I think what Haidt and Mounk are chasing is right in plain sight.
The desire not to be understood, to assert the impossibility of mutual
comprehension is experienced by every healthy teenager (and parent
thereof) in the process of separation (into adulthood).
It is not merely a rejection of "everything you stand for" but an
assertion of total separateness and inscrutability. To be "understood"
is to be colonised, categorised, placed on your Cartesian grid and
thus dominated and neutralised. The chosen identity is arbitrary, it is
simply not yours, and the demand is that the very apparatus of
perception, the frame within which mutual recognition can take place,
be reset. And yet, weirdly, it is not a genuine bid for isolation, but
Greta Garbo saying "I just want to be left alone!"
Why this happened culturally in this century may remain a mystery,
but I see seeds of it in our own geek version of
proto-identity-politics, in Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence
of Cyberspace" [0]
" Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh
and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf
of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are
not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
The desire not to be understood, to assert the impossibility of mutual comprehension is experienced by every healthy teenager (and parent thereof) in the process of separation (into adulthood).
It is not merely a rejection of "everything you stand for" but an assertion of total separateness and inscrutability. To be "understood" is to be colonised, categorised, placed on your Cartesian grid and thus dominated and neutralised. The chosen identity is arbitrary, it is simply not yours, and the demand is that the very apparatus of perception, the frame within which mutual recognition can take place, be reset. And yet, weirdly, it is not a genuine bid for isolation, but Greta Garbo saying "I just want to be left alone!"
Why this happened culturally in this century may remain a mystery, but I see seeds of it in our own geek version of proto-identity-politics, in Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" [0]
[0] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence