Not “Coddling” but “Rewiring”: Explaining Psychic Harm

Sensitivity to harm has become a crisis, and the reasons for this remain unexplained. Across organizations, individuals express psychic damage from trauma to microaggressions. Some call this rise in harm-oriented claims a loss of resilience due to an excess of “coddling.” Although harm is innately social, sociologists have seldom studied the deeper sources of this crisis. I advance a theoretical model to explain how psychic harm functions. The article considers why an eagerness to be perceived as socially marginalized has become commonplace. With in-depth interviews, I illustrate micro-level mechanisms that explain the individual advantages to asserting such claims. These psychic harm mechanisms reveal that social science has fundamentally shifted how individuals understand the self, others, and interaction. New disciplinary discourses—comprising a new epistemology—have contributed to rewiring how younger educated generations understand themselves and others, and these generations tend to spread the new ways of knowing across society. Ferreting out different forms of harm begets demands for ever-more diverse forms of safety, which has profound implications for free speech. I suggest that social science’s pronounced efforts to diminish inequality through a conjoined moral and political epistemology ultimately create a new system of stratification.