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In your personal life, aging depends less on the physiological than on social age. Social age is inversely proportional to your capacity to think, feel, and live the new as future, as a task, as still-to-be-experienced present. You’re as young as your capacity to live life as if it were an experience of constant new beginnings, leading not to repetitions of the past, but rather to futures—maps waiting to be explored and roads waiting to be travelled, always ready to take risks, admit ignorances and respond to new challenges. I speak of the future as anticipation, as the “not yet,” as latency or potency. Seeing as you are aware that you never live but in the present, the future is always the incomplete present, a present as a task, as an event, for which you are personally accountable. To have a future is to be the owner of your present. Conversely, the more you live your life in the belief that the world has already decided what you’re supposed to expect and, consequently, that the future is closed off to you, the older you are. Thus, aging is living on repetition or in repetition, as if each repetition were unique and unrepeatable. It is passing away your days as if it were the days themselves that were passing, in their mindless daily stroll.
La repetició es pot viure de tres maneres diferents: com si el passat fos un present etern que les rutines diàries, les institucions i les notícies gairebé no confirmen (envellir per la mort viva); com si el passat hagués passat i hagués deixat al seu pas un buit inabastable pel qual només els jocs de cartes, la televisió o la xerrada de dolències poden oferir una escapada (envelliment per morts vius); i finalment, com si tant el passat com el futur fossin igualment remots i inaccessibles, provocant un pànic insuperable pel qual només un malbaratament excessiu del cos per alcohol, drogues, gimnàs, església o teràpia pot oferir una escapada (envellir de vida sense mort). ).
In our societies of manufactured and computerized bodies, both public and private services have been created to provide assistance to those who encounter serious difficulties in coping with the repetition of repetition. Ultimately, we’re talking about the normalizing of decay. Aging, in these societies, is always the result of a chronic depletion of energy, either spent or still unspent. It consists in displaying with conviction the “sold out” sign on the door of the theater of life, even if no play has been staged there in a long time or if it hasn’t ever even seen a first rehearsal. As far as the first two forms of aging are concerned, the goal is to invest in the past as if it had never really passed. It increasingly consists in the marketing of co-aging services. They tend to be effective, because the invention of repetition cunningly conceals the repetition of invention. The underlying idea is that no matter how unbearable the experience of aging, it is always more bearable when it is shared. As for the third form of aging, what is sought is not the omnipresence of the past, but rather the omniabsence of the past, an eternal present whereby the future is relieved of having to haunt the living with the not-yet-here bad news. These are the techniques for aging through rejuvenation. They amount to a modified version of the metaphor behind the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story of the same title, whose protagonist is born an old man and then grows increasingly younger until he dies an infant. According to the techniques for aging through rejuvenation, the clock in the railroad station of the small town in the American South stops instead of moving backwards, and with it time stops as well.
As I said above, social age does not coincide with physiological age. But the degree of the discrepancy varies according to historical period, including its social context and the other collective circumstances surrounding it. The same applies to societies. The industrialized world in which we now live began to age rapidly during the 1980s. All of a sudden the future was closed off, and the new common sense that said that there was no alternative to the unjust, racist and sexist capitalist society in which we lived entered our homes faster than pizza delivery or Uber Eats, and spread through the news, the emerging social networks, and punditocracy’s ready-made wisdom. Novel experiments and expectations of collective life had been discredited for good, the world was intrinsically unjust, the rich were rich because they deserved it and the poor were poor in everything, but especially in judgment, you had to live with imperfection, even if you were able to mitigate it by replacing market rationality with the irrationality of the state at whose expense those least able to make it in a competitive society were made to live. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, was second to none in pronouncing the death of the future: “There is no Alternative”—the infamous TINA. Then Francis Fukuyama turned that death into the ultimate triumph of Western society—“the end of history”— benefitting from the fact that Friedrich Hegel, dead since 1831, could not protest such an obtuse interpretation of his philosophy of history. The reinforced concrete torn down with the fall of the Berlin Wall was reinforced in the thousand cemeteries of the future that were built throughout the world. And indeed many were necessary to bury so much of the future.
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Avui en dia, aquest procediment principal d'envelliment del món està representat predominantment per la primera forma d'envelliment esmentada anteriorment, l'envelliment per mort viva. Però les altres dues formes d'envelliment també estan presents. L'envelliment per morts vius és la forma preferida d'envelliment dels fonamentalismes religiosos, que treballen el buit deixat pel passat i prometen ressuscitar-lo en forma d'un futur gloriós en un altre món. Per als promotors d'aquest envelliment, la nostra vida present ha mort i no ressuscitarà fins que els rellotges de la història comencin a retrocedir o tots els rellotges comencen a sonar a l'uníson l'última hora de l'eternitat. No es pren cap responsabilitat social per la injustícia. Només hi ha culpa per patir-la, l'única solució és expiar aquesta culpa.
La tercera forma d'envelliment (vida sense mort) és la forma dominant entre els mil·lenaris, nascuda a l'inici del període en què el teatre del món abaixava el teló d'un futur diferent i millor. Aquesta era una generació condemnada a néixer vella. Van néixer privats del passat del futur, perquè aleshores la noció d'alternativa havia desaparegut de l'horitzó. Per tant, mai se'ls va passar pel cap derrocar el sistema injust que els robava l'esperança d'un futur diferent i millor. El seu objectiu era assolir l'èxit personal dins dels límits del sistema. Van sacrificar temps, drets, oci i plaer amb l'esperança d'un triomf que, per a la gran majoria, no arribaria mai. Volien vèncer el sistema des de dins del sistema. Això era tot el que el sistema volia vèncer-los amb més eficàcia. Aquesta generació és ara predominant en la tercera forma d'envelliment (vida sense mort).
La geopolítica de les estratègies d'envelliment mereix ser analitzada amb detall, però aquest no és el lloc per fer-ho. De moment, n'hi ha prou amb tenir en compte que el món no ha envellit de manera uniforme, ni les diferents formes d'envelliment s'han repartit uniformement per tot el planeta. Va ser sobretot a l'anomenat nord global on la gent va començar paradoxalment a desitjar viure més temps sense ser vist com a vell. El que vull dir aquí és que estan sorgint signes clars que el procés d'envelliment del món és qualsevol cosa menys irreversible. No parlo del rejoveniment, que, com he dit més amunt, és una manera d'enganyar l'envelliment. Parlo de desenvelliment, és a dir, de tornar a creure en un futur diferent i la capacitat de lluitar per ell. Parlo de rebutjar la repetició infinita del present, perquè la repetició ens arrossega inexorablement a l'abisme.
Apareix un anhel de novetat, que no té res a veure amb la barbàrie, perquè la barbàrie és on ja som. A tot el món la gent de totes les edats fisiològica està augmentant, perquè, com he assenyalat abans, les diferències fisiològiques no tenen cap conseqüència quan es tracta de l'envelliment o la desenvelliment del món. Penseu, des de Xile fins a Itàlia passant pel Líban i l'Índia, la trobada de joves i grans per igual, omplint els carrers i places públiques del món contra la política de la repetició i els polítics repetits. Són els nous insurgents, els que diuen No a la imminent catàstrofe ecològica, a la escandalosa concentració de la riquesa, al segrest de les institucions democràtiques per part dels antidemòcrates, a la irracionalitat dels anomenats mercats racionals, al gegantí robatori de la nostra intimitat i intimitat per els nous lladres barons Google, Facebook, Amazon o Alibaba, la bruta indiferència davant el patiment dels immigrants i refugiats assassinats al mar, a la selva o al desert, o tancats en camps de concentració, com si Auschwitz fos només un record cruel, ara darrere nostre gràcies a la victòria del bé sobre el mal.
The political forces on the right, which have always fed off the aging of the world, are crying out in fright at what they call an effrontery, as if everything that had caused the young and old alike to take to the streets in order to de-age were not an effrontery as well. Those same forces argue that there are no proposals—in other words, no repetitions, which is the only newness they recognize. But the truth is that there are proposals. From India to Chile, the forces of repression and the political parties are being confronted with the sense of outrage that is moving the de-aged against the dead letter of such an abundance of constitutional writ. They are being confronted with proposals from plurinational popular constituent assemblies. They are being confronted with proposals for efficient and free public transport services as an exercise in nature-oriented economy. But first and foremost, they are being confronted with the celebration of national, cultural, religious and sexual diversity, with the search for regions freed from capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, and with the search for peasant, indigenous, family, feminist and cooperative forms of community-based economy.
The more the world de-ages, the more the powers that have produced the aging of the world and turned it into the industry that ensures their perpetuation will find themselves confronted with the effrontery to which their own effrontery has given rise. Will they ever age? Z
La publicació d'origen d'aquest article és Open Democracy.