In search of the last adult human being

Ponce de León was not looking for the legendary fountain of youth when he made landfall in Florida in 1513. Gold and slaves were his primary concern—and he found plenty of both. But legend was right to situate the mythical fountain in the New World, the future global wellspring of corporate-crafted youth culture. And five hundred years after de León, New World technological innovation has pushed the envelope to the genetic limit and beyond in terms of extending the lifespan of an elite minority, some of whom are no doubt the distant heirs of conquistadores, with winter homes in Florida.  

Of course merely to live forever has never been the point of the fountain of youth. Merely to live forever, to continue to exist, is to become old beyond all reckoning. Such a fate would be a curse not wished upon your worst enemy. The mythic appeal of the fountain of youth is not the conquest of death, but the conquering of the aging process itself, the promise of eternal youth. The reward for consuming the potent water is to be permanently transported to that imagined state of youthful perfection at the very fulcrum of maturation just before the degrading erosions of time take hold. It is in this, not in the evasion of death but in the eternal paralysis of aging, where the technological fount of modern civilization has been most successful.

Sure, we have several methods for maintaining youthful vigor and extending a more youthful appearance well into what was once considered to be old age—some more effective than others (diet and exercise programs, hair dyes and implants, plastic surgery, Botox, Viagra, joint replacement, etc.).  But that’s not what I’m referring to here when I claim that civilization has succeeded in paralyzing the aging process. A more youthful appearance and participating in activities traditionally associated with youth are just the superficial trappings of youth. Where the technology of modern civilization has delivered on the fountain’s promise is in preventing people from actually becoming adults in the first place: forced dependence on mass technology prevents the development of adult patterns of social, emotional, and psychological maturity.

Maturity can be defined simply as an increase in the capacity for self-regulation. A newborn has virtually no capacity to self-regulate. An infant can’t stifle a cry or keep itself awake, and its emotional state is entirely a function of internal and external environmental conditions. A toddler can direct its body in the pursuit of its own goals, but is unable to override the dictates of its emotional state, and has extreme difficulty redirecting its behavior or disengaging from a particular activity once begun. It is only with looming puberty that the child gains some proficiency at severing behavior from the dictates of its immediate emotional state. Over time, we see a proliferation, expansion and extension of the behaviors, domains, and venues in which the child is able to exercise a modicum of self-control. Maturity in this sense is parallel with autonomy: a mature person is one who has the capacity to engage in independent thought and self-regulated behavior.

The machine of civilization functions by tightly restricting and directing (and redirecting) the behavior of its human components. Independent thought and self-regulated behavior do not merely run counter to the efficient operation of the physical and bureaucratic systems of mass “society,” they pose a direct and potentially catastrophic threat to these systems’ continued existence.

Modern global mass society—through the development and increasingly irresistible implementation of uncountable psychological, social, physical, and bureaucratic technologies designed to increase compliance and inhibit self-regulation—has managed to engender a more or less static state of immaturity among its “adult” participants.

Ours is a society of chronically immature children.

Fracking is environmentally friendly

The year 1984 was three and a half decades in the future When George Orwell published his famous dystopian novel. When 1984 arrived, I was a brand new father and recently unemployed—an early victim of Ronald Regan’s “trickle-down” economics. George Orwell and Ronald Regan both understood that the critical feature of social engineering was language.  The story is everything. 

Orwell’s “Newspeak” was a way of reframing the storyline to fit reality.  If the story tells you that peace is a valued “good” but you have a culture that requires perpetual war in order to function, the simplest thing to do is redefine your terms: war is really peace, and since peace is good, all is right with the world despite perpetual war—simple transitive logic. 

The idea of trickle-down economics works similarly by redefining exploitation: corporate-capitalist culture requires the maintenance of a sharp disparity in wealth in which the poor are given just enough to keep them productive—and the more productive they are, the more money they make for the wealthy, who are then motivated to continue to keep the poor productive by sharing a microscopic portion of their wealth.

The denizens of 21st century global civilization are far too intelligent to fall prey to Newspeak, of course. We know the difference between black and white. We understand that war is war and peace is peace, and most of us (with the notable exception of a few toothless tea-bagging morons from Alabama) know when we are being jerked around by corporate-political double-speak.

We would never fall prey to the thinly veiled propaganda of corporate marketing, for example. We are far too sophisticated to think that true happiness is somehow tied to smartphone functionality or that the hive-mind banter on twitter is about building community.

We realize that bowing to economic coercion is not really the path to personal freedom. We understand that ubiquitous surveillance is not really for our own safety and convenience.

We know that siphoning the bitumen dregs out of tar sand is not really the key to energy independence and we would never think to call fracking an environmentally-friendly alternative: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/08/shale-gas-fracking-good-for-environment

Independence Day in the US

An official government holiday in the world’s most oppressive global empire commemorating the empire's independence from the 18th century's version of the world's most oppressive global empire.

True patriots are expected to celebrate by eating food laced with carcinogens, drinking too much corporate mass-marketed beer, and burning a couple hundred dollars in noxious and noisy fireworks made in China.  

I'll probably eat something free-range and organic and wash it down with too much homemade mead. And if I find myself truly in the holiday spirit and feel compelled to burn something in celebration of empire, I think I have a Chinese-made American flag around here somewhere…

The children of civilization

Many aspects of child development that are assumed to be due to natural maturational process are in fact idiosyncratic features of the specific culture doing the assuming. Ethnographic research has shown that many "universals" of child development are anything but universal. Even some of the most sacred cows of Western psychology have been beheaded on the altar of cross-cultural comparison.* 

For example, the notion that a close mother-child attachment bond is absolutely critical has been dispelled by studies of cultures in which only a very weak bond between mother and child occurs. Mothers in one culture rarely speak or engage in eye contact with their children—even while nursing—until the child is able to talk to them. Yet the children grow up apparently without any emotional or cognitive deficits. Another culture engages in what by Western standards would be considered brutally extreme authoritarian child rearing practices. Yet the children grow up with many psychological attributes that are diametrically opposite of those that strict authoritarian parents are supposed to cause.

If there is one thing that can be said about childhood in different cultures it's that it is extremely varied—varied both in the time course and varied in terms of the thoughts, treatment, and expectations concerning children.

But even allowing for this wide variability, the Euro-American approach to childhood is extremely unusual with respect to other cultures both past and present. Our thoughts, treatment, and expectations concerning children are unique in numerous ways (for instance, the fact that children are thought of as "precious little treasures" despite the fact that we have unmatched levels of child abuse, neglect, and abandonment, or the fact that their education is highly structured and state/community-regulated, or the fact that childhood lasts for over two decades and is legally partitioned by arbitrary benchmarks based entirely on chronological age).

Perhaps that's because Euro-American civilization is not a "culture" per se. Civilized children are not allowed to follow the dictates of a natural developmental unfolding that would gently guide them into an emotionally-rich and fulfilling lifestyle embedded in meaningful cultural traditions. Civilized children are not allowed to grow organically into their roles in society. Instead, they are forcefully programmed for insertion into the bureaucratic tissues of a cold inhuman mechanical leviathan.

*See: Lancy, D. F. (2008). The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. New York: Cambridge