal body is and they pursue it relentlessly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have an image of the ideal soul, and so they do not aspire to it. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing…Today's students are largely indifferent to any concern outside themselves. There is no malice in this self-centeredness; but it has become so deeply ingrained in American culture that it is not even considered unusual.
In his 2018 bestselling book The Pampering of the American MindGreg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt study the mental health crisis among American and British adolescents. Noting alarming increases in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm, Lukianoff and Haidt point to a culture of protectionism, a system in which emotional safety at all costs becomes a ritual of high education, as the culprit behind rising mental frailty and anxiety among children and adolescents. They argue:
A culture that allows the concept of “safety” to inflate to the point that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need to be strong and healthy.
Brave observers go a step further and argue that left-wing beliefs make children unhappier, angrier, and less satisfied. Economist shows that liberal boys and girls report higher rates of depression than their conservative counterparts, largely due to the lack or absence of mitigating factors such as patriotism, religiosity and physical health—obesity is skyrocketing. In his latest book Bad Therapy: Why Aren't Kids Growing Up?Abigail Shrier has noticed similar trends.
Some psychologists theorize a “happiness gap” between conservatives and liberals is due to liberals having greater personal competence, a more positive outlook on life, and higher moral convictions. Others attribute conservatives' better subjective well-being to a rationalization of inequality. At any rate, the consensus is that culture, beliefs, political persuasion, and values largely explain a person's mental health status.
Yet, the torchbearers of the woke cult easily abandon the intellectual curiosity to investigate further and find a convenient scapegoat for the decades-long pandemic, the harmful undertaking of ensnaring young minds in the everything-goes, safety-from-reason, victim-or-victim mind virus. And like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the more children and young adults woke religion teaches, the worse off they are mentally, even the more likely they are to turn to the mental virus that made them sick in the first place. A shaky security blanket turns into a straitjacket.
Photo: Antonio Diaz – Adobe Stock – Asset ID # 483677257
