Posts published in “The Infantilised Society”

The Infantilised Society

A diagnosis of contemporary society focused on responsibility, morality and adulthood in late modernity.

The Infantilised Society is a project examining a recurring tendency in contemporary life: the shift from adulthood towards childishness as a social norm. Here, infantilisation is understood not as personal immaturity but as a structural logic in which responsibility is externalised, conflicts are simplified, and complexity is reduced to moralising narratives.

The project explores how citizens are increasingly treated as incapable of exercising their own judgement—in political communication, institutional practice and cultural systems of norms. Protection, safety and care are deployed as legitimising language, while individual agency is constrained and responsibility is displaced away from both citizens and those who hold power.

The analyses cover phenomena such as moral panics, symbolic politics, overprotective institutions and a public discourse in which adults are expected to react rather than reflect. The project brings together culture, politics and governance to show how infantilising logics permeate everything from the practices of the welfare state to media dynamics and social relationships.

The Infantilised Society is an analysis of how adulthood—as the capacity for responsibility, judgement and consequential thinking—is gradually replaced by simplification, fear and a logic of delegation.