The extermination of social subgroups is a relatively recent phenomenon in history but, unfortunately, it seems to have become more and more frequent in recent times. Often, as in the case of the witch-hunting age, extermination is the result of a perfectly rational attitude that develops in societies under heavy stress. When a social subgroup is relatively wealthy, can be identified, and can't offer significant military resistance, there are good chances that its members will be exterminated and their assets confiscated. That was what happened to the people branded as "witches" in Europe during the 16th and 17th century in Europe. Another classic case was that of the Jews, a few centuries later.
At this point, considering that our society is surely under heavy stress, the question is: which subgroup could be the next target for extermination? I asked this question to the readers in a previous post of this series, but almost nobody could identify the right target. Now I think I can propose the answer:
The most likely target for the next extermination round are middle-class retirees.
Retirees satisfy all the requirements: They are identifiable, of course, they are old! They are often relatively wealthy and, more than that, they cost a lot of money in terms of health care. Finally, they can hardly put up serious military resistance. Exterminating the middle-class elders would be both easy and profitable.
Let's make a few calculations. In the US, there are nowadays about 46 million retirees living on social security. The US spends about 7% of its GDP on pensions, that is, about 1.5 trillion dollars per year (about $30.000/person/year). That's more than the about 1 trillion dollars that the US government spends for the military budget, bloated as it is.
Assuming that you could remove just 10% of the retirees, it would mean saving some 150 billion dollars per year. But, in practice, much more than that if you take into account the health care costs. For instance, summing nursing care facilities and home care for the elderly, we are talking of something close to 300 billion dollars per year, and that does not include hospitalization costs. The potential savings are truly huge: hundreds of billions of dollars.
Of course, exterminating the elderly cannot be done using the same demonization techniques used in the past against the witches and the Jews. Old people are parents and grandparents and their offspring won't normally like to see them burned at the stake or gassed in extermination chambers. But extermination takes many forms, and it is rarely explicitly proclaimed. After all, it never happened in history that you could find a sign with the words "extermination camp" at the gate of an extermination camp. During WWII. for instance, the Germans were told that the Jews were just being relocated, not that they were being exterminated. In other cases, the people being exterminated were glorified as heroes.
So, what form could the extermination of old people take? It would be done using well-known propaganda techniques, the main one being to state the exact opposite of what is being done. In other words, when the idea is to kill some people, propaganda will convince everybody that the plan is to do them a favor (do you remember the "humanitarian bombs" dropped on Serbia?)
In practice, the weak spot of the middle-class retirees is that they need medical assistance and that they cannot normally pay the skyrocketing costs on their personal saving. So, they could be gently removed from the state budget by degrading the public health care system while saying that it is being modified in order to protect them. A clever way of doing it would be to focus so much on curing a specific single disease that the result would be a decline of the care for the illnesses that mostly affect aged people: cardiovascular diseases and tumors. A parallel measure to intensify the effect would be to degrade the quality of the food available, making it become less nutritious and contaminated with all sorts of pollutants.This method would not affect the elites, who can pay for good health care and and good food, but it will hit directly those who live on pensions.
Now, let's take a look at the current situation. In 2020 the average life expectancy in the US has declined by nearly 2% for a total of 600,000 extra deaths, most of them old people. So, we are talking of some 20 billion dollars saved just in terms of pensions. But it is much more than that considering the saving in health care costs. These numbers are not large in comparison to the US GDP, but not peanuts, either. And what we are seeing is just the start of a trend.
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This said we have arrived at a worrisome (to say the least) conclusion. Most readers of the "Seneca Effect" blog are middle-class Westerners (maybe Mr. Gates reads my blog? Unlikely, but who knows?). And sooner or later we are all going to become middle-class retirees. Of course, we are not going to be "exterminated" in the literal sense of the word. That is, no firing squads, gas chambers, or the like. But we will have to live on a progressively poorer diet and we won't have the same kind of free health care that our parents and grandparents had.
What can we do about that? The answer is, unfortunately, "very little." Of course, you'll do well in following a healthy lifestyle, exercise, try to avoid the worst kinds of junk food, all that. A sane mistrust in doctors and their unhealthy concoctions may also help a lot. But you have to face it: the life expectancy of the people who are alive today is going to drop like a stone. It will be a classic example of a Seneca Cliff.
But is it so bad? I don't think we should take this as a reason for despair. At least, we'll avoid the sad trap of overmedicalization in which so many of our elders fell. When my father was 87, he had a heart attack. I remember that while we were waiting for the ambulance, he said, "I think it is time for me to go." He was not happy, but I think he understood what was happening to him and perhaps he savored the idea of being reunited with his wife, who had died the year before. But that was not to be. He was kept alive for five more years, every year worse than the previous year, until he was reduced to a vegetal, his mind completely gone, kept alive by tubes and machinery. Being humiliated in that way is not something anyone would desire. When it is time to go it is better to leave this world in peace. If possible, at home.
Since this blog takes inspiration from the words of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, at this point I might suggest to you to read Seneca's "De Brevitate Vitae" ("on the shortness of life"). Seneca was not so great as a teacher of wisdom and he made some egregiously unwise mistakes (with Queen Boudica, for instance). But when his time came, he died an honorable death. The death of a true stoic.