ABSTRACT

The young people of the counter-culture obsessively use the terms "life" and "death" to make political, moral, racial, and even generational distinctions. Thus, "life-loving," "life-enhancing," or "of the camp of life" are used to refer to those who are young, black, left-wing, or proletarian; while "the camp of death" includes the bourgeois, the white-skinned, the politically liberal or conservative, and the middle aged. Aging is the prelude to death, and to the degree that death is also a personal, psychological event, the study of the normal psychology of later life may also tell us something about the normal psychology of dying. Cut off from meaningful work by mass production, by the absence of clear necessities, and by the failure of symbolic incentives, the young men spiral slowly towards the psychological conditions normal for the aged: they become a premature gerontocracy.