A world without adults!

Last week, I chanced upon a rather curious theory from the French Nobel laureate, Luc Montagnier that paints a rather grim picture of the future. He spoke about the potential removal of a large part of our human population who are vaccinated in a couple of years. Putting it in simpler words, he claims that everyone who has taken any COVID-19 vaccine will die in two years.

Now that set me thinking, in a weird way, if it were to happen, how would the world be — without adults. Since it is the influential, powerful, privileged and mostly adult population that has taken those vaccine jabs. Hence, the meek shall inherit the earth, or the less privileged, and the kids would be to survive.  Imagine, a world full of kids and young folks, as much of the older gents would largely be gone. Imagine!

Working on my thought experiment, I queried my 12-year-old son as to how he would feel. He seemed pretty chill about such a future. Yeah, there would be the sad loss of parents, but on the bright side there would be no schools, no exams and “freedom”. Next, I turned to my daughter, who is 17 and is a kid who is a bit unconventional in her thought process. She responds in a single line without batting an eyelid, “It will be an orphaned world”, and moved away. I know it is impossible to make her expand on that pronouncement. But as I start thinking, there are many dimensions to what she said.

We are so used to be living in a regulated, governed and supervised world. A hegemonized feeling started to run through me. It looks like the whole world is created to control. This control freak matrix that has evolved over the years has encapsulated everything inside it. Even the most powerful, the high and mighty, are controlled. Any abrupt incident which creates faults in this matrix will be temporary; it will regenerate itself to the almost same order.

While, if Luc theory pans out, there will be the initial experience of freedom, it will rapidly sink to the realities.  There will be an absence of the so well-designed resources. Access to money and access to technology will be challenging as the privileged adults control many of the anthropogenic institutions that has been created.

Even what we define as an adult has evolved through this control syndrome. For instance, let’s start with what is the core definition of adulthood? Age, right? We dub a person who has turned 18 as an adult, as if the 18th birthday was some magical Cinderella-to-the-ball event.  Although I am not a biology expert, but have read that the human brain completely develops only nearing 30 years, so that can’t be the reason. Probably at some juncture in our historical past, someone (read powerful and influential) must have pronounced 21 as the age of wisdom, and it later evolved into 18 as an age of adulthood. Maybe because the education system that was designed required you to be 18 to pass high school. A baseline was needed to control many things, and hence 18.

So, what happens when the control is suddenly nonexistent? Not possible, it will regroup and regenerate that control structure soon. There will be new leaders. Alexander, Julius Ceaser, Joan of Arc were not 18 when they started. New kinds of power centres will emerge, and clans evolve. Initially, it will start off as small independent groups and slowly emerge into big hegemonized groups. There will still be a delineation between adults and kids, people who call the shots and those that follow. Although, the age of adulthood will be below 18 for some years. There will still be the privileged and less privileged. 

But for that duration, there will be a void to making the children’s dream come true, which is mostly what we adults think is one of our purpose. I think I understand why my daughter said “it will be an orphaned world”. We have created so much dependency on many things around us to ensure that we are protected.  When that protective affiliation are shattered, we feel abandoned. We do feel orphaned many times in our life, but if this event happens, the magnitude of that feeling will be colossal. But as it happens with us as individuals, we find those small things to hold and gather us back to create more protections around us. It will start stitching what we call the social fabric, that safety net once again. Damn, Mr. Aristotle was quite bang-on, when he said that the man is a social animal bit.  

Let’s take a leap from Aristotle to Luc. Well, we should appreciate him for bringing out the vulnerability of our social fabric. Any hazard resulting from the vulnerability will be evaluated for risk. If the risk is high, we will find ways to mitigate and/or control the risk, or if risk is low, we will keep monitoring it and live with it. Risk management is a major part of our life. When we are bored, we create new risks and engage ourselves in managing them. We will find new viruses to protect us and we will find vaccinations to protect from the virus and find ways to protect us from those vaccinations. Hence, even when the world is devoid of adults, it will very soon grow up into a new era of people who will be adults. The system attains equilibrium —  always (Gravity). What say?