I think it’s safe to say that young people’s obvious new freedoms prove that we’re not in the world of tradition anymore.
But it’s also clear that not being in it anymore raises problems, most of which are still not resolved – where the young are concerned any more than where the old are concerned.
The former are adrift and inspire fear, while the latter are devalued and placed in institutions, with their only fate being to die “in peace.”
So let me propose a militant idea.
It would be very reasonable to organize a huge demonstration for an alliance of the young and the old, directed against today’s adults, in fact.
The most rebellious of the under-30-year-olds and the toughest of the over-60-year-olds against the well-established 40- and 50-year-olds.
The young people would say they’re fed up with being adrift, disoriented, and endlessly lacking any sign of their positive existence.
They’d also say that it’s wrong for the adults to pretend that they’re eternally young.
The old folks would say that they’re fed up with paying for their devaluation, for being stripped out of the traditional image of the wise elder, by being put out to pasture, moved into nursing homes where they’re left to die, and with their total lack of social visibility.
This joint demonstration would be something very new and very important!
Incidentally, over the course of my many trips throughout the world I’ve seen a lot of conferences, a lot of situations, where the audience was composed of a small core of old veterans, old survivors like myself of the big battles of the sixties and seventies, and loads of young people who’d come to see whether the philosopher had anything to say about the orientation of their lives and the possibility of a true life.
So all over the world I’ve seen the lineaments of the alliance I’m talking to you about.
Just as in leap-frog, young people today seem to need to jump over the dominant age group, the one that goes roughly from 35 to 65, in order to form with the little core group of old rebels – the unresigned – an alliance of disoriented youth and old veterans of life.
Together, we would demand that the path of the true life be opened up.
'The True Life' by Alain Badiou
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071KTZ6MG