Emotional Safety and The Case for Second Class Citizens

Part 2 of the “Against liberalism” Series

Part 1

“Words are violence” is a typical rhetoric claim nowadays. The assertion is that some people feel severe discomfort or harm from hearing words or ideas they disagree with and should be accommodated by banning those words. 

The typical liberal pushback claims that students don’t actually feel so bad, could learn to be more accepting of different ideas, and should be happy living in a liberal society. The archetypical response is this essay by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, two of liberalism’s most devout.  They make plenty of very scientific and very logical rebuttals to how speech does not actually cause a physical reaction. Was that ever really the point? These students are not scientists and certainly do not have the IQ or background knowledge of Haidt or Lukianoff. They are not making an empirical or statistical claim. They are just saying “Wow it feels awful when people disagree with me”, to the point that they would genuinely prefer some kind of physical harm instead. Of course, it is possible that some of them could be cynically lying, but there’s no reason to think that none of them could possibly have this kind of disposition. If so many people are claiming to have this affliction, perhaps some of them are honest. It is also true that some of them would be helped by some cognitive behavioural therapy instead of sheltering, but it’s likely that some of them can’t be helped at all.

This is a difficult question to answer in the scientific paradigm, because there might be no reaction other than emotional, even in this case. One test we might have is whether people’s actions are consistent with this expressed belief. There are already plenty of anecdotes to support this idea, primarily opinion columns from Michelle Goldberg and similar legacy media columnists. Here’s a quote from Goldberg:

There is, of course, no way to quantify the scope of mental anguish caused by Trump’s campaign; these stories are entirely anecdotal. There are, however, a lot of anecdotes, as I discovered when I started speaking to both therapists and panicking voters. I’ve covered four elections as a journalist, but this is the first one to regularly poison my dreams; at least once a week I wake up in the middle of the night in clammy, agitated horror. I was curious if other people were suffering in similar ways, so I reached out to a therapist I know. She queried two email lists of mostly New York–based colleagues, asking them to contact me if they’d seen Trump-related distress in their practices. Responses quickly started pouring in; soon I had almost a dozen.

This is not contained within the woke ideology. Diagnosed social anxiety in generation Z, afflicting up to sixty percent of zoomers as of Jean Twenge’s 2017 book iGen, contains similar symptoms. Her book showcases manifestations of this problem in completely apolitical contexts, such as dealing with friends or family. 

What the liberals get right is that giving into their demands will cause nothing but institutional dysfunction, which even the mainstream Democratic party, including Ryan Grim and Ruy Texiera, are catching up with. It’s simply impossible to fit them in interchangeably with another person as liberalism so desires. They will overreact, exploit civil rights and disability laws, all while failing to do a basic job.

The reason for insisting people cannot be genuinely allergic to words is that there are no liberal solutions for them. They benefit from less information, not more. They desire constraint, not freedom. Their life is better in a filter bubble, protected from other ideas, and there is no way to change that. This is particularly true if their ideology isn’t actively impairing their ability to discern reality as wokeness does. Even if that’s the case, jamming them into liberalism is no different from jamming a square peg into a round hole.

These people were best served throughout history by a stable, strict culture, often a religion. In other words, conservatism. This doesn’t mean this type of life is good for everyone because it isn’t; individuals are fundamentally different. It does expose the costs of a ruthlessly liberalizing world who offers no refuge for them. This runs into different problems. Closed societies may be less entrepreneurial and innovative, resulting in lower productivity. 

The solution is actually simple and violates the One Liberal Commandment of reasoning to equality. In fact, people are fundamentally different and when there is such a strict divide between them, they must be treated differently under the law. If we simply take them at their word, they cannot function under the same circumstances as normal people. The costs of this should be looked at transactionally, as there is such a fundamental divide between them and normal people that you cannot cover this up. The difference is greater than that between liberal and conservative or white and black. We’re talking about people who attest to being injured by words! Save hacking into physical systems, they’re basically the only people who can be injured through the internet. 

The important part about this setup is that it is opt-in. You are given all the existing freedoms up until you choose to sacrifice some of them for more emotional safety. You can also switch freely between them. It is not something that can be imposed, only chosen. With that out of the way, we should acknowledge that people who choose to be in this class are second class citizens, whether we formally admit it or not. They are simply unable to do things other people can, such as receive criticism. They can still contribute to society in many ways, but the costs of this impairment are clear and visible. 

So, what rights (or lack thereof) are different in this group? You don’t have free speech in political matters, because of course you don’t, the whole point is that you can’t handle it. You are handed a straightforward moral dogma and are put in a community of shared believers for all your moral or political discussions. Your interactions with the outside world do not involve politics or religion at all. 

Who would agree to do this? Maybe no one. Maybe every last word-sensitive person takes their anxiety medications, goes to cognitive behaivoral therapy, and reintegrates into society. In that case, I’d owe Haidt and Lukianoff an apology. The other possibility where no one agrees to this is that the claimed desire for safety is a cynical excuse for ideological colonization. In this case all our proposed deal does is highlight that these people are enemies and cannot be reasoned with. Some of my readers are facepalming because this was obvious to them from the very beginning. I’m uncertain, but this way we could find out for sure. 

Except for the case where everyone gets CBT, I win my bet against Haidt and the liberals. The stakes? Ideological hegemony and total control over the U.S. government, of course.