What’s so scary about Trigger Warnings?

Bullying, cruelty, and the “softening” of American minds

(I wrote this when I lived in Elko, Nevada, a place still dear to my heart but far from the Bay Area in more ways than one)

I live in the part of the country populated by the kind of people that members of my circle refer to when they talk about “Them”—everyone I knew owned a gun, many of them have never seen a Black person, and they consider the Bible to be a scientific text, but science itself to be a belief system.

There’s no value judgement in that sentence: it is a collection of facts, meant to form an incomplete sketch both of the people I meet and the people I talk with. My readers will believe they have found subtext and that the subtext is negative: if they identify with the description, they will be angry with me. If they identify with me, they will pity me. There will be a flame war in the comments. That’s as may be. I’ve learned a lot from interacting with the people here, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity. It’s made me more sympathetic to rabid proponents of “states’ rights,” EPA-haters (often, I’ve discovered, with good or at least understandable reason), second-amendment crusaders, and people who describe themselves as “Conservative” because the last Republican they researched before voting for him was Nixon (who was still, you know, but he’d be a Democrat in today’s election).

My Facebook feed and my fossil friends share one talking point in common: my Facebook friends lament “Trigger warnings” while my deer-slaying acquaintances who describe themselves as “not politically correct, sorry” constantly defend bullying to me. “All this nonsense about bullying in school. Kids will be kids. They gotta learn how to be tough. No ribbons for participation in the real world.” (The participation-ribbon myth should also be discussed, later.)

A well-meaning new acquaintance said that to me yesterday, nearly word-for- word. I found that while her views as she labeled them were horrifying, she herself was reasonable.

She was a Republican the same way she was a 49ers fan. When pressed, she wanted a living wage, accessible birth control for teens, the removal of big money from politics, universal health care including drug-free psychotherapy, and common-sense regulations on the purchase of guns and ammunition. I told her Bernie Sanders was an “Independent” and that she should look him up. Fine. What sticks, though, is the fear I’ve heard repeated by people of all political stripes: by protecting children and adults from bullying, we make them “soft.”

A friend of mine is missing a testicle. He had been a soft-spoken kid who grew into his height much later than the boys around him. They once beat him so badly they literally busted his balls. No one would claim that this young man was better off with only one testicle. But people are willing to vigorously defend this behavior in the abstract. Kids are better off if they’re bullied. Learn to take their hits, give them back. Gets them ready for life. Without trigger warnings.

What does the trigger warning do? Functionally, nothing. It’s a brief epigram informing the reader that material that may cause them pain is to follow. It’s a note that the material may bring up memories—often memories of other people’s cruelty (childhood bullying, for instance)—and the reader should prepare himself mentally. The trigger warning does not encourage softening; if anything, it invites a temporarily thicker skin. It does not silence. It does not censor. It simply warns: a “Contents Under Pressure—Careful When Opening” for abstract material. Trigger warnings cause no harm to people who don’t need them, and they can alleviate some pain for those who do. Why decry them? Why defend bullying? What is so important about making sure that other people—people who have done nothing to us, people who we do not even know—feel pain?

We are obsessed with remotely inflicting cruelty, making sure other people are “tough”. This doesn’t make sense: the research we have shows that experiencing cruelty at the hands of others does not, by and large, make people tough: if anything, it weakens them — emotional stress leads to physical and mental illness. If we really cared about making people “tough,” we would give them the tools to become physically stronger in an environment that does not injure them; we would help them to nurture their talents so they can perform better under pressure; we would encourage empathy and the ability to read a situation so they can avoid being victims and perpetrators. Fear actually decreases the mind’s ability to respond to danger. Even the so-called “warrior gene,” allegedly associated with aggressive behavior and much beloved of the new generation of scientific racists, only manifests itself when a person grows up under physical and emotional stress. If the “warrior gene” exists, it is the experience of cruelty at the hands of others that triggers it.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is categorically untrue: no one is more physically whole for losing a limb. No child is more confident after getting the shit kicked out of her. No adult is more able to rationally process material for having his PTSD triggered.

So why the mythologizing?

Because, as Jeb Bush so unfortunately said with regards to yet another mass shooting, “stuff happens.” Conscious beings seek purpose and pattern, even retroactively. It’s not enough for stuff to simply happen. It must happen to some end. Whether that end is predetermined is irrelevant—atheists simply assign a purpose to misfortune after it happens. “I learned something” rather than “it was part of a plan for me to learn something.”

Cruelty, then, retroactively becomes necessary for growth in the minds of the people who experience it. People grow up and get stronger physically and mentally because their bodies mature, their neurons multiply, and their frontal lobes increase in size for years, and then begin to establish new neural connections that enable people to continue learning long after their brains cease growing. The desire to attribute these positive changes to the suffering one has endured is a way of rationalizing suffering, assigning meaning to the meaningless. What research we have suggests that physical and emotional stress actually inhibits the formation of neurons and neural connections, but this does not fit into the myth of suffering-as- tempering.

Metal gets stronger in fire. People are not metal. There’s a reason we call it neuroplasticity.

If we expand the concept of suffering-as- catalyst for personal growth, we see why it becomes important to inflict suffering on others. It’s the hazing mentality writ large: other humans must suffer as I have so they must grow as I have. Even though they would grow anyway—perhaps even better—without being on the receiving end of cruelty, the myth we tell ourselves to rationalize our own suffering does not allow for this. Acknowledging that other people are better off not feeling pain would mean acknowledging that we would be as well—that we suffered for nothing, and at the hands of others.

Meaninglessness is anathema to the conscious mind.

So we defend bullying, hazing, triggers—“boys will be boys” for my gun-toting friends, “we are muzzling academia” for my pen-wielders. In truth, we just don’t want to admit that we have been victims of an unnecessarily cruel world: we would rather perpetuate the cruelty onward in the name of “toughening up.” But it is not the American mind we are worried about; it is our own.