Anyone who has dealt with a large institution recently will recognize the scene. You call a public body — say, a university, a utility provider, or a health service. Before you reach a human being — if you ever do — you are met not with a solution, but with a set of gestures designed to reassure you that you are entering a “safe space.” You are thanked for your patience, your frustration is acknowledged, and you are offered various forms of comfort while you wait.
“Would you like to choose your hold music?” inquires the automated voice. The tone is solicitous, therapeutic, and infantilizing. You are not addressed as an adult citizen conducting business, but a vulnerable subject whose emotional state must be stabilized before anything substantive can occur.
This logic now extends far beyond call centers. Contemporary institutions often present themselves as gentle, conflict-averse, and therapeutic, even as they exert quiet forms of compulsion. I recently received an email from a university learning-support officer, copying in a student who had missed every dissertation meeting to date. The purpose, I was told, was simply to “introduce us,” since the student felt anxious about having fallen behind. The tone was friendly and reassuring — but it carried an unmistakable instruction: the student was not to be penalized, or even questioned, for non-attendance. A relationship between two adults — and one in which there was clearly a teacher–student hierarchy — was subtly recast as one requiring mediation and emotional cushioning.
Call it the West’s collective infantile disorder.
This institutional style did not emerge by accident. It reflects a longer cultural process in which adulthood itself has been steadily hollowed out. The social critic Neil Postman diagnosed a trend toward cultural infantilization in the West as early as the 1960s in The Disappearance of Childhood. His argument was that mass media, particularly television, were eroding childhood as a distinct life stage and, with it, adulthood, which depends upon childhood as a sort of apprenticeship. For Postman, adulthood consisted of hard-won capacities for self-restraint, delayed gratification, conceptual thought, historical awareness, reason and order.
A culture increasingly organized around spectacle, immediacy, and emotionalism undermined these qualities. And thus, Postman contended, childhood and adulthood merged, producing adultified children and infantilized adults. Adulthood is no longer a stable moral category that can tolerate ambiguity and regulate the self.
The American thinker Benjamin Barber extended this diagnosis by locating its causes in neoliberal capitalism and the transition from a productive to a consumer economy. In his 2007 book, Consumed, Barber described the “radically individuated” consumer as someone free to choose from among endless options, while remaining powerless to change the “menu of the world” itself. Under these conditions, the Protestant ethic of restraint and effort gave way to an infantilizing ethos of immediate gratification. Citizenship was eroded, as shopping displaced civic participation as the defining mark of freedom. Political life, in turn, was reduced to preference, feeling, and grievance.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the heterodox scholar Christopher Lasch similarly diagnosed the emergence of a narcissistic personality type in which “the egomaniacal, experience-devouring, imperial self regresses into a grandiose, infantile, empty self.”
Together, these processes have produced a pervasive therapeutic culture enveloping education and major institutions alike. Management styles, DEI regimes, and pedagogical practices have become increasingly risk-averse and emotion-managing. Universities routinely affirm their commitment to free speech, for example, but only insofar as it does not disrupt “campus relations” or generate complaints. Teaching is increasingly framed as “trauma-informed,” with trigger warnings, flexible deadlines, opt-out provisions, and student-led choices over how — and sometimes whether — difficult material is encountered.
Mass media — whether Postman’s bugbear of television, or today’s social media — accelerate but do not originate this process; it is more true to say that we evacuated adulthood, and technology filled the vacuum. Before the advent of TV sitcoms, people weren’t all reading Kant — they were reading penny dreadfuls, romances, and Westerns.
Some blame this institutional malaise on a spreading “feminization” — emotion over logic, sympathy over rationality, softness over necessary rigor. The error in such a diagnosis lies in confusing the presence of women with the feminization of authority — a moral and institutional condition that is neither caused by, nor reducible to, women themselves.
Feminization is exemption from existential adulthood — an exemption women were long denied the right to refuse, and is now being visited upon us all. It’s a structural position in relation to authority that borrows the language of care while stripping adults, of either sex, of responsibility and choice.
The adult understands that responsibility for her life ultimately rests with her. The child, by contrast, lives in a world organized by others: what time she wakes, what she eats, where she goes, who she may see, what counts as “good for her.” Decisions are presented as facts of the universe, rather than as choices made by someone else. Because she lacks autonomy, the child experiences limits as givens — as natural, immovable constraints — rather than as contingent arrangements that could be questioned or changed. Children submit to this position innocently. Women, however, have historically been required to inhabit it: denied legal and political autonomy across much of the West, and still so in many societies today.
Women, in short, had to be consciously feminized. This was especially the case for women at the dawn of industrial capitalism. That moment saw a transition away from the household as the primary sphere of agrarian production (in which both men and women had to participate) toward the male-dominated factory. Meanwhile, the household, as Lasch argued, became exclusively the site of family reproduction. It was expected to function as a refuge from the competitive brutalities of the industrial world “outside.” Women — especially middle- and upper-class women exempted from factory life — were now to serve as nurturers: to become feminine, as wives and mothers themselves and creators of future wives and mothers.
“Today, infantilization is increasingly chosen — by men and women alike.”
All this meant, to a great degree, that they had to be infantilized: think of the dreary submission to authority and repression of sexuality demanded of Victorian girls in Jane Eyre. Now, amid the decline of manufacturing and the rise of a services-led consumer economy, both sexes are being similarly infantilized: the authorities are the virtue police, and the repression extends to our language, our professional behavior, and even our thoughts.
Even where the feminine position is not imposed, it may still be chosen, because it is safer. As Simone de Beauvoir observed, it can feel easier to “take shelter in the shadow of men”: to relinquish hard responsibility for life’s decisions, to play happy families, to lose oneself in prescribed feminine roles, whether as wife, mother, or, more recently, trad-wife fantasy. This is not something to which men are immune. Since everyone has been a child, human beings are susceptible to nostalgia for a time when life felt carefree: when responsibility could be disowned. Men, too, may hide behind given masculine roles, treating them as unquestionable, rather than chosen.
Within this framework, it is understandable to connect institutional weakness to the growing presence of women in the professions, particularly as women now outnumber men in college education. The consequences of the growing presence of women are said to include decisions driven by emotion, rather than rationality; an exponential growth of wokeness; and, most seriously, institutions losing the capacity to accomplish their own stated goals.
It is possible to quibble with the empirical details offered in support of this claim. While female medical students now outnumber men, for example, male doctors remain overrepresented in the most prestigious and highly remunerated fields, such as surgery, and are considerably less likely to shift to part-time work, particularly when they become parents. At the same time, the feminization of professions, as sociologist Paula England has shown, tends to be associated with declining pay and prestige, a pattern observable in fields such as biology and computer science. But this “feminization effect” is quite different from the one at issue here: namely, the extension of the way women used to be treated — as child-like creatures — to all of society.
Similarly, proponents of the feminization thesis warn that the legal profession is losing its capacity for impartial judgement as a result of women’s presence on the bar and the bench. Yet it is worth noting that in Britain, the most controversial human-rights asylum rulings, including cases involving migrants with serious criminal histories, are not typically issued by women acting on sentiment, but by male judges applying what they understand to be established jurisprudence within existing human-rights frameworks.
For example, The Telegraph has recently published several investigations into how immigration judges apply the European Convention on Human Rights to allow migrants and foreign criminals to remain in Britain. These decisions are not “heart-led” so much as procedural, risk-averse, and insulated from democratic accountability — they are not feminine, but represent a feminized form of authority.
Women’s participation in public life has often strengthened institutions rather than weakened them, particularly in roles requiring long-term stewardship rather than short-term display. After the 2008 financial crisis, many central banks and financial institutions sought to increase the proportion of women at board and executive level, reflecting evidence that more mixed leadership teams were associated with greater caution and institutional stability. At the highest end of technological and organizational complexity, this pattern is even clearer. At SpaceX, Elon Musk appointed Gwynne Shotwell as president and chief operating officer precisely because of her capacity to translate ambition into execution. While Musk embodies risk, Shotwell has been widely credited with providing the operational discipline that turned SpaceX from a visionary startup into a functioning aerospace institution. Critics of feminization misidentify a moral collapse afflicting both sexes as one caused by only one: women.
Today, infantilization is both forced upon us and is increasingly chosen — by men and women alike — because freedom, once attained, has proved exhausting, bleak, and unromantic. Empowerment arrived without a handbook for existential ethics and choice was steadily reduced to consumption. Institutional infantilization works through compulsion masked as care; individual retreat into infantilized roles works through consent. The two reinforce one another.
This helps explain the growing pattern in which sexual libertinism and conservative domesticity appear not as opposites, but as forms of retreat. Women who move seamlessly from radical sexual politics to idealized visions of wifehood and motherhood do so without contradiction, because both positions offer refuge from the demands of moral authorship.
“Having given up our power, we succumb to mean-spirited envy that seeks to tear down what it cannot create.”
Masculinity has developed its own evasions. On the Right, many propose a return to masculine “thumos” — the warrior virtues of hero, king, or strongman — as an antidote to supposed feminization. Mary Harrington has framed this in terms of masculine archetypes; N. S. Lyons and R. R. Reno see it embodied in figures such as Donald Trump, representing “strong gods” against a civilization weakened from within.
The internal abdication of authority leads to Nietzschean ressentiment, as Douglas Murray rightly insists. Having given up our power, we succumb to mean-spirited envy that seeks to tear down what it cannot create. We see this truth all around us in the spread of ugly, untalented graffiti in urban centers; not street art, but defacement: the scrawling over of buildings and of genuine murals alike by those incapable of producing art of their own.
Ressentiment thrives where agency has collapsed and adulthood has been hollowed out. It is the product of a culture that no longer expects individuals to act, choose, or bear the consequences of freedom. It is immaturity embodied: a sneering hostility towards achievements that required long years of labour, discipline and self-control.
Murray rightly extols humility and gratitude, which are supremely adult virtues, once cultivated during childhood when that stage was understood as an apprenticeship to adulthood. Properly understood, gratitude is not passivity or deference, but what Hannah Arendt described as augmentation: the capacity to receive an inherited world, to build upon it, to criticize it where necessary and to extend it without obliterating it.
Authority, in this sense, does not demand obedience but presupposes responsibility — a willingness to take up what has been handed down and make it one’s own. But this prescription only works if the goal is properly understood. The task is not to overcome feminization or to revive masculine aesthetics, but for men and women alike to relearn how to live as adults, with courage and without refuge.
