Yan Lianke's (2010) novel The Four Books is about a re-education camp in China during the Great Leap Forward. The head of this prison camp is an individual named The Child; in the books, each of which is fictionally written by the prisoners, The Child performs acts which infantilize the prisoners, who are only named by their professions: The Theologian, The Scholar, The Musician, The Author and so on. Most obviously, their books, which are named as both Western and Eastern literary classics, are collected and burned to keep The Child warm in the winter. Yan Lianke is making a clear political point with what might be a bit of exaggeration: the Great Leap Forward was a leap into infantilism.

Aldous Huxley's (1932) Brave New World suggests a world in which people are "dehumanized" -- but in fact they are infantilized, made into people whose idea of fun is a game called "centrifugal bumble-puppy," made into lifelong idiots through growth-stunting alterations of their embryos, and/or constantly distracted by entertainment (including casual sex), hypnotic suggestion, and through an ultimate drug called "soma." In the Huxley fable, nobody behaves like a grown-up -- this is, we are told briefly, because the Controllers do not trust grown-ups, and because the supposedly grown-up world burned itself out in a spectacular burst of warfare. Having failed to achieve adulthood for humanity, and remembering the disastrous experiment in Cyprus, the Controllers of the Brave New World simply assumed that a world of grown-up children would be easier to manage. Conversely, Huxley's portraits are intended to illustrate how members of OUR society are merely grown-up children, instead of being adults.

Our present situation calls out for revolution. But the human being who would otherwise be exhorted to carry out that revolution is not particularly ready for such a thing; we witnessed, for instance, the Occupy Movement of 2011, which was unable to enact sufficient change before it was crushed by state-coordinated military force. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of America lives paycheck to paycheck today; such people are not allowed the security, mental or physical, necessary to enact the revolution.

Che Guevara, onetime avatar of revolution, had a concept of revolution which involved the creation of the "new man and woman." The discussion of these new beings was elaborated in his piece "Socialism and man in Cuba." "To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man and woman," Che tells us. The new man must be a revolutionary, and so, Che says:

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice.

But perhaps Che's self-sacrificing revolutionary is not what is necessary today; Che, after all, was instrumental in bringing about a national revolution in a small nation, Cuba, which went no further than Cuba. The rest is a sort of quixotismo, a tilting at capitalist windmills. His "new man" sets the bar too high. Perhaps, for the new revolution, all that will really necessary is that we be adults.

A collective of adults would not be the current crop, looking far and wide for excuses not to care about the current situation. A collective of adults would recognize that, given the global of abrupt climate change, what is necessary is an adult version of the physical mitigation of climate change. (Needless to say, this means more than a few solar panels, and a complete abandonment of the fossil fuel industry.) Adults would recognize that a society in which homelessness has to be planned to avoid chaotic homelessness is not as good as a society which offers homes to all. A collective of adults would not tolerate medicine for profit, war for profit, or heedless exploitation such as that which divides classes across the globe today. Adults would take responsibility for the form of the human collective, rather than devoting their lives to profit-seeking organizations.

So perhaps a mere collective adulthood ought to be the goal of the forthcoming revolution. Let's dispose of the pointless crap that distracts us from the pathetic condition in which the world is cast, the petty strivings which bind us to lives spent in hunger, the "cheap nature" (to use the phrase of Jason W. Moore) which subsumes both people and nonhumanity, and behave like adults.