No society on earth comes close to matching America’s youthful imagination, its liberation of youthful energies, colors, forms, products, and narratives, all of which appeal directly to what is most neotenic or childlike in our nature. That America is comprehensible from the perspectives of all other cultures, while it is the perspective from which no other culture is comprehensible, would be explained by the fact that youth, while comprehensible to adults, does not comprehend adulthood.

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