Hal at the Inner Infant meeting

The leader names, without knowing it, the exact pathology the whole theme diagnoses: "dysfunctional passivity," the tendency to sit and wait silently for one's needs to be magically met. This is passive spectation abstracted into a psychology — the adult who has been trained by the culture to be a receiver, to expect satisfaction to arrive unbidden the way a broadcast arrives, the way an infant expects the breast. The irony the meeting can't see is that its cure (naming needs out loud, actively going to get them) is prescribed to men whose whole formation has been passive reception, and that the room full of grown infants clutching bears is the culture's spectator-condition wearing a therapeutic mask. The passivity is the disease the Entertainment feeds on, here surfacing under fluorescent light as a men's-issues Meeting.