June 5, 2026
When you look at many of the social reforms of the modern age, a shocking proportion of it seems to follow the same general trend. Increasing regimentation of all activities, uniformity of experience and opportunity, surveillance of public life to a needless degree, which all comes together to serve the same basic purpose: infantilizing the populace, locking them in arrested development from infancy. This is hard-coded into almost everything that exists in modern society, from the most insignificant details to the broadest fundamentals of our social structure.
I know many will be skeptical of this, and it's understandable why, but let me provide some examples to illustrate my point before I get into more detail. Let's start with a small one: the existence of "children's media". A kind of entertainment that is made only to appeal to young children, it started as books and later movies that would teach some moral message through storytelling, ultimately evolving into a massive industry which has been engineered to instill the paragons of virtue according to whichever belief system is currently in vogue. Even in principle, the existence of children's media is unnecessary. The "moralizing" purpose can and should be taught through passive life experience rather than the words of career writers, and it is insulting to the intellect of children who can be entertained just as well by movies and TV made for general audiences. But if the issue with children's media was merely that it exists, it would not be worth pointing out. The true problem lies in the fact that they have replaced other forms of entertainment completely for a sizable chunk of the youth, who are being raised exclusively on Disney movies (and more recently even more worthless forms of consumption). This removes an important source of bonding between parent and child, as rather than watching things together with their parents, things they can both enjoy and talk about another time, they are getting a disconnected experience and their entire set of cultural knowledge is comprised of things which adults would not care to engage with them about. There have been attempts to remedy this by creating children's media that adults can also enjoy, like Bluey, but this is a crude mockery of the experience of watching a regular action movie or something of the sort with parents, and besides no parent who has not themselves been infantilized would care for Bluey at all. Another problem that comes from this is that making the eventual switch from children's media (and other similar moralistic options like Marvel) is made difficult if it is all that a child has known, and so there are now many cases where people enter their teens and young adulthood still watching the same catalog of Disney-esque entertainment on repeat, uninterested in branching out to anything else. This is a very on-the-nose example, but it sets the tone, and I have more.
The proliferation of the modern suburb is a more institutional form of infantilization. In the city, it has long been custom for a person to start going out on his own at the age of around 10-12. There is no particular reason to do this except to pass the time, and often not even to go to any specific place but just for the novelty of hanging out in a new place, to sort of "conquer" the territory and make it familiar. I believe there is a natural exploring spirit in young people, at least certainly in men, that makes it instinct to seek out new sights and experiences. The city encourages this with its wide range of places both vibrant and secluded that can be accessed, places to mingle and places to shop, places to entertain yourself and places to sulk alone. There is great value in these outdoor options when your home begins to feel suffocating, as it so often does in a cramped metropolis. Even the crime and dysfunction associated with the modern city serves a formative developmental purpose for the young man, building situational awareness and the will to assert himself. However safer it may be, a place like the suburban development- where there is nowhere to go and nothing to do, smothers man's exploring spirit in the cradle, and teaches him to be incurious and sedentary. When all the streets in your town are rough copies of each other and your community is made up of tight-assed elderly and middle aged zealots whose idea of paradise is a land where every day is the same, what room is there to enjoy yourself?. Even if a young person decides to make of this space what he can, he will be under constant surveillance by overbearing watchdogs eager to dish out punishment to the teenager, who he sees simultaneously as a ravenous beast always looking to cause havoc and as a total retard incapable of taking care of himself, who if left to his own devices might drown in an inch of water. There are neighborhood groups eternally neurotic about any teenaged activity, always ready to assume the worst. There are security guards posted in places with nothing to steal or destroy, like abandoned buildings and empty land, even places where no crackhead would go to camp, and so they are only there to make that one less place where young people can enjoy themselves. To top this all off, a growing number of parents especially in suburbs are unwilling to let their teenaged children outside even within this hyper-coddled space, and keep them at home to play video games and lie in bed all day. They do this despite the fact that their generation was the famed generation of the "latchkey kids", who spent all day wandering the streets in a time when violent crime was far higher than today, and then many have the audacity to scold their children for spending all this time on the phone or computer after having taken away their right to do anything else. This scolding has gotten to the point where now countries across the world are trying to encode it into legislature, locking teenagers out from social media, by extension locking them out from the majority of popular culture. The only complaints you are likely to hear about this come from adults who are unhappy about having to verify their age- not from the teenagers themselves, who have become so castrated by this infantilizing system that they will not speak up for themselves or may even be in favor of the legislation while still spending as much time online as they can before it passes. In effect, this means they are admitting they lack any degree of self control, and though they recognize they want to stop their internet habit they fail to recognize that the condition feeding it is the utterly boring state of the outside world, and so they ask for the government to rip their phones from their hands, so they may be left with nothing.
While on the topic of teenagers, this too is a category that exists mainly to infantilize. Until the early 1900s, the idea of an "adolescent" did not exist, and there was only child and adult- teenagers generally fell into the adult category, possessing most of the mental faculties of a grown adult. You need only to watch videos of teenagers speaking during the 1800s and early 1900s to see how much more mature they acted than their counterparts today. Nowadays disingenuous "real man" talking points thrown out by geriatrics on the right and left alike love to blame the comparative helplessness of today's youth on their own inherent weakness or laziness, but of course the jabbering idiots never stop and wonder whether it was their job as parents to endow their children with a sense of agency. The adolescents of the past were not more developed as people because they "worked with their hands" or whatever else those ogres like to spout, but because they were also treated by society as adults and had more reason to act as such. Universal comprehensive schooling was in part the cause of the distinction of the teenager appearing, since grade school's regimented and fundamentally demeaning structure in which you are made to sit quietly for 7 hours being fed regurgitated information, needing to ask permission for things as simple as using the bathroom, and any deviation from the norm leading to nagging by some misanthropic administrator is in itself greatly infantilizing. In fact, the hatred in modern society toward the teenager, especially the teenage boy, is maybe the biggest implicit culprit of the great infantilization since that hatred is what causes it to be so widespread- it explains the actions of the suburban security guards and neighborhood watch groups, always neurotic about possible antisocial behavior by "teenage boys", even though statistically said behavior is rare, and also the actions of the school administrators who have been proven in the past to have a bias against them (here are some examples), and the self-appointed media moral-makers who do everything in their power not to let them grow up into "toxic men". This hatred comes in large part from stereotypes that have arisen due to various moral panics and media portrayals over the past century, and smaller things- one minor example, one of many, being the habit of news networks to refer to criminals in the headline as "teens" above all else. A wide range of social sins have been attributed to "teens", even though the overlap between the two is in reality not all that high. Recognizing the hatred of society towards them, a kind of learned helplessness roots itself in the teenager that prevents him from acting according to his nature.
So this infantilization is happening. So what? What does that actually mean for society? One big thing that has come out of this phenomenon is the rise of the "dinergoth"- there is a pretty well-written (though corny) article about it here, but in essence it is the people you see who are in their 20s or 30s still walking around in dressed in permanent subcultural cosplay, hyperfixating on cartoons or kiddie video games, permanently anxious, frightened, neurotic, uninterested in anything beyond their tiny and bizarre bubble. This is not a rare case anymore, it is not "autism", it is now the default state of young adulthood in much of the West and it exists because nothing ever happened to push these people out of childhood. They work jobs, they may even pay bills, but they have little to aspire to beyond working their dead-end job and so they have checked out of proper adulthood, clinging to the idea that they can still be a mental child for as much of the time as possible. It kind of makes sense- why act like an adult if you won't be respected either way? Why engage with "normal" society when it no longer has anything to offer you? When you go to school and sit through your classes being told about chemical compounds and indigenous history, do you pay attention if you have already been convinced your destiny is to work as a welder? That exploring spirit I spoke of earlier, it is becoming more dulled as well, because what can you get out of that? Even around the world, cities are starting to look more uniform, the lives of two people in Los Angeles and Karachi become indistinguishable, national culture is broken down, and that enchanting idea of different worlds out there goes away. Put simply, everything is just more boring than it once was, and when once by withdrawing into your shell you lost out on a world of sights and opportunities, today a life spent in a cocoon might look about the same as any other. There's just not all that much out there. And so, the young generation has lost the virility that defined youth for the entire rest of history, and it's happened because there has been a concentrated effort to tear it away from them. Who has been behind this effort? I would say it is the highly unnatural force that holds most of the power in society, despite having none of the strength or the charisma to have earned it- the gerontocracy.
The spiteful and gluttonous elderly steward class of today's world are threatened, as they should be, by the concept of an energetic youth, because they know that they have no legitimacy to their hold on power beyond the system of bureaucracy they have built that makes it impossible to legally tear them down. In history, when legal action proves useless, the young and restless start seeking alternatives. Even today you can see this process having played out in the past year in Nepal and Madagascar. I was in the Discord server created by the Nepalese revolutionaries, and it was not some politician or general who was posting videos of himself chasing a bureaucrat through the streets with a stick, but a teenager with a Goku profile picture. The spirit of exuberance, the unrestrained energy and DIRECTION of the youth in these videos was far greater than anything I had seen in the United States during my lifetime, including the useless BLM protests spearheaded by the very same group of neurotic nerds spiraling in arrested development. The sort of action that was taken in Nepal could not be replicated in the United States because of the total castration of the youth who now live without agency, in the shadow of the system that works insidiously to make them permanent children. Nobody under 40 is happy about the conditions we are living in in the West, but much like a young child knows rebelling against his parent would be futile, they just cannot fathom doing anything about it that would not be similarly futile. This is the effect the gerontocracy aimed to achieve when this infantilization began, and it does wonders allowing them to cling to power. In case you still don't believe me, think about what caused suburbanization. There is a common misconception of "white flight" from the cities, which overlooks the main cause. When the FHA started offering loans to homebuyers, they deliberately disqualified houses on a certain lot size, with certain setbacks from the street, in other words, in areas of certain density. A homebuyer looking to purchase in the city would find no assistance from the FHA, so they would have to go out into the suburbs. At the same time, the people displaced by slum clearance in the land that later became the suburbs were moved into new Section 8 towers in the inner city, which quickly became hives of violent crime, partly due to their inherent architecture (explained in Oscar Newman's Defensible Space), and created yet another pressure that forced people out of the cities. I do not believe suburbanization was a natural process, but one pushed by the powers that be for their own benefit. So much of the infantilizing elements of life were created in this same top-down way, and are the source of so much of today's mass complacency. It is the responsibility of anyone looking to raise children in today's world that they resist the urge to infantilize their child. A little maturity will, if nothing else, go a long way in putting a child today far ahead of the pack, and if it becomes a wider societal trend to abandon this infantilizing behavior, it may even put a stop to the complacency of our age.
March 10, 2026
There might be nothing more demoralizing on a societal level than feeling completely powerless. When a population goes through a hard time, you would expect them to be spurred to action and start to work to improve their conditions. Doing this requires a base level of willpower and unity among the general public, so that a vision can be formed for what to work towards, and the plan to realize it can be enacted. What do you do when your goal is to prevent any forward progress from being made ever again? Your only sure path to doing this is by stripping the people of willpower and of unity. Without both of these things, everyone is powerless.
The mass mentality of powerlessness is on full display in most every major city in the United States. In the country's largest cities, daily life for the underclass becomes one never-ending humiliation ritual. No public services work properly- you will ride public transit that is always late and always filthy, you will share the streets with people who you know would rob or kill you if they found it convenient, you will navigate around streets that are eternally closed and buildings that are eternally shuttered, and in your free time your sources of recreation are parks and public squares that are never maintained. Police, fire, and medical services cannot be counted on in emergencies, nor can the city government for pothole fixes, frequent trash pickup, or anything else that should be considered inherent in a modern developed nation. In the most extreme cases, there exist areas of cities that are indistinguishable from wartime bombing targets and areas that every local will tell you to take care to avoid, because they are so unsafe that you put yourself in danger by going there. Of course, some people have no choice- they live there.
The thing that makes this a reflection of society without agency is that none of these cities have to be this way. The US continues to be the world's richest country, with the most resources and the largest government. The cities are in a crisis of their own design. The public transit issue is mostly traffic related; the crime and filth issue normally comes from groups of no more than a few hundred people per city who are arrested and released without end; the lack of construction, maintenance, and trash pickup services is from union corruption that prevents the hiring of more workers, etc, etc. There are plenty of countries that do not experience these problems on nearly the same level. The sickness of American cities exists because of two complementary forces: the active maliciousness of the governing class, and the hopeless complacency of the urban population.
The ruling class of the cities in the current era is a coalition of academic, corporate, judicial, and governmental figures that I call the "activists". Their worldview is defined by a theocratic-level obsession with social justice, being completely willing to institute policies proven to have exclusively negative effects as long as they serve to increase equality (even by dragging those in the middle down to the level of the bottom). This uncaring organization is the origin point of many of the modern era's worst ideas, such as catch-and-release policing, equity and inclusion quotas, encampment sweep bans, opiate decriminalization, and many others. These will be instituted time and time again in the nation's cities, always to disastrous consequences, but will never be disavowed because doing so would be blasphemous to the activist theocracy. Even the policies that fail so spectacularly they lose even the faith of the demoralized populace like police abolition are still only denounced half-heartedly, and scaled back only just enough to pacify the masses once again- but still kept in place enough that the general quality of life has dropped noticeably.
Many conservatives say "the cities voted for this, it's their own fault", which is technically true, but this is out of that force of complacency rather than actual political drive. The median voter is largely apolitical, their opinions are minimal and easily swayed, and they find it difficult to imagine a world much different from the one they live in. They have become so used to substandard conditions that they see them as inevitable. This is why they endure the unreliable public services and loss of social trust. Middle class urbanites are aware that the bus will probably be late, used to the feeling of being prepared to avoid the bellicose drug addict who will probably be outside, and familiar with the poor conditions they are sure to find in public spaces. Of course they would like for these problems to improve, but they are resigned to the fact that they won't. In the public consciousness it is not even due to the rule of the activists that these issues exist; the public have been convinced that these are simply inherent parts of living in the city, one everyone is powerless to do anything about. Not only this, but because the ideology of social justice has trickled down to a large proportion of the "intellectuals" and academics in the general populace, speaking openly about opposition to any of these situations often causes hostility from some activist who hears you, in the form of public shaming for acting "right-wing" or in some other way blaspheming against the activist society. The low level of social trust pushes the "choose your battles" mentality to the absolute extreme so that even in situations where the people clearly do have power, like removing an aggressive person from a public space, the fear of being either socially ostracized or met with violence stops many people from taking action. I have personally seen on many occasions buses go off route and the great majority of passengers choosing just to keep sitting there looking concerned instead of speaking up about it, as if the driver is some ethereal figure who cannot be communicated with. The massive shared (and not unfounded) belief if that if you speak up, nobody else will take your side creates a demoralized, meek populace who accept the decay to avoid becoming an "other".
So what can be done about this? The first thing that needs to be done to liberate the cities from their self-loathing ways is by spreading awareness that there are other options. Examples of currently thriving cities can be pulled from across the globe, such as Tokyo and Zurich, but the most topical thing to show an American would be an American city, and the best American cities all belong now to history. Show the average American urbanite photos of their own city from 60 or 70 years ago, and they will almost always be amazed by how much visibly better it looks than it does in the present day. The attached example is of North Philadelphia, but similar comparisons are available online for every other large US city.
Once people realize that things CAN be better, disorder and decay in cities is NOT inevitable, then the next step is to expose to the general consciousness the policies that drove the cities to the state they are now in. This is more difficult, because the educational and media propaganda that exists to support the rule of the activists has been very effective. Many people, even nominally "apolitical" ones, are totally closed off to the notion of ever going against any of the pillars of activist thought, so the idea of removing drug addicts from the streets or preserving cultural homogeneity is very hard for them to internalize. It would take a long campaign of working within the educational and popular/news media systems to introduce the ideas inside the cities (since they are already pretty popular in rural areas), and framing them in a way that doesn't make them look like a "right-wing" ideology (since this will trigger an immediate rejection by liberal viewers). This would probably be a multi-generational process, but it is already beginning online with plenty of intelligent voices spreading their ideas to particularly young men in urban areas. Now is not the time for gate-keeping- as much as many "intellectuals" seem to want to. This is the time for spreading a message of hope to anyone still willing to listen, so that the cities of America can once again be the greatest on the planet. e in one of these classes as a kid). Ultimately though, Malcolm in the Middle is a comedy and is not taken as a serious representation of this problem by most viewers. Until there is wide exposure of the true nature of special ed in a more "serious" light, people who go through this system will continue to have their futures ruined by the conditions they endure as a young child.