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Any suggestions? One of the few things I can think of that satisfies being challenging, demonstrating (limited, for the naysayers) competence and is broadly recognised as (again for the naysayers, largely) legitimate is military or some comparable form of national service. But last time that idea was floated at the old place it was dismissed as being literal slavery (beside the objection that the army and every other profession doesn't want them). Which, hyperbole aside, is admittedly a problem: How can you place demands on a populace under threat of withholding rights and still call yourselves defenders of freedom? Whichever way you look at it it boils down to a state-to-citizen quid pro quo.
The trouble is for it to hold any significance it must impart a cost, and even if the benefits outweigh the costs people will still bristle at the need for any measure of sacrifice.
Pilgrimage? Mortification? Or something altogether more milquetoast like graduating high school, which many here are just as eager to condemn as little different from slavery and imprisonment. Or how about tying it to your first point and make it necessary to have raised a child who graduates high school? Three birds with one stone!
At the broadest, I could see there being some set of standardized tests that try to capture the would-be adults' actual understanding of the world and the implications of entering certain kinds of contracts and relationships. Do they understand how compound interest works? Do they get that sexual activity can lead to pregnancies, STDs, and emotional entanglement? And do they have enough understanding of their own biology to get that certain medical procedures are irreversible and certain drugs are inherently addictive and 'harmful?' If they meet some threshold of understanding, then they get their official 'adulting license' and can be permitted to enter the world as an independent individual.
This is basically how we handle driver's licenses, just expanded out to other privileges of adulthood.
This is, broadly speaking, how we could tell that someone possesses the psychological prerequisites to engage with other 'adults' as equals and can truly consent to various contracts that they'll be entering into.
Now, in an ideal world, "graduated from high school" SHOULD be sufficient to qualify someone as a Level One Adult. I don't think I need to argue the point that it is, demonstrably, NOT enough to prep someone for adulthood in the modern world.
I do think there would need to be some practical/skills based element to it. The thing I like about the Ant-Glove test in that link I posted is it directly checks the mental fortitude of the person subjected to it. Can they endure extreme discomfort without complaint or having a complete mental breakdown. Babies will cry at the slightest feeling of pain. Adults can endure hours of suffering if they believe it will improve their lives or their children's lives.
So what sort of tests are there that someone who is mentally stable and mature would pass handily, but would tend to filter out those who are unable to control their emotions and are repelled by discomfort and are too impulsive to endure painful experiences for later rewards?
Based on my personal preferences, I might suggest some kind of demonstration of martial prowess. Fight 10 different guys in a row, five minutes per round, with 5 minutes of rest in between each round. No need to win, just prove you can push through pain and discomfort and can at least keep your damn hands up by the end of it.
... funny enough there's an element of sense to this, with the argument being that one doesn't fully understand what it means to be an adult until you've been on both sides of the child-rearing equation.
The only real way to do something like this in the modern world seems to be mandatory military service, or something like it. Otherwise our lives are just far too devoid of any real suffering, especially the physical kind.
I do think that the Overton window could shift back enough towards responsibility in our lifetime to make mandatory military service a possibility. The best shot we have at getting Westerners back to some semblance of maturity is in my view instituting a sort-of UBI, but requiring 2 years of mandatory military service to obtain it.
With this system, if you're a criminal and poor or something, well you can either go to prison or go to the military. Tough luck if you don't want to.
Of course within that service there would have to be competence tests, physical trials, etc. but there are decent templates like South Korea. A commenter on an open thread in ACX here recently mentioned that in South Korea the TV dramas tend to have quite a common theme of older folks putting youngin's back in their place. We need more of that energy as well - Rob Henderson does a great job here of explaining how utterly ridiculous and backwards it is that adults now seek the validation of children. Even and especially in universities, where professors really should know better.
I don't like mandatory military service when there's always the risk that our troops could get plunged into a non-defensive foreign war and come back with the grievous injuries, PTSD, or worse.
So mandatory military service should HAVE to be paired with some serious skin in the game where if our leaders send out our troops to a conflict (even without a declaration of war) they have something personal on the line as well.
And I think that helps bring back the 'respect your elders' dynamic as well, if your elders have actually seen some shit and are just as tied to the fate of the nation as you are, and thus aren't trying to trick the young 'uns into dying for a worthless cause and pay a price the elders never had to pay or will have to pay.
My personal belief is that if you advocate for a war you should immediately be assigned to fight on the front lines. If you're an old man who can't fight effectively? I don't care - if you think the war is good, you're going to be the one fighting it. Advocating for entering a war without being willing to fight in it yourself should be at the very least deeply shamed, if not criminalised.
That's a bad idea. No, a terrible one.
You'd actively sabotage the military, which I guess you're okay with. God forbid the country actually needs it for a defensive purpose.
More importantly, you're antagonizing the troops without actually addressing the incentives for leaders to pick fights, since they are already in. It'd be like the Roman Senate trying to handicap Caesar by sending him all their dissidents. What do you think happens next?
The point of this is the chilling effect - I don't expect those old men to go and fight, I expect them to shut up and not advocate for other people to go die in order for them to be personally enriched. My belief is that advocating for other people to go die in order that you can profit off their sacrifice is such a moral wrong that the minor disadvantage of having the occasional octogenarian true believer playing a part on the battlefield is worth the cost. But that said, I could definitely agree to a compromise where people who advocate for a war that they cannot meaningfully fight in or support have to instead perform hazardous and dangerous support tasks back at home - what matters is that they have some skin in the game.
I think that's pretty reasonable.
It's the collision of moral wrong with material wrong that makes this so difficult. Skin in the game is a good thing. The problem is that most any policy which enforces it comes at the cost of effectiveness. As in economics, the most efficient solution is rarely the most moral one.
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Well, if we could somehow return to the legal status quo of the national guard not being deployed outside of the homeland, that would wrap things up rather nicely, yes?
In that case mandatory military service could be fulfilled without being sent on far flung imperialist adventures, and would be more like a militia / police force of last resort as was originally intended.
Professional army stays professional, the militia stays home and learns the basics of military affairs and life and kindly fucks off back to their normal civilian lives with a valuable skill set and shared cultural experience for life. Plus then they are actually around if serious shit pops off in the homeland.
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Despite not being a parent myself I have a solid sympathy with the idea that you're not really eligible for real grown up status until you're a parent. The difficulty is that making parenthood the benchmark is that it would accord a teenage single mum higher status than a childless man like myself while incentivising the creation of yet more teenage single mums, so I added the educational criteria to tilt the balance back to a range of more long term pro-social outcomes (promoting stable relationships, increased fertility rates, parental responsibility/discipline). Totally unworkable in practice anyway as it would never get support, people would be anywhere between their 30s up to their 70s or even 80s before they were granted status.
It's a reasonable idea, definitely more feasible, but that's 100 minutes in total. By the 10th fresh opponent you'd be a sitting duck, especially if they're preparing/prepared for the same trial. Presumably the guys in question are your peers? Seems unfair to fight older or younger opponents. Then again maybe participating as one of a younger-than cohort of opponents would be good preparation and pre-qualification for the initiation and act to rebalance the advantages.
I think I would have understood enough on an intellectual level to have passed such a test at age 13 and then promptly spent the next ten years learning the same lessons the hard way. Analysing it at a remove isn't like knowing it in your bones the way you do after you've been through it, so I think the tests would have to embody a strong practical element somehow.
In my mind, it's 10 opponents who have already qualified for 'adulthood' and thus know how to pull their punches and know exactly what it is like being on the other end of this treatment.
Yes, and that is part of the point. To be exhausted, bruised, hurting (hopefully not actually injured) and barely able to move, and then to have to dig deep and fight on anyhow.
The lesson being that sometimes life is just not fair and when you don't want to go on, quitting is certainly an option (indeed, you can withdraw from the gauntlet at any time you want!) but it won't solve your problems and certainly won't be rewarded.
Yes, the policies would almost certainly have to be introduced as a full package of changes in order to work, and there will be second-order/unintended effects.
Just have to make it clear that the goal is more intact families and more well-developed children.
So, in your ideal society, instead of waiting till 18, to "become adult" everyone must pass some test, whether memorizing and parrotting some stuff, or Thunderdome fight?
So, when I do not qualify, when I just do not go to such tests or fail every time, I am permanent child, I am baby till I die?
This is not so bad. While you adults have to work, I can stay home and play video games and my parents have to care for me. You cannot throw a baby to the street, after all.
Looks rather awesome.
Playing games all life is boring? No problem. I join with my friends, all perma children like me, we go outside and have fun. When our fun gets us arrested? You cannot put us in prison, we are lil widdle babies!
Looks even more awesome.
This is general problem with all people who propose new laws and regulations, whose answer to every problem is: "There should be law" "This should be banned" - these people are generally law abiding and cannot imagine how criminals think, do not ever bother to think "how would criminal, whether simple street thug or smart scammer and con man, exploit this law and used it for his benefit".
Are people who enjoy fights and brawls, who are used to dishing and receiving beating, better and more responsible citizens with stronger families?
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This just sounds like Russian army hazing but formalized. I'm not convinced that they'll be particularly inclined to do anything like "pull their punches". Instead, the average instinct is to get the new guy to suffer at least as much as you did, which naturally results in decreasing restraint over time.
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Younger opponents it must be -- clearly you are not a real grownup if you have yet to find the secret of 'dad strength'.
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