Jonathan Haidt: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think we do that with the disability concept today? We even call it disability, but people, say, with Tourette Syndrome — it’s not clear they have lesser outcomes than other individuals. Do we need some kind of identitarian movement to invert the fact that a whole set of different kinds of people seem to be called inferior right now? Both the left and the right just go along with this. Should we be outraged by that, and we need a new identitarian movement? So there are two empirical questions here. One is a question about political activism and social change. Obviously, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement — these were identitarian movements that were addressing injustice and that were successful. If they’d not gotten together, change might have come eventually, but they certainly speeded things up. I have no problem with identitarian movements organizing for political purposes. I just think they don’t belong in the university, in classrooms. Now, as for mental conditions — you might say disabilities — that brings us to the second empirical question, which is, does turning up identity, does turning up your sense that I am ADHD or I’m on the spectrum, whatever — does that actually help young people to achieve better outcomes? There, I don’t know. I’m not an expert in that, but part of the point of my book with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, was that the ancient idea from the Stoics and the Buddhists — it’s not things that upset us, it’s interpretation of them. If you identify as a person with a disability — let’s take anxiety. Young people talk about “my anxiety.” Here I am with my anxiety, practically like a friend. I suspect that identifying with anxiety and depression as part of your identity is probably bad for you. It changes the way you think. It makes you process in a more biased way. I could well be wrong about this, but overall, I think probably we’re doing it too much in terms of what’s good for young people. Let’s turn to your book, which again, everyone, is called The Anxious Generation. You’re worried about screen time. Why isn’t it the case that AI quite soon is simply going to solve this problem? That is, you’ll have your AI agent read the internet for you, or your messages or whatever, and if you want it to talk to you or give you images or digest it all, isn’t it going to cut down on screen time immensely?…

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