The author had quite the opposite conclusion:
> The Great Regression isn’t really a regression at all. It’s a sign of resilience in the face of profound adversity.
Just as I was fading a few paragraphs in, one of the straw men (IMHO) thrown out caught my eye.
How had I not heard of Alexis de Tocqueville's 1835 critique, Democracy in America?
If you want to wrestle with someone making a much better form of the argument you (understandably) thought was in the article, check it out: https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/ch4_06.htm
Honestly, you and Tocqueville are saying something very similar at the core. A polite society has a known exploit: not behaving politely. The exploit is used by those seeking to amass power and influence.
The result, he posits:
> It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
"The seemingly extreme ways in which adults now play, from Zillennial runway models dressing like kindergarteners, to ‘cuddle parties’, to grownups who choose to marry at Disney resorts – all of it, and more to come – is a reaction to the extreme times in which we find ourselves living. The entire planet may be experiencing its own lost decades now – young and old are suffering. But, as the Japanese experience shows us, embracing our inner child isn’t necessarily a denial of reality. It can pave the way to an entirely new one. The Great Regression isn’t really a regression at all. It’s a sign of resilience in the face of profound adversity. When a child is born, it’s impossible to predict what they might become. Who can say what will emerge from our second childhoods?"
Just try to ignore the social pretences of the group. All three beverage communities have their extremists who can be quite annoying. But on the other end of the spectrum you’ll find some warm, down-to-earth people who just want to have fun exploring different flavours and textures. That’s really all there is to it!
If you can't man up and drink something gross without grimacing, or have the self control to play the most frustrating game in history, you don't have the self-mastery to be near the lever of power.
For example:
> By framing the embrace of childish sensibilities purely as a moral failing, and lumping all forms of it together, critics like Sasse and Andersen miss two important points. One is that there is a nourishing form of regression that harnesses the playfulness, creativity and diversity of childhood, but there is also a destructive form that manifests as blind rage. Both forms of regression are fuelled by a certain disappointment with society. Both crave the creation of something new. But one delights in transgressing boundaries through play, while the other polices boundaries through hate and violence.
I feel the same, but, this is one of those all or nothing things, and the irony is that our own barbaric origins are holding us back from ‘evolving’ so to speak.
We have armies and nuclear armaments because, when it boils down; our species is full of agitated hungry animals, liars and cheats.
You’d need to organize a whole species around a single-world order if you ever wanted to stop wars and denuclearize.
Unipolarity isn't the only solution but it's the most apparent one, and also the most terrifyingly totalitarian one.
1) Someone demonstrates a bigger stick. At this point a bigger stick is effective counter-nukes, or perhaps the presence of an alien civilization.
2) What you call unipolarity, although I think both are unipolarity. Mass behavioral transcendence towards a higher form of morality. Maybe achieved via BCI, or improving standard of living, or subtle coercions by AI, or looming threat of climate change prompting transformative cooperative efforts.
The latter was omitted for brevity, due to its unlikelihood. Of course it’s not binary, there’s a bit of each in the other.
There will come a time when taking from others because of the unwillingness to be a creative member of society is seen as a curable mental illness.
That is basically the opposite of what it said.
I mean, the ability to go to war, together with being a father, has always been considered as the maximum level of adulthood for men, as far as I understand.
And to be clear, I’m not even say that latest generations are “less adult”, ie “less aggressive”, because they are somehow “better”.
In my view, this is a direct consequence of the fact that in the current society, aggressiveness is simply a less effective strategy, on average.
Civilization is too complex now, and there are simply too many people around, for aggressive war-like behaviour to be succesful. Even the most hypercompetitive youth today, say in startups or such, are usually extremely diplomatic persons, that are able to navigate people.
“We are all children” because there is simply no more room to be aggressive!
> But as the legendary Midcentury Modern designer Charles Eames put it, ‘toys and games are the preludes to serious ideas.’ Grownups who play with Lego, dump fortunes into JPEGs of cartoon characters online or dress like overgrown toddlers force us to question long-held assumptions about adulthood and society as a whole.
What the article does challenge successfully is whether the negative connotations are merited. i.e., childish.
And it uses a real life example to argue that it’s not merited at the big picture level.
I don't have strong evidence for this, but I always feel like this is true until you get right to the very top - the individuals and organisations that are considered leaders in their fields. The difference between those people/organisations and the rest is often exactly that they are supportive, collaborative and doing things for the right reasons relative to the big picture rather than their local political context.
It's harder to succeed if you don't engage with the "playground tactics", but those who do are the ones pushing society forwards.
And in many cases, some of them are holding us back.
But your point still stands and I'm gonna think on it in coming weeks.
It also seems it missed a big part (unless they talk about it later). Sure, some people might be doing stuff because of hardships and responsibilities (like living at home to save money). But I think there are also those who were not given responsibilities as a child and don't know how to be responsible and act like an adult now that they are one. I think the delays are even evident in our laws (age of many things continues to increase).
This depends on the public pressure to do so I believe. As a counterexample one could name German ex-chancellor Angela Merkel. You can hardly name any decisions she carries full responsibility for, her role was mostly to mediate finding a compromise between interests of different parties.
It isn't very hard though to find plenty of people acting out those behaviors, both in their own behavior and in the perception/description of the behavior of their in-group members. Adults in 2022 can be conceptualized as being a lot like children "playing house", except we lack a physical frame of reference representing superior competence and wisdom to humble us, as adults provide for children.
Does tweeting funny memes or light trolling make you child? If yes, is that not negated by raising multiple children, founding multiple businesses, and employing hundreds of people?
I’m confused how that’s fundamentally different than cosplay at a convention.
Don't we do that all the time?
Over time, I’ve come to see many “senior” or “success” behaviours as refined versions of childhood ones. Political sniping, business competitiveness, standard hierarchical power dynamics, etc. These are all “playground tactics” but grown up. I don’t see (many) “successful” or “leader” type people publicly engaging in so called “adult behaviours” - supporting, sharing, collaborating, taking time out to understand one another’s needs, looking for win-wins.
Of course, many adults do all these things. However, the higher up the power/success ladder you look, the harder these behaviours are to see. In a lot of situations, many people feel they need to win, or at best draw. Few enjoy losing, and the more they have riding on it (money, reputation, power), the more most people will aim to win. At the level of nations (or gangs), this gets deadly. The ways to win are just the same ways kids explore. The people most likely to win are the ones who lean hardest into those tactics.
So, I’m saying “we’re all children”. If you want to complain about adults playing games and wearing bright colours, you also need to complain about adults using armies to take resources and businesses blocking others out of markets.