It’s clear who the snowflakes are now, and no one embodies this hypocritical transition more than Elon Musk
Members of the right once derided the left for emotional hypersensitivity. Today, they lead the charge to suppress ideas that unsettle them.
Slave owners tried very hard to justify themselves. In the early years of the 19th century, wave after wave of preposterous pseudoscience was published to help them rationalise what was obviously wrong but incredibly profitable. Soon, speech criticising slavery was policed. Books were banned; possession of some, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were criminalised. Newspaper owners were targeted, their presses thrown into the river. Abolitionists were lynched and driven from the American south. Slave owners’ sublimated guilt was so fragile that they needed soft and hard power – indeed, the entire force of culture and government – to maintain the specious lie that slavery was not only not bad, it was right.
This was the most exasperatingly difficult part of the political situation, as Abraham Lincoln explained at Cooper Union in February 1860. What would satisfy and calm the south? “This, and this only,” Lincoln said: “Cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.”
Today, of course, we all know that slavery can never be condoned. We don’t spend enough time thinking about how people got to a place where they didn’t think that. How information ecosystems and political actors can create incredibly dangerous conditions in which conflict is almost certain.
The American Civil War was driven by greed and cruelty, but another way to see it is that it was started rashly and stupidly by men and women who lived in a delusional, paranoid bubble in which they were the victims, that they were the ones being persecuted (by the north) instead of being the villains who enslaved and raped and killed. Slave owners were monsters, but they were also incredibly sensitive, unable to face what they’d done and terrified of living in a world where they couldn’t keep doing it.
As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1835, men and women of the south had been raised for generations as “domestic dictators”, their every wish a command and every belief confirmed with a “Yes, master”. The education system – and the culture – had given the slave owner the character of a “supercilious and a hasty man; irascible, violent, and ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles, but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt”.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that slave owners were little snowflakes to whom even the notion of equality seemed like oppression, and for whom disagreement was literally a duelling offence. In 1856, US representative Preston Brooks beat senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate for criticising his first cousin once-removed in a speech about slavery. Who does this sound like today?
I am asking instead of telling because I know that, depending on your political persuasion, you’ll probably have a different answer. The problem is that it shouldn’t sound like anyone – but it does.
If I were writing this 10 years ago, shortly after I published my first major book on Stoicism (The Obstacle is the Way), I’d probably use examples here of people angrily complaining that a list of books I recommended – about quite a specific philosophical school – weren’t diverse enough. Or were mad that I used a certain offensive word. In fact, during the mid-aughts, as a media strategist and marketing director at American Apparel, I scored my share of marketing coups by playing into the very easily provoked and almost perpetually offended blogosphere on behalf of controversial clients.
This sensitivity is still there. I still sometimes get complaints that the ancient philosophers I write about were “old white guys” or “colonisers” or whatever term is popular at the moment. When I spoke at the White House at the end of the last administration, an earnest young civil servant let me know that when he had heard that Stoicism was going to be discussed, his first concern was that a white nationalist was being platformed.
This political correctness is not just obnoxious but it also has had hugely damaging effects. People were cancelled over silly things when the left was in power. Democrats were punished electorally, and that’s only the beginning of the consequences of the pendulum swing. Comedian Marc Maron has it mostly right in his new special when he says the left effectively annoyed a portion of society into supporting fascism.
Which is what brings me to my main point: Any writer these days who hasn’t been radicalised or redpilled can tell you who the snowflakes are now. The people who were not long ago the loudest in preaching free speech are today the quickest to silence anyone who uses it to disagree with them.
The people who railed against cancel culture are now trying to use the machinery of the state to try to destroy anyone who dares to posthumously criticise Charlie Kirk and the stances he took – which, it should be continually pointed out, included proudly sending buses to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
It’s the people who love to dish out jokes and criticisms but are not only outraged at Jimmy Kimmel’s distasteful jokes about Kirk but fine with overt government pressure to take him off the air. It’s the people who flood my posts or my inbox if I dare say something as anodyne as “I think deporting people because you don’t like their political views is bad”, announcing their departures from following my newsletter, The Daily Stoic, as if we’re at an airport.
Which administration was and is removing books from the libraries of our service academies? I can tell you which one because it was just a few months ago that my four-year lecture series at the US Naval Academy was cancelled for, gasp, intending to mention that book banning is bad, that no future warrior ought to be scared of a book, even an unscholarly or woke one. And the model I was going to use for engaging with controversial ideas was none other than the academy’s revered graduate and Medal of Honor recipient, Admiral James Stockdale, who took courses on Marxism at Stanford at the height of the Cold War – something that turned out to come in handy as he resisted Marxist indoctrination as a prisoner of war.
It’s very clear now that the shoe is on the other foot. No one embodies this embarrassing and hypocritical transition more than Elon Musk. The world’s richest man took over Twitter to make it more friendly to free speech, only to promptly ban media outlets and words – like cisgender – he doesn’t like.
When journalist Matt Taibbi, who had previously collaborated with Musk, dared to criticise him, what did Musk do? “You are dead to me,” he texted Taibbi. Rich, coming from the guy who once said “a well thought out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold”. How did Musk respond to rumours that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta was starting a possible competitor to X in 2023? He challenged Zuckerberg to duel by combat! In a cage!
As I titled my final book on the cardinal virtues of Stoicism (which came out last week), Wisdom Takes Work. Lots of it. Wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas. The Stoic philosopher Seneca used a military metaphor to make this very argument. We ought to read critically and dangerously, he said, “like a spy in the enemy’s camp”. It is what Seneca was doing when he read and liberally quoted from Epicurus, the head of a rival philosophical school.
We must seek out disagreement. We must seek out discomfort. We can’t rig the game in our favour.
Meanwhile, journalist Dana Goldstein reported this week that the Trump administration is pushing “to punish speech it dislikes and to impose its patriotic vision of American history on schools” across the country. Publishers are pulling textbooks; teachers are avoiding once-basic lessons on constitutional limits; and new laws in both red and blue states are narrowing what can be said in classrooms.
History should make you feel angry. Art should break you open, touch you in places that are raw and sensitive. Trigger warnings? The point of art is to trigger. You’ve been warned.
Exposure to conflicting and challenging ideas makes us stronger. Why do people fall for scams and silly ideas? Because they don’t know what a good argument looks like. They don’t know their own arguments well. Why do they listen to demagogues? Because they don’t know what that word means, their history book skimmed over the horrors that such leaders have inflicted on the world. Why do smart people overreach? Because they’ve stopped subjecting their work to the rigour of challenges and dissent – they’ve become convinced of their own infallibility, their own genius.
This last one has come to haunt Musk, specifically. It has been widely reported that in the culture of Musk’s companies people who raise concerns about safety or regulations or express doubts are excluded from meetings and eventually pushed out of the company. The streams of sycophantic text messages from Silicon Valley leaders to Musk, which were revealed as part of a lawsuit during the X acquisition, are both sad and dangerous. No wonder he has gone the direction he has. Who wouldn’t?
The leaders of the south were convinced they would win the civil war. They were convinced that England – which was adamantly opposed to slavery – would recognise this new nation and support its cause. This insanity was belied by facts clear to nearly everyone else, as obvious as the monstrous evil of their enterprise.
“If slaves will make good soldiers,” one general wrote to the Confederate secretary of war, “our whole theory of slavery is wrong but they won’t make soldiers.” So it was the north that armed formerly enslaved men – some 150,000 ultimately served in the Union ranks – driving the final nail in the southern coffin.
Snowflakes make bad decisions because every decision is decided by the least consequential variable: Does this align with what I want to be true?
No wisdom is possible for the fragile. No growth. No truth.
And they make the world worse and more dangerous for everyone else in the process.
Ryan Holiday is a leading promoter of modern Stoicism. His latest book, Wisdom Takes Work, about the importance of engaging with uncomfortable ideas in a culture that rewards conformity and runs on outrage, was released last week. The original version of this story appeared in The Free Press.
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