We Are Surrounded by Adolescents with Power.
A hypothesis about a civilization that forgot how to turn its young into adults.
We are surrounded by adolescents with power. Not adolescents by age, but by inner structure: people unable to hold limits, frustration, responsibility, or truth, while occupying positions from which they run families, companies, institutions, relationships, and even countries. That may sound exaggerated at first glance. But perhaps it only sounds exaggerated because we have grown far too used to immaturity when it arrives dressed as status, money, language, or prestige.
That is where this hypothesis begins: one of the least visible failures of the West is not only moral, political, or psychological. It is initiatory. We have stopped clearly guiding the passage from adolescence into adulthood, and then we act surprised to find ourselves living in societies crowded with biological adults who lack any real adult form within. People with age, autonomy, income, desire, children, a vote, authority, influence — yet who never truly crossed a threshold that forced them out of themselves.
Let me be precise from the outset. I am not saying that every form of contemporary malaise can be explained through this lens. That would be lazy overreach. Nor am I claiming that the past had this problem solved, or that traditional cultures always initiated their young well. Many did it badly — through violence, rigidity, or humiliation. The point is not to idealize what came before. The point is something else: when a society loses its rites of passage, it does not abolish the human need those rites once contained. It abolishes the form. And a human need without form does not disappear. It degrades, it is displaced, or it rots.
That is why the problem runs deeper than it first appears. We are not talking about an anthropological curiosity or a lost piece of folklore. We are talking about one of the cultural mechanisms that once helped turn raw power into form, desire into orientation, dependence into responsibility, and passive belonging into active presence. In other words, we are talking about how a community helped produce adults.
Because this has to be said plainly: growing up is not enough. Getting older is not enough. Working is not enough. Having a partner is not enough. Having children is not enough either. Not even suffering is enough. Adulthood does not arrive automatically through biology or through accumulated experience. It arrives — when it does arrive — through a transformation that is harder to name and much harder to sustain: the acceptance of limit, the ability to endure frustration without collapsing or dumping it onto others, the shaping of one’s strength, responsibility for one’s word, and a genuine movement away from the narcissistic center of the self.
Jung understood very well that what is not integrated does not vanish. It goes into the shadow. And from the shadow it acts. If a culture does not accompany the integration of adolescence, then unresolved adolescence does not simply evaporate. It goes underground. It disguises itself. It rationalizes itself. It becomes socially functional. And eventually it reappears in places of command. Campbell showed that there is no hero without a threshold, without trial, without loss, without an inner change of state. Eliade explained that ritual was not mere sacred theatre, but a symbolic technology for altering one’s mode of being. Put those intuitions together and something fairly clear emerges: a culture that no longer knows how to mark a threshold between one age and another will produce individuals who grow physically, yes, but remain uncertain in their inner position.
And when that happens at scale, the consequences are not small.
The first mistake would be to imagine that we are speaking only about “today’s youth.” We are not. We are speaking about an entire culture stretched out in adolescence. Adults who want recognition, but not correction; desire, but not accountability; freedom, but not bonds; expression, but not necessarily truth; sensitivity, but without the capacity to endure friction without reading it as aggression. We are speaking about people whose language has become more sophisticated, but whose structure has not always kept pace. And perhaps that is one of the traps of the present: we confuse verbal complexity with real maturity.
This becomes especially clear in the male case. Boys go through puberty, obviously, but their passage into adulthood remains far more culturally diffuse when there is no rite, no demand, no shared form. Their bodies gain potency, drive, force, push, desire. But that potency does not come with an inner figure attached to it. Biology pushes them; it does not shape them. Without cultural intervention, without a work of form, men are especially exposed to confusing potency with adulthood. And out of that confusion emerge many of the pathologies we later try to interpret separately: abuse, domination, desire without responsibility, difficulty sustaining relationship, defensive irony, flight from limit, disguised victimhood, emotionally brittle grandiosity, or the need for validation dressed up as independence.
It is important not to be simplistic here. The problem is not that men possess strength. The problem is handing men social force before that force has been tempered. The problem is not masculinity as such, but power without form, energy without initiation, adulthood assumed through external imitation rather than inwardly won. That is why men can appear mature because they function, produce, seduce, or command, yet reveal themselves to be internally adolescent the moment conflict arrives: unable to bear correction, treating limit as offence, commitment as a loss of freedom, and responsibility as an unfair burden.
And yet it would be a mistake to load the entire thesis onto men as though women were automatically resolved. They are not. Here an important difference has to be introduced. Women pass through a more clearly defined bodily threshold. Menstruation, and the whole hormonal, temporal, and symbolic shift that comes with it, marks a real transition. It does not automatically make a girl an adult, of course, but it does introduce a biological threshold more sharply marked than the male one. In that sense, the female body signals something that in the male remains far more indistinct.
But that is precisely what makes the matter more interesting, not less. Biology may open a threshold; only culture can give it form. And what we see today is that, even where women do cross that bodily threshold, their social and cultural role still suffers from a prolongation of adolescence. Not from the same starting point as men, but under a different expression: conflict with one’s own value, dependence on validation, difficulty integrating power and relationship, oscillation between self-assertion and fragility, capture by contradictory cultural models of femininity. In other words: the body may mark something, but if culture does not accompany the change, then the change does not mature — it merely manifests.
That distinction matters because it sharpens the hypothesis. Without ritual, men are especially exposed to confusing potency with form. Women, even with a more visible bodily threshold, are still not given enough cultural contour to transform that passage into full adulthood. So both sexes can remain caught in prolonged adolescence, though with different symptoms. These are not two separate problems. They are two differentiated expressions of the same cultural de-ritualization.
And this becomes painfully visible in the realm of intimacy and relationship. There, more than almost anywhere else, one sees who has matured and who has merely learned language. Many contemporary relationships are full of emotional discourse and empty of inner structure. People who ask for depth but recoil from form. Who want to be loved but not challenged. Who speak the language of vulnerability but cannot endure correction. Who long for intensity but not consistency. Female exhaustion with certain male profiles often comes from exactly this: not only from classical machismo, but from the weariness of dealing with psychologically immature men — men who want understanding without demand, freedom without burden, desire without responsibility. But the phenomenon is not limited to them. Many women, too, reproduce prolonged adolescence in relationships: constant bids for validation, dramatization of conflict, inability to hold ambivalence, or sophisticated forms of emotional dependency.
Put differently: a culture without initiation produces relationships full of feeling and poor in center.
Something similar happens in work, politics, and public life. We have technically competent adults who are inwardly decentered. People with real skills, training, income, authority, or visibility, yet without the inner form required not to turn work into a theatre of validation, rivalry, fear, or abuse. This is where tyrannical bosses come from, narcissistic leaders, the inability to cooperate genuinely, workplace cultures ruled by insecure egos wielding sophisticated tools. Skills are not what is missing. Threshold is.
In politics the problem becomes even more obvious. Immediate reaction. Binary thought. Identity-based belonging. Inability to endure ambiguity. Fascination with hard leaders. Moral hypersensitivity turned into a shield. Or a craving for absolute order after all inner form has been emptied out. In too many cases, public life seems to be governed not by adults capable of bearing complexity, but by adolescent psyches with amplification at their disposal.
And here we arrive at one of the finest — and perhaps most serious — points in the whole hypothesis: when a society fails to internalize form, limit, and responsibility within its members, it is forced to externalize them increasingly through rules, procedures, and legislation. This is not a crude attack on law. Law is necessary. The problem appears when law begins to function as a substitute for conscience, judgment, and inner maturity.
That is exactly what seems to be happening in many spheres. We no longer ask as readily: “Is this just?” “Is this dignified?” “Is this proportionate?” “Is this right even if no one sees me?” The question is displaced by a far poorer one: “Is this allowed?” If it is not forbidden, it appears permitted. If it is not legislated, it appears morally neutral. If the rule does not explicitly prohibit it, the subject feels justified in acting, even while sensing that the act is wrong. Ethics collapses into compliance. And that is not a sign of civilizational maturity. It is often a sign of its weakness.
The hypertrophy of law is often a symptom of an atrophy of inner judgment.
A mature society does not do away with law, but neither does it need to turn law into a constant prosthesis for what its members no longer know how to sustain within themselves. When a community fails to form adults, it ends up trying to govern adolescents by regulation. And the less trust it has in the ethical maturity of its members, the more minute, rigid, and invasive its normativity becomes. Not because law is bad, but because it is stepping in for something that ought to exist earlier: judgment, containment, form, the interiorization of limit.
That is why civilizations do not fall only through corruption or excess. They also fall through rigidification. There comes a point at which the social body no longer knows how to regulate itself and requires everything to be described, codified, legislated, monitored. It is no longer enough to understand; now one must regulate. It is no longer enough to exercise judgment; now one needs procedure. It is no longer enough to have conscience; now one needs protocol. Such a society is frightened of its own members, precisely because it suspects they are not adult enough to move with judgment unless the boundaries of the field are drawn line by line in advance.
And then the double pathology of a non-initiatory culture emerges. On the one hand, emotional overflow, immaturity, dispersion, the constant demand for recognition. On the other, nostalgia for order, the fantasy that someone will come and set clear rules, fascination with an external structure that can replace the inner form never acquired. First limits are dissolved, then authority is demanded. First initiation is emptied out, then discipline is begged for.
When a culture stops initiating, it eventually begins asking for order from outside.
That may explain a great deal about our historical moment. Not only what gets called “toxic masculinity,” not only certain forms of performative sensitivity, not only political polarization, not only relational exhaustion or abuse at work. All of these can be read, at least in part, as distinct expressions of the same failure of maturation. Not a lack of information. Not a lack of laws. Not a lack of discourse. A lack of passage.
We have not stopped producing power. We have stopped producing adulthood.
And if this hypothesis touches something true, then part of our contemporary malaise will not be solved simply through more legislation, more pedagogy, more emotional management, or more declarative sensitivity. We will have to think again about how a culture forms adults. How it integrates force. How it transmits limit. How it turns puberty into responsibility. How it accompanies the passage from one age to another without falling into humiliation or caricature.
Perhaps we cannot give the world back the form it lost. But we can refuse to keep calling it normal when a civilization has forgotten how to turn its young into adults and then acts surprised to find itself governed, at so many levels, by adolescents with power.
Because when threshold disappears, adolescence does not. It simply comes to live among us.