
How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm - aestetix
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/concept-creep/477939/?single_page=true
======
petewailes
I suspect a large part of this is down to

1\. People defaulting to the nuclear option constantly, in their reactions,
and

2\. People not wanting to accept that some issues are complex, and that a
blanket approach doesn't work.

The latter of these is the real issue. People love being outraged over the
lack of women in STEM fields, and how those that are are treated, but few
people talk about the lack of men in teaching it nursing roles. The former is
seen as "a problem" and the latter isn't. I'd argue that both are issues, but
one is something that political groups get behind and the other isn't.

As a different example, you could look at the issue of badger culls it fox
hunting in the UK. The most outspoken people against both aren't from the
countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or
want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and
foxes are cute.

It's the infantilism of understanding; people wanting things to be black and
white and easy to understand, where pretty much everything contentious, when
you dig, is complex.

I suspect a lot of the blame for this is a combination of the short article
and news industries, giving people the feeling of being informed without any
of the substance to back it up, and the increasing politicisation of issues,
where people hold views for reasons more tribal than rational.

Once you start believing that issues are simple, it's easy to fit everything
into that framework and to wander round being outraged or offended or insulted
by things. Because you can read into life whatever you want.

~~~
pvaldes
> The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have
> never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too
> much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute.

You have your point, but is a common and too simplistic interpretation. We
need to repeat this more: _To have cattle or being able to shoot a rabbit is
irrelevant and not a guarantee at all to understand science or modern biology.
Seriously._

Radically new ideas (like for example that wolves will generate money and
provide basic services valued in millions of dollars, or that if you kill the
alpha wolf in a pack there is an increase, not a decrease to cattle damages,
or that to cull badgers will spread faster the cattle diseases that you want
to stop and thus is a questionable investment of public money)... all those
knowledge is generated normally in _universities_ , placed in _big cities_ ,
after years of painfully slow research done by _experts_ in zoology,
chemistry, genetics...

And I'm talking of real experts. Some of the most fantastic environmental
fails were incubated in the local pub by farmers and hunters that lobby to
push the local silly politician hunting for votes. Or by people that _do not
understand how biology_ works. (Ask the Chinese people about the failure of
the big sparrow cull in Mao times, for example).

Farmers are experts in breeding cattle. Point. Not more, not less. Basic
concepts in biology are often terribly misunderstood or just ignored
stubbornly by them for decades, and there is a big inertia in small villages
to accept changes. For some reason, all people are instead ready to follow the
local hero, with his myth based ideas, and often lose money by this.

~~~
reitanqild
> all those knowledge is generated normally in universities, placed in big
> cities, after years of painfully slow research done by experts in zoology,
> chemistry, genetics...

IIRC, so are the ideas that wolves, an animal capable of eating sheep or even
moose would not eat children if they happened to walk unprotected.

Not saying we should get rid of wolves only that some realism need to be
applied.

~~~
pvaldes
Well, if you want realism, wolves are one of the really select club of species
of animals known to readily protect, nurture and adopt a lost human children
if some circumstances occur. This is a fact, not a feeling.

Do you know what other animals can be dangerous for a small children in a
close encounter?: Buffaloes, mooses, deers, bulls, rams, bears, rats, horses,
rhinos, donkeys, chimps, coyotes, pigs, snakes, racoons, big cats, snapping
turtles, electric eels, lots of arthropods, and most of all other humans or
machines created by humans. This is the reason for small children never should
walk unprotected by unsafe areas. For children there is a change at least of
surviving a close encounter with a wolf, that will not enjoy if is a buffalo
instead.

Curiously today the local press tells a story about a man that died after four
years fighting lyme disease caused by a deer tick bite. For some arrogant
interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are increasing in my country at
the same time as wolves being culled regularly.

~~~
tremon
_Some of the most fantastic environmental fails were incubated in the local
pub_

 _For some arrogant interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are
increasing in my country at the same time as wolves being culled regularly._

Oh how ironic. In which pub were you when you decided these two must be
causally related?

Tick numbers are increasing because the climate is getting warmer. Also, ticks
regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick
population. But neither explanation has anything to do with wolves. In fact,
wolf numbers in The Netherlands have doubled over the past year, and we're
still seeing an increase in ticks.

~~~
pvaldes
> ticks regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick
> population

True, (well, shrews are preferred in fact to mice), but only when young. Adult
ticks feed mainly on large mammals, specially herbivores, and die if can't
find a host in a few days, therefore is easy to understand that the
recruitment of new ticks, the number of tick eggs released by surviving
adults, is directly linked with the role of wolves as predators.

In the other hand, to put your "population of wolves has doubled between 2014
and 2015 but ticks had not changed" claim in context, we need to note that
wolf population in the Netherlands between years 1869 and 2013 was composed of
zero wolves.

Then, in 4-Jul-2013 something very strange happened. A she-wolf was found dead
in a roadside next Luttelgeest. The first confirmed case of a "dutch" wolf in
140 years. A study in the journal Lutra covered the issue concluding that:

1) The animal was a purebreed wolf genetically related with East Europe
populations [discarding a dog-wolf mix or a sarloos dog], was unchipped, and
between 1.5 and 2.5 years old.

2) She fed on beaver in either the Carpathian mountains or the Eifel which is
too far for the animal to have walked (9Km/h) from by itself within the 24
hours needed to digest its last meal (Genetic analysis from the remains of the
beaver and the wolf linked both animals with populations living in this
areas).

3) Bullet impacts and shattered fragments where found in the chest and flank
indicating that the animal was shot twice before being hit by a car.

4) No car accident involving an animal was reported to local emergency
services in the previous hours to the discovery of the corpse.

5) A discrepancy between the timing of the post mortem and rigor mortis
intervals indicated that this wolf was shot prior to illegal transport to the
Netherlands, from a distance within 2 days.

[To fake a car accident, running over a previously killed animal is a common
procedure to cover environmental crimes against protected species].

Source:

The first wolf found in the Netherlands in 150 years was the victim of a
wildlife crime. _Lutra_. 2013. 56(2): 93-109. Gravendeel, de Groot, Kik,
Beentjes, Bergman, Caniglia, Cremers, Fabbri, Groenenberg, Grone, Bruinderink,
Font, Hakhof, Harms, Jansman, Janssen, Lammertsma, Laros, Linnartz, van der
Marel, Mulder, van der Mije, Nieman, Nowak, Randi, Rijks, Speksnijder & Vonho

Link to the article:
[http://www.kora.ch/fileadmin/file_sharing/5_Bibliothek/51_KO...](http://www.kora.ch/fileadmin/file_sharing/5_Bibliothek/51_KORA_News/KORA_News_2014/20140210wolf-
luttelgeest-gravendeel-de-groot-kik-et-al_lowres-2013__1_.pdf)

... So in 2013 there was still zero dutch wolves.

Then in 9-march-2015 a single wolf was photographed in Hunze.

So, unless you can show us new data, yes, wolf population was doubled in
Netherlands in the last year... but you forgot to mention that is from zero to
one animal. Here have your answer to the lack of changes on tick population.

~~~
tremon
Yup, that was meant as tongue-in-cheek, but I should probably have left it
out. I didn't look up the specifics, but I know a second wolf sighting was
claimed in Limburg, raising the number of wolves in NL from 1 to 2.

~~~
pvaldes
... Or maybe the same wolf was seen in two different places. Is relatively
common with this species.

------
nabla9
First writers started to use leaving the toilet seat up as a plot device to
generate drama in sitcoms. Then others started to write light hearted articles
in women magazines telling women how to deal with man who leaves toilet seat
up. Now we have number of people who think it's something that can be reason
to have a heated argument.

My theory is that we are living in society where people take cues on how to
deal with everyday issues from media, social media and written word instead of
their community and social environment. We look at the Rorschach inkblot and
there is always some group who knows how it makes you feel and how those
feelings are responsibility of others if you are willing to listen.

Our culture is becoming neurotic.

edit:

Google n-gram viewer for "toilet seat up":
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=+toilet+seat+u...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=+toilet+seat+up&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctoilet%20seat%20up%3B%2Cc0)

~~~
wccrawford
I will never forget having this argument and her reason being, "I might
accidentally sit on it with the seat up."

Yeah, that's gross and disconcerting, I'm sure. My response was that it was
her responsibility to make sure she didn't sit on anything gross, and she
should be looking where she's sitting anyhow.

My solution was to put the lid down with the seat. This is cleaner, looks
nicer, stops the flush from spewing grossness into the room, and does not
solve her problem at all.

Yeah, I was a little petty about it.

Of course, then I got complaints about the lid being down. I refused to budge
on my position, and eventually she stopped trying to argue about it.

My take on the whole situation is that as we solved some really big problems,
people needed a reason to complain or feel afraid. We went from worrying about
dying constantly to worrying about getting a cold or totally treatable
diseases. We're unable to stop worrying about _something_ , and so things get
blown out of proportion. We're obsessed with preventing everything that's
viewed as negative.

------
imgabe
There seems to be a spectrum between whether you consider your feelings
mutable and the world absolute or whether your feelings are absolute and the
world needs to change to accommodate them. The ever-expanding harm movement
leans heavily towards the latter.

If something makes you feel bad, then it must inherently _be_ bad and must be
changed. There doesn't seem to be any consideration that maybe it's your
feelings that need to change, or even any acknowledgement that you _can_
change how you feel about something.

It's definitely not always one or other other, but to be constantly at the
mercy of whatever circumstances happen to exist at the moment seems like a
very difficult way to live one's life.

------
vinceguidry
I look at this as a sign of society evolving. Subtle emotional traumas exist,
micro-aggressions exist. Way more things are harmful to children than we are
really aware of. Mental health issues scale smoothly from 'nonexistent' to
'makes you completely nonfunctional' and can't be easily separated from
'ordinary' personality.

Society was not-so-blissfully unaware of these aspects of life, this is the
process of coming to awareness. You overreact out of confusion at first, but
eventually you figure it out and move on to the next lesson. It's how society
works, you think they didn't have breathless articles in the '50's bemoaning
both the fears of the day and the overreactions to those fears?

~~~
codingdave
I thought the article laid out nice examples where the "evolving" can be good
in some ways, but harmful in others.

I know teenagers who have never been left alone. I know people graduating high
school who have never independently taken care of themselves. And even on an
independence scale, when I was 18, my friends and I could pretty much survive
on our own in wilderness situations just fine, and we did - heading into the
woods and mountains to explore almost every day. Nowadays that would get you
on reality TV shows.

Sure, things are safer now... As long as we all stick inside the little boxes
society provides for us. But that is not always what is actually best for us.

------
oli5679
Individualistic, freedom/harm based moral thinking is far from ubiquitous.

This can lead to libertarian leaning people (like me and many members of
Hacker News) mischaracterising the world-view of many conservatives/liberals
who have different moral beliefs to us and having discussions with them which
are not constructive.

Johnathan Haidt has some interesting ideas on the topic. The idea that many
people value stability/group loyalty/ideas of sanctity is often missed by many
responses to moral issues on this site when people correctly state 'I can't
see who is being harmed here' or 'I'm uncomfortable with people's freedom
being restricted' in response to the day's moral issue.

Ultimately, many/most people have a bunch of sacred beliefs/narratives that
they do not objectively challenge when faced with new evidence (instead they
act like defence lawyers trying to reframe/discredit the information).

------
lr4444lr
This article is a bit muddled in several issues. Important and not mentioned,
though by no means authoritative, is the enduring "negative liberty" principle
and its enormous impact on the American ethos from its founding. An big reason
a lot of this "concept creep" makes us uncomfortable is that the "right to be
free from harm or negligence causing harm" is coming into diametric opposition
with other people's right of expression, movement, and property. For an
article that goes so far as to evoke Aristotle, I'm surprised no mention of
Locke or JS Mill was made.

------
alanwatts
This is hardly a phenomenon that is limited to the arbitrary boundaries of the
US. This "sensitivity" in my estimation is due to the new found
interconnectedness of consciousness via the internet. As Marshall McLuhan
wrote many decades ago:

"The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in
a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums."

"The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive
situations."

Go look at YouTube comments and you'll see what he meant. Never before has the
world, with all its highly variable levels of intelligence, ignorance, and
ideologies, been thrust into a "room" together and "forced" to listen to other
opinions like it has with the internet.

"In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically
extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of
mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of
our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated
role of the literate Westerner."

------
yarou
We are headed to a dystopian state so quickly it's not even remotely funny
anymore. The only thing I will say is resist them - resist the status quo and
fight back against authority.

We can fight back with tools like cryptocurrency, or even secure messaging
apps like Signal (and though end-to-end encryption is heavily criticized on
here, it's a start). We can collectively become hackers that dismantle the
corrupt institutions that have become so heavily entrenched in our society by
engaging in these small initiatives.

------
ansible
They talk about the influence of academics, and yet we (as a people) seem to
successfully ignore things like global warming... I don't know if that
explains it.

We have, indeed, become a nation of wimps, with little common sense. We fear
now, much more than we used to. When I was a kid, we feared the red menace
(Communism), but that didn't stop us from moving forward, or adhering to our
ideals. Our independent spirit as a people.

I don't understand what is happening to us, but I think what they are talking
about in the article is a reaction to the shift in public attitudes, not the
cause of it.

~~~
Kristine1975
_> Our independent spirit as a people._

Except for those pesky blacks:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws)

~~~
benbenolson
Geez, this is exactly what the commenter is talking about. Nobody brought race
into this, and everyone knows about the racist history of America. Your
comment was off-topic and did not further the conversation in any meaningful
way, except set a tone of condescension towards this person's generation. Stop
it.

------
afarrell
> like saying the word “fútbol” instead of soccer

Hispanic folks: Is this in fact a thing that feels alienating to you? If so,
would you be willing to explain why? It is the first time I've heard about it
so I'd just like to confirm that Conor Friedersdorf is referring to a real
thing.

~~~
pessimizer
I'm not Hispanic, and don't care at all about soccer, but I imagine it would
be aggravating as hell. I'm black, and when white people call me bro, or start
speaking in dialect - I honestly start to hate them.

For cultural reasons, when a lot of white Americans are talking about getting
fighting and getting angry, or partying and having fun, relaxing and being
lazy, flirting or getting laid, or one-upping people or hustling for money,
they drop into a black dialect (and an entire stereotypical affect) for a
moment. Even upper-middle class black people do it sometimes - Oprah is famous
for it.

I spoke like that growing up on the South Side of Chicago, my grandparents
speak like that, and many of the people I love speak like that. People are
dropping into dialect because, deep down, they think of black people as a
bunch of violent, lazy, partying, horny grifters - and find it very amusing
and black of themselves when they experience anger, laziness, joy, sexual
arousal, or pride at their own craftiness. This is the reason why most pop
music is delivered in black dialect. It reminds me of what they think of me,
and my family, although they would never acknowledge it to me, and many
wouldn't acknowledge it to themselves.

To be clear, I'm not a fan of oversensitivity and preciousness, or
"microaggressions" or cultural studies departments, or theory-theory
psychology in general, which I think is just secular religion. But someone
dropping into dialect when they talk to you is not all that subtle.

I could see Hispanic people feeling stereotyped by soccer stuff. Soccer is
English, it's called "football" in English, so what's this urge to drop into
Spanish dialect all of a sudden? Do you drop into dialect when you talk to
your white friends? If you do, why?

edit: And I don't mean to imply that white people don't get treated like this
- I hear people drop into an Italian-American affect a lot when they're
talking about being criminals, or being rapey.

~~~
hderms
I'm white and grew up in a near-western suburb of Chicago and have also
noticed that white people were quick to adopt a black dialect. I'm not sure it
was necessarily only correlated with the things you mentioned (partying,
anger, etc...) but it definitely existed. People adopted a lot of slang words
from the black community too, which can sound really unnatural coming from a
rich white kid's mouth.

However, I don't think it was necessarily a result of people viewing black
people negatively, in fact, it often seemed to be admiration. I could be wrong
because I can't read minds but these were young kids that had been raised in
an anti-racist environment, so suggesting that they were mimicking black
culture because they secretly felt negatively about it isn't a convincing
explanation for the entirety of it.

~~~
pessimizer
> However, I don't think it was necessarily a result of people viewing black
> people negatively, in fact, it often seemed to be admiration

But see, that's still racist. And the contexts in which it comes out makes it
seem like an admiration of looseness, coolness, style, toughness, sexiness,
grittiness, authenticity... an escape from just being a plain old person.
Really, these are qualities involved in the identities many teenagers hope to
construct. I'm just a plain old person too, but the culture makes me a
repository for fantasy.

I'll go on a tangent here about something that really bothered me yesterday.
There was a really interesting and informative article yesterday in the LA
Times about an "Asian" propensity towards diabetes - an article which could
help people with their health by informing them of something which they may
not have been aware of.

[http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-asian-americans-
diabetes...](http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-asian-americans-
diabetes-20160419-story.html)

Here's the question:

The article had nothing to do with white people, yet this was the graphic:
[http://www.trbimg.com/img-571584ce/turbine/la-me-g-asian-
ame...](http://www.trbimg.com/img-571584ce/turbine/la-me-g-asian-american-
diabetes-20160418/750/750x422)

and later: "Asians tend to have less muscle and more fat than Europeans of the
same weight and height, studies show. So an Asian who isn't obese or even
overweight could have enough fat to be in danger of getting diabetes, a
phenomenon sometimes referred to as 'skinny-fat.'"

So how did white people get to be the baseline? The zeros of the world, the
people that other people are a divergence from, the people that you have to
know to understand? Why is an article about Asian diabetes instead an article
about comparative rates of diabetes between Asians and whites? Some liberal
arts major might call it a "microaggression", but as a engineering major, I am
just literally looking at Asian health being described mainly in relation to
the health of whites and trying to figure out the words to explain how that
bothers me to white people who can't see it, without them erupting into rage.

~~~
yomly
It was written by a white person in a country which is still assumed to be
predominantly Caucasian. Hence white people were the baseline.

------
spriggan3
Interesting article .... until the Bush blaming at the end which totally
irrelevant to the matter. Both parties are equally to blame for playing
identity politics and encouraging the "us vs them" mentality in US.

------
xlm1717
Excellent piece here. Does a great job of demonstrating "concept creep" from
both liberal and conservative ideologies, and of describing how we got to this
situation in the first place. The bullet points towards the end summarize the
article perfectly:

>“by applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and
clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective
elements into them, concept creep may release a flood of unjustified
accusations and litigation, as well as excessive and disproportionate
enforcement regimes.”

>“...concept creep can produce a kind of semantic dilution. If a concept
expands to encompass less extreme phenomena... then its prototypical meaning
is likely to shift... If trauma, for example, ceases to refer exclusively to
terrifying events that are outside normal human experience, and is applied to
less severe and more prevalent stresses, it will come to be seen in a more
benign light.”

>“...by increasing the range of people who are defined as moral
patients—people worthy of moral concern, based on their perceived capacity to
suffer and be harmed—it risks reducing the range of people who see themselves
as capable of moral agency.” There is a tendency “for more and more people to
see themselves as victims who are defined by their suffering, vulnerability,
and innocence...The flip-side of this expanding sense of victimhood would be a
typecast assortment of moral villains: abusers, bullies, bigots, and
traumatizers.”

>Expanding mental disorder “can pathologize normal experiences, generate over-
diagnosis and over-treatment, and engender a sense of diminished agency.”

Of all these, I find the tendency towards victimhood particularly troubling.
We're seeing a generation of kids growing up blaming everyone but themselves
for their problems, and demanding that someone else change to solve their
problems instead of learning the resiliency needed to survive and thrive.
Couple that with the tribalism of said victims setting one group against the
other, and we're setting ourselves up for civil unrest in the near future.

------
coldcode
Because we have so many lawyers.

~~~
Splines
Expanding your point further, because I agree with you in that the CYA
mentality is everywhere.

Whenever I see news about something bad happening, inevitably it turns into a
blame game. What did someone _not_ do?

The case of the mom getting arrested
([http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arrested...](http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arrested-
for-letting-a-9-year-old-play-at-the-park-alone/374436/)) infuriates me. The
person who called the police (and, really, everyone involved "up the chain")
was faced with a decision:

A.) Do nothing

B.) Call the police (escalate upwards in authority)

C.) Do something else, like find a safer place for the child to be, if you
truly believe the park to be dangerous.

A is free, but comes with the non-zero cost of being "the person who did
nothing" when something bad happens to the girl (unlikely, but possible). B is
cheap (you need to hang around for the police and all that entails), but is an
easy way to attain the moral high ground. C is expensive and really you'd be
no better off than if you did B.

These three options exist for everyone involved, and they escalated upwards
until they found someone who had enough power to do C cheaply enough that they
didn't need to do B. That involved taking the child away.

Passing the buck upwards is easy to do and seldom will someone come after you
for it. I don't have a good answer for how this can be solved, because I can't
say with good conscience that it is never the right thing to do - there are
obvious cases where it is.

I also find the amusing that my thoughts on "how would I make this right?"
lead to "that mother should sue the state for lost wages or something".
Clearly we have too many lawyers.

------
Shivetya
a tyranny of the minority backed up by politicians, government appointees, and
judges, all who realize their power by separating people into groups to play
off each other. Each new victim class further increases the power of
government, the loss of privacy, and worse the loss of community and seeds of
distrust and anger are set to drive people into different camps.

when the individual becomes so important that community suffers we have our
priorities wrong.

~~~
apalmer
This seems to be a commonly expressed concept, the idea that in large this
phenomenon is strongly either caused or encouraged by a 'conspiracy' of the
government.

~~~
yarou
How about multinational corporations that answer to nobody and are staffed by
the top psychologists in the world to subtly manipulate the masses? Is that a
"conspiracy" in your eyes or merely reality?

------
pron
I think this has much to do with the US infatuation with, and fear of,
litigation (as well as the relationship between expert witnesses and the court
system) as any psychological phenomenon. In other words, I think the
explanation is sociological more than psychological.

