epistemic status: scattered half-baked thoughts, probably they should wait until I’ve sorted them out and can put them in a real essay, but screw that I want to get them down before I forget

Civilization is neoteny.  Necessarily and wholly.

We’re all familiar with the thing where a domesticated species, by virtue of being domesticated, becomes neotenous in the literal sense – adults start retaining some of the physiology and the behaviors associated with juveniles of their species.  There are reasons for that.  The big one is that, throughout its lifetime, a domesticated animal is occupying something like the niche that an infant wild animal occupies: it’s not sustaining itself by doing normal wild-animal things (hunting / evading predators / whatever), it’s sustaining itself by causing larger and more powerful creatures to want to take care of it. 

Once your society has moved past hunting-and-gathering or subsistence agriculture, once you’re actually part of a network of specialists and supply chains, you are no longer living like a “wild” human.  Your thriving depends on (1) your obedience to elites and their armed goons [which is true even if you are an elite or an armed goon], (2) your ability to do helpful “chores” assigned to you by other humans, and (3) your ability to be likeable and charming.  These are kid skills.  Even abstract symbolic thinking is kind of a kid skill if you look at it the right way, which may or may not correspond to actual evo-neurological reality; you’re not using your skills to manage the dangers and opportunities of the environment in the way that a masterful hunter does, you’re playing with toys and/or trying out different kinds of imitation and/or trying to understand things for which you don’t really have concepts.  And if your ability to perform kid skills determines your reproductive fitness, well…

Noteworthily: there are lots of different kid skills, especially given that human childhood contains many distinct stages.  One of those skills is the ability to display maturity.  If a child can act scary and tough and independent like a “wild human” adult, he can bully younger children, and often impress adults enough to be offered privileges and opportunities.

This means that putting up a non-neotenous front is not even slightly incompatible with an actually-neotenous nature.  

This is a useful framework for understanding and planning out the future.  What our organization and technology does is make us more dependent, and make us better-suited to being dependent.  Maybe that strikes you as awful, which is a good reason to be a primitivist.  Maybe it’s worth thinking about ways to mitigate it.  Maybe there are useful things to be gained by leaning into it.  But the facts are what they are (in theory).