The modern battle between Neanderthal and Cro-magnon.

Our capitalist society measures maturity by a person’s ability (and willingness) to make money, pay bills, and buy things. However, true maturity in the environment is best measured by how confident a person feels in the presence of their parents; how equally balanced and functional the adult members of a family are. This structure is best for coping with the needs of a constantly shifting environment.

The significance to our overall society is in the fractal development that extends around the family. The capitalist structure is based entirely on wealth. Period. A hierarchy built solely from the ability to make money, pay bills, and buy things. An illusion of maturity. Alternately, a more stable and sustainable society is built around people’s ability to find balance. The better a person is at finding balance, the more responsibility they will be asked to shoulder.

Of course, the latter is harder. It takes much more time and work for a person to find balance with their parents and in their families. It is very easy to move away as soon as possible and start making money, paying bills, and buying things. What is not so obvious is the vacuum that is created where roles a society needs to survive go unfilled. 

Staying in close contact with our families might not be the most pleasant experience, but when we eventually find balance we discover that we have become well suited to a specific role in the family, and thus in society, that would never have been discovered if we simply ran away and got a standard job. (Note how there is a diminishing variety of careers in our capitalist structure.)

The battle we are seeing playing out is between these two social structures. In true Hegelian fashion, neither extreme will be the right answer. Whether we like it or not, money is a permanent element in our environment that needs to be managed and survived, and families and communities need to be able to withstand the immature; those who choose the easiest emotional path.

The biggest problem we face today is how the youngest generation learns to find balance with parents who were convinced money was the only necessity. I am guessing it will take four generations to get back to a stable, but evolving social structure again.