America’s Slide Into Infantilism

As children, we have a naïve notion about how when we grow up we will have the power to change the world and the freedom to do what we please. And then we grow up and we learn about responsibility. Most of us. It seems slowly we as a society have been slipping away from the notion of responsibility, at least beyond the paying of bills and showing up to work on time. We still shoulder our individual financial obligations, but beyond personal matters, we have rather fallen away from the whole notion of being grown-ups.

I can’t help wondering how other societies see our own, if there be any yet we have not infected with the inability to reach a degree of adulthood. For all of recorded history, culture has been maintained and passed down from generation to generation, and in that manner, many cultures have matured into rather sophisticated examples of what civilization can be. Sure, all of them are flawed, just as all human beings are flawed. In many ways the youthful society that is The United States has been able to show new and better ways of being and doing to those cultures that have been so diligent in clinging to their past. That has always been the beauty of America, but it is also our flaw. And whenever a positive is too much accentuated, the flaw becomes more evident. The more a foundation is built from a flawed concept (as all concepts are), the greater the danger the flaw presents.

America’s great flaw and asset is its youth. And it has worked so well as an asset that we have built the entire edifice of our nation upon it. It has worked so well we have led the entire world in unprecedented technological revolutions. We have built something incredibly impressive upon a powerful but untested foundation. And it has for so long stood the test that we have ceased to worry about the imperfection that exists within it just as imperfection exists within everything.

We have defined ourselves as the new kid on the block, the young rebel. We are the New World, the pioneers that discovered new terrain, at last making humanity a global and interrelated whole. The only problem is, we are no longer young. We are a nation doing a combover in order to hide the thinning hair, still trying to fit into the jeans we wore when we were eighteen. We had such a good time in high school and were so popular we don’t want to grow up. But we have to. Our situation has changed. There is no frontier we can send people to when the society we have built becomes intolerable. We can no longer run away, we are now as immobile as Europe has been for a while now. We have sown our wild oats, it's time to start being responsible.

Unfortunately, we have done just the opposite. So pleased are we with what we once were and so unwilling to face life as it now is, we are regressing. As Gil Scott Heron said nearly forty years ago, “this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can - even if it's only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards.” Things have only gotten worse since then. Ironically, our desire to retain our youth and innocence has led to senility.

It isn’t just the past that we cling to, any delusional way of seeing life more pleasantly and ourselves more impressively will do. Our movies don’t reflect reality anymore, nor does our music reflect our lives (we would have to outdo Sodom and Gomorrah for that to be true). Our news doesn’t reflect what is really going on in our nation and the world, and our politicians aren’t any better at addressing the issues that most concern us.

And somehow we are all right with that. Because the media and the messengers have done such a good job transforming us into mindless consumers rather than functioning adults. We see the world through the same simplistic perspectives our masters do, a strictly economic one. As teenagers we asked our parents for the keys to the family car without giving any thought about who pays for the upkeep and the insurance and the monthly payments, feeling we have contributed enough by throwing in a few bucks for gas. Today we feel equally entitled because we pay for it all, but we neglect other costs: how it effects our climate and environment, the military interventions required to insure cheap and reliable gas, the taxes required to keep the roads in good shape.

Somewhere along the way we stopped growing up and taking on the responsibilities of adulthood, all the while demanding all the privileges. Sports heroes claimed they weren’t role models, businessmen denied any responsibilities to the communities in which they worked, and our storytellers abandoned the job of passing on the wisdom of the elders and instead went to work in marketing. We are a country utterly unconnected to the kind of wisdom that requires roots, and we are rapidly headed towards utter infantilization.

It can perhaps best be seen in the political leader of our nation, Donald Trump. It is obvious in his four bankruptcies and just about anything he does that he is utterly unfamiliar with the concept of responsibility. It was no less apparent in the alternative we were given, Hillary Clinton, who never seemed to think herself responsible for anything she had done while in government, from her voting for the Iraq War to her active involvement in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi that has left Libya a failed state. Responsibility is for adults, and they are precious few to be found. The cameras of the media do not focus on them because they are not sexy and are no good for selling cars or beer.

We are a nation that never made the step to adulthood and are now rapidly regressing back to the cradle. Our best attempts at politics are no more mature than siblings sitting in the back seat on a long car ride who poke each other and then try to convince their parents it was the other’s fault. But there are no parents, there is no one driving the car except corporations that aren’t paying attention to the road but instead are busily digging through the cracks in the seats for whatever loose change might be there.

If we are not already there, we shall soon regress into complete infantilism, capable of nothing more than mindlessly consuming and creating waste. And there will soon be no adults left who are able or willing to spoon-feed us or change our nappies. Sooner or later, we will have to grow up. Let us hope that occurs before it is too late.