From Brat to Victim: Why Did Narratives About At-Risk Youth Change?
Distinctions between adults and children are no longer moral, only legal
One of the most compelling questions I received about my previous article defending wilderness therapy (WT) came from my podcast interview with Will White. On his podcast, Stories From The Field, Will asked, “Why did the narrative change from “teens getting what they deserve” in the Brat Camp series, to “teens as victims of an abusive system” in the Hell Camp series?” I answered White’s question on his podcast (which will air soon), but I wanted to give it a fuller treatment and expand on the ideas here. In the following, I present my theory and then go through each aspect of it in order.
Children now have the same moral agency as adults
From the 2000s to the mid-2020s (1) a thoroughgoing moral relativism among liberal elites, (2) low-community engagement, and (3) a very online culture resulted in a radically altered understanding of childhood agency. That is, in childrearing, we no longer draw the same distinctions between children and adults. It used to be a wise thing to say that when kids become adults they realize the adults were making it up all along. Adults now take that so seriously they don’t even pretend to have answers. Similarly, while it was OK to say that teens sent to WT were “getting what they deserve” in the mid-2000s, in the 2020s that same statement in polite company is seen as presumptuous, ignorant, and maybe even abusive. It’s a red flag for someone with authoritarian impulses, who hasn’t “done their work” and really looked at themselves. But it’s seen as humble and brave to say teens sent to WT are victims of bad parents, an abusive corporate mental health treatment mill, or society. Basically, it’s not their fault, ever, and if we tell them that their choices matter, or give them any sort of framework or advice for making their choices, we’re abusing them. Better to blame it on our, “late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world,” as the Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz once did. But I digress … Ok, so how did we get here?
Growing relativism
Let’s go back to the 1980s to unpack my theory. We have an optimistic and self-interested culture with Reagan at the helm and lots of people identifying with their favorite brands and buying lots of things they probably don’t need. Things appear to be looking up culturally (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”) and economically (people buying things they don’t need). But in his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, social critic Allan Bloom is writing that we should be worried. Bloom, a philosopher and classicist born in 1930, criticizes the moral relativism he sees at universities – probably spread by a new generation of ex-hippie-academics born in the 50s and 60s – as promoting a perspective that no single truth exists and that all perspectives are equally valid. Students, he argues, are eschewing arguments they find controversial or prejudiced or Western-centric instead of trying to understand the arguments more deeply – thus “closing” their minds. For Bloom, the disengagement from genuine truth-seeking is just one symptom of a growing nihilism, a sign of a void in the souls of students that they fill with commercial pursuits. To fix this, he says we need to return to a classical Western tradition of philosophical exploration. Bloom’s book is said to be one of the first shots fired in what we now call the culture war.
Loss of social capital
Fast forward to the year 2000. Communism died about 10 years ago and the United States, flying the banner of liberal democracy at the beginning of a new millennium, is the world’s lone superpower. But against the backdrop of this happy, thriving, liberal decade enters another social critic, the political scientist Robert Putnam, telling us something is badly wrong. In his book Bowling Alone, he says our community engagement is collapsing and that social capital, the term he uses to describe the connections and social networks among individuals, has been on a downward trend since 1960. People are voting less, attending fewer public meetings, participating less in parent-teacher associations, and working less with political parties. Putnam says this weakens democracy and causes other social problems like ineffective education, economic strain, and social conflict. Putnam places blame for the decline in social capital mostly on generational differences (50%) and television (25%).
Changing moral preferences
While the trends of moral relativism and declining community engagement might seem separate, we can use a new(ish) theory of moral psychology called Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) to put them in terms of a larger narrative. According to MFT, both trends are evidence of changing moral preferences, or you might say, tastes. In his book, The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says that the moral preferences described by MFT are analogous to our taste preferences. Through evolution, our tongues developed the ability to taste five flavors: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. The ability to detect these flavors presumably allowed ancient humans to consume more of what they needed (if it tasted good) and less of what they didn’t need (if it tasted bad). Humans worldwide can taste these different flavors, but our culture and genetics influence our preferences for certain kinds of tastes. You can imagine the common experience of a Westerner vacationing in India and eating foods too rich with spices for them to enjoy, but if that same person lived there for a considerable time, they would develop a tolerance for the food and may even come to prefer it. Likewise, MFT states we have something akin to taste buds for morality which are found across cultures, that we developed through evolution, and that are expressed to greater or lesser degrees depending on culture and genetics. These moral “taste buds”, or foundations, include Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. The foundations of care and fairness are known as the individualizing foundations, as they deal with the role of individuals within social groups and are endorsed more than the other three foundations in those with liberal political beliefs. The foundations of loyalty, authority, and purity are known as the binding foundations, as they pertain to the formation and maintenance of group bonds and are more commonly endorsed by those with conservative political beliefs.
The victory of individualizing foundations over binding foundations is largely the story of western civilization since the signing of the Magna Carta. It was unjust for the medieval Catholic Church to exploit poor peasants to buy their salvation with indulgences, so we got the Reformation. It was impossible to adjudicate the conflicting religious claims that led to the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, so we got the Peace of Westphalia. It was depraved to enslave Africans in American colonies, so we got the Civil War. It was evil to exterminate a race in the name of Lebensraum and Blut und Boden, so we got the Nuremberg Trials. Separate but equal wasn’t actually equal, so we got the Civil Rights movement. And each of these events was the victory of a new generation over an old one. The old generation and its’ appeals to Loyalty, Authority, and Purity were thrown out in favor of the new generations’ appeals to Care and Fairness.
And isn’t it horrifying to consider the alternative? If Germany had won WWII, we might say the arc of history bends toward purity. But they lost – thank God – so we say it bends towards justice. So, what good are these other foundations? I think it’s easy to say they aren’t any good, and in the West, you don’t see much effort to incorporate them into moral development, at least publicly. Teachers in our schools have untold numbers of posters that come just shy of bludgeoning their students with the message “Be Kind”, “In a world where you can be anything, be kind,” and “Kindness matters” – all emphasizing the Care foundation. And when we want to communicate our moral flexibility, we say, “No worries, man. It’s all good.” And when we hear about a lifestyle that is very different from our own, even if we would NEVER in a million years want that lifestyle for ourselves or our children, we say, “To each their own” or “Who am I to judge?”, emphasizing our commitment to the Fairness foundation. Wouldn’t we harshly judge a poster in a classroom that gave some alternative prescriptive advice, like, “Listen to your parents,” or “Sometimes those who wander are lost,” or, “If you fail it’s on you”?
There just doesn’t seem to be any arguing with the steady march of moral progress. Best not to challenge it, lest you end up, “on the wrong side of history,” as we are so often warned about. And so, we don’t challenge it. In this environment, liberal and very-liberal ideas have become increasingly widespread [1], [2], [3], [4] whereas culturally and ethnically bound beliefs and practices, like religious service attendance [1], [2] have declined.
But – bear with me for a second – in The Lion King, when Simba is in the jungle hanging out with Timon and Pumba, he realizes the emptiness and escapism of no worries (yes, the link goes to a scene from the movie The Lion King). What he decides to go back to, what he realizes is worth preserving, is a community, a hierarchy, a family, and we presume, the rhythm of life defined by all the little rituals and responsibilities and idiosyncrasies that entails – all those little unjustifiable things that simply are the content of our lives. What I’m saying is that kindness and moral flexibility matters for the preservation and operation of a liberal, democratic, and diverse society. But what we are returning home to must be something more than how to properly conduct oneself in a multicultural society and our right to do as we please.
The content of our lives, the things that bind us together with others that are determined by loyalty, authority, and purity – these are the things that Bloom and Putnam are warning us of losing. I believe, and I think many others share this intuition, that they are being replaced by a mindless consumer culture where the deepest meaning in our lives is simply what we can signal to others about our status in the meritocracy. I wear Patagonia. I vacation to Santorini. I shop at Whole Foods. I have a Harvard sticker on my car (hey, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that). At least, this was the environment we lived in during the 2000s. Then came smartphones and social media.
The harmful effects of powerful new technology
The third cause of changing narratives about at-risk youth has to do with technology and social media. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt once again helps us understand the chaotic 2010s in his book The Anxious Generation. Beginning around 2012, Haidt notes in comprehensive research that there was a sharp rise in teenage mental illness and suicide that has only gotten worse. There is no shortage of data:
Among US college students, diagnoses of depression and anxiety more than doubled between 2010 and 2018.
In the decade to 2020 the number of emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 188% among teenage girls in the US and 48% among boys.
The suicide rate for younger adolescents also increased, by 167% among girls and 91% among boys. A similar trend has been observed in the UK and many other western countries.
Happiness used to be U-shaped by age, with middle age the least happy. Young people are now the least happy.
It hit liberal girls first and fastest.
Also in 2012, smartphones with front-facing cameras, high-speed internet, and access to social media sites like Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook became ubiquitous in our culture. Haidt concludes that this explosion of social media and technology – what he calls, “the great rewiring of our generation” – is to blame for our teenage mental health epidemic. His argument is very convincing, and he has excellent recommendations for how to fix it in his book The Anxious Generation. But to me his argument misses a critical piece: a direct indictment of relying too much on individualizing foundations for living our lives.
As NY Times columnist Ross Douthat points out, the technologies and their effects just revealed the vulnerabilities that already existed. He writes:
“If you were comfortable with the world of the early Obama years, it makes a lot of sense to focus on the technological shock that brought us to this place, to lament and attempt to alter its effects. But those effects should also yield a deeper scrutiny as well — because what looked stable and successful 15 years ago now looks more like a hollowed-out tree standing only because the winds were mild, and waiting for the iPhone to be swung, gleaming, like an ax.”
Douthat hasn’t forgotten the warnings given to us by Bloom and Putnam. Addressing the problems that new technology has caused just gets us back to where we were in 2012, which wasn’t a very good spot anyways, rife as it was with mindless consumer culture. Fixing our relationship to post-2012 technology doesn’t fix the moral relativism, lack of community, and persistent feelings of emptiness. On the contrary, the technology we built was an attempt to address these very problems, illustrated poetically by Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook that gained him millions of friends but lost him his one true friend.
A radically altered idea of childhood agency
The behaviors that post-2012 teenagers adopted on social media were also an attempt to fill these persistent feelings of meaninglessness, whether it was from the online left or online right. Discussing the online behaviors of teens in the early 2010s, Jonathan Haidt writes:
“Angela Nagle (author of Kill All Normies) described the culture that emerged among young activists on Tumblr, especially around gender identity, in this way:
‘There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self… And that’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the snowflake [referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique], the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves, and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity.’
Nagle described how on the other side of the political spectrum, there was “the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.” The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic, the experts on the podcast [The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling] suggest, that today’s cancel culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.”
Having worked with both types of adolescents in mental health treatment, there were three critical differences between teenagers I encountered who might use Tumblr and those that would gravitate to 4chan. First, the behavior of the 4chan teens we could say was “disgusting”, objectively wrong, and so forth, whereas we couldn’t say similar things about the Tumblr teens’ behavior. The Tumblr teens’ were “well-intentioned” (or at least it was convenient to say they were), misunderstood, victims, they had complex trauma, PTSD, etc. – and many of them really did – but our language did not allow us to speak to them or about them like the 4chan kids. It was difficult, if not impossible, to hold the Tumblr teens’ accountable for their behavior (even if the consequences were terrible), shrouded as it was under layers of kindness and sweetness and tears and simply being misunderstood. Second, the Tumblr teens had measurably worse symptoms than the 4chan kids and also improved the most [1],[2],[3]. Third, despite this fact, we treated fewer Tumblr kids than 4chan kids.
Changed childhood agency
As far as I can tell, Tumblr kids latch on to the victim identity in order to hide (what remains of) their cultural identity and to fill the void of meaninglessness that comes from having no connection to it. But our inability to effectively discuss this as a defense has become so entrenched that even the externalizing 4chan kids (those with “acting out” symptoms) adopted similar strategies of rebellion to the internalizing Tumblr kids (those who were more anxious and depressed). Oh, you say you care about me? Then why are you making me clean my room? Then why are you sending me to treatment? You smoke pot and drink alcohol when you’re stressed out. Why are you being a hypocrite? Why don’t you love me? Caring about me means you will let me do what I want! While I can imagine kids engaging in this line of argument with their parents from time immemorial, rebuttals like these became ubiquitous and effective, spurred on as they were by parents and caregivers’ lack of conviction that they have any moral ground to stand on.
The truth is that we don’t have any moral ground to stand on, we don’t have the moral language to discuss it anymore, and, actually, the kids are right! At least, they’re right about us being hypocrites. We gave up the moral language because we knew if we used it, we wouldn’t be able to live up to it. Or perhaps we simply wanted to do as we pleased – to discover our “true” preferences, to find our “authentic” self, to practice “self-care” – so, in an effort to be consistent, we let them do the same. (In practice, this often translates to finding the basest and most degraded forms of pleasure, prioritizing my individual preferences at the expense of the group, and putting self-care over discipline.) This lack of conviction starts from the rot of meaninglessness and lack of community (and our own flawed nature) – we have to get while the gettin’s good, we can’t resist getting what’s ours because, in spite of the material bounty of the world we live in, we feel so starved and so empty.
Liberals, especially liberal therapists, don’t like to use the word morality, speaking instead in terms of “harm reduction”, values rather than virtues, and related therapy-speak concepts like boundaries and trauma. You can’t even find the word “moral” in the American Counseling Association’s Code of Ethics. Yet you can find moral ideas in it, they have just stripped them down to the studs, to a thin morality of harm and fairness disguised as “mental health”, which we forget is actually a euphemism.
The kids know this thin morality is bankrupt, they know that deep down caregivers believe in more than just harm and fairness. When the kids get “gooned”, parents don’t want them to think it’s a punishment, they want to convey that they are just trying to prevent harm. But aside from being frequently necessary, transporting is a punishment, and the shock of getting transported and ending up in the middle of nowhere is part of what makes it effective – the kids finally see that their parents are serious. And then when programs greet the newly arrived kids, staff collude with the parents, reassuring the kids that it was for their safety; because if caregivers tell themselves that gooning and treatment is just “harm reduction” for the child’s “health”, then they don’t have to deal with the anger and hatred they sometimes feel towards the child, and that they would in fact like to have some sort of moral influence over the child so that they no longer feel this way. It fools some kids, but after watching their friends weaponize this language against caregivers as retribution, most catch on soon enough.
As I’ve written before, in one of my last conversations with a departing therapist at a WT program, she said, “The kids are winning.” As sad as this was, she still had the heart to phrase it as if we were still in the game. On the contrary, I’ve heard several mental health professionals say some version of, “You can’t control other people,” which is theoretically true, but it’s also a resignation to something like a state of nature where society should not try to impose its rules and practices on its members. This is a sign of defeat and nihilism, a sign that the game is over, and a resignation of the responsibility of adults and society to mold moral children.
It’s been said that therapy is ethical manipulation. Call it manipulation if you like, but at least when the show Brat Camp came out, there was some sense in which adults were telling at-risk kids that their behavior was bad for them. Now kids are telling adults they are victims, and we’re the ones getting manipulated.