Do No Harm
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Society has long held that activity that damages others ought to be curbed. John Stuart Mill posited the so-called harm principle -- the belief that activity that harms someone ought to be condemned or even barred -- in the mid-19th century. But Mill refused to conflate harm and offense: Being offended wasn't cause for sanction of another.
Broadly speaking, society agreed with this formulation. But in the past few years, this formulation has been completely turned on its head. Now offense is not only considered a harm; it is considered the chief harm in our society. Physical injury, after all, is merely physical. But mental or emotional injury -- that threatens our very sense of identity. Because we find our identity in our own sense of self-creation, any societal denial of that sense threatens our identity. As Carl Trueman writes in "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self": "The era of psychological man therefore requires changes in the culture and its institutions, practice, and beliefs that affect everyone. They all need to adapt to reflect a therapeutic mentality that focuses on the psychological well-being of the individual."
When individual self-creation becomes the chief goal of a society, institutions must be torn down -- institutions, after all, foster a set of rules that may not be conducive to individual self-creation. Informational flow must be dammed -- after all, information may allow others to take a different, objectively based opinion about you than you take subjectively about yourself. Books must be burned -- after all, books carry with them implicit messages that may threaten your sense of yourself.
More... https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/10/why_dr_seuss_had_to_go_145378.html
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Society has long held that activity that damages others ought to be curbed.
Interesting article, but I thought this first sentence was also interesting. Especially in the US, there is also a part of the country which is for individual rights over those of society. That seems to be against what the article is saying in some ways.
