Abigail Shrier versus the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress

Launching ERI’s book review with the most important read of the year

Back in 2020, just for fun, I started a monthly book review in the old version of ERI on FIRE’s website. My Book of the Month in each installment would receive what I dubbed the Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award — named after the Assyrian king who established “the first systematically organized library in Mesopotamia and the ancient Middle East.”

I’ve decided to relaunch the monthly book review here in the new ERI, and the first official winner of the Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award is Abigail Shrier for her newest work, “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.”

“Bad Therapy” is simply a masterpiece — easily the most important book of the year. Unfortunately, it most desperately needs to be read by the very people who are likely most hostile to Shrier’s work. The book focuses on the harms of the therapeutic approach to raising our children and how the generation treated with the most psychological therapy and psychiatric drugs has become the most miserable, anxious, and disempowered generation on record. (“Disempowered,” by the way, was the original title of the book I wrote with Jonathan Haidt, which became “The Coddling of The American Mind.”)

Shrier comes to many of the same conclusions that Haidt and I came to in “Coddling,” which I’d sum up like this: As a culture, we seem to be teaching young people the mental habits of anxious and depressed people — encouraging them, often through example, to engage in negative mental exaggerations called cognitive distortions. It’s a kind of reverse-cognitive behavioral therapy. I’ve talked about this problem for the last decade, beginning with Haidt’s and my original 2015 article for The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and most recently with my piece, “What’s behind the campus mental health crisis?” for UnHerd.

Shrier’s book also focuses on how parenting in the K-12 environment is informed by an ideology that completely undermines students’ sense of an internalized locus of control. Indeed, if you really want to make someone despondent, just persuade them that all important decisions are out of their hands and that they are essentially powerless in their own lives.

Haidt and I — and more recently a Substacker named Gurwinder Bhogal — have pointed out that the current campus left ideology inherently tells young women in particular that they are unavoidably simultaneously both oppressors and oppressed; that their life is determined by their immutable characteristics; that the planet is doomed; that fascists are everywhere; and that there’s not much that can be done about this other than consciousness-raising and feeling guilt, shame, and despair.

What I’ve been emphasizing more recently is that, in many cases, teaching people these cognitive distortions was largely done in the name of motivating them towards some positive social action. This is a terrible strategy, of course, because depressed and anxious people make terrible activists. Depression and anxiety more often result in fatalism and despair than an attitude capable of bringing about positive social change, so it’s a weird way to build a movement.

If you really want to change the world in a positive way, you need empowered young people who have hope for the future and can think of concrete, practical, and actionable solutions to help improve the world as it is, which is always more complicated than any ideology allows.

But Shrier’s book goes far beyond what Haidt and I did in “Coddling,” and that is why every single parent and K-12 teacher must read it. Despite being steeped in this stuff for the better part of two decades, I still learned a great deal from it — including that the research behind the health harms of growing up with “adverse childhood experiences” is far weaker than I understood it to be.

The book is gorgeously written, thoughtful, compassionate, and has gobs of both research and common sense. It also features some of my favorite experts, including my friend Camilo Ortiz, a professor and clinical psychologist who specializes in CBT. Other friends who make an appearance include Jonathan Haidt, Lenore Skenazy, Rob Henderson, Richard J. McNally, Paul Bloom, and Peter Gray.

But before “Bad Therapy” can get the kind of broad acceptance and readership our country so badly needs, Shrier is going to have to face a punishing series of discursive dodges, diversions, and deadlocks specifically designed to prevent honest engagement.

Rhetorical obstacle courses, minefields, and fortresses … oh my!

Beyond showing that Cancel Culture is indeed real and happening on a historic scale, my book with Rikki Schlott, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” critiques the way too many of us argue today — on social media, on campus, and increasingly in the rest of the real world.

The easiest way to dismiss someone in modern discussions without actually engaging (something Rikki and I call “winning arguments without winning arguments”) is to simply dismiss your opponent as a bad person. This is because of what Rikki and I describe in “Canceling” as the “Fourth Great Untruth” (continuing from the first three in “Coddling”) or the “Untruth of Ad Hominem”: bad people only have bad opinions.

Shrier’s new book will be dismissed right off the bat because in her previous book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” she committed a secular blasphemy. She questioned and criticized the move to put youth who might be questioning their gender identity on puberty blockers — or worse, start medically transitioning them — in what, thanks to a huge PR victory on the part of trans rights activists, is now referred to as “gender affirming care.”

Having authored such a book makes Shrier persona non grata in many media and academic circles. Indeed, it even led American Civil Liberties Union staffer Chase Strangio to assert in a now-deleted tweet, “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” And since bad people only have bad opinions, nothing new that Shrier has to say is considered worth hearing, even if it’s on a different topic.

For the record, I read “Irreversible Damage” years after it came out, and despite the commentary around it I found the book to be a thoughtful and compassionate critique of the most sudden and radical trend around youth medical care in my lifetime — or, that I’m aware of, in history. A lot of what Shrier talks about in the book is now receiving empirical backing in countries outside of the United States.

But of course, once you’re labeled a heretic it’s hard to get your detractors to take your work seriously even if you turn out to be right. That’s why Shrier is going to have to deal with the Great Untruth of Ad Hominem, along with what Rikki and I call the “Obstacle Course,” the “Minefield,” and the “Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” in “Canceling.”

The Obstacle Course

The Obstacle Course consists of a number of rhetorical dodges and logical fallacies you might be familiar with:

• Whataboutism: Defending against criticism of your side by bringing up the other side’s alleged wrongdoing.

• Straw-manning: Misrepresenting the opposition’s perspective by constructing a weak, inaccurate version of their argument that can be easily refuted. (I have seen Shrier’s arguments straw-manned constantly, and doubtless will again.)

• Minimization: Claiming that a problem doesn’t exist, is too small-scale to worry about, and (eventually) that even if it is happening it’s a good thing. (Thankfully we see less of this than we used to when it comes to youth mental health, but it had to get incredibly bad first.)

• Motte and Bailey arguments: Conflating two arguments — a reasonable one (the motte) and an unreasonable one (the bailey).

• Underdogging: Claiming your viewpoint is more valid than your opponent’s because you speak for the disadvantaged. (Obviously, given that trans people are a minority group, this tactic is used against Shrier all the time.)

The Minefield

If you clear the Obstacle Course, you still have work to do. The Minefield is about attacking the person making the argument rather than the argument itself, otherwise known as the ad hominem fallacy. This is why you’ll see that the Great Untruth of Ad Hominem underpins these tactics:

• Accusations of bad faith: Asserting that your opponent is being disingenuous or has a sinister, selfish, and/or ulterior motive. (This is de rigueur if you say anything the slightest bit controversial these days).

• Hypocrisy projection: Asserting that your opponent is hypocritical about a given argument, often without actually checking the consistency of their record.

• Claiming offense: Responding to an idea you don’t like with “that’s offensive,” rather than engaging with its substance. (This is so normal now we hardly even notice it.)

• Offense archaeology: Digging through someone’s past comments to find speech that can be held against them.

• Making stuff up: Fabricating information to bolster a weak argument — and asserting it with confidence! When all else fails, why not just lie? (We use journalist

  Jesse Singal
  as an example of someone about whom critics are constantly making stuff up.)

The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress

Rikki and I describe this in detail in “Canceling,” but in short, the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress consists of a series of questions that serve as barricades to having an argument on its merits or substance. You’ll be amazed by how effectively each identity-related barricade of the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress allows anyone inside of it to cover their ears when they don’t want to meaningfully engage with an argument they don’t like.

The first barrier is a tactic I call fasco-casting, which consists of labeling people “conservative,” a “right winger,” “far right,” “fascist,” or the hilariously absurd “neo-confederate,” whether they actually are or not. As Shrier herself has said, “conservative” in this space is simply another word for a bad person. And since bad people have only bad opinions, anyone who can be labeled conservative — or even “conservative adjacent” — can be dismissed without further consideration. Despite being more of an old-school liberal, Shrier is constantly called conservative or conservative-adjacent by her critics. She wouldn’t make it past step one.

Next up, you’re taken through what we call the “Demographic Funnel,” which uses identity characteristics to negate people as legitimate interlocutors without addressing their arguments: What’s the speaker’s race? What’s the speaker’s sex? What’s the speaker’s sexuality? Is the speaker trans or cis? 

Being on the wrong side of these questions immediately justifies your being shut down — and it ends up allowing about 99% of the population to be dismissed without a single counterargument. If Shrier could somehow convince her opponent that she is not in fact a conservative, she’s still a cis white woman and therefore easily dismissed anyway.

And the thing is, even if you do happen to fall into the very thin sliver of people who check all the right identity boxes, it doesn’t matter. All of that is kabuki anyway — the rhetorical equivalent to taking a knee and running out the clock. The truth is that you can be smeared and dismissed as a traitor for having the wrong opinions. Tactics in this “Just Kidding!” column of the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress include questions like:

• Can the speaker be accused of being “phobic”? If you can be pegged as exhibiting any kind of “ism,” or having any kind of “phobia,” then your point of view doesn’t matter.

• Are they guilty by association? If you can connect the speaker to someone considered morally “beyond the pale,” then you can accuse them of being guilty by association. It’s essentially the Great Untruth of Ad Hominem by proxy.

• Did the speaker lose their cool? We dub this the “don’t get angry” barricade, in which someone hastens their own demise by voicing frustration.

• Did the speaker violate a “thought terminating cliché”? If you can be accused of things like “dog-whistling,” “punching down,” “being on the wrong side of history,” or “parroting right-wing talking points,” no further engagement is required.

• Can you emotionally blackmail someone? When it seems like you’re starting to lose the argument, you can always fall back on emotional outbursts and claims of harm to prevent more discussion.

And if all else fails (which it won’t), you can abandon all pretense of staying on point and making a cogent argument by darkly hinting that something else is what’s really going on. All you have to do is ominously allude to the notion that something other than the issue at hand is really what the problem is. Say, “Well, really this was all about ‘a context’ in which other bad things were happening, so the community was rightfully upset — even if I was wrong,” and you’re home-free.

If it isn’t clear by now why Rikki and I call it the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, it’s because it’s designed to be invincible — and it is. Shrier doesn’t stand a chance against it. No one does.

The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress can’t be defeated — only rejected

The potential population of people who make it through the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress and are “allowed” to speak is vanishingly small and likely in perfect lock step with today’s orthodoxy. In other words, the only people who get to speak are those who wouldn’t disagree anyway.

It’s impossible for any speaker to defeat the Obstacle Course, the Minefield, and the rhetorical fortresses, which is why I am trying to urge people to reject them instead. There is nothing about being a conservative or a liberal, and there is nothing about your race, sex, sexuality, or the friends you keep that means you are automatically wrong or right about a given issue. Indeed, there’s nothing about even being a bad person that means you’re wrong or right about any particular issue, and there’s nothing about being “good” that means you are always right.

Even though in my opinion Abigail Shrier is a brave and principled human being, it’s beside the point. Anytime critics bring up the claim that she’s a bad person, a transphobe, or the fact that she’s a cis white woman, the reasonable response must be, “Noted. Can we please get back to the argument now?” The only way to beat these rhetorical barriers and deflections is to recognize that you don’t need to fight your way through them at all. 

Then, maybe, we can get to things that are actually worth our time, like Shrier’s fantastic new book. I hope everyone will read it. I hope its publication signals that we are starting to see the end of the weird ideological eruption Matt Yglesias dubbed the “Great Awokening.” 

And I hope we are now instead entering what I’d like to call the “Great Debunkening.”

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Enjoy this new clip from my interview with John Cleese, and keep an eye out for the full video in the coming weeks!  As John says: 

"All moments in my life that have been important in forming my personality came when I suddenly had a realization that something I believed wasn't the case."