Last week I attended Soapbox, a free speech conference in Philadelphia hosted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. It was awesome to be in the company of such a diverse group of people united by a shared commitment to free expression and open inquiry.
Being there got me thinking about how I first became interested in free speech. It started when I was a university professor and witnessed the rise of campus censorship and cancel culture. When I attended college in the 1990s, I did not see students asking administrators to regulate speech. Encountering ideas we disagreed with was seen as part of getting an education. Students were treated as adults who could handle tough topics. And many of us enjoyed hearing views that challenged our own.
By the mid-2010s, things looked very different. Some of the safest and most privileged young adults on the planet, and in the history of the world, were asking their universities to protect them from speech they did not like. Students called for speakers with opposing views to be disinvited, demanded trigger warnings on course material dealing with difficult subjects, reported classmates and professors to campus bias response teams for saying things they found offensive, and argued that offensive words are a form of violence.
At the time, some observers saw this as mainly about ideology, with activists and administrators using the language of psychological harm to shut down views they disagreed with. I think that is part of the story, and I wrote about it in a piece for the Wall Street Journal in 2017. My concern was that politicizing mental health could make it harder for the students truly struggling with mental illness to get the support they need.
But I think something else was also going on. In one of my earliest essays for the New York Times, also published in 2017, I noted that young Americans on both the political left and right were becoming more skeptical of free speech and democracy. I proposed that the deeper issue was anxiety, and a culture that was not preparing young people to manage it. When people feel anxious, they become less open-minded and less tolerant of those with different views. They cling to certainty and avoid risk. In short, anxiety leads people to privilege psychological security over liberty.
I argued that young people needed more opportunities to navigate the world on their own and learn to self-regulate difficult emotions. Without that ability, anxiety tends to grow, and so does the retreat from freedom. But those who become skilled at emotion regulation are better able to push through discomfort and engage openly with the world, including with ideas and people they disagree with.
It has now been nearly a decade since I wrote that piece. In that time, anxiety among young people appears to have gotten worse, and by many measures, support for free speech on campus has continued to erode, as FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings show.
My current work on how our culture approaches mental health, which builds on the ideas in that 2017 essay, may help explain why many young people today are more anxious and less supportive of free speech. We are more focused on mental health today than at any other point in our history. Public health campaigns urge us to check in on our feelings. Some schools now provide mental health interventions to all students, including those with no signs of a mental health problem. Social media is full of mental health influencers, and therapy speak has become part of everyday conversation. Mental illness is featured more and more in movies, television, books, and video games. And there are thousands of mental health and wellness apps.
Though well intentioned, all this attention may be backfiring. As I argued in my latest piece for the New York Times, the more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom, and the more likely we are to see disorder in ourselves. These beliefs can become self-fulfilling. For example, if we come to see ordinary anxiety as a disorder, we can become hypervigilant about avoiding anything that triggers it, which can increase the risk of developing an actual anxiety disorder.
So it is not just that many young people are not learning to self-regulate normal anxiety. They are increasingly being encouraged to view that anxiety as a disorder, which may be making it worse and further orienting them away from freedom.
I think the solution, or at least one solution, is to turn outward. That is the idea behind Head Out, our public education initiative at the Archbridge Institute’s Human Flourishing Lab. Head Out encourages people to spend less time monitoring their feelings and more time moving, working, creating, connecting, and pursuing something larger than themselves. Research finds that these kinds of outward-oriented activities are good for mental health. And what makes outward action good for mental health also helps cultivate the characteristics that support a free society.
First, outward action takes our minds off our own worries, which can reduce anxiety. And, as previously noted, people who are less anxious tend to be less defensive and more open to new ideas and differing perspectives.
Outward action also fosters agency and self-confidence. Each time we take on something difficult and persevere, we learn that we are capable of managing discomfort on our own. People who believe they can direct their own lives are less inclined to look to authorities to protect them from uncomfortable ideas.
In addition, outward action connects us to other people, including people whose experiences and beliefs differ from our own. These interactions can make disagreement feel less threatening and help build the tolerance and trust that a free society depends on.
Finally, outward action is how we build meaningful lives, and meaning helps us turn freedom into flourishing. Meaning makes us more agentic, more resilient in the face of difficulty, and more persistent in pursuing goals that improve our lives and the world around us. People who perceive their lives as meaningful are better equipped to embrace the challenges and opportunities inherent in a free society.
The relationship between outward action and freedom also runs in both directions. Free expression, entrepreneurship, creative work, religious practice, and civic life all involve outward action. Getting out of our heads is good for freedom, and freedom gives us more opportunities to get out of our heads.
Have a great weekend!
Clay