In this post, I’m going to get right to the point. We’ve all seen those articles, videos, and other media that begin with a trigger warning similar to the one in the title of this post.
Perhaps you just assumed some well-meaning do-gooders at the executive level thought it would be helpful to warn their audience about the potential triggers in the content they are about to issue that may reactivate painful personal memories for some viewers, listeners, or readers. Or, perhaps, you just assumed it was the result of the legal department covering their derrières with a little language that might prevent their company from being sued by some Karen with nothing better to do than tug on the tail of tranquility.
But, most likely, both those assumptions would be wrong. Certainly, there are those few dullards who would dive into the sea of ignorance just because the water is crowded, but that’s not the case in most instances. What we’re witnessing—whether by way of virtue signaling or by way of blind faith—is the manifest worship of the cult of safetyism. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, attorney and social psychologist, respectively, explain that
“Safetyism” refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. “Safety” trumps everything else, no matter how likely or trivial the potential danger.
It is good and virtuous, of course, to be reasonably safe and to try to keep others from harm. But Aristotle showed us nearly three millennia ago that a virtue becomes a vice whenever a good becomes excessive or deficient.
What Haidt and numerous other sociologists and psychologists have discovered is that an excessive commitment to safety creates a dangerous feedback loop for young people: “kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient.” In other words, numerous studies show that Safetyism is harmful to individuals and society and not in the leastwise helpful.
Safetyism in the forms we know it today (i.e, trigger warnings, safe spaces on college campuses, micro-aggressions, etc.) is derived from something psychologists call “concept creep.” Concept creep is the phenomenon where the meaning of various concepts—“abuse, bullying, trauma, and prejudice,” for example—expand (i.e., creep) “‘downward,’ to apply to less sever situations, and ‘outward,’ to encompass new but conceptually related phenomena.” In the cult of safetyism, concepts like “trauma” have now expanded downward and outward to include “emotional pain” and concepts like “safety” have, in turn, expanded in similar fashion to include “emotional comfort.”
Luana Colloca, M.D., Ph.D., and Arthur J. Barsky, M.D. have written a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine about what they call the Placebo and Nocebo Effects: “Placebo and nocebo effects are the effects of patients’ positive and negative expectations, respectively, concerning their state of health.”
This is an important paper because their research demonstrates that “trigger warnings” often create a Nocebo Effect. That means “participants who were given trigger warnings before reading a disturbing passage reported more ‘anticipatory’ anxiety (when they also showed a belief that words could cause harm) than those who saw no trigger warnings.”
Further, it has been shown that in cases where real trauma has taken place—not just emotional pain—“trigger warnings often increase trauma survivors’ tendency to see their trauma as central to their identity, which has been linked to increased PTSD symptoms.” This is because “avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.” Trigger warnings are actually “counter-therapeutic” because they encourage the feedback loop that makes a person who suffered a traumatic experience more fragile and less resilient.
And, it further creates situations where those who have not experienced real trauma—only emotional pain—believe they have, which subsequently throws them into their own kind of feedback loop which fosters entitled, fragile behavior.
As the old adage goes: “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”
Bibliography
Colloca, Luana, and Arthur J. Barsky. Placebo and Nocebo Effects, February 6, 2020. https://www.nejm.org/.
Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. The coddling of the American mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. New York City: Penguin Books, 2019.
Amazing thoughts, thank you brother. The safetyism culture cultivating people to make their trauma their identity is so weak. It creates a weak society and weak people. It is terrible to see this. Hopefully we can reclaim this in our Christian households over the coming decades!