The Last Adults in the Room
On Chicken McNuggets, Sippy Cups, and the Economics of Civilization
In 1983, my eighth-grade class at Byron Middle School took its traditional graduation field trip to Six Flags Great America. It was a big occasion, one of those excursions that marks the unofficial end of childhood, when you're old enough to begin imagining yourself an adult but still young enough to get excited about spending an entire day at an amusement park with your classmates. One of the anticipated highlights of the trip was a stop at McDonald's, where a remarkable new product had recently appeared on the menu: Chicken McNuggets.
Everyone was smitten. I watched nearly every one of my classmates order the new delicacy with something approaching glee. These little breaded morsels were apparently a culinary revelation, and I seemed to be the only person who didn't understand why. I wasn't even aware of what went into making one of these little miracles, but something about them struck me as peculiar. Why had chicken suddenly been reduced to a collection of identical, bite-sized shapes? What was the attraction? I didn't have a theory about processed food or consumer psychology. I simply didn't get it.
Looking back, I think that afternoon may have been one of my earliest encounters with a cultural development I've spent much of my adult life trying to understand: the infantilization of the consumer. Not because there is anything inherently childish about eating a chicken nugget, or because my classmates were behaving inappropriately. We were thirteen or fourteen years old, after all. We were practically the intended audience. What interests me now is that the same approach to food, entertainment, and consumer behavior that appealed so successfully to children would increasingly become a dominant feature of adult life.
Forty-three years later, adults carry enormous sippy cups.
They are usually called tumblers, of course, and many are quite sophisticated. They have handles, straws, spill-resistant lids, and sometimes enough capacity to supply a family of four with drinking water for an afternoon. They come in collectible colors and limited editions. People personalize them, display them, and develop considerable emotional attachments to them. I don't object to any of this. A convenient drinking vessel is a perfectly reasonable thing to own. What interests me is the cultural trajectory that connects the chicken nugget to the adult sippy cup, and the possibility that both belong to a much larger transformation in the way human beings are encouraged to behave.
Adult coloring books, stuffed animals marketed as emotional support companions, cartoon characters on adult clothing, nostalgia-driven entertainment, and workplaces that distribute badges and prizes for completing ordinary tasks all seem to occupy some portion of the same territory. Individually, none of these things is particularly alarming. Some are harmless, some are enjoyable, and some are genuinely useful. But taken together, they raise a question that I don't think is unreasonable to ask.
Why does so much of contemporary consumer culture seem designed to make adulthood resemble childhood? And who benefits from that resemblance?
The political theorist Benjamin Barber explored a version of this question in his 2007 book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. Barber argued that modern consumer capitalism increasingly depends upon encouraging childish appetites in adults while simultaneously recruiting children into consumer culture at younger ages. The result is a peculiar convergence in which childhood becomes more commercialized and adulthood becomes less distinguishable from childhood.
The logic is not difficult to follow. A mature consumer might eventually conclude that he has enough possessions, enough entertainment, enough stimulation, and enough novelty. He might become satisfied with what he already owns. From the standpoint of a business that depends upon perpetual growth, such a consumer presents a problem. An individual whose desires can be continually renewed, redirected, and intensified presents considerably more opportunity. The market does not necessarily require people to become less intelligent or less capable. It simply benefits when they remain perpetually dissatisfied.
The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler approached the subject through the relationship between consumer culture, attention, and psychological development. He argued that industrialized systems of consumption could undermine the processes through which individuals develop independent judgment and mature identities. In this account, infantilization is not merely a matter of adults enjoying childish products. It is a matter of increasingly sophisticated systems learning how to capture attention, stimulate desire, and encourage dependency.
Neither Barber nor Stiegler needed to propose a secret committee of executives conspiring to turn the population into children. Economic incentives can produce coordinated-looking results without any coordination at all. If a particular approach to selling products proves successful, other companies imitate it. If emotional attachment produces repeat customers, businesses learn to cultivate emotional attachment. If nostalgia sells, nostalgia becomes a product category. Eventually an entire culture can begin to reflect the cumulative effects of countless individual commercial decisions.
Still, I find myself returning to a more uncomfortable question. Is there ever an element of deliberate humiliation involved?
The question deserves some care, because infantilization is not always voluntary, and its consequences are not always benign. Researchers studying institutional care have documented situations in which elderly or disabled adults are addressed in baby talk, offered childish activities, or denied ordinary opportunities to make decisions for themselves. Such treatment can undermine dignity and reinforce the authority of caregivers or institutions. There is a meaningful difference between an adult choosing to enjoy something associated with childhood and an adult being treated as incapable of exercising adult judgment.
Humiliation, in this context, can be a method of establishing power. To treat another adult as a child is sometimes to announce that the person is no longer entitled to the autonomy, authority, or respect ordinarily associated with adulthood. But it would be a mistake to assume that every childish consumer product is an instrument of humiliation, or that the people who manufacture such products secretly despise their customers. I have no evidence that anyone at McDonald's was laughing at my classmates in 1983, or that the designers of contemporary drinking cups are amused by the adults who purchase them.
The question is more interesting without those assumptions. What if infantilization is not primarily an expression of contempt but a commercially advantageous way of organizing relationships between institutions and individuals? What if encouraging dependency, cultivating emotional attachments, and rewarding predictable behavior simply turn out to be effective methods of managing consumers?
That possibility brings me to an apparently unrelated subject: the economic value of a humanities education.
For years, I encountered the reassuring argument that graduates with degrees in literature, history, philosophy, and related disciplines might begin their working lives at a financial disadvantage but would eventually catch up with, and sometimes surpass, graduates in more immediately lucrative fields. The reasoning was attractive. Humanities graduates developed skills in communication, critical thinking, interpretation, and judgment that became increasingly valuable as their careers progressed. Their education might not produce an immediate financial reward, but the marketplace would eventually recognize its worth.
The evidence, unfortunately, is less reassuring. Although humanities graduates often experience substantial earnings growth over their working lives, recent research does not generally support the claim that they eventually overtake graduates in engineering, business, or other higher-paying fields. The financial advantages associated with many technical and professional degrees frequently persist well into middle age.
I don't find this surprising, exactly, but I do find it revealing. We have become accustomed to defending education almost exclusively in terms of its eventual economic return. A degree must justify itself through salary, employment prospects, and measurable productivity. The humanities are therefore placed in the awkward position of having to explain why the study of human civilization is a worthwhile investment.
But what if the purpose of studying literature is not to earn more money? What if philosophy is valuable because it teaches people to examine assumptions, recognize contradictions, and consider the consequences of their beliefs? What if history matters because societies that cannot remember how they arrived at their present circumstances are poorly equipped to determine where they should go next?
These are not particularly extravagant propositions. For much of the history of education, they would have been considered central to the enterprise. Yet they are difficult to quantify, and what cannot be quantified increasingly struggles to establish its legitimacy.
I don't believe humanities graduates are inherently wiser, more ethical, or more independent than people educated in other disciplines. A university can produce an astonishing variety of fools, and practical experience can provide an education no classroom could replicate. The question is not whether one academic discipline produces superior human beings. It is whether we still regard the cultivation of independent, thoughtful, responsible adults as an objective worth pursuing even when the financial rewards are uncertain.
Which brings me to a line from one of my favorite horror films.
In George A. Romero's Day of the Dead, released in 1985, actor Richard Liberty plays Dr. Matthew Logan, a scientist nicknamed Dr. Frankenstein by the military personnel with whom he shares an underground installation. Civilization has collapsed, the dead have risen, and the remaining human beings are struggling to survive in a world that no longer resembles the one they once inhabited.
Logan has been experimenting on zombies, attempting to determine whether their behavior can be modified through conditioning. He has discovered that certain responses can be encouraged through a system of rewards. Explaining his methods to the military commander, he offers an observation that has stayed with me for decades:
“Civility must be rewarded, Captain. If it isn't rewarded, there's no use for it. There's just no use for it at all.”
It's an extraordinary line, partly because Logan is talking about zombies and partly because his observation seems applicable to almost everything else. He is not suggesting that his subjects have developed moral convictions or rediscovered their humanity. He is demonstrating that even creatures operating on the most primitive impulses can learn to perform socially desirable behaviors when those behaviors produce rewards.
The distinction between genuine civility and conditioned obedience is central to the film's unsettling implications. Logan is trying to produce the appearance of civilized behavior in creatures that may no longer possess the capacities upon which civilization depends. His methods can teach a zombie to behave appropriately under certain circumstances, but they cannot necessarily teach it why appropriate behavior matters.
And this is where my three apparently unrelated subjects begin to converge.
What happens when a society expects adult behavior but increasingly rewards childish impulses? What happens when the qualities associated with maturity—patience, judgment, independence, restraint, responsibility, and the capacity to consider something beyond one's immediate desires—become less commercially advantageous than their opposites?
We are continually instructed to behave responsibly. We are expected to manage our finances, maintain our health, participate in democratic institutions, make informed decisions, and navigate an increasingly complicated world. Yet many of the commercial systems through which we experience that world are designed to encourage impulsiveness, emotional dependency, and immediate gratification.
Companies compete for our attention by developing increasingly effective methods of interrupting it. They encourage impulsive consumption while celebrating financial responsibility. They cultivate emotional attachments to products while praising independence. They reward engagement rather than reflection, novelty rather than continuity, and reaction rather than deliberation.
None of these developments requires a conspiracy. A business that discovers an effective method of increasing sales has every incentive to continue using it. A technology platform that discovers emotional reactions increase engagement has every incentive to encourage those reactions. An institution that discovers compliance is easier to manage than independent judgment may gradually organize itself around compliance.
The cumulative effect can be a society in which the qualities necessary for responsible adulthood are continually praised in principle and undermined in practice.
I think it is important, however, not to confuse maturity with solemnity. Childhood possesses qualities that adulthood would be poorer without: curiosity, imagination, playfulness, wonder, and the capacity for spontaneous delight. An adult who enjoys cartoons or stuffed animals is not necessarily surrendering any portion of his independence. Nor is a person who finds comfort in familiar objects necessarily less capable of exercising sound judgment.
The problem is not that adults sometimes enjoy the pleasures of childhood. The problem arises when those pleasures become substitutes for autonomy, when comfort becomes a substitute for understanding, and when the management of human behavior becomes more important than the cultivation of human judgment.
There is an enormous difference between making life easier for adults and encouraging adults to remain dependent. One removes unnecessary obstacles to independent living. The other can gradually make independence seem unnecessary, undesirable, or even frightening.
And I wonder whether we have become sufficiently attentive to that distinction.
In 1983, I watched my classmates discover Chicken McNuggets. They were excited, and I was puzzled. There was nothing sinister about their enthusiasm, and I doubt the experience meant much to anyone besides me. But I remember the sensation of watching something become instantly desirable to nearly everyone around me while remaining entirely uninteresting to me. It was an early encounter with the peculiar power of manufactured enthusiasm.
Since then, I've watched countless products, fashions, technologies, and cultural habits arrive with the same apparent inevitability. Some have improved people's lives enormously. Others have merely introduced new ways of satisfying desires that nobody seemed to possess until someone discovered how to create them.
The question that interests me is not whether people should be permitted to enjoy these things. Of course they should. Nor do I think there is anything particularly noble about refusing to participate in popular culture. Skepticism can become its own form of vanity, and disliking something does not automatically constitute evidence of superior judgment.
What interests me is the relationship between the people who design these experiences and the people who consume them. How much independence do we surrender in exchange for convenience? How much judgment do we delegate in exchange for reassurance? How often are we encouraged to experience the world as consumers rather than as participants capable of shaping it?
And who benefits when those distinctions begin to disappear?
Perhaps the answer is simply that businesses benefit from predictable customers, institutions benefit from manageable populations, and individuals sometimes welcome the relief of having fewer decisions to make. None of these motives is particularly mysterious, and none requires the participants to harbor contempt for humanity.
But the consequences deserve examination.
Civilization is not merely a collection of buildings, laws, universities, and institutions. It also depends upon habits of mind: the willingness to exercise judgment, to recognize obligations, to tolerate disagreement, to consider consequences, and to accept responsibility for one's actions. Those habits have to be learned, practiced, and sustained. They do not automatically appear when someone reaches a particular age.
And they are not guaranteed to survive in an environment that consistently rewards their opposites.
Dr. Frankenstein understood something essential about behavior. If civility is to persist, there must be some reason to practice it. His solution was to offer rewards, because his subjects were incapable of understanding much beyond the immediate relationship between action and gratification.
I would like to believe human civilization can aspire to something more sophisticated.
I would like to believe we can cultivate people who behave responsibly not merely because they expect a reward, but because they understand why responsibility matters. People who value knowledge even when it does not increase their salaries. People who can enjoy comfort without becoming dependent upon it, participate in consumer culture without surrendering their judgment, and retain the pleasures of childhood without relinquishing the freedoms of adulthood.
But such people do not emerge from nowhere. They are the products of cultures that recognize their value.
If a civilization continually rewards dependency while treating independence as an inconvenience, it should not be surprised when fewer people develop the habits of independent adulthood.
And if it ceases to reward civility, Dr. Frankenstein has already explained what happens next.
There is simply no use for it.
I still wonder about those Chicken McNuggets. Not because I believe they represented some decisive turning point in American civilization, but because they remind me how early I began noticing the curious ways people can be persuaded to want things.
Forty-three years later, the products have changed, the packaging has become more sophisticated, and the methods of persuasion have grown considerably more powerful.
I'm still trying to understand who wants us to remain children.
And what, exactly, they hope to gain.
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