My apologies for calling many Americans “wussies” on Twitter the other day. I was Omicron-delirious. I should have called them babies instead. I mean that, however, merely as a descriptive term, not as an ad hominem attack. America’s adult-age babies are victims of governments, especially the national one, which have been working hard for decades to infantilize the citizenry. As explained below, their efforts clearly are paying off.
Reversing Americans’ infantilization will not be easy, but biological adults will have to grow up emotionally and intellectually before they can become truly free.
What do I mean by infantilization? Infants have unique attributes now shared widely among the working age adult population. (In other words, this is not a rehash of the well-worn diapers-to-diapers life cycle observation that the aged begin to resemble babies.) Eleven major similarities between babies and (too) many working age Americans spring to mind.
Babies, real ones and adult-aged ones:
defecate in public. Have you heard about the street poo in San Francisco, New York, and other cities in California and elsewhere? Most is adult-age baby feces, not diaper detritus.
throw temper tantrums for no apparent reason. Have you seen that video of a woman screaming maniacally for no reason? I am kidding, there are dozens of them, including this one at a gas pump, and this one at a Victoria’s Secret. Maybe some of the perps are on drugs but the ones who curl up in the fetal position and cry really make the baby angle pop.
lash out in anger over nothing. There are lots of those videos, too, but the recent one of a maskless semi-famous celebrity berating and then slapping an old man for not wearing his mask while eating on an airplane is perhaps the most recent of the ugly genre.
beg for food and other stuff. If baby gets hungry, cold, or tired, baby cries, which is its way of asking for help. If adult baby gets hungry, cold, or tied, adult baby goes on Twitter and begs for help from Uncle Sam, or a paternalistic local government. [Error! References too numerous to link.]
cannot be told the truth. Parents tell their babies all kinds of sweet lies. Everything will be okay. Some fat dude is going to give you stuff. Some rabbit is going to give you stuff. Adult babies prefer putrid lies. Nothing is right with the Constitution. The world will end soon unless everyone submits and suffers. The country is tainted by slavery. Some people are “white” and they are privileged and yet fragile.
are easy to abuse. Despite several articles by AIER writers detailing abusive government policies, most Americans continued to allow it to happen, with only a few stirrings of protest, mostly at the polls in Virginia and southern New Jersey in November.
wear diapers. Babies wear them on their bottoms and adult babies on their chins, leading to the environmental crisis exposed in this photo essay.
have untrustworthy immune systems. We love our babies so we start working on their immune systems right off, with momma’s milk. Unfortunately, scientists and public health officials tricked some mothers into believing that manufactured “formula” is better when in fact it leads to diabetes and allergies. Most of us also get our precious little ones vaccinated, after the shots have been thoroughly tested for years, of course. Adults have long been left to decide for themselves if they want annual flu shots or the shingles vaccine. But adult babies cannot be trusted to take their medicine and their immune systems cannot possibly handle SARS-CoV-2, so everybody has to get as many experimental vaccine shots as possible as soon as possible, possibly forever, which may not be that long.
like to play peekaboo. If you ever want to see a real baby laugh – and who doesn’t? – cover your face with your hands while saying peekaboo and then open them quickly while saying the magic phrase, “I see you.” They will bust out laughing as they learn object permanence. Adult babies like to play peekaboo policies. They get infatuated with some silly policy idea, like DC statehood, then forget about its inanity once it leaves the news cycle, only to express baby-like delight at its eventual reemergence.
are easily distracted by shiny objects. If you want to distract a baby, jingle some keys nearby and it will soon be fixated, even as its screaming mother is carted off to jail. America’s adult babies are also easily distracted. In fact, crazy Covid policies may have simply been a big set of shiny keys meant to distract Americans from The Great Reset (which is a thing!). It has certainly muted public discourse over the problems with the 5G rollout, which some claim will exacerbate recent air travel disruptions by interfering with aviation safety systems. The BBC and the WSJ reported on it before Christmas, when Fauci the Grinch was still stealing headlines. Boeing and Airbus warned Mayor Pete that the 5G rollout on 5 January could have “an enormous negative impact on the aviation industry,” including passenger safety. Most Americans talk about Covid passports for air travel while airline executives hint that planes could fall from the sky. Jingle, jingle!
cannot think rationally. For all their cuteness, babies are a total mess upstairs. They can’t even walk or talk right. Adult babies are not quite that bad but many fall short of achieving what educational psychologist Jean Piaget called the “formal operational stage” of cognitive development. Most people do not achieve that stage until early adolescence at the youngest. More to the point here, most people achieve it in only one area of specialization and these days many never get there at all. Even many college students do poorly on formal operations assessment tests. These days, many public pronouncements sound crazy because they are essentially irrational as the thought processes leading to them do not follow the fundamental rules of logic but rather are riddled with logical fallacies. Goo goo, gah gah, photo id is racist/transphobic etc. in voting but just fine for vaccine passports.
I could go on, but think you get the point given the way the phrase “adults in the room” has been used in the mass media over the last few years.
The important question is: how can Americans learn to grow up, into adulthood and, ultimately, freedom? Unfortunately, there is no magical red pill. All we have are incentives. Americans need to grow up, emotionally and intellectually, before they wake up one morning in a paternalist, centrally-planned hellhole.
A collective action problem, however, means that liberty loving adults have to do more than educate their fellow Americans about the horrors of paternalism and statism. It is costly to become an adult. Imagine the internal dialogue of an adult baby: “Why should I work hard to grow up and live free if that allows others to live free, as free as an adult baby can live anyway, without bearing any of the cost? Worse yet, what if I bear the costs of growing up but too few others do as well to save the country from authoritarian subjugation, be it under the Left or the Right? If I stay an adult baby sheeple, I might barely notice the change as I just follow orders anyway. And once you go adult, Jack, there is no going back. Adult pacifier, please!”
Here is a way out of that collective action problem. Being a free, rational adult in a land of adult babies is really, really cool once you come to see it in the right way. It’s like the saying about the one-eyed guy being the king of the land of the blind. You shouldn’t take their candy any more than you should steal some from a real baby. But you can ethically have fun with them. Make them laugh. (With your words or actions but don’t try tickling their feet or motorboarding their bellies, without permission anyway.) Induce them to donate to a cause that is the exact opposite of what they purport to believe, like I did one lucrative summer thirty years ago. Shame them into reading a real book. And note that it is legal to have sex with adult babies, again with what passes for their consent.
As more Americans decide to become actual adults to share in this booty, or at least avoid being taken advantage of, the marginal gain from adulthood will decrease. But so too will the risk that real adults will not be numerous enough to control public policy. So as the individual incentive declines, so too does the collective action problem.
Moreover, it is always better to be a free adult than an adult baby, which is better than being a slave in only one way. It remains in the power of the adult baby, at least for now, to break loose their swaddling blankets, rid themselves of chin diaper rash, save their adult pacifiers for special occasions, and develop policy permanence and formal operational thought.
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