Keith

Such developments suggest we have entered a distinct new phase of capitalist modernity – a patronising, anti-adult era characterised by adolescent diversions and pop-cultural infantilisers.

But while infantilisation was taking hold all around us, it was its impact on the political sphere that concerned me the most. Here, my issue was not simply with politicians acting like attention-seeking adolescents on TikTok, or celebrity pundits stupefying the political arena with their ill-informed opinions. Rather, what worried me was the emergence of a new anti-adult form of political

expression evident in everything from ‘Brexit-derangement syndrome’ to the look-at-me hissy fits of middle-class Just Stop Oil protestors. However, it was the toxic fallout that followed in the wake of Donald Trump’s election that really brought home the full extent of the new infantocracy.

Seen in this way, infantilisation
represents something far more serious than just the elongation of youthful pursuits. It suggests a new way of viewing the world that’s already shaping our history by damaging democracy, destabilising institutions and tearing civilisation apart.

Beyond the dictionary, the term ‘infantilism’ has a specific connotation within psychiatry, where it is used to describe a defence mechanism or psychological regression in which an older child or adult exhibits the cognitive and emotional behaviour of an infant.

However, the sociologist Simon Gottschalk recently came up with a useful summary of the diminished and childlike behaviour that characterises the infantilised actor: ‘An infantile individual is a person who fails to enact the cognitive, affective, and interpersonal qualities that are considered appropriate to his or her age in the life-cycle, and who instead enacts those that s/he acquired in a previous stage of development. The infantile individual is a regressive one.’

age queering’: ‘the refusal to conform to the social constructs of age – namely, rejecting the young/old binary, [and] embracing the measurement of time without clinging to the idea that time is linear’.

Second, as life stages blur and the psychosocial experiences of adults and children become more interchangeable, conflicts between
generations will intensify.

This nasty politics of reciprocal generational enmity is what happens when life stages collapse, and people start to look and feel the same. As material aspirations and cultural lifestyles align, and individuals of different ages assimilate and develop ideas in the same way, people end up reinterpreting those above and below them in the life course as competing factions in a Hobbesian generational battle of all against all.

The tragedy is that in a society fixated with puerile pastimes and juvenile distractions, the line between natural moments of intermittent childlike spontaneity and all-encompassing arrested development is getting thinner by the minute.