The Wish Power of “Have a Good Day”

As I left the YMCA tonight, Rachel, the pleasant woman at the entry desk waved to me and said, "Have a good evening!"

I jokingly replied, "Have a good rest of your life!"

She frowned and even looked insulted.

I said, "Since we are trading wishes and hopes, I decided to give you the biggest one I could think of."

It is funny how, in the expression, "Have a good [X]," the X signals approximately how long it might be until you think that you will see each other again. Thus, the BIG wish that I uttered, which ostensibly seems more generous, suggested that I would never see Rachel again (or maybe even that I didn't want to ever see her again). Conversely, "Have a good afternoon" often signals that the speaker hopes to contact the other person that same evening (or at least, soon).

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Expiration Dates for Claims That Things Are Good Things or Bad Things?

It’s rather amazing that we continue to use the words “good” and “bad.” Can you think of any words that are less precise than these? Do these words even have valid or reliable meanings? “Good” and “bad” often seem to serve only as hazy placeholders for shots in the dark or ineffable emotions. Philosophers have struggled to define good and bad things for millennia with very little of practical use to show for all of their labor. Except for such fundamental things as having food and shelter and avoiding unwanted physical pain and death, people constantly disagree about what is good and bad. The subjects of these disagreements are everywhere. They include such things as good and bad food, cities, politicians, cars, jobs, art, children, pets, technology, habits, websites, books, moral choices, friends and romantic partners.

But let’s set aside our ubiquitous disagreements for a moment. Let’s assume that within our own particular comfy community we can somehow find a general consensus that something is a “good” thing. If that were possible, it would reveal an equally big problem that is the focus of this article: Good things often only seem good only until they play out in real in the real world. To our dismay, good things often turn out to be bad things with the passage of time. And things that seem bad today often turn out to be good.

• You got fired from your job (bad), which opened up a better opportunity (good).

• You got that job you always wanted (good), but two months after beginning that job, you hated it (bad).

• WWII caused terrible suffering for millions of people (bad), but that hellacious war inspired countless acts of heroism and resulted in the defeat of tyranny (good things).

• You were late to the airport and missed the plane (bad), but the plane crashed (good for you that you weren’t on it).

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Coddled Children Grow up Self-Disruptive

In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Attorney Greg Lukianoff (founder of FIRE) and moral psyhchologist Jonathan Haidt address America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse. Increasing numbers of people are claiming that they cannot cope with ideas that challenge their own world view. They sometimes claim that ideas that challenge their own ideas are "not safe." In dozens of well-publicized cases, rather than work to counteract "bad" ideas with better ideas, they work to muzzle speaker by disrupting presentations or even running the purportedly offensive speakers off campus. There is a related and growing problem. We cannot talk with each other at all regarding many many important issues. We shout each other down and use the heckler's veto. These maladies are especially prominent on some American college campuses, but these problems are also rapidly spreading to the country at large, including corporate America. Consider this 2016 example featuring the students of Yale having a "discussion" with Professor Nicholas Christakis: You would never guess it from this video alone, but this mass-meltdown was triggered after child development specialist Erika Christakis (wife of Nicholas), sent this email to students. This incident at Yale is one of many illustrations offered by Haidt and Lukianoff as evidence of a disturbing trend.  Here's another egregious example involving Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College who was run out of her college after committing the sin of writing this email to a student.  More detail here.  The authors offer this as the genesis of the overall problem:

In years past, administrators were motivated to create campus speech codes in order to curtail what they deemed to be racist or sexist speech. Increasingly, however, the rationale for speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by “triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”
The solution offered by Lukianoff and Haidt is to take a moment to stop to recognize what they call the “Three Bad Ideas.”

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Trump’s Three Main Techniques for Avoiding Honest Communication

I have a difficult time even wanting to think about the man who is further degrading the Presidency every day, but it is important that we cut through the noise and work hard to understand how he convinced so many people to vote for him. John Oliver identifies three specific techniques Donald Trump uses to avoid meaningful communication:

  • Delegitimizing the Media
  • Whataboutism
  • Trolling
This video is filled with video illustrating these problems. This video is one month old, but very worth watching for its precise analysis of these problems.

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The Effect of Concepts Creeping to the Left

In this paper titled, "Why Concepts Creep to the Left," Jonathan Haidt supplements Nick Haslam's paper titled "Concept Creep," in which concepts such as bullying, trauma and addiction morph over time. And there are newish terms that have become prominent and expansive in recent years, "trigger warnings" and "microaggressions." But these concepts don't merely change. They change to the whims of the political left. And they especially change for current students and young adults rather than those over 40. In his article, Haidt asks why there is a direction to that change. Haidt writes: These terms are part of a new conceptual package that includes all of the older concepts long referred to as “political correctness” but with greatly expanded notions of harm, trauma, mental illness, vulnerability, and harassment. These concepts seem to have expanded in just the way that Haslam (2016) describes -- horizontally, to take in new kinds of cases (such as adding the reading of novels to the list of traumatizing activities) and vertically, to take in ever less extreme versions of older cases (as is made explicit by the prefix “micro” in the word “microaggression”). In this conceptually augmented political correctness, the central idea seems to be that many college students are so fragile that institutions and right-thinking people must all work together to protect vulnerable individuals from exposure to words and ideas that could damage them in a lasting way. If this protection requires banning certain speakers from campus, or punishing student newspapers that publish opinions that upset the dominant campus sensibility, then so be it. What are the reasons for this expansion of these concepts to the left. Haidt explores several possibilities . ..

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