{"id":87491,"date":"2024-05-07T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=87491"},"modified":"2024-05-06T08:04:27","modified_gmt":"2024-05-06T13:04:27","slug":"suggestible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=87491","title":{"rendered":"Suggestible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>A couple of points in background:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>If you&#8217;re talking to someone, and you stare over at something in the distance, or at the ceiling without saying anything about it, they <em>will <\/em>eventually look over to see what you&#8217;re looking at.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>If you reward, not just bad behavior, but counterproductive and self-destructive behavior, you&#8217;ll get more of it. It creates a &#8220;perverse incentive&#8221;. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>If you have a child, you know this.  You may have learned some of it too late &#8211; indeed (spoiler) many parents today are &#8211; but eventually&#8230;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>If you don&#8217;t have kids &#8211; like a growing share of our nation&#8217;s teachers, psychologists, and child-policy wonks &#8211; you might know it.  Or think you know it.  <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Social contagions exist.  <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>We&#8217;ll come back to each of those. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>I could probably quote half of this interview in this post.  It&#8217;s Ben Shapiro interviewing Abigail Shrier about what&#8217;s wrong with kids today:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: Resisting Indoctrination | Abigail Shrier\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/6Onyx3qONtRZccTBfKcC53?si=f37ce150f7fd408a&#038;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s a well-spent hour, although you can&#8217;t speed Shapiro up, since he already sounds like he&#8217;s talking at double speed.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We&#8217;ll come back to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>I detest generational politics; the Miillennial \/ Zeeper taste for blaming &#8220;boomers&#8221; for their problems is both an evasion <em>and <\/em>ancient (I keenly felt I was in direct competition with Baby Boomers too, when <em>I <\/em>was in college, uh, twenty years ago).   I might be early Gen-X.  Or I might be from &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Generation_Jones\">Generation Jones<\/a>&#8220;, the kids who don&#8217;t remember the Beatles and, let&#8217;s be honest, didn&#8217;t spend a lot of time obsessing over their generation &#8211; just learned that one last week.  Or I <em>might <\/em>still hold the notion of generational &#8220;identity&#8221; and politics in sneering contempt.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But just because you detest something doesn&#8217;t mean it isn&#8217;t coming for you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The memes are everywhere: Gen-Xers bragging about how they drank from firehoses, stayed out until dark, rode bikes without helmets, and are just plain <em>tougher <\/em>than the Millennials and Zeeps that followed with their helicopter parents and gluten allergies.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And there may be something to that.  Not about the generations themselves, but about how they were raised, and how their feelings were treated.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve joked with my kids, and other younger people, that some of my teachers were World War 2 veterans.  My high school chemistry teacher had been a Navy dive bomber pilot, who was fond of telling us that his radioman and tail gunner, whom he trusted with his life, was maybe a year or two older than us, and that he wouldn&#8217;t trust us to get the donuts from the bakery.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>More on point?   &#8220;Feelings&#8221; weren&#8217;t the coin of the realm.  If you hadn&#8217;t learned the meaning of the word &#8220;no&#8221; at home, a teacher would set you firmly straight, then and there; some of the men at the tip of a big wooden paddle if it were serious enough &#8211; as opposed to medevacing you to a therapist, writing up a special ed plan,  and pumping you full of ritalin.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You didn&#8217;t get a pass for feeling, or being, bullied.  You dealt with them &#8211; by hitting back, telling them off, or learning to ignore them (I did a little of all three).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if you <em>felt<\/em>, in your adolescent anomie, like you were really, I dunno, Napoleon Bonaparte, you were not hustled to a (let&#8217;s come up with a name) personality dysphoria clinic and pumped full of drugs to make you shorter, Corsican and a military genius.  You were told &#8220;No.  You are Jonny Schmidt, and always will be.  Now do your homework&#8221;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sometime in the past forty years, that changed.   The emphasis on parenting focused less on community, &#8220;normalcy&#8221;, and coping.  Parenting (and teaching, and child psychology) became therapeutic pastimes, focusing on validation, feelings and perceptions (and, paradoxically, teaching the skills that parents taught Xers\/Jonesers and before because a discipline in psychology, &#8220;Cognitive Therapy&#8221;, that actually works and charges a ton of money); <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway &#8211; just as people will look at the ceiling when you stare upward, kids who are constantly asked about whether they&#8217;re depressed, or suicidal, or suffering &#8220;Trauma&#8221; from some hurt in their past, or feeling like they&#8217;re the wrong gender, are going to start thinking they&#8217;re depressed, suicidal or bound by trauma, or the wrong gender.   Or at least utterly unable to deal with adverse feelings and events productively (without the help of a cognitive therapist, anyway).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Which leads to a generation of people who not only have a tough time dealing with life, but with each other.  Meaning no couples, no kids, no future.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>And as it turns out, this is all borne out by research.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Give the interview a listen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of points in background: We&#8217;ll come back to each of those. I could probably quote half of this interview in this post. It&#8217;s Ben Shapiro interviewing Abigail Shrier about what&#8217;s wrong with kids today: It&#8217;s a well-spent hour, although you can&#8217;t speed Shapiro up, since he already sounds like he&#8217;s talking at double [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87491"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87492,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87491\/revisions\/87492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}