I’ve always said trigger warnings make PTSD harder to deal with. Not only do they outright censor thought, but they prevent anyone struggling with PTSD from facing the trauma that paralyzed them in the first place. Trigger warnings create a potentially violent world of repression that makes people with PTSD unable to function in every day reality.
As political economists may have predicted, a revolt against trigger warnings has recently been building up. New studies have proven that trigger warnings make mental health worse. Some have even suggested to expel people who demand trigger warnings. With this new rebellion against censorship, you have to wonder is if we are actually accomplishing anything, or if we are simply making ourselves martyrs in a Cultural Marxist wasteland.
Will this new revolt actually stop the Left’s war against free speech?
A friend once told me that university culture is whatever people consider to be progressive, much like how church culture is whatever people consider to be conservative. Judging by this theory, standing against abortion would be considered progressive if universities were to endorse pro-life views. (much like supporting gun control would be considered conservative if the churches were to endorse gun control) I am inclined to agree with him here. After all, when the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s stirred revolts in cities like Berkeley, places like the Free Speech Movement Cafe were formed on campus. It was considered progressive to support free speech, simply because university culture endorsed it.
The Free Speech Movement Cafe still exists today, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone there who truly supported diversity of viewpoints.
When censorship became the way of the Left, there were some “true progressives” who claimed this went against the very notion of progress itself. Sadly, their voices were drowned out by those in power. “If You’re Against Sex Work You’re a Bigot,” one article boasted. Whatever your stance is on sex work, isn’t calling someone a bigot for their views extremely (wait for it) bigoted?
Most recently coined the Cultural Libertarians, this new revolt is now encouraging free inquiry and diversity of thought on a mass scale. I naturally feel that this will become yet another topic for Salon and the Guardian to be “relevant” about, and I’m wondering if there is anything we can do to stop this. The mainstream has historically culled its origins to make things desirable to the Idiocracy. Isn’t it only a matter of time before the thought police are railing against trigger warnings themselves? Aren’t we, the consumers, merely telling these entities how to think?
Through starting a revolt against trigger warnings, we have begun leading a political climate in which freedom of speech is no longer suppressed. Let’s just make sure we keep it authentic, and show extreme derision toward organizations that parrot our views in order to win brownie points from our “bleeding edge” consumer-base. We should be able to differentiate the real thing from the imitation.
When everybody is a thought criminal, nobody is.