Greeings from Tampa!
RWL #397
Greetings from … Tampa, Florida! That is the view from the 27th floor of the JW Marriot where I’m attending the annual AUPHA meeting, talking with other leaders of health administration programs. It’s definitely a niche crowd, but we’re pretty passionate about what we do. I am going to have to come back because there is kayaking on that river and I am not getting a chance to go. To be honest, the best thing about this conference is I get to catch up with a bunch of my old Army buddies who I taught with at Army-Baylor, who are all, like me, now retired and leading programs across the country.
My students are starting their internships and I am getting good feedback from most of them. There are always a few bumps and hiccups, but mostly it’s excitement that I am hearing. I’m starting to line up my road trips to visit them all. It’s going to be a very full summer.
On to the links! As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: The Eternally Radical Idea, The mental health consequences of social justice fundamentalism
Why: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently conducted a large scale survey of college students (N = 55K) and found some troubling statistics: too many college students are struggling with mental health issues. But beyond that, there is a correlation, and perhaps a causal relationship between ideology and self-reported mental health. See graphic below.
The whole post is worth reading, but here’s a snippet that I think gets to the point:
Social justice fundamentalism, on the other hand, seems to incorporate a great many rigid concepts that could understandably be depressing and anxiety-producing. Take “intersectionality,” one of the key concepts underlying social justice fundamentalism… In practice, intersectionality is a combination of two cognitive distortions: overgeneralizing and blaming. It also arose from a perspective in which the world is utterly dominated by impersonal forces, against which human beings are simply objects that are acted upon rather than people with agency. Within this framework, individuals understandably don't really feel like they have an internalized locus of control — or an ability to guide the course of their own lives.
That is a depressing and anxiety-producing worldview.
The authors argue that to embrace social justice fundamentalism (SJF) concepts such as intersectionality is to internalize these cognitive distortions which teach that you are helpless in a hopeless world. The reason I bristle at this philosophy is that it teaches learned helplessness. Psychology Today has a good summary of the concept:
Learned helplessness occurs when an individual continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and stops trying to change their circumstances, even when they have the ability to do so.
Psychologists did all kinds of terrible things to dogs that we probably wouldn’t allow today to demonstrate this behavioral outcome. Today we’re doing all kinds of terrible things to our kids, and the graphic above shows what the outcome is.
A second, related piece of the higher rates of self-reported mental illness among the SJF, I suspect, is the valorization of having mental illness. In intersectionality, the more identity challenges you have, the more oppressed you are, and the more oppressed you are, the higher status you are in the SJF community. It’s hard to change your race to claim greater oppression but since mental illness is internal, one can largely make claims to things like anxiety and depression and no one can challenge you. If you make a mental illness claim, it raises your status in the SJF community. I think the problem with mental illness is the more you lean into it, the worse it gets. We all have a certain amount of anxiety and depression. A modest amount is perfectly normal and even, one could argue, beneficial. Those conditions are normal reactions to difficult situations in life. But if you embrace mental illness, you will get more of it. I think that is at least part of the story in the graphic above: harmful status seeking behavior.
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Watch
What: Solaris, The Way of The Superior Man - Miyamoto Musashi (9 min)
Why: I have written about the great 17th century samurai Myamoto Musashi before. This video explores some of his philosophy, which mirrors Western Stoicism. Musashi’s writings focus on mastery of warfare (strategy), but the thing one is mastering, whether through the study of swordsmanship or any other discipline, is the mastery of the self. The stillness Musashi sought is a great counterpoint to the cognitive distortions I just discussed above in the read article. Discipline leads to eudaimonia, as I wrote about this past weekend. This video is worth listening to because it gives some timeless wisdom for being better.
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Listen
What: Conversations with Tyler, Marc Andreessen on AI and Dynamism (31 min)
Why: Cowen interviews Andreesen on the challenges of economic growth. Andreesen was an early internet entrepreneur and continues to be a major influence in the tech field. Toward the end they have an interesting discussion of managerialism, which I need to look more into.