This is an excellent post. Thank you for taking the time to address the nuance.
I think a lot of our societal issues revolve around failure. We don't teach and embrace successful failure. We just focus on failure. It's totally in character for us to polarize an issue. On one end of the spectrum, failure is not an option. If you fail, then you failed yourself, your family, your teammates, your boss. And so on. That grinds on you. You fear for your job. You can't sleep at night. You fixate on the failure.
On the other end you have people that don't even acknowledge failure. If you want a manufactured image - participation trophies. No one loses. Everyone wins. You did your best. And then when people raised in this environment meet one that that doesn't accept failure you have similar problems. Fear, rejection, inability to cope.
We aren't raising and embracing balanced minds. We've tribalized emotion. Once our beliefs are challenged at that very raw emotional core, our stability and how we respond is usually not pretty. Now add in firearms as an "easy" solution to an unstable mind and there's not many dots between then and where we are now.
Failure isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing. And it's how we learn. We don't have innate instinct in us like animals. We aren't born perfect and we only really learn when we fail trying. We need to embrace that failure isn't bad, encourage the growth after it, and provide support when people do. But we also can't ignore it either. If you are never told no, or never fail, then you've not ever really learned.
I think that the intersection with society and mental well-being is spot on. I try to avoid using mental illness as a description of mass shooters because this is a highly unusual event, and although mass shooters are clearly not mentally well, there is no clear specific mental health problem/diagnosis that is attached to such an action. While many mass shooters have been diagnosed or possibly could be diagnosed retrospectively with certain mental illnesses, those illnesses themselves would ordinarily not be attached with risk of such an action. There is a problem with stigmatizing people with mental illness inherent in the wording, and that's not going to make anyone better. I think it also invites a fantasy that all we need to do is beef up our mental health system and this problem will go away. That is far from accurate. It suggests that people who would potentially commit these acts would definitely get care and stay in care, and that their mental health treatment would be successful in prevention even if that were true. I think it's likely explicitly untrue anyway, although mental health treatment presents an opportunity for meaningful social engagement for many people. Still, that is a very gaping weakness especially in the US in our systemic ability to improve someone's mental health. It is arguable that the evidence base suggests that social interventions are more important for things like schizophrenia for example than medication, even in the absence of medication altogether.
Anyway, as to society I would caution against our tendency to identify what's bad and try to eliminate it. That's exactly how we've ended up adopting a lot of the things which we are being critical of as societal adoptions. Instead, we should turn to evidence for what actually leads to individual success on a physical, emotional, and financial level. For this, resilience and social connectivity seem to be most important.
Here I would argue that our attempts to isolate individuals from failure are a response to noticing the harms of failure. However, the more important thing would be to understand how to build resilience to the experience of failure. And here, mere exposure to repeated failures is not effective. Neither would I argue that an unrealistic isolation from failure is productive, but I think it is less important than we are inclined to believe. I'm a little torn in saying "I think" vs. "this is the way something is" with a lot of this. Largely, I'd say my expressed opinions are informed from a broad awareness of academic study, but I wouldn't be able to nor intend to cite anything specifically, and for the most part my formulation involves translating more basic findings to bigger conceptual framework that really couldn't be studied directly.
Disclaimer aside, in regards to resiliency and social connections, the most important thing on an individual level is building a positive sense of self. Essentially, a securely established self is more inclined to recognize failure as an opportunity to learn how to succeed more in the future, whereas a less secure self is more oriented to protecting their self-esteem from said failure, in which case repeated failures would simply be more destabilizing. From a societal level, I see this as a harm with the ways we attempt to make things more equitable by toning down our celebration of success and recognition that, at least in a particular instance, one individual is or does better than another. Often highly capable people have significant deficits in their self-esteem and struggle with the conflict of whether they are somehow bad for being more capable or privileged.
On a more social level, I also think we are far to rigidly approaching many moral questions. Having any degree of racism, for example, is wholly unacceptable for an individual to be seen as possessing value in society. This is despite the absolute impossibility for this to be true. Racial inequity is systemically built in, and all people growing up here are exposed to seeing those disparities. In fact, in looking at unconscious racial bias, it is often people who have strong values of racial equality but very little direct experience with diversity and systems where this applies. Instead, people are more likely to unconsciously pull from stereotypes they are exposed to largely via media. This is natural, and we see it all the time with people who come up with all kinds of distorted views of the world simply through their limited exposure from social media, clickbait headlines, etc. It is also natural that people tend to believe that their understanding of something is far more accurate and extensive than it really is, and it is largely their own direct experience where their preconceptions prove inaccurate which allows them to appreciate more to the picture. Direct challenge rarely works, but here again we run into overly moralistic and harsh judgments when providing feedback as well as poor resiliency limiting openness to external feedback. Racial stereotypes and value-judgments are ubiquitous and inevitable in everyone, but this societal approach to being against racism, a value which I absolutely agree with, severely limits our ability to not only share and address our individual failings to meet the ideals we believe in but more importantly to even be able to become aware of those failings in the first place. Here, the problem is judgment. While those failings are
bad, a person themselves is not
bad for possessing them. But if we continue to bifurcate people into good or bad based on whether or not they can hide their racism, it's going to be very hard to make progress, and we become all the more fragile individually when society itself embraces moral ideals. Interestingly, this rigid moralistic viewpoint when it becomes distorted enough to make people at least unconsciously aware of their failings actually serves to undermine their self-esteem for the goodness that they have in making very real societal progress against racism across time. People instead see it as meeting an obligation rather than genuinely being proud of their goodness and secure that they are basically good no matter what so exposure to awareness of where their normal racism crops up makes is a
good thing because it presents the opportunity to be better. Even where people can appreciate this, often people are inhibited in trying because it risks exposing their "badness" to others.
I use the example of racism here because it's such an important societal issue and the ideal of racism = bad is nearly universally held, even in people who are relegated to the category of "racist" by society. Several other things, such as LGBTQ equality have a lot more variability in value in our society, however it is another thing which is overly determined so that we categorize people into categories of good or bad depending on our underlying values rather than recognizing that there is a spectrum of beliefs and biases in all of us. This, combined with poor resiliency, pushes us more and more into tribalism with us motivated to protect ourselves from our own inherent moral "badness" by attacking the other.
This is very quickly becoming a treatise. I think I'll stop here and try to address any questions/comments if it's seen as valuable to the community here.
