John Cleese: I'm so grateful that you came. Greg Lukianoff has co-written the best book on this subject that I've read. You co-wrote it with Jonathan Haidt, wonderful author. It's called "The Coddling of the American Mind," and it's the most interesting thing I've read on all this stuff.
But what I'm fascinated by, is that it all started with you having a severe depression. So, tell the tale.
Greg Lukianoff: Well, in 2007 I got so depressed I had to be hospitalized as a danger to myself. And in the process of recovering the next year, I studied Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is something that teaches you to talk back to your own exaggerated thoughts.
Cleese: So, when you have the voices in your head you argue with them?
Lukianoff: Exactly. When you're catastrophizing, you call it out…
Cleese: So catastrophizing means what?
Lukianoff: That you're just thinking everything's going to be a catastrophe. It sounds very much like it sounds. When people are anxious and depressed, they have all of these cognitive distortions you know at Volume 11 going on in their head. And that just getting in the habit of talking back to them can relieve many of the symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Cleese: So, when you discovered that, what happened then?
Lukianoff: Well, you know, it changed my life, but I started seeing all over the place ways in which we were teaching young people the habits of anxious and depressed people. It was as if, both in K through 12, in grade school and in higher education, it was like the adults were saying, by the way do catastrophize, do engage in emotional reasoning, do engage in binary thinking, which I know you think a lot about as well.
Cleese: So, you linked up with Jon?
Lukianoff: I linked up with Jon Haidt, I told him what I thought was -- cause I'm a constitutional lawyer. My major focus…
Cleese: Are you? I thought I liked you.
Lukianoff: … and I was defending freedom of speech on college campuses, and academic freedom, and I noticed around 2013 that students were really clamping down, both on freedom of speech, but they were also rationalizing it in this kind of medicalized way that was all catastrophizing, all binary thinking, all of these cognitive distortions. So, we wrote an article together in 2015, saying the things that are threatening free speech on campus are also the kind of mental habits that will make young people anxious and depressed.
Essentially, it's teaching people that essentially, they should avoid challenges, they should avoid things that cause them any pain, but of course and things that cause you pain are also what cause you growth. And so, the emphasis on having your children not experience either physical or emotional pain or challenges, is actually a profoundly unhealthy way to teach kids to think about the world, and to let them be kids and grow up. It's tempting as a parent, because I have a five and a seven-year-old, I understand that you want to protect your kids from emotional difficulty, but if you don't prepare them for a world that's difficult, and you don't prare them for challenges, you're not preparing them to be adults. And even worse. you're creating a situation where of course they're going to be anxious and depressed, because they're afraid of the world, they're afraid of adulthood.
Cleese: Having all these insights with you, how do they affect the people who are advocating woke ideas?
Lukianoff: I think that to a degree, this terrible advice is inherent to a lot of what we might call woke ideology. That essentially, challenge is bad, that you should always follow your emotions, and most importantly, that life is a battle between good people and evil people. A lot of the ideology that we're seeing particularly on campuses, is this very simple narrative of there is pure good and pure evil, and you want to be on the side of pure good always at war with the other.
Cleese: So that if you agree with a lot of the transgender agenda but disagree with some of it, then you are a very bad…
Lukianoff: You're absolutely evil.
Cleese: … person and you're absolutely wrong.
Lukianoff: Yeah, and this is part of the way that unfortunately, in the places where we should be learning to argue like adults, we're teaching this very childish way of arguing. It creates the situation where you can just dismiss any person, any book, any thinker, any institution you disagree with, because since you can find everything is evil, anytime you don't want to listen to somebody, you just declare them evil and…
Cleese: You don't have to bother with them.
Lukianoff: You don't have to challenge your thinking at all.
Cleese: Now, I want to ask you a little bit more about cancel culture, because every time I get on television, the second question is something to do with cancel culture, and my friends are saying, why are you always talking about cancel culture. And the answer is, we're obsessed with it. Tell me what you're thinking about it.
Lukianoff: So, I have a book coming out called "Cancelling of the American Mind."
Cleese: Cancelling, yes.
Lukianoff: Yes, and it's making the point that not only is cancel culture real, but it's so bad we're going to be studying it in 100 years. One thing that we've collected is the number of professors who have been punished or fired. And in the United States, you have to go back to the 1950s to McCarthyism to see numbers that are anywhere near as close to the number of professors…
Cleese: What? The McCarthyism?
Lukianoff: In terms of numbers, absolutely. The estimate's about about 100 to 150 professors were fired from 1947 to 1957. And right now, we're approaching 200 professors getting fired.
Cleese: How does it happen? The students?
Lukianoff: Used to be the administrators were the ones getting professors in trouble. And then it increasingly became the students and the fellow professors who were reporting them. So, McCarthyism, it was generally people outside of higher education who were reporting professors. But now it's coming from within, and it's devastating for the production of knowledge. Because if people think -- people aren't stupid. If they look at an expert, and they come up with an opinion, and they say to themselves, "wait a second, if you can be cancelled for having the wrong opinion, why should I trust you to be objective about this anyway?"
Cleese: Is it anything to do with the fact that the fees at universities now are so high that the students are also kind of customers as well as students?
Lukianoff: That is part of the problem.
Cleese: And they don't want to lose their customers, right?
Lukianoff: It's related to the fees both because it creates a "customer is always right" situation, but also because those fees, at least in the states, increasingly pay for armies and armies, ever growing numbers of bureaucrats and administrators who enforce really rigid ideological norms. They police freedom of speech and it creates an environment that is very chilled.
Cleese: Because the only real aim they have in life is not to get fired.
Lukianoff: Careerism definitely plays a part, but there's also people who think that the key to saving the world is less and less freedom of speech. You would think we would have learned a bit from Galileo.