About why the Western culture is adolescent

I really like «The Culture Code» by Clotaire Rapaille. This is a fun and insightful book about world cultures, and, mostly, about American culture. I have never forgotten its observation that American culture is an adolescent culture. He explains it in a way that is too long to write here but it is very convincing. If you want a good reading, I fully recommend it.

I have thought a lot about that because American culture has exported this adolescence to the entire Western culture and I see it in my country. While kids have no freedom and no responsibility, adults have all the freedom and all responsibility. Teens or adolescents want all the freedom without any responsibility. So they rebel against their parents while assuming their parents will help them if the consequences of their freedom go wrong.

This is the stage of our Western culture and comes from the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment talks about freedom and rights but not about duties and responsibilities. How many politicians or normal people do you know that speak about rights? How many do you know that speak about duties? The score is about one million to zero. So the Enlightenment is an adolescent ideology/religion. It took two centuries for it to take hold, because American people followed Christianity, which is a religion with duties. These Christian duties permeated society, like the Confucian emphasis on duties permeates Chinese society. Christianity and Confucianism are adult religions/ideologies.

But, since the 60s, the elites achieved what they had wanted for centuries: uproot Christianity from the American population and replace it with the Enlightenment ideology (in its last version: liberalism). For then on, Western population has returned to a state of perpetual adolescence.

People talk about infantilization but it is not so. Children are happy to do what they are told. Western people want rights without duties. Western society is structured to encourage this adolescence, with the State taking the role of parents. For example, «Be free! Fornicate! It is your right! You are pregnant? No responsibility! Abort»

In most societies, adolescence does not exist. You go from being a kid to being an adult with all rights and responsibilities, through a rite of passage (for example, chasing a lion). In the case of women, the rite of passage is marriage. In our Western society, adolescence goes from the age of 10 to the age of 40 at least, but I have seen 80 years old to be mentally adolescent. These are the fruits of the Enlightenment.