The Infantilization of Comfortable and Oppressed Societies: Two Distorting Mirrors Facing the World’s Challenges

Since the end of World War II, a large part of Western populations — especially in Europe and North America — has followed a relatively linear collective path: growing material security, physical protection, expanded rights, medical progress, mass education, and continuous improvement in living standards. For many, this historical experience has instilled the idea that the world is (or should be) predictable, rational, morally readable, and above all, reformable without pain.

At the other end of the human spectrum, billions of people have lived for decades under authoritarian regimes, in impoverished and violent societies, where the satisfaction of basic needs — security, food, health, shelter — remains uncertain. Their daily lives, shaped by instability and survival, foster a very different relationship with the world: often raw, distrustful, lacking nuance, and even fatalistic.

And yet, these two worlds — which are diametrically opposed in terms of living conditions — paradoxically converge on one point: each produces, in its own way, simplistic and reductive visions of major political and international issues.

“Protected” Societies: The Illusion of a Simple and Moral World

In post-1945 Western societies, progress became the norm: social progress, technological progress, moral progress. The welfare state, civil rights, the rise of individualism, globalization — all these factors contributed to shaping populations convinced that problems can and should be solved simply, quickly, and peacefully.

When confronted with complex challenges such as the far right, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, mass migrations, identity tensions, or colonial legacies, many respond with a binary reading: good/evil, oppressor/oppressed, democracy/autocracy, shameful past/reparative future.

We thus witness a form of cognitive infantilization:

✅ Any nuance is experienced as a moral betrayal.✅ Any strategic approach is suspected of cynicism.✅ Every conflict is reduced to a black-and-white moral logic.✅ Any tension is seen as an anomaly that can be fixed through dialogue, international law, or economic sanctions.

It’s the illusion of a world where complexity is perceived as a failure of communication, where violence is seen as an outdated relic, and where everything can be debated on equal terms in a TV studio.

“Oppressed” Societies: Desperate and Fatalistic Brutality

At the opposite end, in autocratic, corrupt, or chaotic regimes (some areas of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Latin America), the absence of prospects, repression, and widespread poverty shape another kind of simplification:

✅ Power is seen as necessarily brutal and corrupt.✅ The outside world is viewed as a stage of constant injustice, where only power dynamics matter.✅ Elites are seen as sold-out, treacherous, or untouchable.✅ Hopes for change are often projected onto strong, messianic, populist, or military figures capable of “restoring honor” or “sweeping away the system.”

Here too, global issues are reduced to simplistic frameworks: Israel becomes the absolute embodiment of the oppressor; the West, a uniform and hostile bloc; democracy, an inaccessible luxury or a hypocritical façade; nationalism, a legitimate revenge against centuries of humiliation.

A Shared Blindness, Two Opposite Origins

Ultimately, these two attitudes — those of the overprotected societies and those of the overoppressed — lead to the same analytical dead ends:

✅ They reduce political and geopolitical issues to slogans.✅ They overestimate the role of moral intentions (good or bad).✅ They underestimate structural dynamics, power relations, historical determinisms.✅ They feed caricatured and sterile debates, incapable of grasping the gray zones.

But their origins are opposite:

➡ On one side, an excess of comfort that disarms people in the face of the world’s real violence.➡ On the other, an excess of oppression that makes any nuance suspicious or impossible.

Towards an Adult and Nuanced Thinking?

Escaping these dead ends requires a double effort. For Western societies, it means accepting that not everything can be solved through morality, that democracy does not automatically guarantee peace, and that strategic compromises are sometimes necessary — even with questionable actors.

For oppressed societies, it means rebuilding trust in spaces of debate, accepting that change can be gradual and institutional, and that it doesn’t always have to come through strongmen or bloody revolutions.

This work is not easy, as it demands what many avoid: complexity, doubt, intellectual discomfort. But it is the price to pay to overcome infantilization — whether it comes from comfort or oppression — and to finally think about the world as it is, not just as we would like it to be.