The Real Reason We Need To Stop Trying To Protect Everyone’s Feelings | Observer

The Real Reason We Need To Stop Trying To Protect Everyone’s Feelings | Observer
"Like every kid, I was forced to read Fahrenheit 451 in high school.
If you’d asked me what it was about before last week, I would have told you: “Firemen who burn books.”
And if you’d asked me why on earth they did that, I would have answered just as confidently: “Because a tyrannical government wanted them to.”
...Let’s go back to 451, which I found myself re-reading recently. 
It begins with Guy Montag burning a house that contained books. 
Why? 
How did it come to be that firemen burned books instead of putting out fires as they always had?
The firemen have been doing it for so long they have no idea. 
Most of them have never even read a book. 
Except one fireman—Captain Beatty—who has been around long enough to remember what life was like before. 
As Montag begins to doubt his profession—going as far as to hide a book in his house—he is subjected to a speech from Beatty. 
In it Beatty explains that it wasn’t the government that decided that books were a threat. 
It was his fellow citizens.
“It didn’t come from the government down,” he tells him. “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!”
In fact, it was something rather simple—something that should sound very familiar. 
It was a desire not to offend—of an earnest notion to literally have “everyone made equal.” 
And it’s at the end of this speech that we get the killer passage:
“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?…Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, to the incinerator.”
...It’s important to realize that today, we have a media system paid by the pageview and thus motivated with very real financial incentives to find things to be offended about—because offense and outrage are high-valence traffic triggers. 
We have another industry of people—some call them Social Justice Warriors—who, despite their sincerity of belief, have also managed to build huge platforms by inventing issues and conflicts which they then ride to prominence and influence..."
Read on!