“We didn’t really travel to Greece to discover these three terrible ideas,” the authors reveal. This excursion turns out to be a bit of mischief ( misoponos means “lazy”, and Koalemos is an obscure god of stupidity). As if paying homage to Bloom’s love of classics, the new book opens with a pilgrimage to Misoponos, a Greek oracle who serves Koalemos, preaching the three great untruths. Their title echoes The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom’s 1987 bestselling attack on the “relativism” that he said threatened the achievements of western civilisation. Generation “iGen”, the one that comes after millennials, is, according to the authors, suffering a mental health crisis because of smartphone addiction and the paranoid parenting style of the upper middle class. Their targets are “safetyism”, the language of microaggressions, identity politics and intersectionality. The first section elaborates what the authors call the “Great Untruths” that supposedly dominate college campuses: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker Always Trust Your Feelings Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People. Instead, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt focus on students demanding “protection” from arguments they find challenging and the professors and administrators who cave in to them.
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