Almost every modern statesman or stateswoman in the First World can be described with one word: old. It has become universally, tacitly accepted that to hold public office one needs experience, meaning that perfectly adult people like the French president Emmanuel Macron (43 at time of writing) the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (34) or prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern (41) are all labelled by the media as young. Trump and Biden might be radically different in many ways, but they share the fact that they are both well over 70. Add to that the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, 81-year-old Nancy Pelosi who shows no signs of ceding power to anyone any time soon and you have a complete picture of who runs the world.
Well... almost complete, think of all the super rich. How old is Warren Buffet? George Soros? Charles Branson? It might be that I am cherry picking examples, since young people like Elon Musk are doing very well as well, but wait, Elon Musk is young because he is only 50. I love the positive outlook this promotes, implicitly claiming that you are still young at 50, but let's take a step back and remind ourselves that even for the ultra rich who can afford a heart transplant every year, humans rarely make it to an age measured in three digits. So even for those with practically unlimited resources, living in one's eighth decade should be a twilight age, preparing one for death. Why then are old people seemingly running the show? And more importantly, why should we care?
A simple explanation would be to point out that advances in medicine have made people with access to those technologies much more productive in their objectively old age. I am however not concerned with the physical or even sociological causes of this change. I write of the moral and psychological developments within the gerontocrat class that we ought to concern ourselves with today. Allow me to start by pointing out that most if not all civilisations known to us had developed reverence for aged individuals.
Since the often unproductive existence of old people could well be ended to preserve resources, there must be a strong factor or a bundle of factors that make old people so revered. While part of this respect has a utilitarian motivation, the utility of information and advice, in no short supply in the minds of those who have lived twice or even thrice as long as one has, being recognised, and another cause for it would be familial piety being extended to include all senior members of society who cannot be considered rivals in the struggle for the same resources that young people compete for, like mates and opportunities, I propose that respect for one's elders has strong metaphysical underpinnings.
The image of an old man conjures up awareness of the passage of time and forces us to reflect upon our mortality. It is not surprising then that according to legend the young prince Siddhartha had been awoken from his materialist stupor when he encountered, amongst other things an old man, which forced him to confront his own ultimate end and became the Buddha. If, then, old people remind us of our death, why respect them? It can only be that old people have developed various coping mechanisms to prepare for the inevitable and those fill us with awe. A senile man who does not fear death fills us with hope that we also, in due course, will become immune to the terror of no-longer-existence. One of the symptoms of this final maturity (if not, as perhaps Nietzsche would have it, putridity) of old people would be a reclined posture towards all things political, financial and material. It is becoming increasingly clear that as they age and get richer, modern people have no intention of becoming what in Hindu tradition would be described as a sannyasa.
The continued political friskiness of the silent generation, not to mention the boomers is a symptom of something more sinister. This will to live is not in any way healthy or Nietzschean: it is motivated by fear and fear only. It is clear that old people have lost the ability to withdraw themselves and wait for death to come. Instead they grasp at the dwindling straws of life they have left and desperately seek a cure for entropy, like the much (unjustly) ridiculed quest for the philosopher's stone. Fortunately, no one is a perpetuum mobile and sooner or later those old men shall stop in their tracks, but until then their actions are a great hazard to the young and healthy.
Consider the old men of old, their courage in face of death well outranking that of heroes, who fight to win and live, with death being merely one of the possible outcomes. The old people that rule us today have lost the one thing that once made their kind respectworthy: acceptance of death and recognition of its vital (pun intended) function. Gerontocrats clasping in their aged hands the reigns of power look increasingly pathetic and desperate, but in despair they flail the whip of state to prolong their lives. You may think I overdramatise, buy how do you explain locking down the economy? Rulers were legitimately afraid if not terrified of the virus because for the first time in a long time the threat faced by the organisations they stand at the helm of threatened their own wellbeing. I will end this overlong post with a short proposal. All those hit by lockdowns and restrictions ought not to rally against some novel cold but 'gainst the equally unhealthy and no longer justified or morally superior gerontocracy.
