Culture Friday – An Olympic-sized critique

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NICK EICHER, HTE: It’s Friday August 6, 2021.

Glad to have you with you for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Hello, I am Nick Eicher.

PAUL BUTLER, HTE: And I’m Paul Butler.

MEDIA EDIT: Well this is from Tokyo in the US / gymnastics superstar Simone Biles / quadruple Olympic gold medalist / pulled out of the all-around final / she said she was would focus on her mental health / her sanity / her mental well-being / the US gymnastics team applauding him, writing in a statement, / after further medical evaluations, Simone Biles stepped down to focus on her mental health / people use Simone Biles as their own soapbox / what is your reaction to the news? / Is she a pathetic coward or a heroic warrior and pioneer of sanity, or are both of these accounts wrong? / It’s a combination of social networks …

The question of the emotional pressure that young, high performance athletes are feeling on the world stage these days has sparked much reflection in the media.

EICHER: The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by psychoanalyst Erica Komisar that targeted social media.

Quote Now: This makes teens very vulnerable to outside influences and especially susceptible to harsh criticism and bullying. Twitter and Instagram are breeding grounds, she says, for brutal, constant and pervasive bullying and judgment. Social media also encourages unrealistic standards of what it means to be beautiful or cool and to have a good life, which contributes to anxiety, self-awareness and harsh self-criticism.

Its Culture Friday. John Stonestreet is here. He is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Hello Jean.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Hello.

EICHER: I want to read another quote from this editorial: shallow pursuits [of the sort we see on social media] have always been part of adolescence, but they were a brief phase of development on the path to self-acceptance and emotional security.

Now, social media is prolonging this period of personal involvement, self-awareness and insecurity, and teens and young adults often find themselves stuck in a negative feedback loop.

What do you think, Jean? Is there something to this?

STONESTREET: I think there’s absolutely something to it. And we have to be very clear on what it is. The mental health problem in the West, especially America, is pervasive. It is at an all time high. I mean, and it’s much worse than COVID by the way. Three times as many people committed suicide in this age group of young adults than died from COVID last year.

So we took a group that was already struggling with mental health issues. And then we put them all alone in front of those very dangerous social media platforms that you just described, and Erica Komisar described.

But I think it’s even more than that. I don’t think it’s just bullying: I think it’s kind of like going back to the Columbine shooters in 1999, people were like, well, they were bullied. And what we found out was that maybe it was partially true, it wasn’t really true. The truest thing was their philosophy of life which they had embraced.

Now the problem with the ever-changing world of social media and influence is that it doesn’t give students time to really sit down and think about what’s true and what’s wrong. sense. And what is worth my attention and my loyalties and my allegiances. It moves them from one thing to another. But what he does not give them is a philosophy of life. It doesn’t give them something greater than themselves to live on beyond the here and now.

In fact, it’s not even here. It’s just now, because the here keeps moving and social media. You can be here and elsewhere. And you care what happens when you shouldn’t. So there is this perpetual fear of missing something. There’s this perpetual feeling that something’s going on without me[of] being disconnected.

And there is not this deeply framed responsibility to love God and to love your neighbor. This deep sense of purpose and meaning, why I’m here. How I can actually give my life to someone else. And Jesus made it clear, if you don’t lose your life you cannot keep it and our life must be lost for others.

But it’s a completely insular and self-directed and self-referential way of living on social media. You know, you can live with tough challenges if you have sense. You can’t live with the most, you know, an incredible amount of leisure and wealth if you don’t make sense.

BUTLER: John, in that same article, Erica Komisar writes this:

A 2019 survey for the Lego Group found that YouTuber is the most common career aspirant for ages 8 to 12, nearly three times more popular than the astronaut.

Hoping to go viral or earn your 15 minutes of fame is a powerful siren not only for young people but for adults as well.

STONESTREET: Yeah, well, we took a trip. I mean, the journey started, you know, in this modern age of entertainment. There were reports and entertainment stories. So we’ve gone from having news and celebrities to having celebrity news to kind of providing a platform for celebrities to tell us the news.

You know, I remember, you know, 20 years ago picking up a newspaper and seeing Johnny Depp on the front page, you know, criticizing the war in Iraq. And I was like, well, I mean, I’m sure he has an opinion and the right to have an opinion, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t get security briefings from the Pentagon. . So why do I care what this guy, you know, the pirate, has to say about Iraq, because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Now you are moving quickly to today. And you have a celebrity democratization, where some of the best known people in the world are people with social media channels. And that’s the thing that everyone is trying to get.

And, you know, I remember, you know, again, 20 years ago, I go out on my own, but I, I work on the campus of a little Christian college and I have these freshmen at me and, and I asked them what they majored in, and that, you know, he said kind of young punk, I specialize in basketball. And I was like, do you realize where you’re at like, you’re in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee, and you’re playing NAIA Division 2, but like, if that’s your life, this is pretty sad.

In other words, it was emulating this basketball as a kind of life with NBA players. And he had completely lost perspective. Multiply that all over the field of adolescence, where the democratization of celebrity has given everyone the illusion that that’s what it means to be a teenager is to try to be a celebrity and therefore to try to be a celebrity. trying to be an authority and that in a way gives you some sort of moral position in which to make a proclamation and quote without quotes use your platform. I think you are losing any sort of external point of reference for truth, meaning, value, perspective.

EICHER: Let’s change gears now. Have you seen the story of a short-lived Planned Parenthood president, Dr. Leana Wen, explaining why her tenure was so short? According to our story in WORLD, she was criticized by colleagues for not being enthusiastic enough about abortion.

Leah Savas reported: Wen says she used to think pro-life groups touted the connection between Planned Parenthood and abortion to lower the organization’s reputation with lawmakers. But she found out that Planned Parenthood wanted to own the abortion label. Some of her colleagues said they took pride in providing the procedure and would label themselves pro-abortion rather than pro-choice.

Does that tell you that the pro-life argument is a winner or maybe just the pro-choice argument is a loser, or is it something else?

STONESTREET: That’s an interesting way of asking the question. I think the pro-life argument wins because it matches reality and not because of that, but I also looked at the story and I’m wondering, man, what’s really going on here? Is this the story of the loss of social capital around abortion, leading those who believe you know that the quality of life itself depends on the preservation of it must now go all the way on the offense? , you know, when you when you kind of are in the cultural majority and people are with you, and you know, you’re able to sneak under the radar, you know, verbal gymnastics like health care for them. women or whatever. Then at this point you don’t really have to defend it. And now that all of that, I think, has been exposed, you just have to step out of it and make it your own. That’s it ? I mean, is it kind of like, you know, communist revolutionaries finally admit their plan was to kill everyone? I do not know. I mean, that’s what seems to be, what it is.

But you know, some of us have been saying this for a very long time, haven’t we? We said it was the bread and butter of planned parenthood. This is where they make their money. This is what they are most attached to. It’s not really anything about women’s health. It’s something about abortion. And you see it come out when you have these people that’s like, well, I really want to help women, in other words, their true believers in the story of helping women, and then they get to it. And that wasn’t the Abby Johnson story, how crazy it would be if Leanna, when would you know, follow Abby Johnson’s path is so disoriented and turn around and go, yeah, maybe it was not such a good plan and maybe unborn children are human and become activists against family planning. That would be great. Because it’s just that it’s, you know, the evil that’s hiding is the evil that’s blossoming, and now we have yet another story of someone pulling the blanket off and saying, here’s what’s happening. really goes behind the scenes.

BUTLER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

EICHER: John, thank you very much.

STONESTREET: Thanks to both of you.

WORLD Radio transcriptions are created within an emergency time frame. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative recording of WORLD Radio’s programming is the audio recording.

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