The Infantilization of the American Mind

How the Failure to Grow Up Can Endanger a Nation

My father was a lawyer and he always used to say, “Speak to the smartest person on the jury.” Over my 38-year career as a professional speaker, I’ve learned the difference it makes with an audience when you assume they can handle a mature conversation. So many adults are used to being spoken to like they’re twelve years old, that they’ve acclimated themselves mentally to processing information as though they were.

And thus we are where we are.

Political and media consultants have created and also perpetuated the problem, counseling their clients that the best chance of getting the vote, or making the sale, lies in talking to the perennial adolescent within us all. Serious and complicated subjects are ground up into baby food of the mind as though that’s all we’re capable of digesting. Dumbing it down is a sales pitch to unsuspecting consumers of bad information. No better way to control a population than to make us forget who we are.

But I’ve seen that change in an instant, and there’s a chance that it can change en masse. Having worked with many people diagnosed with life-challenging illnesses, I’ve seen what happens when someone is first told that they, or someone close to them, has a critical disease. It’s as though in the first five minutes, layers of ultimately meaningless considerations that were accumulated over years begin to drop away. All of a sudden someone who hadn’t done that much serious thinking for a decade or so is asking the most intelligent questions about chemotherapy, radiation, stem cell therapy, and diagnostic statistics. It’s as though people forget to be smart and noble, and then we remember. We’re trained to think junk thoughts the way we’re trained to eat junk food, and we become accustomed to it. Something has to happen to jolt us out of our infantilized state. Something has to happen to remind us to grow up.

In some cultures, and in some generations, that is the purpose of the coming-of-age ceremony: the ritualistic marking of the transition from immaturity to maturity. From thinking of oneself as a boy to thinking of oneself as a man; from thinking of oneself as a girl to thinking of oneself as a woman. Too many adult Americans never made that transition, leaving us collectively ill prepared to face the seriously adult problems in our midst today.

Joanne Clancy

The reason I have hope is because I’ve seen how individuals, when confronted by serious problems, often awaken from their stupor. And I think people are awakening now. Things have gone too far. It’s not just racial injustice. It’s not just the climate crisis. It’s not just toxins in our food and water. It’s not just health care or economic hardship. It’s not just Afghanistan. It’s not just the Proud Boys. It’s not just covid. It’s everything. And people know it.

It would be one thing if we had confidence that the established powers that be were capable of handling those problems. But things are too far gone for us to think that now. We realize how often and in how many ways the established powers that be created those problems. Once you realize Mommy and Daddy are both off their rockers, you’re motivated to grow up fast.

And that’s what’s happening today. Humanity is going to either start dropping dead like flies, or we’re going to start sprouting wings like butterflies. We’re going to either start dumbing ourselves down even further, or we’re going to discover the wild and extraordinary levels of consciousness and intelligence that lie within us all. It’s a choice that only we can make for ourselves.

What’s happening now is our collective coming of age, our collective initiation, our collective invitation to sober, mature, and meaningful analysis of the world as it is now. The world is in crisis, and we know it. It will be saved, if it is to be saved, not by any of the institutional sources of power that we’re accustomed to looking to for guidance and strength. It will be saved because something happens within us. The zeitgeist shifts. The mind awakens. The personality matures. The people get real.

The ultimately meaningless falls away, and we remember who we are.