Bret Easton Ellis, the author of American Psycho, has a long history of standing up to today’s political correctness. This week on his podcast he made a particularly compelling case/rant against the victimhood culture, safe spaces and campus crybullies.
You can listen to it here.
“If you define yourself through a trauma that happened to you, and that is still a part of you, you are probably sick and in need of help,” Ellis said. “If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you’ll be harmed by the reading of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.”
He continued:
When I first started hearing professional victims demanding that things shouldn’t be posted or shown, or posts should be blocked, or people should be punished and shamed and blamed or fired because they offended the victim on some level, I’d laugh at how ridiculous it all was, but then get queasy when a certain faction would try and appease the victims, elevating them to hero status.
But now a backlash is beginning against PC victim culture perpetrating itself onto the rest of us, instead of letting victims wallow in their own self-victimization, proudly asserting it, demanding everyone pays respect to their pain.
The University of Chicago sent a letter to its incoming freshman classes this summer, the class of 2020, stating in essence that there will be no trigger warnings or safe spaces allowed. That there will be no crackdown on microaggressions, and that visiting speakers will be allowed to speak without being boycotted because a fraction of the student body doesn’t agree with what the speaker represents, or the ideas that the speaker may want to talk about.
This announcement was greeted by almost everyone with a huge sigh of relief. Moving forward, a progression in not coddling students and keeping them victims and babies, and instead making them adults dealing with the world that is mostly hostile to your dreams, your ideals, and restoring the university as a place where young adults can stop shutting things down, building themselves up by empowering them with ideas that are different from their own.
