CANCEL THERAPEUTIC CULTURE.

Nation contributor Adam Johnson has an insight.  "We Live in a Golden Age of Crybullyism."  He starts with what sounds like more Oppression Studies.  "Those in power, promoting austerity and war, no longer want us to fear them. They demand something much more sinister: that we feel sorry for them."

Read on, though, and consider an object lesson for everyone.

[Billionaire and Harvard nemesis Bill] Ackman’s naked cynicism should rankle even the most jaded media observer.

The term “crybully” dates back at least a decade and has been used by both the right and the left to criticize a tactic of interpersonal or political manipulation. The concept describes someone who engages in abuse, intimidation, or foul play, and then when that person gets pushback, they immediately recoil into a feigned fetal position of a victim. What’s new is how popular this tactic has become for high-level politicians, billionaires, and corporations. Increasingly, when under pressure from voters, reporters, workers, or activists, those with power look up at us with doe eyes and, as Ackman did, tweet about their hurt feelings.

Our ruling-class crybullies cynically wield the language of therapy to evade responsibility and to reframe the oppressor as the oppressed. They try to show themselves as sensitive souls just trying to make their way through this difficult world. The language of anti-bullyism is even being incorporated by the union-busting corporations, with the worst offender being Starbucks.

And where, dear reader, did that language come from?  That's right, the purveyors of therapy dogs and teddy bears at exam week.

That therapy, though it is sometimes about erasing behavioral boundaries: you will accept the new dispensation, or you will be medicated or re-educated, is not quite the erasure we ought be considering.  Here's my reflection, shortly after Cole Hall.  We have to be judgemental.  "Put another way, the burden on my colleagues upstairs -- nay, on higher education generally, will be lighter once the common culture recognizes that judging 'judgemental' behavior harshly is not evolutionarily stable."

If for Nation readers, calling on well off people to check their privileges when they "cynically wield the language of therapy" becomes a first step toward, well, questioning the value of oppressed-first therapies, that might be an evolutionary step toward the extinction of a therapeutic culture that is an evolutionary dead end.