To sustain a worthy civilization, one that attempts to help all citizens, requires knowledge and skills among its citizens. The development of knowledge and skills requires work, especially intellectual work. Yet, human beings struggle against the requirement of effort, of the demands of intellectual work. This is one of the elements at the root of the complexity and vulnerability of human civilizations.

Core Concepts in

The Adolescence of American Culture:

Cultural Cons and American Cultural Decline

Civilizations rise. Civilizations fall. All civilizations fall. The arc of changes in a failing civilization can be mapped. The temptations, the motivations, the confusion, the uncertainty, the mistakes – all are disputed but visible. Events are specified, decisions are identified. The facts are observable. The evidence is compelling, undisputed, definitive. Yet, in the end it dissolves and disappears, a victim of complexity. Complexity nurtures disputes. Disputes become fertile ground for cultural scams.

All the information needed to build and sustain a just and productive society for every citizen is available. The dilemma is complexity — there is so much information to choose from because organizational coherence has not been agreed upon. American Adolescence identifies the essential information and reorganizes it, using science and the humanistic sciences.

The protection of a worthy civilization begins with an examination of how the problem of complexity interferes with efforts to sustain a trustworthy, sensible culture for all its citizens.

The clarification of the impact of complexity – complexity that is unopposed, accepted, and ignored — opens windows of understanding about how easily cultures become victims of scams.

The humanistic sciences converge to provide the voices of experts speaking over more than 2000 years as they specify the sources of responsible, successful civilizations and the origins of the downfall of civilizations.

The first requirement is to identify the functional structure of a successful civilization, building this functional structure by mapping the vital concepts emerging from the greatest minds of more than 2000 years, determining how they fit together, and using the map to specify the functional framework of a successful, thriving civilization. The vital concepts describe the behaviors of individual citizens that nourish a successful civilization and those citizen behaviors that damage and destroy civilizations.

The second requirement is to specify the neural mechanisms that underlie the vital behaviors of citizens for preserving a society and the behaviors damaging to the society. This specification of neural mechanisms validates observations of helpful and destructive citizen behaviors. The specification indicates how brain organization and functions determine why the specific beneficial and destructive behaviors have their respective effects.  An understanding of neural mechanisms also motivates us to use the knowledge to anticipate potential actions of citizens using cultural scams and avoid falling victim to them.

The specification of the effects of individual behavior and its foundation in neural circuits define the functional structure of citizen behaviors that build a civilization and its vulnerabilities. Understanding why the functional structure is organized as it is validates the behavioral observations and motivates citizens to use the knowledge to benefit the culture and all citizens. 

The third requirement is to apply this knowledge to activities to preserve a responsible and productive culture committed to the welfare of all of its citizens. For example, one crucial element is to reduce, carefully, the reliance on government regulation, while markedly increasing the education and moral responsibility of each citizen.

The primary protective activity for a culture is education for everyone. This is an education teaching flexible, changing adaptive behaviors among citizens. It is anticipated that citizens engaged in cultural scams will find that their tactics are losing effectiveness through exposure and evolve new strategies and tactics. Citizens need to develop responses to the changing tactics, even as they continue to be attentive to old, exposed cultural scams. 

What is American Adolescence?

The Cons: See the Scams

and

The Adolescence of American Culture: Cultural Scams and American Cultural Decline

are two public websites that evolved from The Thinker, the original site, which is no longer public. The Thinker remains as the conceptual home for the two sites, a place of concept-building. All material in the two public websites is initially to be found in The Thinker.   

The “final” conceptual material of The Thinker, when complete, is presented as the content for the two public websites:

thecons.info  

americanadolescence.com 

A new post generally is published each Friday (The Cons) and Tuesday (American Adolescence).

These two sites present scientific and humanistic material making it possible for you to build knowledge and skills. There is no mechanism for communicating with anyone at either website. It is not possible to seek comments or ask questions. This is intentional. The natural, appropriate impulse of each person engaged in learning is to make it social learning – meaning to talk to others, ask questions, and engage in information exchange and disputes. This is not the purpose of these two websites.

Instead, these two sites are intended to present information, some of it quite novel, for anyone to use for personal learning. All the material necessary for learning about these topics is available in the posts.

Learning occurs through effort — work — meaning careful attention to the materials (text, quotations, and videos) and engaging in thought about how the information is related to the reader, each of whom is unique.  Returning to posts for further study after thought and application of the concepts is beneficial. Successful learning is dependent on one’s intellectual effort; the information is available.

Watch the entire film, not just a clip. Read the entire book, not just a quotation. Listen to the entire musical piece, not just a minute or two.

Learn to recognize and understand meanings in your life and relationships. Learn to recognize others who understand meanings in their lives and relationships.

American Adolescence enables you to understand how genes and culture shape the development of each person, from the beginning of our lives. The posts begin by examining how the complexity of our lives confuses us and seduces us into a neglect of more complete understanding. While this is an easier path, it also produces a vulnerability to scams that take advantage of our preference for avoidance of intellectual work and for leisurely fun.

The posts are organized to provide interesting, vivid, entertaining examples that encourage thoughtful engagement:

Two types of quotations provide guidance, context, and orientation:

1. “Voices”presents the comments of individuals throughout history, experts in the humanistic sciences and the general sciences, about significant phenomena encountered in our lives and the meanings that underlie them. These comments are rendered as text (“paper clips” – e.g., quotations) or media (e.g., “film clips”)

2. “The Scientific Spotlight” presents descriptions of underlying biological or physical mechanisms that are relevant to a topic by neuroscientists and other scientists.

You will gain a more accurate understanding of the meanings of the actions and communications of others, and, most importantly, a better understanding of the meanings of your own actions and communications.

The information helps you See Your World by learning to recognize and describe meanings of human behavior that you previously failed to see, through the experiences of films, myths, stories, commentaries, science, history, music, images, literature, biography, and journalism.

You will learn about life’s treasures and trials, games and ghosts, pleasure and pain, loves and lies – what happiness is and how we find it, or not. You will learn to See Your World, more realistically, in its fullness and its distinctive detail.

J. Gerald Young, M.D., was Professor of Psychiatry, and then Research Professor of Psychiatry, in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. He is the founder of The Media Sciences Group. He is past Editor-in-Chief of the Book Series of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions and was a member of the Executive Committee of that organization for eighteen years. 

Dr. Young received a B.A. in English literature from the University of Notre Dame, and his M.D. from Northwestern University Medical School, where he also completed an internship in internal medicine. His residency training, in psychiatry and also in child and adolescent psychiatry, was at St. Luke’s Hospital Center, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, in New York City. He completed a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center. He served as a lieutenant commander at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda Maryland for two years, during which he was also on the faculty of the Georgetown University School of Medicine.

In the past, Dr. Young was tenured Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and founder and Director of the Laboratory of Developmental Neurochemistry at the Yale University School of Medicine and Child Study Center, where he was a Berger Research Fellow and a W. T. Grant Foundation Research Scholar. He was Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics and Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Hospital in New York City, where he was also Director of the Laboratory of Developmental Neurochemistry.  Dr. Young was Director of the Developmental Neurobiology Program and Associate Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. He received training as a psychoanalyst and child analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Haven, CT. 

Dr. Young is a past Chairman of the Psychopathology and Clinical Biology Research Review Committee of the National Institute of Mental Health. He is a past Chairman of the Committee on Research of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, where he was also a member of the Editorial Board and the Program Committee.  Dr. Young was a founder of the Research Forum for that organization.  He is board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in psychiatry, as well as in child and adolescent psychiatry. He is a member of many scientific organizations.

Dr. Young has edited or co-edited eight books and more than 100 scientific papers and chapters, among which are:

Shapiro, A.K., Shapiro, E., Young, J.G. and Feinberg, T.E., (1987), Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome, Second Edition, Raven Press, New York.

Chiland, C., Young, J.G.(editors), (1992), New Approaches to Mental Health from Birth to Adolescence, Yale University Press, New Haven.  French edition:  Presses Universitaires de France, Paris

Chiland, C. and Young, J.G. (editors), (1990), Why Children Reject School:  Views from Seven Countries, Yale University Press, New Haven.  French edition:  Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.

Young, J. Gerald (editor), (1994), Entretiens diagnostiques structurés pour enfants et adolescents, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.

Chiland, C. and Young, J.G. (editors), (1994), Children and Violence, Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, New Jersey. French edition:  Presses Universitaires de France, Paris

Young, J. Gerald and Ferrari, Pierre (editors), (1998), Mental Health Services and Systems for Children and Adolescents:  A Shrewd Investment.  Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel.

Gomes-Pedro, J., Nugent, K., Young, J. G., and Brazelton, B. (editors), (2002).  The Infant and the Family in the 21^stCentury.  New York: Brunner-Routledge. 

Young, J. G., Ferrari, P., Malhotra, S., Tyano, S., and Caffo, E. (editors), (2002).  Brain, Culture, and Development.  New Delhi: MacMillan. 

Dr. Young was elected as Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He received a Certificate of Appreciation from the Autism Society of America, and a Certificate of Achievement from the Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities of the State of New York. Dr. Young was honored with a 1998 Books of the Year Award by the American Journal of Nursing, the official journal of the American Nurses Association, for the year’s most outstanding book in psychiatry (Mental Health Services and Systems for Children and Adolescents:  A Shrewd Investment).