Colleges Are Cults “Teaching Victimhood” — and Twisting Minds

By Selwyn Duke

“I was anxious. I felt guilty constantly. I couldn’t stop thinking about the whole white privilege thing.”

This is what Lucy Kross got for her money as a Stanford University student (yearly tuition, room, and board: $76,312). She would eventually realize she’d been deceived and, it could be said, intellectually abused — as would fellow undergraduate Kimi Katiti.

Katiti’s abuser was the Art Institute of California, where her indoctrination wasn’t quite like Kross’.

“I was full of self-confidence when I was 18. But while I was in college, that disintegrated,” Katiti related on StosselTV. “I was introduced to ideas such as microaggressions.”

“If I see someone, like, coming up with their dog, for example, and the dog’s barking at me, I could interpret that as a racist, microaggression on the part of both the dog and the dog walker,” she elaborated. “I was like, the world’s a lot darker than I thought it was.”

Given this, is it any wonder that, some evidence shows, most “mentally ill” people are leftists? Is it surprising that a majority of young, liberal, white women have been diagnosed with “mental disorders?”

Welcome to modern higher education, where iniquity masquerades as insight, prejudice as prudence, racism as realism — and de facto cults as colleges.

New Report, but Now an Old Problem

First there was the 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, in which philosopher Allan Bloom scored higher education for “impoverishing” students’ souls. Now reporter John Stossel delivers his own takedown of academia in his new documentary The Coddling of the American Mind.

Featuring the aforementioned two young women, among other people, the work’s website relates in a synopsis:

In 2012, anxiety, depression, and suicide rates among young adults began to rise dramatically, and nobody knew why.

THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND … explores the Gen Z mental health crisis through the intertwined stories of five remarkable 20-somethings, including Kimi, a Ugandan immigrant, and Lucy, a former psych ward patient struggling with various mental health challenges. As they enter college, their bright futures are soon overshadowed by fear and despair.

They’re full of promise as they enter college, but the teens quickly succumb to paranoia and misery. Lucy is convinced people want to kill her simply because she’s autistic. Kimi is on the brink of homelessness.

… THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND explores a global mental-health crisis that threatens an entire generation.

Bending the Knee to the Cult

Interestingly, Kross and Katiti both confessed that they sensed the indoctrination’s wrongness but complied anyway. “In order to kind of compete and get the best grades,” said Katiti, “I sort of showed how much of a victim I was in order to impress my professors.” She found this disturbing but, she elaborated, “I thought, I’m paying a lot. So, they’re definitely teaching me, like, the golden rules for life.”

For an example of the indoctrination, both young women were told that commentator Ben Shapiro’s ideology was toxically unwoke. At Stanford, Kross “was taught that Shapiro’s ideas put black, brown, trans, queer, and Muslim students at risk,” informed Stossel.

“My first thought was, like, this is extreme. This is ridiculous,” said Kross. “And then I sort of, there was the, well, you’re privileged, you’re white.” So she drank the Kool-Aid; she accepted her school’s conception of being “good.” This meant she wouldn’t “read too many books by white authors or listen to the wrong kind of music,” Kross stated. “I was really torn on rap because I didn’t know if that was appropriation or appreciation.”

In fact, Kross even altered her speech to gain acceptance. “When I started to use the vocabulary of, like, marginalized, intersectional, hegemonic, blah, blah, blah, people just kind of smiled a little bit more,” she said. “And I started feeling like … I was part of an in-group.”

This group-acceptance motivation is especially effective with young women, who instinctively crave social approval. This would partially explain why in colleges today, women are far more left-wing than the men are.

Words to Actions

These cult victims are often catalyzed to take action, too. Just consider what transpired after Katiti was made paranoid about Shapiro. She “joined the mob trying to get Shapiro’s posts blocked on Twitter,” said Stossel. “She kept sending complaints to Twitter’s censors.”

“I would sit down all the way through the night,” Katiti explained, relating what sounds like obsession. “I’ll try again. Try again.”

There’s more in Stossel’s segment, too, but important here is understanding what this “wokeness” actually represents. It’s not just silly. It’s not just misguided. And the worst thing about it isn’t that it causes students psychological distress, bad though that is. Rather, this false teaching is an attack on all that’s great and good. It seeks to destroy millennia of accumulated wisdom — in particular, the Christian understanding of virtue.

Consider forgiveness. The West began emphasizing it because, through hard and bloody lessons, we learned that vindictiveness can destroy civilization. (Hence its centrality to the Lord’s Prayer.) But wokeness — evil, really — emphasizes forgiveness’ opposite. It rubs feelings raw, telling people they’ve been wronged when they haven’t and to cultivate grievance.

An example, from Stossel’s video and elsewhere, is that telling a black person “Wow, you’re so articulate!” is a “microaggression.” Putting aside the claim’s inanity, what’s happening here is that students are learning to read the worst into things. This is contrary to the virtues of Kindness, Charity, and Prudence. In theological circles, it’s called rash judgment. It is a sin.

More could be said about how this indoctrination encourages vice. But leftists will sometimes object to conservatives’ use of the term “woke,” saying it’s inappropriate — and this is true.

Anything that encourages what’s the polar opposite of Truth isn’t just errant. It is, again, pure evil.

Stossel’s Coddling of the American Mind segment is below.

                  This article was originally published at The New American.