Molded to Adolescent Expectations

Jerry Kosinski, award-winning novelist, said that America’s moral scene changes and “reflects the great number of people who don’t know what to do after having grown up in a society which basically leaves individuals to themselves, with all the options available to them.” “Well,” he concludes, “there are some options that perhaps we shouldn’t take. We need spiritual guidelines to know which options are good and which bad.”

He views America’s popular culture as “that all-pervasive cultural climate basically molded to adolescent expectations. Popular culture makes little demand for sustained effort. It’s predigested, prepackaged and calls for a minimal attention span. Popular culture is typified by the enormous popularity of entertainment, television, films and radio that make great use of pop music—adolescent disco music. Since perceiving popular music doesn’t call for our intellectual apparatus to be at work, one could say that the more of such entertainment we have around, the less we think.”