Generational turnover happens by force

It's the right and duty of ambitious young men to disembowel the gerontocracy

Over the past few years we’ve heard a lot of talk about “gerontocracy.”

And it’s a serious issue to be sure—so much so that we’re only ever allowed to discuss it in the narrow context of octogenarians with visible dementia, which in the grand scheme of things is an incredibly small part of what’s going on.

The real problem is that medical advances have ensured that far too many leadership positions remain clogged up by greybeards in their sixties and seventies—men who ostensibly retain all rational faculties but have grown soft, out of touch, and (most damningly) far too risk averse to lead a dynamic, vital, and agile civilization.

This is obviously why the government felt entitled to ruin everyone’s life for two years during Covid. All of society give undue weight to the interests of old people and it literally didn’t matter how many young folks lost their jobs or suffered from major depression or gained forty pounds, because it was deemed absolutely essential that we shut down civilization to give grandma a few extra years.

Yet even this pales in comparison to the impact oldsters have as part of the electorate. Because of their insanely high turnout it’s functionally impossible for a politician to propose *any* constructive changes to Medicare or Social Security without the Long Testicle Mafia freaking out and sinking his candidacy, and this in turn makes balancing the budget a pipe dream.

But you know what? I can’t blame Boomers for any of this.

They’re only doing what I’d expect from any interest group—deploying the resources at their disposal in pursuit of what benefits them collectively.

If anyone is to blame here it’s us young guys, who have seemingly failed to intuit a crucial principle about generational turnover and power transfer:

When you covet the old king’s crown you can’t simply wait for him to hand it to you. You must shove your cutlass down his throat and rip it off his head.

---

One mistake a lot of “trads” make is assuming there used to be some kind of amity between generations. It’s unquestionably true that higher parental age and a more dynamic cultural ecology have made intergenerational tension worse, but there’s also a biological element at play that’s existed since time immemorial and is here to stay.

To put it simply, young guys are always competing with older and more established men over resources, women, and social status / prestige, and this conflict has a political valence completely orthogonal to the left-right divide.

Most old guys have transitioned in life stage from Hunter to Lord, and having carved out a comfy little niche for themselves will typically profess their desire for a stable material ecology with “predictable rules and robust institutions.”

In practice that means lots of gatekeeping mechanisms to facilitate rent seeking and protect their dominion from ambitious young bucks wanting to knock them off their perch. Think regulatory capture, onerous credentialing regimes, non-competes—anything that enables pink-cheeked Chamber of Commerce types to pull up the ladder behind them and draw an enormous sinecure for very little effort while their twenty-something peons do all the bitch work.

Meanwhile, ambitious young men will always prefer a chaotic environment with flexible rules, relatively weak institutions, and lots of room for disruption. They will first lobby the power structure to tear down unreasonable gatekeeping mechanisms, and if their lobbying is ignored (or they’re denied a bag befitting their talents) will instead turn to piratical tactics outside established norms.

This is the natural and eternal dialectic between old and young: the hoary old king erects his castle and digs his moat to protect his dragon’s hoard, but the hungry young bandit is forever circling the periphery and looking for an opening so he can storm the gates, plunder the treasury, and fuck the princess.

And most of the time the bandit gets knocked down on his ass, which is of course the right and proper order of things; you can’t maintain a civilization if the king doesn’t win most of the time. But sometimes the bandit needs to win (or at least come close enough to scare the king into abdicating for a younger heir), otherwise you’ll invariably see decadence, gerontocracy, and an enormous decline in overall agency.

Because once the young bandit grows too timid to storm the gates just watch how fast the king grows complacent and lazy, the peasants stop paying their taxes, and the entire kingdom gradually regresses back into the Dark Ages until some neighboring barbarian horde just swoops in to devour everything.

---

Looking at modern America, the primary source of our gerontocratic woes is clear: Gen X men have proven tragically inept at seizing real power away from Boomers.

Please understand I’m not shitting on Gen X here. Xer guys are individually the most capable cohort by far, and most of the ones I know have built a stupendously impressive motte and bailey for themselves. Most of America’s greatest entrepreneurs and tech CEOs and cultural critics are Gen X, and I’m proud to call some of them my friends. I’ve also written at length about how the Xer leadership of movements like the Alt Right were fantastic “big brothers” to my cohort of Late Millennial men.

But how many of their gnarly dadrock hillforts could ever project meaningful power against King Boomer? And how many Xers even have the balls to try?

Last year Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis—probably the two most powerful right wing Gen X guys on the planet—made a serious play to seize the mantle from Trump, and their venture proved an embarrassing failure for everyone involved.

Why did they fail? All the reasons we’ve come to expect from men their age. They couldn’t play well with others. They’d grown narcissistic from past success in some narrow domain and failed to anticipate the ways in which such victories might not scale. Their hearts weren’t really in it. They weren’t willing to bet the house and sacrifice everything in pursuit of a big beautiful dream.

And so the Big Orange Boomer simply rubbed his greasy balls all over their latchkey kid faces, just as Sleepy Joe is currently doing to the Democrat Party’s shifty and prevaricating Xer leadership. Of course it remains to be seen whether this latter maneuver will work, but based on all prior experience I’d honestly bet on the Boomer.

---

Millennial and Zoomer men need to accept that Gen X won’t dismantle gerontocracy. They couldn’t do it if they wanted to, and at this point they honestly don’t want to.

They’ve lost their vital energy and youthful hunger, and the majority of them are simply too far removed from a young man’s experience to meaningfully understand the worst excesses of Corporate America. Most of the really capable ones have long been ensconced in a comfortable bubble, and in most situations will instinctively empathize with your manager or employer instead of you.

Again, you can’t blame them for this—they’re responding to the incentive structure. You can’t count on them to fight for you simply because they are your competitors now.

Elon and Ron DeSantis and all successful men of their cohort will instinctively desire a stable and predictable world that continues to afford them comfort, status, and power—not one that enables a young and talented guy to quickly rise to the top.

If you want a world like that you need to create it yourself.

And to that end it’s crucial to understand that Millennials and Zoomers can never hope to displace the gerontocracy by making a clean run at the castle. Boomer power structures are much too resilient and the Boomer Truth Regime far too robust. When you fight on the Boomer’s terms he always wins, and when you fight on your own terms he will simply unperson you, deplatform you, or freeze you out of polite society.

So to vanquish gerontocracy we’ll instead play the inside game.

We’ll tunnel under King’s Boomer’s walls, burrow into the old man’s wine cellar, and steal off with his crown and jewels and princess in the dead of night.

---

What specifically does that look like?

Basically we’re looking to identify asymmetries and pressure points in the Boomer power structure that can easily be exploited for exponential return while maneuvering inside Boomer institutions. Just think of all the little inefficiencies / irrationalities that should obviously be done away with by society at large but persist simply because Boomers insist “that’s how things are done” and still control the levers of power.

The example of this I’ve personally found most lucrative is job stacking, or the practice of working several bullshit remote jobs to collect multiple six figure salaries.

I recently organized a group of guys who are building out infrastructure to execute this strategy in concert, and any interested readers can learn more here.

---

Some people will object to strategies like job stacking on moral or civicminded grounds, and I’ve offered plenty of arguments rebutting those objections.

But any such disagreement is likely pointless and intractable, simply because it exists atop a very straightforward difference in material interests between labor and capital.

Would it make sense for the lord to argue with the peasant about his taxes? Would the highwayman ever argue with the lord about how much he should rob him?

Of course not; both men assert their Will to Power and seize whatever the fuck they can.

Just like the Boomer partners I reported to at a Big Four, who made millions on the consulting engagements I managed by exploiting cheap Indian labor and oh-so-subtly pressuring me to eat hundreds of billable hours for the good of the firm.

Just like the Gen X entrepreneurs who owned the small consultancy I worked for in Nebraska, which brutally underpaid its employees and Stalinistically reproached people for talking to each other about compensation.

Just like the Millennial Jewish dude I briefly partnered with last year, who called non-equity employees “furniture” and exploited me for weeks of sweat equity before flagrantly breaking a handshake agreement while laughing in my face about it (and thereby becoming easily the best business mentor I’ve ever had).

That’s what the modern business world is like—exploitative, deceptive, radically Pareto distributed, and full of insane asymmetries that contain all the real margin.

You can remain an unambitious Hobbit and never get exposed to the really nasty shit, or you can try to swim with the sharks. But if you opt for the latter you’d best not decide later you’re actually a dolphin. And when you’re seriously competing with someone more established then yourself you must never hesitate to rip his fucking guts out.

Obviously none of that means you can’t be the biggest sweetheart in the world after you get your check. At that point it’s great (and to my mind obligatory) to dispense largesse, but you need to constrain that to your ingroup—the people you care about.

And before you get paid you always owe it to yourself, your woman, and your family to embrace the ruthlessly mercenary business ethic of the modern world.

Sometimes that means adopting oblique tactics in the face of Boomer hypocrisy, and this will obviously rub some very honest and civicminded folks the wrong way. But never forget that as we siphon off King’s Boomer’s wealth and metastasize through his decaying power structures we’ll be the ones defining right and wrong.

Because at the end of the day—at least in America—success justifies itself.