June 5, 2026
When you look at many of the social reform 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, all coming 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, later evolving into a massive industry and diversifying into options made for a wide range of different groups, with some targeted towards newborns and others targeted for ages up to the late teens. There is nothing wrong with children's media existing in principle, though it is unnecessary since the "moralizing" purpose can be taught naturally just through experience and children can be entertained just as well by movies and TV made for general audiences. Where the problem lies is 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 like YouTube Kids). 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 things that 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, learning to use public transit and navigate the streets. There is no particular reason to do this except to pass the time, and I believe there is a natural exploring spirit in people, at least certainly in men, that makes it instinct to seek out that which is not already known and make it familiar. The city encourages this with its range of options and experiences that can be had, and even random encounters with some unexpected event or occurrence. I am not speaking about crime and dysfunction, which are not natural elements of the city, though these can still often be formative learning experiences and I am sure just about everyone who grew up in the city in modern America has had something of the sort. However, even if safer, a place like the suburbs, 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 people whose idea of paradise is a land where every day is the same, there is nothing new to see, no place to explore. Even if a young person decides to make of this space what he can, he will be under constant surveillance by overbearing police eager to dish out punishment to the teenager, who he sees as simultaneously a ravenous beast always looking to cause havoc and as a total retard who is incapable of taking care of himself. 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 "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 legislate it, 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 even be in favor of the legislation while still spending as much time as they can until it passes on social media. 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, leaving them 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, and this is not only because they "worked in factories" or whatever the popular explanation is, 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 taught information that is 90% unnecessary, 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 it is what causes it to be so widespread- it explains both the actions of the suburban security 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.) 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? That exploring spirit I talked about 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 start to resemble each other more, 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 you lose out on less by withdrawing into your shell than you ever would have before. 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 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 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 permanently children. Nobody under 40 is happy about the conditions we are living in in the West, but much like a young child 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 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 movement is the origin point of many of the modern era's worst ideas, such as catch-and-release policing, high minimum wages for gig workers, 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 man who will probably be acting aggressively outside, and familiar with the poor conditions public spaces are likely to be in. 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 confused 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-imposed suicide is 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.
January 24, 2026
Lately the documentary clip of the lone penguin walking towards the mountains has consumed the Internet at a ridiculous speed. It seems like a big part of its popularity comes from the debate over why the penguin is doing this, and what part of the human experience it can be applied to. Ignoring the biological questions that come from judging the actions of a penguin by human thought processes, there is an interesting fact that a person's views on the penguin video can tell you a lot about their political and philosophical beliefs. Many people see The Penguin as "depressed" or "nihilist", and find it relatable as a response to a purposeless existence: it is "giving up", withdrawing from its life, leaving food, the colony, and everything it knows to walk off towards nothing, certain to face a death spent cold, hungry, and alone. This view seems most common on Reddit and parts of Tiktok, platforms that tend to lean left. Some quotes I found that reflect this view:
"You could describe it as the penguin "going insane" but people just call it "depressed penguin" which probably mirrors us more than anything, the want to just walk into the horizon and disappear"
"This penguin is a metaphor for modern human consumerist civilisation - heading in the wrong direction and its inevitable demise is the only conclusion. If there are aliens observing us, they might come to the same conclusion about us and we do about the penguin."
"I always saw it as an extremely sad thing he is literally isolating himself from his friends and family and is leaving his home into what that penguin has to know is certainly death he's not going on a fun little adventure he's going to starve to death in the middle of nowhere isolated from his family."
The other major interpretation I've seen of The Penguin is that its actions are admirable: it represents a desire to control one's own destiny and set off to do something great, even though there are risks and it's unknown what lies ahead. This view is more common on more right-wing parts of Twitter, often associated with the Friedrich Nietschze quote, "I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible". It has even been shared by several government accounts, including the White House. Here are some of the posts I found with this interpretation:"
"Reddit doesn't understand that the penguin represents everything they're not. They're content to just exist, happy in their hedonistic materialism. Grind, eat, sleep, wake up, and repeat. The penguin wants more. It wants to know what's out there. The dangers don't matter because the question is before it and it demands an answer. Is there more to life, to existing, than the comforting routine?"
"The Penguin represents the inner spirit of the adventurer, the one who plots his own course in the face of overwhelming adversity."
And this overly pompous and intellectual one: "Reflecting further on this: To reduce the solitary penguin to a meme of "depression" or "nihilistic surrender" requires a truly pedestrian intellect. It is a diagnosis that betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Will to Power.
The colony represents the Last Man: content, loud, driven only by the banal biological imperatives of breeding and feeding, trapped in the safety of the herd. To remain there is the true death. The "deranged" penguin is not fleeing life. He is rejecting the aesthetic stagnation of mere survival.
By turning his back on the ocean and marching toward the mountains, a landscape of pure indifference and certain mortality. He is not committing suicide. He is engaging in the ultimate act of self-overcoming. He is asserting his agency against the tyranny of instinct. He creates his own meaning in a void that offers none.
hat march is not an error. It is Amor Fati. It is the rejection of the biological script in favor of a destiny that is beautiful precisely because it is futile. He does not march to die. He marches to become the Übermensch, leaving the flightless masses to their meaningless noise while he stares into the abyss and laughs. To pity him is to admit you are incapable of understanding greatness."
The common aspect between both of these interpretations is that it is reacting to a life without purpose. The "left-wing" analysis is obviously not a very healthy way of looking at it. The "right-wing" analysis is more positive, but it is still conceding that the basic existence in society is purposeless, and The Penguin is making its own purpose. None of these posts urge the reader to do a specific thing, other than (in the words of the White House account post) "Embrace The Penguin". What that would actually entail is up to the reader's own interpretation. You can see it as a call to do things even when they are hard, or not to do what everyone else does just because everyone else is doing it, and set off to achieve something great, but the most literal way of looking at it would be to do something great, as your FINAL act. In this definition, to live a great life is to go out on your own terms and die with dignity, the way of Chris McCandless or Richard Russell. This would involve abandoning society the way The Penguin does and going "into the wild", to do something that hasn't been done before.
If this is the intended interpretation from all these posts, then that paints a pretty bleak picture of the current right-wing mindset. Certainly, many folk heroes of the online right led lives that could be explained this way, like Terry Davis and the previously mentioned Richard Russell. To Davis and Russell, what they chose to do was not that "hard", other than making the hard choice to choose that path. In fact, for people who decide to live antisocial lives, the thing that is "hard" is continuing to live within society. It's hard to move up in the world, it's hard to meet people you like, and to make connections with those people, even if billions have done it before and billions are doing it now there is some special circumstance for you specifically that makes it an impossible task. In a sense this is just another form of "giving up", since you are giving up on a critical part of being human, the part that needs social interaction because humans are social creatures. The first post I quoted for the rightist analysis dismisses the normal life as nothing more than eating, sleeping, and working, the only pleasures that can come from this life are hedonistic. Anyone who can find any comfort in this life just doesn't get it. I certainly understand this perspective, since I often feel that way, but obviously some people are happy with their lives in society, normally people who have friends or family, or any sense of community at all. The opportunities to build community have been taken away over time, and you could convincingly argue that it is now harder to make one than ever before. If you say "it's over, they made it impossible" and walk into the mountains, is that not giving up? If you are active on Twitter you might have seen this post: https://x.com/Nimbopill/status/2008298537214472239
To make a Nietschzean comparison the way that annoying gay tweet did, the Zyzz mindset from around 2010 represents the will to power, the drive to overcome obstacles and achieve greatness. The Clav mindset of 2026 is accepting defeat, you'll never move past where you're at right now so no point in trying, and this manifests as looking like the will to power because it enables you to do whatever pointless thing you feel like without regard to how others perceive it, since it won't get any better anyway. You can look at The Penguin in either of these ways, either setting off to become something more than itself or trudging pointlessly toward the end of the road, but either way it has died. For an entire ideology to have this goal is to guarantee its extinction: If everyone on your side has left society and died, who will be left to spread your message?
January 18, 2026
A fundamental difference that can be drawn in the mindset of every person on Earth is their relationship with the area outside their home, and with "outside" in general. Knowing a person's mental concept of "outside" tells you a lot about how they operate in general. I have found that everyone I meet can be divided into categories I call "outside" and "inside" people.
In outside peoples' minds, they exist in a location relative to everything around them, and so they have a "mental map" that includes their home, their general surroundings, everything they know of, and they take this all into account when thinking of things they can do. Outside people are always looking to expand this mental map and better understand their surroundings- this is known to be a practical skill for a taxi driver but is also common for anyone who wants to take an interest in their town, city, or community.
On the other hand, inside people think of the outside only in terms of special activities (hiking, skiing, vacation, etc) and see little value in building their knowledge of their own area. When they go out, it is always to specific preset locations, they never leave their home just for the sake of leaving their home. A subset of inside people hardly leave their home for any reason at all- it has become increasingly easy to be this kind of person with the invention of computers, package and food delivery services, and voice/video calling- some people even prefer voice and video calling over physically meeting with people. Below I have attached my representation how an inside person visializes the world around them: they have no understanding and do not care to understand how thinfs connect together or what "unimportant" things are around them, areas they go to are bubbles in a sea of irrelevant space.
This distinction probably comes from childhood, in my experience people who spent their childhood living in undesirable houses either due to disliking the house or the people inside would take any chance they could get to get out of it, and as a child you can do little else outside on your own than aimlessly wander in the streets. This shows up as saying "meet me at the gas station" when meeting with friends rather than "at my house". Those who didn't have this issue during their childhood and were content to stay inside all day were unlikely to develop the habit later on. I have not found a way to convincingly explain the deeper value of being familiar with your own area (beyond "you won't get lost as much") to people who haven't valued it their whole life, so it is probably a fundamental value, one where if you don't get it, you just don't get it.
So, why does this matter? The difference in mindset between the inside and outside person indicates a difference between the person who has a drive to take new and unfamiliar things and make them familiar. People who don't have an interest in traveling are often criticized for ignorance and being uninterested in seeing new things or having new experiences, but when traveling you don't typically become familiar with the places you visit, you just get the basic idea of a small piece of them. My explanation for the issue with the "inside" person's mindset is that in the same way how someone who travels gets only the surface level experience of a place, an inside person only cares to get the surface level of other concepts. Often the same people have their opinions shaped just by being told how to believe, and does not care to look into details and truly understand why they feel that way. The drive to gain knowledge is the natural instinct of humanity, and to be indifferent to gaining knowledge about something like your own surroundings is sort of an antisocial trait that signifies indifference to many other aspects of life.
January 14, 2026
For six years during my childhood I was placed into "special" classes, which I was assigned to after being repeatedly given detentions and suspensions during kindergarten-3rd grade. In 3rd grade I was sent to a psychiatrist who determined that I had special needs (and about half a dozen mental diagnoses) and could not succeed in general education. I believe that being put into these classes has majorly stunted my development of social skills, and also stunted the development of every other child who was dragged through the special education system. Many people have a general understanding that the special education system is a broadly negative thing, but I don't think that they comprehend the full scale of its effects on the minds of children who go through it. It's not surprising that former special ed students have worse outcomes both financially and socially than the average person, and while it's easy to blame this on their mental conditions, I think these can be overcome in the right conditions. Conditions in special education classes are the opposite of the right conditions.
Some say that special ed is a "necessary evil", that although the conditions are not ideal they are needed to encourage the development of mentally disordered students. Instead, these classes almost always completely ruin their development, and this can be explained due to a simple fact: special education exists for the single reason of separating the students who have some perceived learning problem from the "normals". The administration doesn't care what happens after these students are separated, they only care that they are separated - after this they are out of sight, out of mind. After being condemned to the special education program, you will grow up in an environment comparable to a county jail. The easiest part of this comparison to make is the overwhelming culture of paranoia and violence that rules in both places. The special ed "teachers", who tend to be glorified babysitters, are fully unequipped to deal with violent outbursts from the normal unstable individuals (no wonder the profession has such a high turnover rate), so it is common for a security guard to be posted in or near the rooms on call to stop these when they happen. This is of course not a desirable job, so these guards often become spiteful and hostile towards all the students. When all people ranging between those whose issues are nothing more than having trouble sitting still are grouped in with unstable, aggressive sociopaths, and both are treated with the same amount of contempt, the ones who are closer to normal will always feel alienated and start drifting more towards antisocial behavior. The culture of violence comes then, from these now anxious and hurt young people being constantly placed in self defense situations by the nature of the class, and so they grow to expect it at all times. This is an extremely low trust environment.
A more obvious source of social stunting is the lack of "normal" people to interact with. Grade school is the most formative period in a person's life, and especially elementary school mainly has the function of teaching kids to socialize. If your pool of people to socialize with during this period includes no "normal" people, how can you expected to socialize normally later in life? Once again, it's easy to say that this chance of normal socialization was low anyway because of the pre existing mental disorders, but many students in special education are fairly smart and act fairly normal when they are first placed into the system, and their behavior only becomes more antisocial after being enrolled in the classes. One example I have personally seen is a girl who was brought into the special ed class during middle school who probably had mild ADHD, but no other noticeable problems. She acted sort of stuck up during the first week or so, she clearly was very unhappy to be put in this class, and was probably coming from an upper middle class family who (like so many other families) turned to the psychiatrists and treated their word like the word of God, and were convinced into medicating their child and sending her to a class that would help her "develop" better. After a short time exposed to the conditions of the class, the belittling teacher, the violent outbursts, the infantilizing atmosphere, etc she withdrew more and more, and by the end of the year she acted nearly catatonic and spent all her time in the class sitting perfectly straight in her seat, not making a sound, not turning to look at anyone. Also in this class were people was a boy with a habit of throwing chairs, another one who often threatened to shoot up the school, another who would do nothing but sit with his head down and vibrate while making growling noises, among other exciting characters, and the 300 pound security guard who was always ready to take any one of us down at a moment's notice.
My assessment of the special education system is coming mainly from my own personal experiences, but I have spoken to other people from all over the nation and the world who have experienced similar environments in their own versions of special ed. If this is such a widespread occurence, then why is there so little awareness of it in the general public? Most people's perceptions of a thing they have not seen with their own eyes comes from media they have consumed about it. A classic example is how the meatpacking industry had to fully reform after people read about slaughterhouses in the Upton Sinclair book "The Jungle". Special education is not often portrayed in popular media, so there is no cohesive understanding of it for the general public. The most accurate representation of special education I've seen in media is in the show Malcolm in the Middle, where the character Dewey is subjected to a class of emotionally disturbed students, who are given no opportunities to do anything except to be kept busy with pointless work from an oppressive, infantilizing teacher. You can read the plot of the first episode regarding this class here. I find this funny because Malcolm in the Middle is supposed to have an exaggeratedly cynical view of the world, and yet this representation was very accurate (it makes me wonder if one of the writers spent time 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.