A dynamic and innovative society, focused most on launching people into the prime of their lives, depends on taking good care of those aging out of it—if only to keep the threat of gerontocracy at bay. Our neoliberal age has pitted creativity against care. But there is no way to prize the first without privileging the second, too.Article continues after advertisement
How we can get to a collective society in which anyone’s and everyone’s needs are covered by those with means is one of the longest (and longest-winded) debates in modern history. However, nobody to date has proposed doing so by overturning gerontocracy. Bear with me.
The biggest difference opponents of gerontocracy might make today, in fact, is putting a positive spin on senior status: building up fairness as a collective goal for all, and prizing retirement as an ideal time to pivot to new kinds of tasks. The final phase of life may end in death, but it is also one of great potential.
It is not just that older Americans will need a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine of disempowerment go down. It is that everyone deserves importance and meaning as long as they live. Sweetening the dose of disempowerment—the higher taxes and the mandatory retirement—by providing new opportunities is likely to make it more acceptable, to the old not least. Only the ideal of supported and worthy retirement can ultimately make old people hoarding power more generous to their younger contemporaries than they are now.
