December 2022
Dear Atlas Society Supporter, Rising inflation, depleted savings, looming layoffs, plummeting consumer confidence—all these factored heavily into the recent midterms. But while voters fear a possible Great Recession, a deeper shift is driving social dysfunction: The Great Regression. The college professors on our scholar faculty recount how each new class of freshmen arrive on campus markedly less mature than their predecessors. Instead of welcoming hatchlings ready to take intellectual flight, administrators find themselves incubating fragile, fearful eggs, insulating them with the styrofoam of speech codes that further extends the expiration date of adolescence. Over Thanksgiving, recently, my parents reminded me how much I hated being a child and what a desperate hurry I was in to grow up. This impatience fostered behaviors ranging from reckless (regularly climbing down from my second-story bedroom to sneak into downtown Boston nightclubs) to responsible (getting jobs and earning money). Whether it was the clothes I wore, the friends I chose, the habits I adopted, or the attitudes I affected, my parents (rightly) complained that I was “trying to grow up too fast.” Their grandchildren, by contrast, belong to a generation that’s far less likely to take risks in general; and while some of that is welcome (e.g., less underage drinking), much of it is born of an exaggerated sense of fear, whether inculcated by overprotective parents or fearmongering media. Not only are children taking longer to become adults, adults seem to be regressing into children. Witness the recent round of tantrums thrown by climate activists. Dumping milk on grocery floors. Hurling food against the wall. Sitting on the floor and refusing to move. Demanding that they be brought their potty. All infused with puerile indignation and accusation. “My life is over!” has become “The world is ending!” accompanied by demands for parental governments to fix the planet. What’s going on here? Researchers describe “infantile personalities” as characterized by “low demands on self, accompanied by high demands on society.” It is laziness born of low confidence in one’s own agency: “An infantile person seeks to escape the need to adequately assess objective social reality.” More fundamental than any fear of a climate apocalypse, the eco-anxiety so prevalent among the young is a deeper disquiet Ayn Rand described this way: “When men abandon reason, they find not only that their emotions cannot guide them, but that they experience no emotions save one: terror… the unbearable inner state of men who are deprived of their means of cognition and who seek escape from reality.” Her observation rings even more true today, with “young people’s dread of independence” driving “a frantic desire to ‘belong,’ to attach themselves to some group, clique, or gang.” Just as
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