Social Implosion

National Public Radio did a story recently about how companies across the board have made it a policy not to hire or hire back people who were laid off during the Great Recession who are over thirty years old. Some of these people are now homeless. It's time to get out the old dystopian science fiction movie classic of 1972, Logan's Run, which speaks to this latest self-destructive behavior our society has conceived. In Logan's Run, people who turn thirty experience a warning signal embedded in the palms of their hands, which begins flashing a red ruby light. This light signals them that they must now go to a special place where they are "transformed" into a higher state of being. Some of the citizens of this far future world suspect that "transformation" really means "extermination" and attempt to escape their literally bubble-enclosed world into the wild, post-apocalyptic realm outside their dome. In the bubble world, life is all pleasure without pain, but only a temporary utopia, because it is a society that eliminates the problems of old age by eliminating people beginning physical decline entirely. Though the film depicts this in a sensational form, there really isn't much difference in practice to what we are doing now in our present-day society. We are making middle-aged people outcasts in our brave new economy. They are effectively shunned from participating effectively in our economic world, which is as good as social ostracism, otherwise known as social death. There was a time when we were wise enough to value people of proven experience and vastly accumulated practical skills. Such people had a personal history that told them what worked well and what didn't, and they knew when someone was trying to pull the wool over their eyes. These people were highly valued as leaders in the business world. They passed their wisdom to the younger people coming up through the ranks beneath them. Then they retired in old age with honor for a term of well-earned service to their company and society. They received a well-deserved pension, and those behind them could look forward to the same once they had completed their careers of proud dedication. In short, we were still connected with our truly ancient simian tradition of recognizing the importance of giving ultimate leadership to the "silverback", as they are called in the case of our evolutionary cousins, the gorillas. Look at how this was still emblemized in the culture of the twentieth century with such middle-aged male-lead film stars as Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, John Wayne, or middle-aged female-lead film stars as Katherine Hepburn, Betty Davis, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Kathy Bates. I am aged forty-two at the time of writing this blog, and was not discriminated against when hired as a public librarian during a career-change a few years ago, because state-run services still preserve the cultural ethics of our former business culture. The private sector by contrast has now become a jungle. The corporate world has forgotten there is a difference between being in one's superficial physical prime, and having reached a stage of life when one has entered the optimum phase of social and intellectual effectiveness, which comes later. All I can say to younger workers who are cooperating with corporate heads to continue this destructive trend is this: time flies, and it gets faster year by year. Before you know it, you will have reached the age of your victims. You will be especially struck by the irony of it all, if you get laid off at that time, because you will know that you are coming into the prime of your understanding and skills. Even putting aside your distress at becoming in your turn a victim of acute ageism, your objective self will think: what a waste!