24 AUGUST 2025

This week I’ll look at two trends which many people on the right of politics claim to discern in contemporary life: infantilisation and Dianafication, both of which they view as destructive developments. According to these critiques, the former manifests itself in authorities of all kinds – governments, health services, advertisers, educationalists, health and safety officers – treating the people they communicate with as if they were children. The latter, a tendency towards extravagant sentimentality, named after the emotional frenzy that followed the death of ‘the people’s Princess’ in a car crash in a French tunnel, is the demise of the stiff upper lip which had been regarded as a permanent feature of the British psyche (or at least the English and Scottish). Instead there has been a shift to a mediated public space in which everyone is ready to burst into floods of tears at a moment’s notice.

The most common allegations of infantilisation have centred around health and safety. There is no lack of ludicrous stories in the tabloid press of things being prohibited on the grounds of ‘elf n’ safety: a council banning kites in case one lands on someone’s head, a school not allowing their pupils to throw snowballs because of the risk of injury, packets of peanuts carrying a warning ‘May contain nuts’, first-aid kits not able to stock plasters (band aids) because of the danger of ‘contamination’, a big red sign on a path where people can see the ocean directly in front of them which says ‘Danger: Cliff Ahead’. Some of these stories may have been invented by knee-jerk hacks working on trashy tabloids, but the ones above seem to have been genuine.

In many cases, the fault does not lie with the Health & Safety Executive: there is often no law banning X, Y or Z, but overly zealous jobsworths with too much time on their hands find imaginative ways to catastrophise and get their biggest kick of all by stopping other people enjoying themselves. Another key reason for the proliferation of health and safety is protection against legal redress if some kind of injury occurs: no one wants to be sued. And finally, as in a reported case where an airline steward refused a passenger a blanket because of ‘health and safety’, but said she could have one if she paid five pounds, H&S can also be a way to hide unpopular company policy behind non-existent laws and regulations.

Motorists face a thicket of signs every time they leave their house and sometimes need to negotiate urban stretches of street with a roadsign every few yards. A few years ago, there was a famous experiment in the Netherlands where a local council drastically stripped the central streets of their town of nearly all their signs and the number of accidents fell, presumably because drivers took greater responsibility for their behaviour. And this is the general problem with this proliferation of signs and endless rules and prohibitions: if there is an assumption that people are lazy and irresponsible, that’s the way they’ll behave. Meanwhile, packaging of items comes with more and more warnings and information which most of us totally ignore, but which make legislators feel good about themselves because they are rescuing hapless child-adults from their ignorance and personal laxity. Some of this information, such as the nutritional content of food, can be useful and empowering if people read it, but messages that say ‘Open here’ on cartons of milk or packets of nuts seem to assume a public so intellectually challenged that they could never have worked that out by themselves.

Health is an area rife with infantilisation. I’ve written about this a couple of times before in my blogs, but the tabloid press and YouTube are full of superfoods and hidden killers, sometimes with tragic repercussions as in the case of the MMR vaccine and children now dying from measles, a disease we had more or less eradicated in the west. But the blame for this should not be placed solely on sensationalist journalists or the self-aggrandising know-it-alls on YouTube. Advice from official bodies is just as likely to be based on the same assumption that the general populace is deeply stupid and needs to be bossed and policed, and this policing ratchets up gradually over time as guidelines become subject to a kind of mission creep. For example, recommended levels of LDL cholesterol have plummeted from 160 to below 100, blood pressure targets are following the same downward trend, and alcohol limits for men have gone from 28 units per week not so long ago to current guidelines which recommend no alcohol at all; apparently even sniffing the cork is as good as signing your death warrant.

In this profusion of scary statistics, there is no serious attempt to make people aware that they have a choice and that a lot of the science is contested and hedged with all kinds of caveats even by the researchers themselves. Guidance is simply handed down from on high in the form of misleadingly exact figures and stats, so it’s hardly surprising that people believe them and, when they fail to reach these unrealistic targets, shrug their shoulders and think they may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Underlying all of this is an assumption that the great unwashed have to be scared into submission in the same way that a child must be frightened by the bogeyman because otherwise they can’t be trusted to make rational decisions.

This segues into the issue of public information in general and what we are allowed to know and see. These days there is an often a warning before a TV programme that some people might be upset by the scenes it contains, as if they are children peeping out from behind the sofa at the Daleks in Doctor Who. As I mentioned a few weeks ago in a different blog, the BBC now adds warnings that The Germans episode of Fawlty Towers contains moments when Basil says some nasty things about Germans, and originally tried to remove the episode altogether from public consumption. We are helpless infants, it seems, who need protecting from the realities of life, even when watching something we know is just a comedy. On YouTube there are words which the hosts can’t say – for example ‘porn’ – as if none of us knows that this exists and if no one ever says it, it will disappear from the earth, while my Norwich City forum blocks out parts of offending words with asterisks. The ironic truth is that this has the opposite effect to that desired: if someone reads ‘Arsenal’ they immediately think of the football club; if they read ****nal, they immediately think of ‘arse’.

Business is no better. These days a letter from my bank is likely to be headed ‘Dear Alan’ or even ‘Hi Alan’, as if I went to school with the bot which is sending me the letter. Meanwhile, the teaching platform for which I do part-time work invites me to send an emoji to a returning student at the start of a subsequent class. This is a 28-year-old woman who is studying for a PhD and they encourage me to treat her like a five-year-old. At WordPress, the people I need to contact if I have a problem or want to know how to do something on the site aren’t called ‘Technical Advisers’ or something similar: they’re ‘Happiness Engineers’. At educational institutions where I worked, if HR organised a workshop, it would often be centred around playing games and having ‘fun’. What happened to the concept of professionalism and simply doing your job? Why don’t we just build a sandpit in the middle of the campus and bring our buckets and spades into school?

A major cause of infantilisation must be the evils of modern advertising. In adverts the actor-consumers are shown in a constant state of emotional delirium as they use a product: UK Baby Boomers like me will remember the Shake n Vac woman having a multiple orgasm as she cleaned her carpet. Meanwhile, men are nearly always depicted as pathetic children vastly inferior to their wives, not because the advertisers are feminist, but because they know most decisions about which household products to buy are made by the wife and a little bit of flattery will go a long way. But ultimately both men and women are portrayed as children totally unable to control their feelings, flitting from product to product with childish delight that lasts for a few moments as they finally consume the item for sale. Their inner child is cuddled and nourished and they are taught that they are entitled to be part of consumer heaven (as long as they can afford it) ‘because you’re worth it’.

So far I’ve focused on the way that institutions relegate us to the position of children but we are not entirely free of blame in this sorry process. Often we seem to actively yearn to be infantilised. In past generations, young people looked forward to the day when they were older and took full responsibility for their lives just like their parents; in total contrast, nowadays the elderly dream of returning to the unbridled licence of childhood when life was an endless round of fun and games in the playground. The parody of Dora Bryan’s all-singing, all-dancing group of wrinklies in the comedy series AbFab was a wickedly accurate depiction of modern old age, in which almost no old person would be seen dead in a nice cardie or a tweedy skirt or sensible shoes. Instead they dress and behave like hormonal teenagers, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this makes them look the very opposite of ‘cool’.

Yes, I know, I’m a grumpy old man but on this topic I’m basically on the side of the crusty right wingers: we infantilise ourselves and are infantilised in return. It’s great that people do things like go sky-diving when they’re seventy, or learn to play the piano, or take up karate, or study for a degree. But these are adult things that require discipline, the opposite of being a fly-by-night or a couched potato, whereas most of the things I’ve mentioned in this blog don’t demand any self-discipline at all. They simply need decent health and a bit of money and the lack of anything that might be called a brain. I want to make clear that I don’t wish to prevent the elderly doing anything they want to do and I’m definitely not against sensible health and safety laws: for example, where I live in Malta there is virtually no protection on construction sites, so every few months I read in the local paper of another worker who has plunged to his death. But I am against the broader trend of infantilisation because it is a way that governments, authorities and corporations can more easily handle and manipulate the people they claim that they are serving. It’s not happening because ‘we’re worth it’; it’s happening because it makes life simpler for them.

To turn now to Dianafication, this became a topic of hot debate after the death of Diana, when the UK exploded in a paroxysm of media-led grief and mawkish sentimentality. The scenes following Diana’s death became a sort of template for everyone to copy and when anyone vaguely famous dies, not only serious public figures but soap opera actors and pop singers and the stars of reality shows, the messages on the wall and the wreaths and flowers and candles have become clichés with little inner meaning. I recognise that this is partly a natural process as figures who were important parts of our lives die off one by one, reminding us that life is passing us by and soon we will join the departed. But the extreme performative nature of the grief seems excessive to the point where it feels self-indulgent and basically fake. A perfect example of this was the way Elton John repurposed his song for Monroe and repackaged it for Diana, highlighting how the chance to dramatise our grief was more important than the unique human being we were supposedly honouring. Perhaps we are trying to fill a hole that we sense in our lives in a world where materialism tells us that the route to happiness is buying stuff, but it doesn’t fill the hole in the slightest and in reality these extravagant displays of grief often don’t even show genuine respect for the person we’re commemorating.

This outpouring of performative grief is a reflection of a world where we all indulge in self-dramatisation, especially on social media. In the past we had our own little local circle where we mattered but we recognised that we weren’t important beyond this tiny corner of the world, but nowadays, while we can’t all be a Kardashian or Taylor Swift, we can at least be mini-stars among our Instagram clique. We are all media whores now. We can see this difference if we watch recordings of members of the public being interviewed in front of the camera in the early days of television and compare it with 2025. In the early videos, interviewees stutter and blush, are bashful and awkward, and most of them look as if all they want to do is run as far away from the camera as they can. Contrast that with the modern world, when everyone looks slick and rehearsed in comparison, as if they have been waiting all of their lives for this moment, their fifteen minutes of fame. The modern world and its social media feed a voracious narcissism which enslaves us as it lures, and we are trapped in a garden of earthly delights, a virtual surrogate much more exciting and vibrant than the mundanity of everyday real life.

Because of this new desire to perform before the world, topics which were once taboo and hidden away are now openly displayed, up to and including graphic details of what we do in bed and who we do it with. We are told that the worse thing we can do is bottle up our feelings for this will surely lead to mental ill-health, so we ‘let it all hang out’ to use a favourite phrase of the counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s, when theories like the primal scream encouraged us to release our inner demons because that would lead to catharsis. Unfortunately, recent research suggests that this doesn’t happen and that dealing with anger by screaming and punching a pillow actually does the opposite and helps to keep the rage alive. Yet a feeling seems to exist that the more we overtly express our emotions, the more sincere that makes us, while anyone unfashionable enough to maintain a stiff upper lip in moments of heightened emotion is diagnosed as having psychological issues of self-repression.

Feelings trump facts every time in our contemporary reality. The political right tends to put the blame for this on postmodernism, but in my opinion this is placing the cart and the horse in the wrong positions. Modern technology and consumer society are the fuel that feeds our abandonment of rationality, much of which stems from the insincerities of advertising, the purpose of which is to endlessly flatter us and tell us how wonderful we are as long as we buy the right product, and, more importantly, to convince us that happiness is something we all deserve as a natural right and, even more importantly, something that can be bought. A comparison is useful here between ads at the dawn of modern advertising, which tended to list credible reasons why we should buy the product, such as price or efficacy, and modern ads, which are carefully constructed symphonies of emotional manipulation. If they contain any ‘facts’ at all, they are mostly lies, or exaggerations, or details which are insignificant compared to the sweep of emotions the advert aims to evoke. Bernays has a lot to answer for.

As with infantilisation, not everything about our increasingly sentimentalised society is negative. A lot of things which were once buried beneath silence can now be openly discussed in the public arena, and we no longer have a situation where only the chosen elite can go to a library and borrow ‘dangerous’ books hidden away in the back because the hoi polloi cannot be trusted to read them. One huge plus is that women are now more willing to report assault or rape and a wall of silence no longer blankets STDs and sexual health. And personally I have no problem when sportspeople cry at losing a game or someone openly weeps at a funeral of a loved one, and despite the research I mentioned earlier, I believe this is perfectly normal as well as psychologically beneficial. But there is a difference between these genuine bursts of emotion and the performative displays of feeling that have become so common and formulaic. Even in an increasingly shallow and cynical world, sincerity still matters.

Moreover, we must understand the reasons for this sentimentality in the context of a world where science is making grandiose claims at a metaphysical level and annexing fields of life where its methodology is not always the most appropriate. Everyday common sense and folk wisdom is caught in a pincer movement between the ocean of sloppy sentiment that results from laissez-faire relativism and the imperialism of science supremacists like Dawkins, Krauss and New Atheists who belittle and deny the value, or even the reality, of subjective experience. At one extreme of the spectrum there is a lazy relativism which denies the possibility of truth and at the other a dogmatic physicalism which strips life of purpose and meaning. The masses are piggie-in-the-middle, looked down on by both hard-line materialists who see non-scientists as quaint relics from the past who are pitifully deficient in little grey cells and an anti-scientific intelligentsia putting forward obscure and often unintelligible arguments that have no relevance to people’s everyday lives.  

It may seem surprising that I broadly agree with many on the right of social politics regarding these issues of infantilisation and self-indulgent sentimentality, since I imagine most right wingers would label me as irredeemably ‘woke’, with my involvement in the gay liberation movement as a young man, my belief that racism is still systemic in most western countries, my support for the trans movement in the recent divisive culture wars, and my feeling that men need to change and adapt to new social and technological realities. But I see no reason why these issues of infantilisation and sentimentalisation should be seen as automatically positioned on a right-left divide, and if the liberal left assumes they are, I think it is in danger of accepting that the right are more sincere in some way, whereas in general they are not; they have their hypocrisies and blind spots just as those on the liberal left do.

I know a lot of this blog reads like a rant, but ultimately we are talking about what we want our day-to-day social reality to be like when we step outside our front door, which is something far more relevant to us than most of the abstract babble that spouts from the mouths of economists, party politicians and public intellectuals in the media. However much power autocrats accumulate, and things aren’t looking good in that regard at the moment, this everyday world of the street belongs to us and we can all play our tiny role in making it more honest and more meaningful. There’s not much we can personally change in this mediated world, perhaps, but rejecting this collective insincerity and media-led fakery might be a good place to start.