Greg Lukianoff: belief

Transcript context

…Why does that have a negative effect? Is it because it enforces a kind of group think where people start becoming afraid to sort of think and speak freely, liberally, about whatever? Well, one, it selects for people who tend to be farther to the left in a situation where you already have people, a situation where universities do lean decidedly that way, but it also establishes essentially a set of sacred ideas that if you’re being quizzed on what you’ve done to advance anti-racism, how you’ve been conscious of intersectionality, it’s unlikely that you’d actually get in if you said, “By the way, I actually think these are dubious concepts. I think they’re thin. I think they’re philosophically not very defensible.” Basically, if your position was, “I actually reject these concepts as being over simple,” you’re not going to get in. I think that the person that I always think of that wasn’t a right-winger that would be like, “Go to hell,” if you made him fill one of these things out, it’s Feynman. I feel like if you gave one of these things to Richard Feynman, he would tear it to pieces and then not get the chop. Yeah, there’s some element of it that creates this hard to pin down fear. You said the firing… The thing I wanted to say is firing 100 people or 200 people. The point is even firing one person, I’ve just seen it, it can create this quiet ripple effect of fear.…

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