Category: psychology

Antisemitism flourishes in psychotherapy

January 26, 2026 • 9:45 am

I’ve known for a short while that psychotherapists (both psychiatrists and psychologists) are increasingly evincing antisemitism in their professional communications, despite the fact that the field was started by—and still largely consists of—Jews.  One would think that therapists, trained to be empathic and caring, wouldn’t go so far as to criticize and even refuse to treat Jewish patients, but that is sometimes the case. I know it’s true in Chicago, where the American Psychological Association had an online discussion group that became increasingly antisemitic, to the point where the APA President had to stop the bigotry.

In the post below from Commentary (click on screenshot, or find it archived here), psychiatrist and Yale lecturer Sally Satel describes how the Jew-hating termites are boring into the structure of American psychotherapy:

Some excerpts. Note that Jewish therapists or patients are often called “Zionists”, even when their views on Israel are unknown. This shows more than ever that “anti-Zionist” is simply a euphemism for “Jew hater” or “antisemite”.

It starts in Chicago:

Shortly after October 7, 2023, an Arizona-based group called the Jewish Therapist Collective received a sharp increase in calls from Jewish therapists. The collective is an online community that offers support to Jewish therapists and helps Jewish patients find welcoming practitioners. Its director, Halina Brooke, learned that in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, many Jewish therapists were being told by their colleagues that their very presence was ‘triggering to non-Jewish therapists.’”

A therapist in Chicago named Heba Ibrahim-Joudeh felt that patients, too, needed to be protected from Zionist therapists. In winter 2024, Ibrahim-Joudeh, a member of the Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists Facebook group, organized a “blacklist” of local Zionist therapists. “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to,” she wrote to colleagues, who responded with thanks.

As I understand it, that list was put together not even knowing whether all the blacklisted therapists were Jewish; some were included simply because they had “Jewish names.”

In 2025, a young Jewish woman had her first appointment with a psychotherapist in Washington, D.C. During the session, she mentioned a recent months-long stay in Israel. The therapist, who was part of a group practice, smiled and said, “It’s lucky you were assigned to me. None of my colleagues will treat a Zionist.”

The intolerance is not confined to isolated examples. It’s roiling the American Psychological Association (APA), the nation’s foremost accreditor for psychological training and continuing education programs. Tensions reached a new level last winter when more than 3,500 mental health professionals calling themselves Psychologists Against Antisemitism sent a letter to the APA’s president and board. The signers called upon the association to “address the serious and systemic problem of antisemitism/anti-Jewish hate.” The letter told of APA-hosted conferences for educational credits in which speakers made “official statements and presentations [including] rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis; antisemitic tropes; Holocaust distortion; minimization of Jewish victimization, fear, and grief.”

Singled out by name was the former president of the APA Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology from 2023 to 2025, Lara Sheehi. In addition to diagnosing Zionism as a “settler psychosis,” Sheehi had posted expletive-laced messages on social media, including one stating “destroy Zionism” and another describing Israelis as “genocidal f—ks.” Her sentiments infiltrated the annual meeting of the APA in Denver last summer, where, according to psychologist Dean McKay of Fordham University, professional Listserv postings urged attendees to wear keffiyehs at the convention and read a “land and genocide statement” before giving their presentations, some of which contained Hamas propaganda. McKay has alsodocumented cases of therapists urging their clients to go to anti-Israel protests as part of what they see as their role in promoting activism.

Satel describes how some therapists reject patients who say they are Zionists, with the therapists explaining that “their values do not align”.  That is a violation of how therapists are supposed to work, without regard to whether their political opinions are in synch.  Yes, therapists can reject patients who are hostile, or those whom they think they can’t help because of other factors. (One example: patients who seek treatment for alcoholism “because my wife told me to come here,” for therapy won’t work unless the patient comes in of their own volition.) But requiring an alignment of politics a professional violation.

. . .one might be surprised to read the APA’s current Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct: “Psychologists establish and maintain knowledge and awareness of their professional and personal values, experiences, culture, and social contexts. They identify and limit biases that may detract from the well-being of those with whom they professionally interact.”

These tenets do not preclude therapists from making choices about whom they will treat. Such decisions, however, should spring from an individualized consideration of whether they can serve a patient well, not whether they morally disapprove of him. A therapist who lost a loved one on October 7, for example, might not want a patient who is a pro-Hamas activist. A therapist with relatives in Gaza could understandably pass up a potential patient who organizes pro-Israel marches.

But those tenets don’t matter.  The culture of therapy is becoming an ideological enterprisem with spreading “social justice” takes priority over helping the patient. Bolding below is mine:

. . . the culture of psychotherapy is changing. Before the murder of George Floyd, an identitarian approach to therapy had been simmering for at least a decade. Afterward, it burst upon the clinical scene. My colleague Val Thomas, a psychotherapist in the UK and editor of Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice, calls it Critical Social Justice Therapy. Untested as a form of therapy, it views patients as either perpetrators or victims of oppression and understands this simple dynamic as the root of their problems.

Social justice therapists—who see themselves as activists first, healers second—usurp the goals of therapy. They override patients’ needs and preferences in favor of their own politicized aims, such as “dismantling racism.” To the extent that Zionism is, in some quarters, considered a form of racism or white supremacy, pro-Israel patients face an uncertain reception when they show up at therapists’ offices.

. . . Yet now, regardless of the best interest of patients, the post–October 7 therapist seems to feel entitled to make his own comfort paramount, to quell his own anxiety. In the realm of responsible psychotherapy, this is a grave transgression.

If you’re Jewish and seeking therapy, it might be useful to ask potential therapists about their reaction to your beliefs. As Satel says, “Today, Jewish and Zionist individuals who seek psychological care must search carefully for an experienced therapist who, no matter his or her politics, will regard the patient, foremost, as a fellow human who is suffering.”

Even if you’re one of the rare Jews who doesn’t favor the existence of Israel, you’re still considered a “Zionist” (you’re still a “racist” and “white supremacist”, something I was called this morning), and shouldn’t have to spell that out for a therapist.

I had this post in draft, and saw this morning that Steve Pinker posted about Sally’s article, noting that he’d quit the APA some years ago.  Apparently at that time antisemitism was already on the rise.

Four degrees of sympathy for Charlie Kirk

September 12, 2025 • 9:30 am

Preliminary note: they’ve apparently caught a suspect in Charlie Kirk’s death. A tweet:

I’ve read a bit about reactions to the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and got into at least one heated argument about it with a friend who said that Kirk’s murder was a good thing.  There have been various degrees of reaction to the bloody assassination, ranging from jubilant celebration all the way to canonization and martyrdom.

My own view is that although I differ with Kirk on nearly every issue he espoused, I see him as someone who was simply of opposite political views to mine.  While you can make the case that his views espoused or created violence, I don’t think you can make much of a case. And I am not aware that anything he said violated the First Amendment. In general, he and his Turning Point group generally espoused civil debate, not calls for killing, injury, or destruction.

Several people who applauded Kirk’s murder have brought up two things. First, Kirk was allegedly elated when he heard that Nancy Pelosi’s husband was injured with a hammer bu a trespasser. I remember that attack, but not Kirk’s reaction.  This is what AI said when I asked it what Kirk’s reaction was:

In a 2022 podcast [on”The Charlie Kirk Show”], Charlie Kirk jokingly suggested that an “amazing patriot” should post bail for the man who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi. Kirk was not supporting the assault but using it to criticize the justice system and progressive bail reform policies, while simultaneously condemning the attack as “awful”. 

  • The attack: In October 2022, an assailant broke into Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home, asking “Where is Nancy?” before attacking her husband, Paul, with a hammer.
  • The podcast: On the October 31, 2022, episode of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” Kirk questioned why the assailant was being held without bail, using the incident to critique policies in cities like Chicago and San Francisco.
  • The criticism: Kirk sarcastically contrasted the denial of bail for the Pelosi attacker with his claim that other serious crimes were often treated less severely under “cashless bail” policies in other cities.
  • Condemnation of violence: Despite his sardonic comment, Kirk also stated, “I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful. It’s not right”. 

Further, with reference to point #3 below, there’s what I call the Argument from Roosting Chickens, which says Kirk espoused violence through approving the Second Amendment, and so that violence came home to him.  Here’s the AI answer to my question, “What did Charlie Kirk think of the Second Amendment?”:

Charlie Kirk was a staunch defender of the Second Amendment and strongly opposed gun control. In his view, the right to bear arms was a crucial protection for individuals against a tyrannical government.
Key points of Kirk’s stance
  • Willing to accept gun deaths as a cost of freedom: In an April 2023 event for TPUSA Faith, Kirk controversially stated that it was “worth it” to accept “some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights”.
  • Protection against tyranny: Kirk framed the Second Amendment as a fundamental safeguard to protect Americans’ other rights, implying it was a deterrent against government overreach.
  • More armed citizens for safety: He advocated for more armed Americans, not fewer, as the solution to gun violence. In 2023, he argued that if airplanes and banks have armed security, schools should have armed guards as well.
  • Rejection of “utopian” gun control: Kirk believed it was unrealistic to think a society with an armed citizenry would have zero gun deaths, dismissing such thinking as “nonsense” and “drivel”.
  • Long-standing advocacy for gun rights: He was a consistent advocate for gun rights and had previously spoken on behalf of the National Rifle Association (NRA)

Although his statement about gun deaths were the “cost of freedom”, I took it as meaning that if you think the Second Amendment is now an overall good thing, he thought the benefits it brought, including possible saving of lives, was worth the accidental deaths of innocent people caused by firearms. This is what one of our  readers commented yesterday,

I believe his actual point about the 2nd was that on balance it would save more lives to have guns than it would to ban them.

I believe he was wrong about that, but his point wasn’t “we must save the 2nd Amendment no matter the cost.”

That was my interpretation. Unfortunately, the data show that FAR more innocent people are killed, commit suicide, or are murdered by guns in the hands of civilians than the number of bad guys killed in self-defense.  There is no justification for the use of guns for self-protection as a way of saving innocent lives (in fact, there are more deaths by accidents or suicide than deaths via self-protection). The original intent of the Second Amendment can no longer be justified.

Now one can argue that it’s too late: the guns are out there and we can’t find them. The bad guys have them and we can’t stop criminal gun violence, so we should allow gun ownership by citizens. But I don’t agree that this means we should stop trying to get rid of guns.  So, in general I disagree with Kirk on the Second Amendment. But I don’t think his statement should be seen, as our reader noted, as a callous disregard of innocent people killed as a byproduct of owning guns. I think Kirk really considered the Second Amendment a good thing for America.

But to me these two points are largely irrelevant in how we judge those who reacted to Kirk’s death.  No, he was not a saint, he said some reprehensible things.  But I have heard far worse from my friends about Republicans, for example  I often hear a fervent wish that Trump had died in the two assassination attempts on him.  Some of my liberal friends think the courts’ interpretation of the Second Amendment, now allowing civilian ownership of guns for reasons other than forming a militia, are fine, even though they surely know, like Kirk, that innocent people will die.  Do these friends deserve to be killed for their views? I think not!

But the issue at hand is this: “How should we think of the different reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death?”  I see four classes of reactions, though there are undoubtedly more.  Remember, Kirk never killed anybody, never caused anybody’s death, and did not espouse violence as a way to achieve political aims. Also keep in mind we’re talking about a man shot in the neck and killed horribly in front of his wife and two young children. Should we celebrate Kirk’s death, as many have, or should we say that he deserved what he got because of who he was?

I am talking now about civilians like Kirk, not terrorists or deaths in wartime, so don’t pepper me with questions about “What about Hitler?” “What about bin Laden?”  I am not going to answer questions like that.

And so I’ll divide the reactions into four groups with a few words on each.

1.) “Who was Charlie Kirk? Since I don’t know him, I have no opinion.”  Many people don’t know about him and Turning Point. This is a perfectly acceptable reaction given that you don’t know if he was a civilian giving a political talk or somebody killed while physically assaulting someone else. But inquisitive people will find out who he was, and when they do they should condemn his killing.

2.) “I know who Charlie Kirk was and how he died.  But I don’t care whether he was killed.”  I find this reaction lacking in sympathy, for he had a wife and two kids. It also seems to justify politically-motivated murder, which at the least can spread the view that killing someone for their views along is, well, not to be condemned. (I note that Kirk was speaking on a college campus, which is supposed to be especially tolerant of such speech). Regardless of the circumstances of the assassination, one should at least condemn this kind of murder. Luana adds that because the celebration is largely by people on the Left, simple human decency that condemns the killing of innocents will, in the end, come around to hurt the Left.  I agreed, but in this discussion we should leave out the political consequences for one side or the other and talk about simple morality instead. Bernie Sanders discusses the consequences for democracy below.

3.) “Because Kirk espoused violence, he got what was coming to him. The chickens have come home to roost.” This is false, obtuse, and reprehensible. As you see above, Kirk didn’t go around advocating violence against his opponents. The two remarks above about Pelosi and the Second Amendment, similar in kind but not content to what I often hear from my friends, do not justify killing the speaker. Period. Kirk had a wife and child, many friends and colleagues who cared about him. Those who neglect that, and the fact that these people will be devastated (no, they don’t deserve that devastation), are people with zero sympathy. This view is reprehensible.

4.) “Kirk deserved to die because he was a homophobe/transphobe/horrible right-wing activist/promoter and enabler of Trump/antisemit, etc. etc.”  This is taking the most unsympathetic and immoral view of all, and, sadly, it’s not an uncommon reaction. But Kirk did not “deserve” to die for his political views. We have a First Amendment that insulates people like Kirk—and most of us—from punishment, much less murder.(As for Kirk’s antisemitism, the NY Times reported it inaccurately; Kirk did not espouse antisemitism but deplored it.)

Only the first view above is justifiable.  The death of anyone is a tragedy for their friends, relatives, and loved ones, even if they are horrible people.  But in Kirk’s case, there is nothing I can see to mitigate that tragedy.

I never though I’d finish a post by touting the words of Bernie Sanders, but here he speaks very eloquently, and I agree 100%.  We must condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk as strongly as possible, for justifying politically-based murder  is both immoral and corrosive to the foundation of our free society .

h/t: Luana for discussion

Abigail Shrier’s new book on the malign effects of child therapy

October 4, 2024 • 9:45 am

Last night I finished Abigail Shrier‘s new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.  In an earlier post I reported that Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, reviewed the book on his Substack site, but the review largely neglected the book’s thesis in favor of reprising Lukianoff’s own ideas published earlier. But he did call Shrier’s book a “masterpiece.”

While I wouldn’t go quite that far—I reserve that word for books like Anna Karenina, the book is, in my view, superb, and should be read by every literate adult, whether or not you have children.  For it offers not only guidelines for parenting, but also explains why young people in society (as well as adolescents, college students, and young adults) are showing higher rates of anxiety, depression, and mental illness. They are emotionally stuck at about age twelve. And that, says Shrier, is due to “bad therapy”: the rise of an American therapy culture in which every child is constantly assessed, supervised, and psychologized by parents, their schools, and doctors.  (It is the schools and doctors, which include therapists, that have convinced parents that their children have psychological problems and need treatment.) The result is that we have one generation (I’d say two or more) that has grown up fragile, solipsistic, afraid to engage with the world, and socially inept.

In Lukianoff and Haidt’s earlier book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), the authors proposed their own explanation for why college students were fragile and ridden with anxiety, producing the current university culture of “safetyism”, in which students’ emotions are prioritized, ensuring that they never feel “unsafe”.  This in turn gave rise to the campus culture we all know: woke, opposed to “hate speech” (i.e., offensive speech), and imbued with a DEI mentality that itself rests on a presumed hierarchy of oppression in which those seen as the most oppressed are the most coddled.

This is no doubt one of the inspirations for Shrier’s book, but, pinning the blame for student dysfunction on well-intentioned parents, Coddling doesn’t really explain why the parents have become that way.  In contrast, Shrier’s book lays some blame on parents, but says that parents themselves been heavily influenced by others, namely school teachers and administrators, doctors, and therapists (amateur and professional), to believe that normal childhood behavior can often be seen as having some dysfunction that requires therapy. And that, in turn, gives rise to schools’ monitoring children’s emotions using “social-emotional learning methods” and to children being sent to therapists who, not knowing what to do, simply affix a diagnostic label to children and often medicate them.  Once “diagnosed,” children carry that label with them for years, in effect becoming their disease.  We thus have a generation replete with kids who believe they have fixable mental issues, and a generation of parents who reinforce this with “gentle parenting” that defers to the children at the same time robbing them of independence.

The other influence on Shrier’s new book is her first one,  Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, a controversial work that attributed the rapid rise the desire of young women to change gender to “social contagion”.  Shrier endorsed a new form of emotional dysfunction, “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), that, she said, was promoted by social media. And this led doctors, bent on “affirmative therapy” to affirm children’s desire (mostly young women)  to change gender, leading first to hormone therapy via puberty blockers, and later to full transitioning with more hormones and, perhaps, surgery.

While Shrier’s first book had mixed reviews, with the bad ones coming largely from those sympathetic to gender activism, in the end I think she’ll be proven right.  Her idea of ROGD, the most controversial part of the book, may not become a formal psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM, but it’s clear that something happened in the last 15 years to boost the desire of young women to change gender. And I don’t think this is simply that society suddenly allowed those with gender dysphoria to go public.  Rather, the possibility of social contagion, caused by the rapid rise of social media, must partly explain the desire to change gender. There’s no doubt that this has happened in some cases, for I’ve heard testimony to that effect.  But regardless of a formal psychiatric diagnosis, Shrier was certainly correct that the rise of affirmative therapy has been damaging to young people. One need only look at the Cass Review, or the increasing recognition that affirmative therapy is bad therapy, to see that. Further a huge proportion (~80%) of gender-dysphoric adolescents who aren’t treated with that therapy will have their symptoms resolve, most of the children becoming gay (no surgery or meds required) or reverting to heterosexuality.

You can see how the idea of professionals influencing parents to think that their kids are ill has led naturally to the new book, which avoids gender issues in favor of describing how our “therapy culture” is ruining modern parenting. The book is heavily researched, and you’ll be horrified by examples of, for example, how schools have largely put aside their mission of teaching in favor of monitoring the emotional well being of kids.  (Often the parents have no idea what’s actually going on in schools.) Likewise, Shrier interviews therapists of all stripes, showing that many of them simply pathologize kids, dispensing medications after only one or two visits.  Even if only talk therapy is used, this can turn kids into solipsistic ruminators, constantly monitoring their own emotions. And that impedes their growing up.

If this is why are kids “aren’t growing up,” then what is the cure? Shrier advocates a form of old-fashioned parenting, curiously combining authoritative parenting that, at the same time, allows kids a lot more independence.  Instead of parents engaging in intensive discussion with kids who disagree with them, they should simply set up sensible rules for kids to follow (giving them chores, encouraging them to get jobs, and so on), and make the kids adhere to those rules. Shrier’s view is that children really want parental authority (this is why our universities are in loco parentis), and if they don’t get it then they don’t grow up (perhaps this is why one-parent familites produce dysfunctional kids more often.) She makes a strong case for severely limiting kids’ access to “devices” and social media, including banning the use of cellphones during the school day.

At the same time, kids need less safety and more independence. When I was a kid, when I got home from elementary school I hopped on my bike and rode off to see my friends. We had no parental supervision at these times. No longer! This kind of freedom and independence is now seen as parental neglect, and can even be illegal. Yet the lack of parental monitoring, and the need of kids to interact with only their peers, free from adult supervision, is essential, says Shrier, for learning how to negotiate life and with its inevitable burden of sporadic unhappiness and disagreement with others.

I am not a parent, and can vouch only for how much I enjoyed my own freedom as a kid (and yes, I had chores and rules, too).  But Shrier makes a convincing case that the “therapization” of kids is proceeding apace, and that schools are largely to blame (they are ofteb the gateway to professional therapy). In other countries like Japan and India, for instance, kids are sent off to school or to the store on their own at ages as young as five. And kids treated that way grow up fine.  American parents who feel deficient will find considerable solace in this book, as well as finding their own freedom from emotional distress around parenting as well as from obligations to constantly monitor their kids.

As I said, I don’t have kids, but I do recommend the book to parents as a palliative to the many volumes on “gentle parenting”. And, as I said, everyone should read it, really, because it explains what’s happening not only with this generation, but with the one before it: the high-ability but overemotional kids who now write for the New York Times and are the future “progressives” in Congress.

I have but two plaints about Bad Therapy, and they are absolutely trivial. First, Shrier made the decision to use the jargon of the new generation of kids to spice up her writing. The writing is generally engaging and excellent (one of the best features of the book), but sometimes the jargon is grating (I don’t have the book before me, so can’t give an example).  Second, Shrier, who is Jewish, keeps religion out of the discussion, but it slips in at the very end when she claims that hearing her young son’s first piano recital was the moment in her life when she felt “closest to God”, and avers that the sound of her three children’s first cries after birth could be explained only by a miracle (I’m pretty sure she means a divine miracle here).  But who except for a petulant atheist would beef about this stuff?

Child psychologists or schoolteachers may kvetch about this book, but its thesis, documented with over 40 pages of notes and references, makes considerable sense. Get this book and read it.

 

(Image below links to Amazon site):

Here’s Shrier talking about the malign influence of schools on kids’ well-being:

 

 

 

Greg Lukianoff reviews Abigail Shrier’s new book

September 19, 2024 • 10:30 am

Abigail Shrier has a new book out, and it’s doing quite well despite the vitriol she received for her first book, Irreversible Damage, the Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters. I read the latter one, and thought it was quite good—not nearly as inflammatory as the gender activists deemed it. But of course the topic—that social media was contributing to a desire of young women to identify as men, a
“rapid-onset” change that was unnecessary and generally harmful—was tailor-made to anger gender activists. Remember this tweet by ACLU LAWYER Chase Strangio about that book?

An ACLU lawyer advocating censorship! What has the world come to? Well, Strangio, a biological woman who identifies as male, deleted that tweet, but the Internet is forever.

Now Shrier has a somewhat related book, in that it’s about children’s psychological difficulties, but this one isn’t directly related to gender. Click on the icon to go to the Amazon link.

I haven’t yet read it, but have ordered it by interlibrary loan (I can no longer buy books because I have no space on my shelves), and will report my take forthwith.  But Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE and coauthor of two books (one a blockbuster bestseller), has reviewed Shrier’s new book on his website, The Eternally Radical Idea. He pronounces Bad Therapy a “masterpiece,” which is high praise. But he also takes up about 70% the review listing the varieties of opprobrium that Shrier will meet.  Click to read Lukianoff’s review; I’ll just give a couple of excerpts:

First, Lukianoff’s assessment and brief summary. Bolding is mine:

“Bad Therapy” is simply a masterpiece — easily the most important book of the year. Unfortunately, it most desperately needs to be read by the very people who are likely most hostile to Shrier’s work. The book focuses on the harms of the therapeutic approach to raising our children and how the generation treated with the most psychological therapy and psychiatric drugs has become the most miserable, anxious, and disempowered generation on record. (“Disempowered,” by the way, was the original title of the book I wrote with Jonathan Haidt, which became “The Coddling of The American Mind.”)

Shrier comes to many of the same conclusions that Haidt and I came to in “Coddling,” which I’d sum up like this: As a culture, we seem to be teaching young people the mental habits of anxious and depressed people — encouraging them, often through example, to engage in negative mental exaggerations called cognitive distortions. It’s a kind of reverse-cognitive behavioral therapy. I’ve talked about this problem for the last decade, beginning with Haidt’s and my original 2015 article for The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and most recently with my piece, “What’s behind the campus mental health crisis?” for UnHerd.

Shrier’s book also focuses on how parenting in the K-12 environment is informed by an ideology that completely undermines students’ sense of an internalized locus of control. Indeed, if you really want to make someone despondent, just persuade them that all important decisions are out of their hands and that they are essentially powerless in their own lives.

Haidt and I — and more recently a Substacker named Gurwinder Bhogal — have pointed out that the current campus left ideology inherently tells young women in particular that they are unavoidably simultaneously both oppressors and oppressed; that their life is determined by their immutable characteristics; that the planet is doomed; that fascists are everywhere; and that there’s not much that can be done about this other than consciousness-raising and feeling guilt, shame, and despair.

What I’ve been emphasizing more recently is that, in many cases, teaching people these cognitive distortions was largely done in the name of motivating them towards some positive social action. This is a terrible strategy, of course, because depressed and anxious people make terrible activists. Depression and anxiety more often result in fatalism and despair than an attitude capable of bringing about positive social change, so it’s a weird way to build a movement.

Here are the three conclusions from Haidt and Lukianoff’s best-selling and influential book:

1.)  We young people are fragile (“What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”)

2.) We are prone to emotional reasoning and confirmation bias (“Always trust your feelings.”)

3.) We are prone to “dichotomous thinking and tribalism” (“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”)

So what’s the difference between Shrier’s book and the earlier one? I’m sure they are quite different, but Lukianoff says very little about this issue. In fact, he says nothing about what Shrier add’s to the Haidt and Lukianoff book:

But Shrier’s book goes far beyond what Haidt and I did in “Coddling,” and that is why every single parent and K-12 teacher must read it. Despite being steeped in this stuff for the better part of two decades, I still learned a great deal from it — including that the research behind the health harms of growing up with “adverse childhood experiences” is far weaker than I understood it to be.

The book is gorgeously written, thoughtful, compassionate, and has gobs of both research and common sense. It also features some of my favorite experts, including my friend Camilo Ortiz, a professor and clinical psychologist who specializes in CBT. Other friends who make an appearance include Jonathan Haidt, Lenore Skenazy, Rob Henderson, Richard J. McNally, Paul Bloom, and Peter Gray.

And that first paragraph is all you’ll get. The review and assessment of the book takes up only a third of Lukianoff’s piece. Now I don’t mind someone using a review as a platform to launch their own ideas into the ether (H. L. Mencken was famous for that), but Lukianoff uses the book as a way to list all the potential criticisms that Shrier’s book will face, criticisms that he outlined in another book with Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There is a Solution. The review leaves me, at least, not knowing what Shrier’s book is really about.

The criticisms that Lukianoff says that Shrier will face fall into three categories: “The Obstacle Course” (“rhetorical doges and logical fallacies” like strawmanning and misrepresenting the book’s arguments); “The Minefield” (dissing the book by attacking the author, a tactic with which we’re quite familiar), and “The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” (raising guilt by association, labeling people as bad because of their politics, and so on). If you read Shrier’s earlier book, you’ll see all of these tactics were indeed used to dismiss it. It turns out that Shrier had a good point, as we now know as European countries dismantle their use of “affirmative treatment” and puberty blockers for gender-dysphoric youth, most of whom would come out as gay (and not lose body parts nor get sterilized) if they were treated less “affirmatively” and they deep-sixed the hormones for adolescents. But now that Shrier has been labeled a Bad Person and guilty of Ideological Wrongthink, that label can be used to discredit everything she writes in the future.

At any rate, and despite the digressions by Lukianoff that are aimed at pushing his own platform, this is certainly a book worth investigating. I haven’t read any other reviews, but just found on on Slate that is quite critical.  We shall see if the author of that one, Anna Nordberg, engages in the bad-faith criticisms described by Lukianoff. (Nordberg does have expertise in the area of parenting and child psychology.)

Fred Crews died

June 27, 2024 • 9:30 am

If you’ve studied Freud, or read the New York Review of Books, then you’ll surely have heard of Fred Crews.  Although I met him only once (see below), we exchanged tons of emails over the years and, after reading his works, became a big fan and admirer. Sadly, according to the NYT, Fred died six days ago at his home in Oakland. He was 91.  The NYT gives a fair accounting of his accomplishments; click on the link below or see the archived obituary here. Indented quotes in this piece, save for the last one, come from this NYT piece:

Fred was a literary critic—and later a Freud critic—and taught English at UC Berkeley for 36 years, eventually becoming Chair before retiring. He told me he left because he couldn’t stand the way literary criticism was going, becoming too tendentious and ridden with various “theories”, effacing the value of a work of literature itself. He made fun of these schools of criticism in two of his books (The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh) in which the Winnie the Pooh stories were analyzed through the lenses of various literary schools. The books are hilarious, and the NYT says this about them:

As a young professor at Berkeley, Mr. Crews made a splash in 1963 with “The Pooh Perplex,” a best-selling collection of satirical essays lampooning popular schools of literary criticism of the time; they carried titles like “A Bourgeois Writer’s Proletarian Fables” and “A.A. Milne’s Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex.”

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Gardner called it a “virtuoso performance” and “a withering attack on the pretensions and excesses of academic criticism.” (In 2001, Professor Crews published “Postmodern Pooh,” a fresh takedown of lit-crit theories.)

The Pooh Perplex should be read by all English majors, or anyone who likes literature. It’s a hoot! Click below to see the Amazon site:

Fred was perhaps the most scientific literary critic I know of.  This was seen both in his willingness to change his mind (he began as a Freudian critic but later repudiated Freud), and in one of the big projects of his life, debunking Freud, which he did elegantly, trenchantly, and in a thorough way that nobody has rebutted (the critics didn’t like his analyses mostly because they were imbued with love of Freud).

And having read a lot of Freud myself and being appalled as a scientist by its empirical vacuity, I agreed with Fred: Freud was simply a charlatan, fabricating theories that were never tested, pretending he had hit on the truth, and stealing ideas from others.  As you know, Freud did, and still does, dominate the mindset of Western intellectuals.  But Freud was also tendentious, an intellectual thief, and a miscreant in his own life, as well as a cocaine addict whose addiction influenced his work. If you want to read one book to show what a fraud the man was, go through Fred’s book Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017), which is at once a biography and a demolition of Freudianism as a whole.  You can get the book on Amazon by clicking on the title below. Anybody who has the pretense of being an intellectual in our culture simply has to read this book; and it’s best read after you’ve read some Freud, so you can see the effectiveness of Crews’s demolition.

The NYT says this about the book:

“Freud: The Making of an Illusion” was his most ambitious attempt to debunk the myth of Freud as a pioneering genius, drawing on decades of research in scrutinizing Freud’s early career. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2017, George Prochnik found the book to be provocative if exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”

But Freud didn’t develop: his ambition was overweening from the start, as was his tendency to fabricate stuff and steal ideas from others.

I read many reviews of that book, and virtually all were negative, for they were written by acolytes of Freud, many of whom, lacking a scientific mindset, had no idea that his theories were fabricated, false, or untestable. Even now Freud has a strong grip on the therapy culture, and you can still find expensive analysts who will make you see them several times a week at unbelievable prices. They may mutter a few tepid disavowals of Freud, but their technique is based on Freud’s model.

Fred was a great guy, and in the face of this criticism, he simply moved on, unleashing other attacks on Freud, and on other unpopular views. More from the NYT:

Professor Crews started writing for The New York Review of Books in 1964, beginning with a review of three works of fiction, including a story collection by John Cheever. His essays over the decades covered a lot of territory, literary and otherwise, and while his writing was invariably erudite and carefully argued, it was often mercurial, by turns sarcastic, penetrating, acerbic and witty.

What’s wrong with mercurial?  Here the NYT is trying to sneak in some criticism, but I urge you to read some of his essays yourself (you can find many of the NYRB  essays here, and some are free).  The writing is wonderful and stylish. I don’t get why “mercurial”, turning at times to humor, sarcasm, and penetrating analysis, is pejorative.

Another unpopular cause that Fred took up after retirement was the reexamination of the case of Jerry Sandusky, which I posted about (and about Fred’s commentary) in 2018.

One unlikely cause that he devoted himself to in recent years was to assert the innocence of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing young boys and is now in prison.

“I joined the small group of skeptics who have concluded that America’s paramount sexual villain is nothing of the sort,” Professor Crews wrote in one article in 2021, adding, “believe it or not, there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that he ever molested anyone.”

He also went after “recovered memory therapy” in league with his friend Elizabeth Loftus (see my post here, which contains a comment by Fred). That, too, rests on no empirical evidence, but simply on the wish-thinking assertions of therapists and prosecutors.

Professor Crews linked the charges against Mr. Sandusky to another of his notable targets, the recovered memory movement, which took hold in the 1990s and which he saw as stemming from the excesses of psychoanalytic theory. His two-part essay, “The Revenge of the Repressed,” which appeared in 1994, was included in his collection “Follies of the Wise,” a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award.

“Thanks to the ministrations of therapists who believe that a whole range of adult symptoms can probably be best explained by the repression of childhood sexual abuse,” he wrote in The Times in 1997, “these people emerge from therapy drastically alienated not only from their families but also from their own selves. In all but the tiniest minority of cases, these accusations are false.”

Professor Crews’s work “was and remains an invaluable weapon, wielded on behalf of sanity and science, against the forces of ignorance, self-interest and moral panic,” Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and another longtime critic of recovered memory therapy, said in an email.

His recovered memory essay prompted a series of no-holds-barred exchanges with readers that spilled over into multiple issues of the magazine. Professor Crews was often at his most full-throated in The Review’s letters to the editor column, where intellectual debates can border on trench warfare.

He proved to be a merciless adversary over the decades, especially for Freud supporters, and in the process helped elevate the letters column into something of an art form.

“Mercurial” my tuches!

And some on his other efforts (he was a busy man):

Frederick attended Yale University and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1958 with a dissertation on E.M. Forster. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1958 and taught there until his retirement in 1994. In the mid-1960s, he became involved in the antiwar movement, serving as a co-chairman of Berkeley’s Faculty Peace Committee, “but when even moderate Republicans joined the antiwar cause around 1970, I felt that my activism wasn’t needed anymore,” he told an interviewer in 2006.

In addition to his essays and critical works, Professor Crews wrote “The Random House Handbook,” a popular composition and style manual first published in 1974, and edited several anthologies and style guides. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Fred helped me once or twice by suggesting edits on my own popular writing, and in gratitude I purchased, at long distance, a good bottle of Italian red wine at a store in Berkeley, and then told Fred to go pick it up.

As I said, Fred was a great guy, and despite the academic squabbles in which he participated (which show both his heterodoxy and his courage), he was a man of sanguinity and of even keel.

His emails were works of art themselves, and during one of our exchanges I asked him what, given his numerous achievements (and battles), he thought was his most memorable accomplishment. I still have his response, and here it is (I’ve given a link to what he cites):

My most memorable feat, though it originated simply from a book review assignment, was the exposé “The Unknown Freud,” in NYRB, issue of 11/18/93. It caused the biggest hubbub in the magazine’s history. When there was a similar stir, a year later, regarding my piece on recovered memory, NYRB decided to turn the two controversies into a book (The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute). Because I’ve always been a debater, the sparring with shrinks was a special pleasure.

Indeed!

After many years of e-communication, I finally met Fred and his wife Betty for lunch in Chicago in 2009. That was a great pleasure, and here’s a photo of Fred and Betty that I took in the restaurant. He doesn’t look like a man who would battle with shrinks and academics, does he?

No prayers need be offered, for Fred was a diehard atheist, but I’ve given a few thoughts in this short memoriam.  The world in general, and especially the literary world, is poorer for his absence.

Taboo conclusions in human biology

June 10, 2024 • 10:00 am

Reader Suzi pointed me to a RealClear Science article about subjects that cause controversy in psychology—but also in biology and among people in general. Click the top headline to see their short summary of a longer paper in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a paper you can access by clicking the second title.

While you can click the title below to get to the article, you can also find the pdf here.

The purpose of this study was severalfold, and I’m not going to go into all the questions and conclusions. What I found most interesting was the authors’ list of ten taboo conclusions about psychology and society, the degree of confidence that psychologists had in these conclusions, the degree to which psychologists would self-censor their opinions on these topics (and the correlation with their agreement between censorship and belief), and, finally, the consensus on academic freedom—the assent of psychologists that people should be able to study whatever they wanted.

First, the authors asked 41 psychologists to give a list of what they saw as “controversial” conclusions. From this they distilled the ten most controversial ones, often using their own phrasing to state the conclusions clearly.

Then, the authors gave these conclusions to a bigger sample of psychologists: 470 who agreed to answer the questions (4,603 were asked).  Among other things, they were asked to state their degree of confidence in the answers and then their reluctance to share their views, whatever they were. They were also asked whether “scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment.”

 

I’ve put below the list of ten c0ntroversial conclusions derived from the preliminary survey, along with the average degree of agreement for each conclusion among the scholars who gave answers (not all 470 answered every question). First, how the scholars were asked to agree/disagree and how they judged their degree of risk that would make them self-censor (this is all from the paper itself):

Participants were told they would be responding to 10 taboo conclusions in the social sciences that were nominated by their peers in earlier interviews. First, participants responded to three questions regarding each conclusion on 101-point sliding scales (ranging from 0 to 100): “How confident are you in the truth or falsity of this statement?” (responses ranged from 100% confident it is false to 100% confident it is true), x

Participants then reported how at risk they would feel of various consequences if they shared their views on these topics openly on a sliding scale ranging from no risk at all to very high risk. (All sliding scales used in our study had a range of 0–100.)

After each question, I’ve put in bold the average degree of confidence among the respondents about whether they consider the conclusion to be true.  Notice that the first question is about whether men were naturally selective to be sexually coercive, a conclusion I attacked strongly when younger (I’d have a more nuanced answer now, I think).  Note that two of the questions, #4, #7, are taken up by Luana and me in our paper in Skeptical Inquirer, and we have high confidence in them (I just asked Luana, and we agreed that we both have 100% confidence in those two conclusions).

So here are the top ten hot potatoes in human psychology along with the average degree of agreement.

1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.” (53.47)

2. “Gender biases are not the most important drivers of the under-representation of women in STEM fields.”  (45.26)

3. “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).” (59.29)

4. “Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people.” (66.10)

5. “The social sciences (in the United States) discriminate against conservatives (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”(52.06)

6. “Racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to White Americans.” (46.93)

7. “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.” (65.50)

8. “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.” (29.10)

9. “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” (54.11)

10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.” (21.44)

Note that for most topics psychologists had split opinions, but not for racial differences in IQ being somewhat based on genetic differences (question 8) or diversity leading to worse performance (question 10). In both cases a big majority of people disagreed  The highest agreement, though, came for the questions that Luana and I discussed (sex being binary for the vast majority of people and men and women had different psychological traits because of evolution.  It is surprising that questions whose answers are dead obvious, like the two I just mentioned, don’t have close to 100% agreement, which means that psychologists don’t know much about the binary nature of biological sex or about evolutionary psychology (note that question 7 doesn’t say that ALL psychological differences between men and women are evolved; it implies only that some of them are, which to me seems palpably true, e.g.,  differences in attentiveness to their offspring or the degree of choosiness in mating).

What I found almost as interesting to me is that there was, with one exception, a positive correlation between the degree of belief of individuals in these statements and their reluctance to share their views. Can you guess what the exception is?

Here are two graphs showing particularly strong correlations between degree of belief of a controversial statement and the degree of “self-censorship”; each point represents one individual. Surprisingly, the first one is the binary nature of biological sex. The more strongly you accept it, the more likely you are to keep it to yourself. That’s not true for Luana and me! It’s bloody obvious and we’ll shout it from the rooftops!

This one is more understandable as it’s the hottest of the hot potatoes: the claim that IQ differences between races are appreciable (at least 10% of the difference is based on genetic differences). The more you think that IQ differences between races are genetic, the more likely you are to keep it to yourself:

Did you guess that the one statement that people didn’t self-censor about was a statement in line with liberal ideology. Yes, it’s this one: “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”  The more confidence you have in that, that more likely you are to espouse it publicly, because it makes you seem less racist to be public about it.

All of the correlations, negative and positive, were statistically significant.

The authors note two differences in responses between males and females (that assumes a sex binary!), though of course these not be based on genetics or evolution (bolding is mine):

As seen in Table 3 and Figure S1 in the Supplemental Material, men believed more strongly in the truth of every single taboo conclusion relative to women, with two exceptions: (a) For political bias in social science, there was a small but not significant effect in the same direction, and (b) women believed more strongly that academia discriminates against Black people. In some cases, differences were quite large. For example, female psychologists (on average) were quite confident that academia discriminates against Black people, but male psychologists (on average) were on the fence; male psychologists (on average) were quite confident that men and women evolved different psychological characteristics, but female psychologists (on average) were on the fence. Future research should explore whether male and female psychology professors present to their students different evidence and arguments regarding the veracity of taboo conclusions.

As has been noted by some, women are likely to be more empathic than men, and this may explain the result vis-à-vis racial differences.  Here’s another:

Female scholars were more left-leaning (M = 20.86, SD = 16.03) than male scholars (M = 27.90, SD = 18.70), t(401) = 3.93, p < .001, and younger, t(400) = 4.73, p < .001.

Since most academics are left leaning, I would expect this sex difference based on my hypothesis (which is not mine) that females are more empathic than men, and being more empathic makes you lean even more to the left (a hypothesis that is mine).

Finally, although self-censorship is rife in academia, I was glad to see that most scholars (but only by a bare majority) don’t think that people should be penalized for working on anything they want.

A slim majority of professors (52.3%) reported that scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment for their conclusions. By contrast,1.6% said scholars should not have this freedom, and 46.0% said it’s complicated.

Well, it is a bit complicated, for, as we said in our discussion in Amsterdam, there are some questions (though very few) that people should not be free to work on. But such work is banned anyway by research stipulations of granting agencies and academia, as this work involve harm to humans and other animals (i.e., the kind of experiments on inmates that Josef Mengele did in Auschwitz). Readers may want to think of some questions NOT involving harm to humans and other species that still should not be allowed.  Right off the bat I can’t think of any. There are plenty of experiments that I think are not worthy of doing on humans, but none that should be banned if they don’t cause mental or physical harm.

The belief in academic freedom does conflict with the ability of researchers to investigate some of the questions above, particularly those that have implications for social policy (i.e. is there bias against blacks or women in academia?).  It’s the “politically correct” thing to say that there is, but you really need to know how much bias there is versus other factors (culture, preference, etc) that can cause inequity before you start intervening to achieve equity. But I’ve discussed this before.

It would be a good thing if people didn’t have to self-censor, for that kind of censorship inhibits free discussion, the kind of discussion essential for a university to function and for people to examine their ideas and/or sharpen them.  But we’ll never get rid of self-censorship on questions like the ones above so long as academia is pervaded by ideology, which it must be since scientists are humans and don’t want others to think poorly of them.

The happiest man in the world. . .

August 23, 2023 • 12:30 pm

. . . according to the New York Times, is a 77-year-old monk named Matthieu Ricard, who happens to be the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter. The NYT article (click below) also says his books have been bestsellers, that he got the French National Order of Merit, and that he has a Ph.D in “cellular genetics.”

Of course the title of “world’s happiest man” is a bit dubious, as it’s based on brain activity, but the interview with him by David Marchese, which is well worth reading, is very good. It emphasizes that happiness comes from compassion (a Buddhist tenet that I happen to agree with), and that one can never be happy all the time, for suffering is part of life. But you can be unhappy without being angry or despairing. Above all, Ricard preaches empathy for others.

Here’s how he got his monicker:

In the early 2000s, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that Ricard’s brain produced gamma waves — which have been linked to learning, attention and memory — at such pronounced levels that the media named him “the world’s happiest man.”

And here he is with his Boss (photo from the NYT):

Click the screenshot below to read the interview:

First, how he reacts to his title (interviewer’s questions are in bold, Ricard’s answers in plain text):

For a while now, people have been calling you the world’s happiest man. Do you feel that happy?

It’s a big joke. We cannot know the level of happiness through neuroscience. It’s a good title for journalists to use, but I cannot get rid of it. Maybe on my tomb, it will say, “Here lies the happiest person in the world.” Anyway, I enjoy every moment of life, but of course there are moments of extreme sadness — especially when you see so much suffering. But this should kindle your compassion, and if it kindles your compassion, you go to a stronger, healthier, more meaningful way of being. That’s what I call happiness. It’s not as if all the time you jump for joy. Happiness is more like your baseline. It’s where you come to after the ups and downs, the joy and sorrows. We perceive even more intensely — bad taste, seeing someone suffer — but we keep this sense of the depth. That’s what meditation brings.

And his three “rules for life”:

You know, once I was on the India Today Conclave [an annual TED-like event held in India that gathers leading thinkers from a variety of fields].  They said, “Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?” I said: “First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.” I’m happy to feel I am on the right track. I cannot imagine feeling hate or wanting someone to suffer.

And when I read the last point, I immediately though of my blog nemesis, P. Z. Myers, who is always going off on me.  I rarely respond, and am not really going to diss him, but I think he needs to listen to Ricard’s last sentence, as Myers is always wishing that people (especially Republicans and rich people) would suffer or die, an emotion I’m training myself to curb. Here’s the latest example from Myers, one of many, and the subject is Elon Musk, whom Myers hates:

. . . Ronan Farrow reviews Elon Musk’s life. Imagine an angel of utmost probity assessing his soul at the doorway to heaven, nodding kindly as he summarizes each decade, and then, sadly, pulling the lever that drops him into a blood-drenched flaming tunnel to Hell. It’s so satisfying.

Sadly, many of the followers who bark at Myers’s heels share this same wish for people to suffer.

But I must move on. More on compassion in the interview:

It’s not the best thing to say, but I can easily imagine wanting certain people to suffer. How are we supposed to deal gracefully with our polar opposites in a world that feels increasingly about polarities? I mean, the Dalai Lama could talk to Vladimir Putin all he wants, but Putin’s not going to say, “Your compassion has changed me.” 

Once, a long time ago, someone said to me, who is the person you would like to spend 24 hours alone with? I said Saddam Hussein. I said, “Maybe, maybe, some small change in him might be possible.” When we speak of compassion, you want everybody to find happiness. No exception. You cannot just do that for those who are good to you or close to you. It has to be universal. You may say that Putin and Bashar al-Assad are the scum of humanity, and rightly so. But compassion is about remedying the suffering and its cause. How would that look? You can wish that the system that allowed someone like that to emerge is changed. I sometimes visualize Donald Trump going to hospitals, taking care of people, taking migrants to his home. You can wish that the cruelty, the indifference, the greed may disappear from these people’s minds. That’s compassion; that’s being impartial.

I no longer wish anyone to suffer or die, and my philosophy of determinism helps me with that. If you think that bad people are like broken cars—the results of the laws of physics, including their genes and environments—then you don’t wish them to suffer—any more than you wish a broken car to suffer. What you want is for the car to fe fixed, and that’s what Richard wants. Fixing “bad people” is what should be the sole goal of judicial punishment (as well as keeping them from doing more harm).

You should read the whole interview, as I think it’s helpful. Ricard adds that sadness (which “goes with determination to remedy the cause”) is okay, but that there’s no point to despair. For those of you, like me, who say that “I can’t help it: I do feel despair,” Ricard notes that emotions can be changed (well, not by some numinous “will”, but by training). It’s similar to cognitive behavioral therapy.

Finally, Ricard recounts the last time someone “got on his nerves”, a very rare event:

Who gets on your nerves at the monastery? My nerves? Once in New York, when I was promoting one of my books, a very nice journalist lady said, “What really upsets your nerves when you arrive in New York?” I said, “Why do you presuppose anything is upsetting me?” It’s not about something being on your nerves. It’s about trying to see the best way to proceed. Paul Ekman [an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California San Francisco, known for his work on facial expressions and emotions. He is also the co-author, with the Dalai Lama, of the book “Emotional Awareness”] once asked me to remember when I got really angry. I had to go back 20 years: I had a brand-new laptop, my first one, in Bhutan, and the monk who didn’t know what it was, he was passing by with a bowl filled with roasted barley flour and spilled some on it. So I got mad, and then he looked at me, and he said, “Ha-ha, you’re getting angry!” That was about it. I get indignation all the time about things that should be remedied. Indignation is related to compassion. Anger can be out of malevolence.

There’s a lot more, so read the interview. I have to add that as I get older, I do seem to have acquired a bit of useful wisdom, which is a shame because you should be born wise, for when you’re really wise from experience and age, you either die or get dementia! One thing I’ve learned (though I still let it control my emotions sometimes) is that anger is a toxic and generally useless emotion, which can stand in the way of fixing either personal or societal problems. Another is that if you want to cooperate with others, and have them do what you think is best, treat them with respect and never, ever call them names.  Also, never accuse someone directly of bad behavior: simply tell them how their behavior makes you feel.

I know I’m sounding sappy. So it goes. Now if only I could curb my biggest problem: anxiety. I tried meditation, but I’m generally too keyed up to meditate!