The constant celebration of childish behavior in adults has profound negative consequences for all of us

For one reason or another, I have not lately read much Freddie deBoer.  I came across one of his essays yesterday, and what a banger.  deBoer is one of the most accessible and reasonable leftists in the punditry, so there are always a few points where a Classical Liberal will have to disagree with him.  For me, it is interesting that so often the actual difference is as much a difference in degree as it is a difference in kind.

From Prologue to an Anti-Therapeutic, Anti-Affirmation Movement by Freddie deBoer.  Too long to extract everything and much with which to agree, even vehemently

I’m not really one to call a “vibe shift.” The reality is that all large-scale cultural phenomena take place in distributed landscapes where profoundly different realities can reign, even in those social spaces that are very close to one another. Hollywood appears to be losing patience with the lumpen social justice politics that it cynically embraced in the past decade, while academia by and large seems to be doubling down. And of course even in any particular industry or culture, there will be local dynamics that make a huge difference for the lived experiences of the people in those local spaces. It frequently seems like canceling has run out of steam, as a disciplinary tactic; you watch people on social media trying to get somebody canceled, these days, and it sometimes feels like watching them trying and failing to get a pull-cord lawnmower started. And yet many people remain profoundly vulnerable to being canceled - perversely, they're the ones in closest proximity to the social justice movement - and the notion of a “vibe shift” would not be very comforting to them if they were. So when people ask me whether we’ve turned a corner, as they frequently do, I’m never sure what to say. “Woke” vs. “Anti-woke” is a horribly exhausted and pointless framework, one which suggests binary simplicity where there is only boundless complexity, but beyond that, there was never any chance that there was going to be some clear victory for one or the other. What will emerge will be some synthesis of the two impulses. (Probably an equally exhausting one.)

[snip]

• Not getting what you want is a default and healthy status, not a tragedy, though you are perfectly within your rights to be unhappy about it, and people who do not give you everything you want are not inherently “toxic,” though you’re perfectly within your rights to be unhappy with them

• Self-diagnosis is inherently unhealthy, without exception

• Acting as though the social and personal rules that apply to children should apply to you when you are an adult ensures that you will behave selfishly and hurt others, and the constant celebration of childish behavior in adults has profound negative consequences for all of us

• Many conflicts in life involve multiple people making equally valid attempts to secure what they want in matters that are genuinely zero-sum, meaning that society actually can’t satisfy the desires of everyone, and most of the time, these conflicts are between people who are all principled and decent and who are simply trying to achieve their goals and desires the way we all do

• Some people are just assholes, not narcissists, not toxic, not under the influence of the “Dark Triad,” not sociopaths or psychopaths, not BPD, not any other tendentious medicalized term you’ve used to express your distaste for them - they’re just assholes

• Sometimes you're the asshole

• Disagreement, expressed in language, can never be violence