INFANTILIZOMANIA Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler    Friday, 23 September 2005 Yes, I invented this term. You won’t find it in Webster’s, the OED, or Google. At least not now. Hopefully soon you will, as it becomes the accepted term for the neurosis with which all those on the Left are afflicted. Just as a pyromaniac is driven by a compulsion to set fires, a kleptomaniac by a compulsion to steal, and - everyone’s favorite example - a nymphomaniac by a compulsion to have sex, an infantilizomaniac is driven by a compulsion to treat adult human beings as children. The compulsion to infantilize people is the neurotic compulsion of liberals. Liberals of course do not call it infantilizomania. They call it compassion. We can see the results of liberal compassion in the wake of Katrina: hundreds of thousands of New Orleans inner city blacks helpless to take responsibility for themselves. Liberal compassion is the modern form of the White Man’s Burden, and has destroyed, just obliterated, three to four generations of inner city poor in America. How many more generations of inner city blacks have to be wiped out until liberals admit their compassion is a fraud of epically tragic proportions? It is a blatantly phony compassion. Compassion for the plight of others in difficult and desperate circumstances is a noble emotion. But it becomes fraudulent when you demand that your compassion be paid for with other people’s money. A liberal’s compassion is a Ponzi scheme, robbing Peter through government taxation to pay for his compassion for Paul. Most of all, however, liberal compassion is rendered demeaning, patronizing, and un-noble by equating compassion with treating adults as if they were children. There is a fundamental aspect to our human nature that allows the Left to get away with it. It’s called neotony. Neoteny is a biological and neurological process where a species retains juvenile traits into adulthood. Just as a dog is a neotenous wolf, so man is (among other things) a neotenous ape. Our neotony accounts for many of the most distinctly attractive and lovable features we possess as adult human beings - such as our unbridled curiosity, our sense of humor and playfulness. Young apes, just as the young of many other species, are playful and curious - but not as adults. The price of maturity, for most all species except man (and those species bred by man to retain them, such as dogs bred to be adult puppies), is that such endearing traits as juvenile playfulness must go out the window. But for everything there is a price. For many human beings, the price of neotony is a pronounced need for a parent after their physical childhood is over. Most often this need is fulfilled through either a cosmic or ruler-parent who promises to protect you if you are a good obedient little boy or girl, and threatens to punish you if you are a bad disobedient little boy or girl. One’s own parents cannot satisfy this need, because they cease being physically larger, dominant, and biologically protective when their children grow up. Communist dictatorships were well aware of this price of neotony, with the omnipresence of gigantic statues of Lenin, for example (which is especially funny as Lenin was five-foot-three, one inch shorter than Stalin). The purpose of such huge statues was to reduce adult subjects in a Communist country to the physical size and status of children who will obey their ruler-parents. The liberals’ path to power is to reduce adults to children through their phony claim of compassion. As French philosopher Pascal Bruckner points out, in order to look at grown adults as innocent, they must be infantilized. But by transforming real grown people into idealized innocent infants, liberal compassion becomes contempt. In Bruckner’s book, Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt , he observes how there can be “sadism in pity.” He requests that liberals, those “prophets of guilty conscience,” those “martyrs of malediction,” abandon compassion as contempt, stop looking at inner city blacks as children, and accept them instead as adults capable of being responsible for their own happiness. In his latest work, The Temptation of Innocence: Living in the Age of Entitlement , Bruckner discusses the devastation wrought upon people whom liberals infantilize. Not only are they encouraged to think and behave as children, as infantilized victims, but to believe that their powerlessness is “a virtue without responsibility.” Conning people into viewing themselves as children allows liberals to get them hooked on their drug of OPM (yes, pronounced “opium” and standing for Other People’s Money). OPM welfare subsidies are no less an addictive drug than cocaine or heroin ( so it is no coincidence that most drug addicts are welfare addicts). Once you get on the drug of the dole, you can’t conceive how you could survive without it. Conservatives need to regard liberals as drug pushers. By building up constituencies hooked on OPM, liberals assure themselves of votes by doling out the drug. New Orleans is the most currently perfect example - and of the fantastic danger it has become. The danger results from non-liberal politicians falling for the fraud of liberal infantilization. They buy into the liberal message, “We have to take care of the helpless children no matter how much it costs!” - no matter if the “children” are full grown adults hooked on OPM. (One reason so many folks didn’t evacuate New Orleans is because they didn’t want to miss their next welfare check due to arrive in the next day or so.) George W. Bush began his presidency by promising it would usher in a new Age of Responsibility. Katrina has provided liberals with an ideal opportunity to intimidate him into abandoning his promise. Oceans of OPM will now be spent to placate the infantilizomaniacs. The Age of Responsibility was a pipe-dream. Until the liberal neurosis suffers constant exposure and can no longer be used as the liberal path to power, we will continue to live in an Age of Infantilizomania.