Rage of the Snowflakes

A toxic combination of identity politics, an increasing tendency to perceive campus problems as medical problems, and altered parenting styles has produced a student body intent on ridding their environment of any ideas deemed threatening. This requires the bastardization of language. Though the mainstream media portrays campuses as extraordinarily unsafe, the crime rate at most U.S. universities is far below the national average (not counting underage drinking). But the perceived danger has called forth a new vocabulary, with “vulnerable” students demanding “safe spaces” to protect them from the unknown. The label “vulnerable,” first used by U.S. media to refer to university students in 1991, appeared 1,407 times in indexed publications in 2015-16. The “remarkable increase in allusions to the vulnerability of students,” [Frank] Furedi writes, “provides a striking illustration of an important transformation of the way that university students are represented and perceived.”

Students and their bureaucratic campus allies demand protection in a variety of ways. “Safe spaces”—like vulnerability, a term that has proliferated and broadened in meaning in recent years—allow students to avoid viewpoints with which they disagree. … Combating “microaggressions,” meanwhile, provides cover for restricting the most innocent speech, if “marginalized” students interpret it (regardless of intent) as hurtful. Students obsessed with identity politics perceive “slights as a form of victimisation” and employ “rhetoric that continually reminds the world of [their] victim status.” …

Campus social life is an easy target for adherents of this new, infantilized order. Harvard’s senior administration recently resolved to penalize students for joining off-campus, private, single-sex social clubs—a policy enforceable only if students report on their colleagues. … At Bowdoin in early 2016 some students held a tequila-themed birthday party. Moved to act by the “traumatizing” presence of tiny sombreros, the school offered counseling to students “victimized” by the morally offensive “cultural appropriation.” Two student government members who attended the party faced impeachment hearings. Other students had to move out of their dorm. It’s no surprise that some Bowdoin undergraduates informed the Washington Post that the lesson they learned from the affair was to keep their opinions to themselves.

Calls for outright restrictions on campus speech have become common. Writing in Slate, University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner justifies campus speech codes on the grounds that “students today are more like children than adults and need protection.” He contends that speech codes, far from reflecting the ideological agenda of “lefty professors” (although speech codes are almost always targeted at non-leftist speech), are popular because “universities are simply catering to demand in the marketplace for education,” supplying “what most students want.”

Read the whole, thought-provoking article by KC Johnson

Liberalism's Impact on Abhorrent Behavior

A lot has changed over the past 30 years. America has always had many firearms in circulation, laws against killing people, gun control, bullying and the like – these are not new phenomena. What is strange, however, is that people suffering from mental illness decide to mow down their classmates instead choosing to seek help or being flagged by their parents, classmates, or teachers. Two decades or so ago, people still faced similar problems – disappointment with their lives due to normal, coming-of-age pressures. But instead of overcoming said obstacles like adults, they resort to terrifying violence. It’s clear that something has changed in regard to how people seek help and how they overcome the realities of life. Liberalism is that change – pampering people in safe spaces instead of making them act like adults. . . . 

As a governing ideology, liberalism has mainstreamed all behavior no matter how bizarre it might be. This enables crazy conduct that has no limitations – an era best described as “anything goes.” The reality is that conduct must have well defined and established borders. We have become unmoored from community standards of decency and acceptable behavior. This, in part, stems from cultural and political liberalism – where nothing is too extreme and no conduct or lifestyle can be judged in terms of acceptable societal norms.

Unbridled liberalism waged and won a culture war. This has eroded societal norms in regard to behavior. Cultural rot and degradation, liberalism tells us, has some redeeming quality that should be embraced by all. Therefore, no consequences exist for unwanted behavior. We are now paying the price for not having won this warped culture change, one that is playing out in mass shootings. . . . 

If we seriously want to re-establish the time-tested means of societal control of human behavior – bedrock principles that keep bad behavior in check – we should start by getting rid of liberalism’s control of effective parenting, school discipline and the criminal justice system. We need to allow society to stand in judgement of and marginalize people who behave way outside the mainstream. Those people, as we have learned, have been welcome in the mainstream and have committed mass acts of violence.

Sheriff David Clarke (Ret.), Liberalism’s Impact on Abhorrent Behavior

Consequences of Actions

There’s a story told of a father whose son repeatedly caused trouble and chaos in the family. After each painful incident, he would come to his father, say, “I’m sorry, Dad,” and his father would forgive him. But the boy seemed cavalier about his sins. He acted as if he felt entitled to forgiveness, as if all one has to do is say, “I’m sorry,” and the incident is over as if it never happened. The young man seemed to have no awareness of the suffering his sin and rebellion caused his mother and father.

So the father said to the son, “Let’s go out to the garage. I want to show you something.” In the garage, the father took a hammer and nail, and he pounded the nail into the garage wall. Then he handed the hammer to his son and said, “Now, son, I want you to pull out the nail”

The son shrugged, used the claw end of the hammer, and pulled out the nail.

The father said, “That’s like forgiveness, isn’t it? When you do something wrong, it’s like pounding in a nail. Forgiveness is when you pull the nail out again.”

“Yeah,” the son said. “I can see that.”

“Fine,” said the father. “Now, I want you to take that hammer and pull out the nail hole.”

The startled young man said, “But I can’t make the hole go away!” And then his father’s meaning became clear. Forgiveness can erase the offense, but it cannot erase the consequences. Sin and folly always produce consequences that do not go away, even by forgiveness.

Ray C. Stedman, For Such A Time As This: Secrets of Strategic Living from the Book of Esther, pg.55-56.

Cultural Results of Anti-God Agenda

We have raised a generation unaware of God’s presence and its potency as an aid to self-monitoring. What might happen, for example, if a gang member were to reject bad influence with a paraphrase of Joseph’s words: “God is watching and would not want me to go with you.”  (Actually, if more of us were to simply think this sentiment, what impact might that have on morality in our society?). ...  

In spite of the fact that many studies show considerably less criminal activity among religiously involved families, the anti-god theoreticians feel that the cure is worse than the disease.  Under no circumstances can we encourage religion, and we must try to remove it from organizations such as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts (or at least remove these organizations from our schools).  Most ordinary citizens would disagree.  The most serious public policy consequence of this principle is that...there can never be enough policemen. Once each person’s internal monitoring system has been disconnected, everyone needs to be watched all the time. …

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.254

Turning Tantrums Into Psychiatric Disorder

Child psychiatrists often dare to go where no one has gone before—and children wind up paying the price.  They keep inventing new ways to wildly over diagnose psychiatric illness in kids.  Perviously I mentioned a study that found 83 percent of kids qualify for mental disorder diagnosis by the time they are twenty-one.  Now the child researchers have taken it a step further—introducing a new DSM-5 diagnosis that may get the number even closer to 100 percent.  First called “temper dysregulation disorder,” then rechristened with the tongue-twisting “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder” (DMDD); the idea of turning temper tantrums into a mental disorder is terrible, however named.  We should not have the ambition to label as mental disorder every inconvenient or distressing aspect of childhood.

Allen Frances, M.D, "Saving Normal," p.177

As a Man Thinks, So He Is

We have got an adage which reminds us that “As a man thinks, so he is.”  It is absolutely true, although we often tend to forget it.  Everybody today who is alive and doing this or that is proclaiming exactly what he or she thinks!  Everybody is a philosopher, everybody has got a philosophy of life, and we show what our philosophy of life is by the way in which we live.  Our actions always correspond to what we think and what we believe.  Therefore, if people are living a superficial, bubble kind of existence, they do so because that is the sort of mind they have.  It is their failure to think that causes them to live a superficial kind of life.  And this leads me to say that the problem of immorality or vice or crime can never be tackled directly.  Conduct is the result of the point of view, so you can never deal with conduct directly.  To try to do so is the fatal blunder of every non-Christian system.  And we are seeing the failure on all hands.  Men refuse to recognise the fundamental principle that as a man thinks, so he is.  Therefore, it is of no use trying to control his behaviour if his thinking is wrong.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Darkness and Light: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:17-5:17,” pg.383

Freudianism and Irresponsibility

A second major liability of Freud’s theory has been its promotion of irresponsibility.  This evolved logically from the belief that individuals are governed by powerful unconscious forces, arising from early childhood experiences, which thereby usurp their freedom of action.  It has led, in the words of one writer, to the “golden age of exoneration. . . . Almost nobody can really be held accountable. . . .  Bonnie and Clyde came along too soon.  Nowadays they could settle for a year at the Betty Ford Clinic as victims of compulsive bank-robbing addiction.”

It is the areas of child rearing and criminal behavior in which Freudian theory has had the most profound effect and in  which traditional concepts of responsibility have been challenged.   In the Freudian scheme, men and women are seen increasingly as puppets of their psyches governed primarily by the edicts of their egos.  The corollary of “don’t blame me” is “blame my parents,” expressed clearly from the earliest days of the Freudian movement, as in this 1926 rendition:

Mental hygienist are stressing one great point, namely, that in most cases of nervousness, in many cases of delinquency, in some cases of insanity, and almost all cases of child behavior or conduct disorders, the trail leads inevitably and directly back to the home and the parents. [Emphasis in the original.]

In the Freudian schema, mother, father, family, social circumstances, and culture become the causal agents for whatever is wrong.  The ripple of personal irresponsibility spreads slowly outward to cover ever-greater areas until the very terms “good” and “bad” seem to no longer have meaning.

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., "Freudian Fraud: the Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture," p.249

The Humanist Crusade Against Children

Seventy years ago, eugenics promised to cure America's social problems through better breeding.  Today, mental-health crusaders promise to eliminate behavioral problems among America's children by screening every schoolchild for mental illness and then putting millions of them on psychoactive drugs.  Like the eugenics crusade, the current push to dramatically increase the number of children on psychoactive drugs reduces all behavioral problems to a material basis.  And like the eugenics crusade, it is accompanied by grandiose claims that go far beyond the actual science.  Like the eugenics crusade, it is justified in humanitarian terms even while it raises serious issues about civil liberties and human dignity.  How many children will be hurt before this latest crusade runs out of steam?

John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.364-365

When Sin is Called Sickness

Sin is the core issue on which the Church is commissioned to speak.   We can no more have a gospel without sin that we can have a gospel without Jesus Christ.  To evade sin and responsibility is not new, but it is dangerous.  By suggesting there is another explanation for troubles and difficulties, the devil deludes us and sabotages the gospel.

The medical model of sin is dangerous because it damns people.  It undercuts social morality.  In a day of high crime and antisocial behavior, calling sin sickness undermines the individual's responsibility to control his behavior.  The disease model actually inflames behaviors.  It legitimizes, reinforces and excuses sinful behaviors and attitudes in believers and unbelievers alike.


David Tyler & Kurt Grady, Deceptive Diagnosis: When SIN is called SICKNESS, p.57

Reducing Behavior to "Brain Disorders"

The tendency to reduce all behavioral problems to brain disorders that should be solved primarily through drugs is indicative of just how uncritically our society has embraced the philosophy of scientific materialism.  Scientific materialism adds plausibility to the idea that all behavioral problems, including criminal activity, can be fixed through biological and chemical interventions, even if research has yet to sustain such a claim.

The consequences of this overselling of science as the solution to crime and misbehavior have been tragic.  Instead of improving the human condition, it has led to dehumanization, with criminal defendants and delinquents treated as guinea pigs for experiments in the service of scientific ideology.


John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.101