10/13/2016

Origin Of The Snowflakes

You've either heard or read of the “precious snowflakes” or “fragile snowflakes”, specifically when referring to the overly sensitive and perpetually offended young men and women infesting our college campuses. They're the ones who have a knack for pissing off many of their fellow college students, professors, and administrators.

The need to be 'protected' from all kinds of things that normal, well adjusted adults shrug off with nary a flutter of the heart or the need to retreat to some semi-mythical “safe space”. The need to be protected against microaggressions (whatever the hell they are), speech with which they disagree, and ideas that they find uncomfortable.

In other words, they're big babies and they aren't doing themselves any favors by acting like one.

With this in mind, one has to ask “Where the hell did these damaged and deluded souls come from?” The answer – their parents.

Howard Schwartz, professor emeritus of Oakland University, has for years studied the psychology underlying political correctness, and in his new book Political Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order: Chronicling the Rise of the Pristine Self, he offers some clarity on why the term “snowflakes” is now synonymous with college students today.

Schwartz, who taught classes in social and behavioral science within its business school, said the term stems from what he calls “the rise of the pristine self.”

Schwartz writes in the book that “this is a self that is touched by nothing but love. The problem is that nobody is touched by nothing but love, and so if a person has this as an expectation, if they have built their sense of themselves around this premise, the inevitable appearance of the something other than love blows this structure apart.”

--snip--

Schwartz points to the rise of helicopter parents and capitulating campus administrations as contributing to this phenomenon.

“People now experience the entire world as a form of bullying. The helicopter parent protects the children from real dangers but also fantasy dangers. These precious snowflakes are the children of political correctness, their parents and schools lead them to believe that the world is perfectly moralistic — they don’t live in the real world, it is a fantasy,” he said.

Schwartz said the pristine self is a sort of narcissism – individuals who regard themselves as pristine selves cannot handle the unlovingness of the world, even if it manifests itself in indifference rather than malice.

To them, everything is an act of offense.

And therein lies the problem. To them everything is offensive and it is up to everyone else to make those offensive things go away. But it is they themselves who are offensive to a very large majority of the population, yet the expect everyone else to change.

Here's a clue, snowflakes: If you think everyone else is an offensive a**hole, then you're wrong. It's you who are the offensive a**hole.

Their parents, they politically correct 'friends' and teachers and counselors didn't do them any favors. Then again, the purveyors of political correctness had an agenda that had nothing to do not being offensive and everything to do with making sure that emotionally fragile snowflakes like them would be psychologically incapable of being independent. They would be totally dependent upon a state that wants to make sure they are incapable of acting up, of questioning The Powers That Be or the status quo. They wanted perpetual children and they got them.

The rest of us wonder just what the hell is going on, why these immature and spoiled children seem to think they can demand anything from the rest of us? That these snowflakes will be dependent upon the rest of us the rest of their lives is something I find both repulsive and offensive. That it was done to them on purpose just makes it worse.

While I haven't run across but a very few of these damaged children, I do have a response to any of them who might make the mistake of trying to get me to conform to their twisted view of the world - “Piss off, snowflake! I've got better things to do than waste my time wiping your ass!”