The book (The Righteous Mind) is based around three great untruths. My first book The Happiness Hypothesis is actually about ten insights you find in ancient cultures all over the world. Psychological insights. And so one of them is what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That was Nietszche's formulation. You find the exact same idea in mensches in ancient China, you find it all over the world that kids need challenge. Human beings need challenge, obstacles, failures, setbacks in order to grow. So that's a basic truth. That's a psychological truth.
But what we're finding on campus and finding in the lives of American kids is an increasing presence of the idea that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. In fact oh my god just recently there's an article making the rounds. Kids are mobilizing in high school to end the practice of regular public speaking. That some kids have anxiety around public speaking. That's very common. One of the lines in this Atlantic article quoted a high school kid saying nobody should be forced to do something that they're not comfortable doing. Wow! Wow can you imagine raising kids with that dictum? How would they come out?
If this is true that we need challenges, setbacks, even fear, we have to be afraid in order to overcome it and realize “Oh, I can do that.” And if we give in to this idea that no one should be forced to do anything they're uncomfortable doing, we are setting up the next generation for failure. And that's exactly our subtitle. How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.
More briefly, the second great untruth is always trust your feelings. And the third is life is a battle between good people and evil people. And our contention in the book is that if we can successfully teach the young generation all three of these great untruths, they're almost guaranteed to fail.
--Jonathan Haidt at The Daily Wire Sunday Special Ep 22 Oct 7, 2018