In 2021, Jonathan Haidt – an American academic whose previous books, The Coddling of the American Mind and The Righteous Mind, had become bestsellers – was on sabbatical working on a new book about the “moral psychology of economic life”. But as he settled down to write the early chapters, his mind kept turning to what seemed like a much more urgent question: “What the hell is happening to us? Why does everything seem to be going haywire?”
As he recounts in his Substack newsletter, he felt forced to put his book aside to tackle these questions. The result was an essay for The Atlantic, which appeared in 2022, entitled “Why the past ten years of American life have been uniquely stupid”. That turned out to be “the most important thing I’ve ever written”, Haidt told the Financial Times. He then abandoned his planned book and started work instead on two new ones that would expand on the ideas in the essay. (You can follow along as he writes these books and shares his findings by subscribing to his newsletter at jonathanhaidt.substack.com – most of the content is freely available.)
The two books will pick apart two intertwined threads and trace their common source: the first will look at why public and political life in the West has become so divided and fractious; the second at why the mental health
