The end of trigger warnings
The 2020s is a weird decade so far. It started off with years of nothingness thanks to the pandemic erasing social life, and even though 2023 is almost half over, the decade doesn’t have a real feel to it yet. But one of the main features I can gather from it so far is that the insane nonsense of the 2010s is beginning to be reckoned with. I remember listening to an interview with some awful professor on a podcast in like 2011 where he discussed the new (at the time) concept of “microaggressions.” This was kind of the dawn of the era of what later evolved into wokeness, cancel culture, “problematic content,” trigger warnings, and all that other horrible bullshit that everyone with a brain hates now. He mentioned trigger warnings, and that was the first I heard of it.
Of course, I always knew that all this stuff was stupid. But, as you know, this bullshit dominated the 2010s, and we are dealing with the consequences politically, socially, and culturally. The concept of trigger warnings was covered in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, which describes how they actually just increase anxiety. The point, I guess, was to decrease anxiety, by warning students that they were about to be exposed to content that could be disturbing in some way—that could “trigger” them into having a negative time or something. (This idea is so stupid that it’s hard to even define or describe it without veering into absurdity).
It never made sense in the first place, so of course it didn’t produce anything socially good. Not only has it made people more anxious, but I think it has made them colder and harder and crueler. If the point was to produce more sensitive, compassionate people, it has failed miserably—all that’s left anymore is bitter rage, from right and left (moreso on the left I think—they’re the ones who go out of their way to destroy people over total bullshit out of pure spite).
Was the idea behind trigger warnings that people are very sensitive and should be shielded from challenging content? And that shielding them in this way would preserve their sensitivity? And by doing so, we would have a wider society that was more sensitive? (Of course I’m sure that the so-called “experts” who dreamt this bullshit up never even asked these basic questions).
If the goal was to make society more sensitive, then it has failed. It was a truism for a while that the millennial generation was a bunch of “sensitive snowflakes” and so on, and I guess that’s why trigger warnings became a thing? But I think the opposite has become the case—people are way less sensitive now, and very desensitized, numb, cold, callous. Trigger warnings not only didn’t preserve sensitivity and empathy—it killed it. Being exposed to negative, challenging, “triggering” content doesn’t make you negative, it forces you to grapple with your own values and ideas and develop ways of processing it. Being protected from it insulates you in a fake little cocoon, and makes you a monster. That has been the result—the most sheltered people, the ones most protected by trigger warnings, are the most detached from reality, and so are the most comfortable with doing horrible things. If you are exposed less to the negativity of reality, you will produce that negativity yourself—it’s a compensating mechanism. The more positive and smooth and conflict-free reality becomes, the more negative and hateful the individual will become, to try to balance it out. In social engineering a perfect liberal utopia, we have created a society full of monsters.
The name “trigger warning” is also interesting because it brings guns to mind. And during the 2010s (and especially in the early part of the 2020s), mass shootings have skyrocketed. 2023 is the most trigger happy mass shooting year yet. Is it any wonder that more young people, sheltered from anything real or challenging that could “trigger” them, are pulling the trigger themselves? Wasn’t it better for people to be slightly triggered by content that could challenge them, rather than try to live in a fake cocoon devoid of triggers, and then bursting out of it in a spasm of violent rage, pulling real triggers themselves?
The lesson of the failure of trigger warnings—and of all the associated bullshit of the 2010s—is that the more reality is avoided, the more it resurfaces, in uglier and uglier ways. And this is especially the case in the 2020s as so much of life increasingly takes place in digital space—people need reality now more than ever. If they don’t get it, they will act out in insane anti-social ways.
Part of the concept of the social is that it involves negativity—being shielded from it because it is triggering doesn’t create a totally positive society, it just creates a doubly negative society, as people will resort to extreme measures to supply the negativity they are deprived of.