“The children now love luxury; they have
bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love
chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of
their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the
table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
Does this sound familiar? These days it’s
quite often that you see similar sentiments from the older generation, but the
quote above is not recent. Although frequently attributed to Socrates, it stems
from the Cambridge dissertation of Kenneth John Freeman, and although not quite
as dated as Socrates, he published it in 1907.
And yet it still seems appropriate today.
When we look at the news, it seems that ‘Youth Activism’ is blamed for
everything from the decline of morals and for the riots and demonstrations that
seek to upend the status quo. The Youth, they say, has no respect for the
proper order of things, and only ‘want, want, want.’
It seems that those making the claims are
rather stunningly not recognizing the self-made indictment against their own
parenting abilities – after all, the youth did not raise themselves. These same
individuals who now decry this in the youth are the same people who taught them
that they can be anything – movie stars, rock stars, anything they want to be –
and are now confused as to why a generation taught that they’re ‘special’ are
now quite disgruntled when they enter the world and find out that when
everyone’s special, no one is.
After all, when you’ve raised your kids to
aim high, they’re bound to be disgruntled pumping gas and waiting tables. And
perhaps the older generation sees the past with rose-tinted glasses – after all
they claim they were always respectful to their elders, etc. And yet in the
United States, these same Baby Boomers were the hippie generation – the epitome
of counter-culture!
In Namibia, the contrast is even more
stark. The older generation were the Revolutionary Generation! They fought
against the status quo, in armed conflict, to secure Namibia’s independence.
What are the odds that they never instilled these revolutionary values in their
own children? How can they thus be surprised that they now, too, rebel against
the status quo?
Worldwide, it seems this trend is rising.
In the Brexit referendum, the youth voted overwhelmingly to remain, while the
older generation was the ones who voted to leave. In the United States presidential
primaries, it seems the youth were quite attracted to Bernie Sanders, while the
older voters tended to skew towards Donald Trump.
Over the last decade, it seems that a
fundamental shift occurred in the world, and that an intergenerational rivalry
arose. While it might seem almost unthinkable, when you dig into the data, you
can see why this shift in attitudes occurred. After all, as medical science has
advanced, so too has the average life expectancy. And as quality of life has
increased for the older members of society, so too has their prospect of
working well beyond what used to be the normal retirement age.
Medical science also reduced infant and
maternal mortality, which reduced the size of families. As the cost of
childcare has increased, so too has the population growth rate decreased. And
that has resulted in a demographic first for the world – the proportion of the
old in the population is growing, and soon will exceed the number of children
in society.
In the developed economies, this is already
occurring. The victory of the Leave campaign in Britain already shows this. As
time goes by, the rest of the world will age as well – even Africa. And while
it is not in Africa’s immediate future, we will have to deal with the rest of
the world struggling with their own aging problem. In Japan, currently, every
ten working age individuals now have to support 4.3 old people, and by 2050,
every 10 working age individuals will have to support 7.1 retirees. In the US,
every 10 workers now have to support 2.2 retirees, and that will double to 3.7
retirees by 2050.
For the first time in history, demographics
is turning the democratic vote from one controlled by the young to one
dominated by the old. Upward employment mobility is stagnating due to the
retirement age shifting outward. And for a youth who were promised the world,
is it any wonder that they feel frustrated? After all, when voting on
far-reaching policies such as climate change, you can understand that those who
still have 60 years to live on this planet feel disillusioned when their say is
overridden by those with only 20 years left to live.
In a way, this intergenerational war has
been fuelled by the mistaken belief that life is fair. The older generation
believe that the young must be struggling because they’re not behaving
correctly and not working hard enough – after all, in a fair world, upstanding
hard workers won’t suffer. They fail to see that their own actions caused the
youth’s hardships. The youth, believing as well that their hard work and upstanding
nature should have brought them success, still find that they’re struggling,
and assume that it must be unfairness from those in power that’s keeping them
down, not realising that it’s not the older generation that’s causing their
struggle, but rather that the world has changed. As Marcus Cole said, “I used
to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, 'Wouldn't it be
much worse if life *were* fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us
come because we actually deserve them?' So now I take great comfort in the
general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”
Luckily, here in Namibia, we seem to be
blessed with a post-revolutionary government that has reaped the benefits of
peace and stability, and learns from the mistakes in the rest of the world. The
Harambee Prosperity Plan seems quite prescient in this regard, as the old
revolutionaries have seen what happens in other African countries if poverty is
not addressed. With they themselves aging, they’ve realised that it is the next
generation that needs to provide for them, and set up a plan that will enable
the youth to grow prosperous enough to carry the nation going forward. All that
is required now, is for the youth to take this olive branch of prosperity and
peace that has been handed to them, and grow the country they will inhabit for
the next 60 years, lest we suffer the same fate as the rest of the world.
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