The Oscillating Self: Universities as Nursing Homes for Fragile Identities
Beneath the surface of our modern lives, something vibrates — like the echo of an ancient tremor. A dull sound from the souls of those who no longer know how to find footing.
We live in an age of oscillation: emotional outbursts have become the default state. Stability is the anomaly. We have freed ourselves — first from chains, then from grounding. These days, we collapse not only from real violence, but already from a harsh tone of voice.
After World War II, people in Western societies discovered therapy. What was meant to heal the human psyche also had a downside, leading to a development that gradually uprooted us. The individual became sacred. Self-expression replaced discipline. Duty increasingly came to be seen as oppression, family as coercion.
The therapy culture began with compassion and ended in exaggerated individual self-rotation. The self as free choice, as an oscillating, shimmering “project”. The self as wound — you are what you have suffered. The world must bend to you and your feelings, your triggers, your perhaps unbearable self, against which you fight, which you maybe do not want to acknowledge, against which you construct your “substitute self”.
The grand narratives, the shared, collective identities slowly disappeared. All that remained was the echo of one’s own voice. Everywhere only me: in every room a mirror, for every need a feed. No one comes to tell you: “Let it go, grow up.”
The new narcissism doesn’t boast. Well, it does, but it works hard to make sure you don’t notice: It boasts, for example, of vulnerability, of humility, of belonging to minorities. The new narcissism does not appear harsh, but fragile. The new narcissism — it trembles, demands no admiration, but rather: “forbearance” or protection. And not forbearance or protection from firm authority — but from contradiction, from ambiguity, from the possibility that someone might not find you wonderful.
The ego was once a fortress. Now it is a sculpture of glass: as sparkling as it is hypersensitive. Every tone, every glance — a potential threat. We call this “vulnerability.” But in truth, it means the inability to face the world as it is.
Universities and colleges have become nursing homes: for egos, for feelings, for fragile identities. “Safe spaces” were once shelters to express one’s opinion as freely as possible. Today, “safe spaces” are something else — an expected standard: Everything must be “clinically” clean and safe, every email, every meeting, every exam — and this standard can be legally demanded at any time. Meetings begin with affirmations. Scripts are sterilized. Any criticism can potentially be denounced as a microaggression.
Thus, organizations do not become smarter but in a certain sense “dumber,” because a “prophylactic restraint” becomes the norm: Before I argue and end up with a lawyer on my back, I’d rather say nothing. The problem is that many common standards (evaluation criteria, attendance requirements, etc.) collapse and disappear under the weight of constant questioning. Those who no longer have an inner backbone ensure through their questioning that there are hardly any binding guidelines left — but the maximization of one’s own comfort zone remains legally enforceable.
This rhythm of the desire for affirmation on one side and of the scrutinization driven by the need for self-assertion on the other side also affects relationships:
At first:
“Stabilize me.”
“Hold me.”
“Tell me that I’m enough.”
But already in the next breath:
“Let me be who I am.”
“I need freedom. I’m enough for myself.”
“You’re suffocating me.”
This is a double bind that is fatal to relationships. The longing for attachment meets a narcissistic autonomy delusion fueled by self-rotation. Intimacy as instability: Two people barely grounded in themselves cannot hold each other — they drift, they collide. They call it love, but it’s a never-ending up and down, the spikes are impressive, they overlap, and eventually, the screen of an oscilloscope is no longer enough for the ups and downs of the dynamic of mutual admiration and mutual questioning.
Perhaps this is one of the most powerful lies of our time (at least in the context of universities and colleges): Every new rule, every language requirement, every trigger warning is meant to protect us from hate. But it does not protect us from hate (which still grows), rather from the realization that our own view might not be the “right” or even “true” one.
Behind the overly loud emphasis on diversity lies not a longing for diversity, but zeal.
Doubt in the “truth” or even other “truths” (what are our theories but at best “approximations”?) itches. But this “itch” provokes, it doesn’t fit our ideal of “non-violent communication.” We filter, smooth, dampen everything — until nothing is real anymore. Only feel-good bureaucracy — and theories that hardly mean anything anymore — or, a little less sarcastically: that are of little help in understanding current global developments because they view the world normatively, that is, they describe how the world ought to be, rather than trying to approach how the world might also be.
What remains in this world of zeal-born caution, of hyper-reflected word choices, of prophylactic restraint? Perhaps the insight that there is no ultimate security, but always resistance, friction, burden, change — and that this would be bitterly necessary, especially where study and research take place.
We seem (for now) to have made our choice: For fragility and the flight from the world. And now, fragile and sensitive as we are, we drift onward — and search… but we find nothing, except new know-it-alls or new radicalisms. None of it is any real help. It all just drives us — further.
Jörg Heidig
PS: The picture above was created with the help of an AI. This translation was also made with the help of an AI.