YOUTH, OBSOLESCENCE AND AUTHORITARIANISM

Abstract

Modernity, in general, devised to us a conception of progress, heir to the Christian concept of hope, which has opened space for a discourse about the future to the detriment of the insignia of the past. In the West, that discourse, together with objective social processes, such as the dominance of bourgeois market society, decomposed the ancestral wisdoms in knowledge (technoscientific) and life learning (moral), questioning and disallowing traditional wisdoms together with those who possessed it, the older subjects, promoting the appearance of new forms of barbarism that rob them of their autonomy and create a false sensation in the younger ones that they belong to a world in which memory becomes a dispensable accessory. This article intends to briefly discuss some consequences of the dark side of progress with regard to human temporality, such as the appearing of the old age administration, which favors the impoverishment and the symbolic rupture in societies, causing a roominess for the assumption of authoritarian ideologies and a disturbance in the image societies create for themselves from the neglect of old age, making this image and concept, beforehand, injured. Expressions like obsolete, overtaken, and outdated are just a few prototypes of the reflexes starting from language and advancing on people's behavior towards their elders. This text presents some empirical (sociological) examples of this symbolic disturbance in societies, also relating it to the fall of patriarchy, and it ends with a critical proposition for the symbolic recovery of the place of longevity in contemporary societies.