‘If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice.’ — Nassim Taleb
I begin with a confession: I am an extremely angry young man. Now, you may think that extreme anger has no place in polite society, nor in the decorous columns of a local newspaper. You may think that, as it is my anger, it is my responsibility to flush it out of my system; perhaps I should take up a fun sport, like kickboxing, say, or psychotherapy? Well, under normal circumstances, this may well be fruitful advice. But these are not normal circumstances. I believe that we live in times of such unusual moral decrepitude, of such egregious and widespread dereliction of duty, that to suggest that one should bottle up or displace one’s justified and legitimate emotional response is tantamount to an act of violence.
At the very least, it is foolish and immature, and stores up problems for the future. But this is exactly what older people have been doing to younger people. As an example, I have a friend, a very beautiful, very loving, very good young woman of 31. Like many of her generation, she has suffered a great deal over the last few years. Finishing an art degree which, it turned out, was of little to no value (except to her creditors), she found her way into the hospitality industry. She enjoys the work, but it is exhausting and exploitative. Despite being in a stable relationship, she has been unable to save any money of any consequence, the majority of the couple’s income going to their landlord. They would like to start a family, but with their prospects as they are, they simply don’t know how they could manage it. Exacerbating all of this, my friend was forced to endure the misery and uncertainty of lockdown, which had a disproportionate impact on the young. On one of the very few occasions she has tried to express her complex sense of despair to her parents — who could help her substantially by selling their house — her father’s response to her, as if she were being ridiculous, was, ‘Why are you being so emotional?’
But she is not the only one. I too, along with many of my generation, can become emotional about these issues. So for the benefit of those who may not understand, and in the interest of expressing legitimate and perfectly rational emotion, I will explain precisely why I am angry.
Firstly, I am angry because the institutions of this country concerned with the raising of good citizens have, so far this century, shown themselves to be unfit for the task, and in the process have all but abandoned their responsibilities. By institutions I mean, the family and the education system. In my experience, parents generally have had no clue how to prepare their children for the vicissitudes of life today, and have increasingly palmed off this responsibility onto the supposed authority of the education system. This is an education system which at secondary level is close to useless, and at university level is almost syphilitic with the lust for profit. Looked at as a whole, this system does not prepare young people for useful work; it does little more than steal time and money from them.
This has been unfolding in a general economic climate that is rapacious and immoral. Since the financialization of the economy in the 1980s, there has been a ballooning in indebtedness and asset values, crucially in housing. This has been fostered and hard-wired into civic life by successive governments. Much of the apparent wealth of the country comes not from useful activity but from a demographic fluke and subsequent gaming of the system. Because it is not real, this ‘wealth’ will soon vanish.
It is younger people who are being asked to pay the price for this folly. The older generations have effectively been preying on the good faith of the younger, and they appear to have done very well out of it.
Secondly, I am angry because, though these facts have been plain for all to see for years now, there has been no moral adjustment on the part of older people. They cannot be blamed for the over-arching concatenation of forces — which are geo-economic, as it were — but they can be blamed for their reactions, which have generally been lamentable, and have exacerbated the situation. There has been no proper reflection on the part of mature people to recognise that the wealth and resources they control are, in large part, unearned. There has been no development of socio-economic norms to encourage the widespread liquidation of inflated assets such as housing to free up capital for younger people at crucial times in their lives. There has been little hint of any meaningful solidarity, and certainly no imagination as to how one could go about remedying these perfectly soluble problems. Why is it that parents, just because of their chance superiority in years, get to spend decades in morbid comfort, owning houses and enjoying the fruits of stability, while their children desperately try and cobble together a future for themselves? Why do the parents not go and rent? Why do they not hand over their pensions? Where is the solidarity? Where are the reparations for this historic injustice?
They are nowhere to be seen. Instead, one sees acts of denial, and continued abrogation of responsibility. One sees, even, the brazen display of this unearned wealth. Walking along St. Leonards seafront, often I see richly dressed pensioners, pretending as if they are in the bloom of youth. Perhaps someone can explain to me, what is the good of all this wealth being concentrated in the hands of older people?
Lastly, and significantly, I am angry at myself, because I have been unable to express these legitimate feelings to the people in my life who need to hear them. I believe that the situation I have been describing points to a horrifying blind spot in the human condition, that often, and especially when the issue is between parents and children, individuals are simply unable to communicate what needs to be communicated for the collective good. It also suggests to me that the word ‘family’ does not mean quite what it should. I believe that, with this historic inequity between generations, the Golden Rule of western civilisation, that ‘you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, has been broken, and it makes me feel troubled. If I am able to have children, what goodness, what pride, can I pass down?
I really do not know. This issue needs to be addressed, not suppressed. But there are too few public voices saying what should be said. One rare voice is that of David Willetts, ex-Conservative minister. Now I will never vote for his party, but I agree strongly with a recent pronouncement of his, that ‘the social contract between generations has been broken’. If we do not, as a nation, as communities, as families, do the brave work of trying to right this historic wrong, then this broken contract will be the cause of a lot more violent emotion to come.
