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Myrddin Emrys's avatar

Mr Chirot, you are 82. And you are still there, talking, teaching, influencing people. So, spare us this kind of hypocritical pseudo-wisdom.

Old age has been either glorified or vilified across several different periods of history, and actually the lionization of youth is a very recent phenomenon, one of the symptoms of a world hinged on the constant surpassing of its previous achievements and obsessed with growth per se.

Age has little bearing in the failings of today's world leaders, except as an easy negative charge. These people are not supported just by a gerontocracy, but by vast numbers of the young as well. And the younger leaders, left and right, are neither more reasonable, more moderate, or less corrupt: does youth make a positive difference between Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping? Vance and Trump, or Ocasio-Cortez and Biden? Just Stop Oil and Corbyn? Et cetera, et cetera.

You are a social scientist, Mr Chirot, and truly such easy judgements based on an identitarian category like advanced age are below you.

It is not age that makes a difference, it is ideas, and the reasons why people embrace such ideas. It is, like you have pointed out often in your research, the enthusiasm for righteousness that is willing to ride roughshod over everything and everyone to obtain the one goal reputed worthy and saintly -- in religions, in revolutions, in counter-revolutions.

It is ideas that are supported not by reason but by emotions of the worst kind: fear, egoism, envy, hatred, greed. Even where the ideas have some worthy point in theory, being fed by this kind of emotions warps them beyond redemption.

And this is the Spiritus Mundi of the beginning of this century, unfortunately. East and West, North and South, everywhere. It is difficult to remain untainted.

But it has very little to do with age.

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