The infantization of American Culture is now pervasive.
Here’s what infants and juveniles do. They license themselves to believe anything they find appealing at any moment for any reason while untethering themselves from any observable fact they find momentarily inconvenient or distasteful.
Early childhood is Fantasy Land, and there actually is significant societal benefit from that cultural swaddling, both for children and their parents. We want to protect our children. We want them to feel secure. We crave their smiles. We make sacrifices to spark those smiles.
One of the things we sacrifice is the truth. About all kinds of things. And it’s usually a loving, benign, and occasionally even noble sacrifice that seems to be hard-wired into parental brains and hearts. Anything for our kids…
“But when I became a man I put away childish things.” The same for women, of course.
Mature adults usher their children into adulthood. Adulthood can rationally be defined as transition into a willingness to relegate childhood Fantasy Land to the basement and embrace a factual universe, however unpalatable.
But because American adults have refused to be adults, our nation is now mired in a state of Extended Childhood.
So now we have folks who can view dozens of hours of video of what can only be labeled an armed insurrection at our Capitol, but then deny it ever happened. “You didn’t see that. You only thought you saw it.”
You didn’t like the results of that election? OK, then feel free to reject them and attempt to overturn them.
You don’t like representative democracy? Then feel free to try to overthrow it, while denying your intentions.
You can observe a growing percentage of the Earth’s surface become uninhabitable and deny its clearly established cause.
And then there’s this one. “Guns don’t kill people…”
We have pulled our collective blankie over our tiny heads.
I began this post by calling our National Infantization “pervasive.”
No?
Millions of Americans can watch the Bengals’ Joseph Ossai hit Patrick Mahomes three yards out of bounds and deny it, even after they see video and stills that leave no doubt. Even after exactly nobody on the Bengals disputes it. Why? Because they simply didn’t like the result.
Two weeks later, Eagles DB James Bradberry admits that he illegally grabbed Chiefs receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster—a a fact once again verified by video evidence—and about half of the 113 million Americans who watched Super Bowl LVII either deny that it happened, or dishonestly dismiss its impact, or even suggest that the entire game was somehow “rigged,” simply because they didn’t get a cookie.
You didn’t see what you saw. You only think you saw what you saw.
Pervasive.
This is pretty much why we started Radically Rational. And it’s why we will persist.
