91 percent of College Students Say "Words can be Violence" (Reason, JD Tuccille) \ stacker news ~Politics_And

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91 percent of College Students Say "Words can be Violence" (Reason, JD Tuccille)reason.com/2025/12/10/survey-91-percent-of-college-students-think-words-can-be-violence-that-could-feed-real-violence

1012 sats \ 11 comments \ @denlillaapan 4h Politics_And_Law

I've only ever met a handful of people who seriously maintained this, but it was the insistence and hysteria with which they did so, and the overwhelming agreement/support in their in-group that was the most disturbing.

There are cliques of basketcases around, where brain-eating ideas have taken hold.

Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former.

"Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression [FIRE] and College Pulse," FIRE announced last week.

Fully 22% of survey respondents completely agreed with the notion that words can be violence (with another 25% saying "mostly" and 28% saying "somewhat"). Can't always derive too much from these things, since what the respondents actually mean isn't always clear (hedge, misinterpret question, social desirability bias etc, etc).

We've seen the cognitive and emotional decay for a while:

In 2017, when the conflation of words and violence was relatively new, Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, worried that the false equivalence fed into the simmering mental health crisis among young people. He and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote in The Atlantic that "growing numbers of college students have become less able to cope with the challenges of campus life, including offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or even racist and sexist peers"

It's terrifying enough that there are any people, let alone university-educated, "smart" ones, who believe this. All I have for them is, ironically, a punch in the face.

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102 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 4h

The headline is a little exaggerated. The exact poll question was something like:

How closely does the statement 'words can be violence' align with your own thoughts?

Entirely describes my thoughts

Mostly describes my thoughts

Somewhat describes my thoughts

Describes my thoughts a little

Does not describe my thoughts at all

And it was like 9% of people selected 5. People tend to choose moderate options in surveys, so 91% is a stretch.

However, the headline is directionally correct in the sense that too many young people think words can be violence. Something like 49% selected 1 or 2.

88 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan OP 4h

yeah, that's still entirely disastrously fucked... the number selecting 1 or 2 should be a rounding error -- some clinically insane antifa person, but really nobody else.

167 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby 2h

I'm curious if anyone has written a history of this concept. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me was a thing as early as mid 19th century, so when did "words are violence" start?

102 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 2h

Not specifically about "words are violence", but Carl Trueman wrote a history of expressive individualism, which is the philosophy most closely associated with "words are violence" because it prioritizes the subjective experience of the internal self over external, objective reality.

The book is called "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self". I highly recommend it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 1h

clean

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @unboiled 4h

This is simply proof that indoctrination works.

It has been proven multiple times before. Yet here we are, expecting us to be smarter than people in the past and therefore immune to it. So we don our surprised Pikachu faces and try to claim that indoctrinated people must be dumb or otherwise faulty.

74 sats \ 1 reply \ @winteryeti 4h

I will say there is a definite heightened sensitivity to words in today's college versus what we had as Gen X. Mind you, my generation was shitted on as kids and in our first jobs by Boomers who lorded over us how much better, smarter and disciplined they were (bullshit). And then we now parent the kids telling us we don't know crap and are luddites on tech (note, we were the Atari kids). All of that said, my two daughters are college age and, wonderfully, they have very robust vocabularies which serves well for fun, intellectual debates. Unfortunately, they get emotional when certain statements are made; they haven't developed the necessary thick skin to not take heated talk personal. That right there is missing in a lot of young folk today. I won't blame wokism; that's a bullshit argument for hidden racism. Instead, it's trying to be too nice for the sake of nice and missing the fact that sometimes life is hard and you need too buck up to deal with it. Younger people are missing that key strength Gen X has too much of, and why we regularly get accused of being blunt or rude.