threats, the more we will see them, regardless of how safe or comfortable our
environment actually is. And we see this playing out in the world today.
It used to be that being the victim of violence meant somebody had
physically harmed you. Today, many people have begun to use the word
violence to describe words that made them feel uncomfortable, or even just
the presence of a person they disliked.^3 Trauma used to mean specifically an
experience so severe that the victim could not continue to function. Today, an
unpleasant social encounter or a few offensive words are considered
“trauma,” and necessitate “safe spaces.”^4 Genocide used to mean the physical
mass murder of a certain ethnic or religious group. Today, the term white
genocide is employed by some to lament the fact that the local diner now lists
some of its menu items in Spanish.^5
This is the Blue Dot Effect. The better things get, the more we perceive
threats where there are none, and the more upset we become. And it is at the
heart of the paradox of progress.
In the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology and an
early pioneer of the social sciences, ran a thought experiment in one of his
books: What if there were no crime? What if there emerged a society where
everyone was perfectly respectful and nonviolent and everyone was equal?
What if no one lied or hurt each other? What if corruption did not exist? What
would happen? Would conflict cease? Would stress evaporate? Would
everyone frolic in fields picking daisies and singing the “Hallelujah” chorus
from Handel’s Messiah?^6
Durkheim said no, that in fact the opposite would happen. He suggested
that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small
indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped
killing each other, we wouldn’t necessarily feel good about it. We’d just get
equally upset about the more minor stuff.
Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that
protecting people from problems or adversity doesn’t make them happier or
more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has
been sheltered from dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will
come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will
have the childish public meltdown to prove it.^7
What we find, then, is that our emotional reactions to our problems are not
determined by the size of the problem. Rather, our minds simply amplify (or
minimize) our problems to fit the degree of stress we expect to experience.
Material progress and security do not necessarily relax us or make it easier to
hope for the future. On the contrary, it appears that perhaps by removing