---
title: "1. On The Outcast Generation"
url: "https://ebooks.socialeurope.eu/6/a-chronicle-of-crisis/85/1-on-the-outcast-generation"
---

# 1. On The Outcast Generation  

*17 January 2011*  

Every generation has its measure of outcasts. There are people in each generation assigned to outcast status because a ‘generation change’ must mean some significant change in life conditions and life demands likely to force realities to depart from expectations implanted by the conditions-quo-ante. These changes devalue the skills they trained and promoted, and therefore render at least some among the new arrivals, those not flexible or prompt enough to adapt to the emergent standards, ill-prepared to cope with novel challenges and unarmed to resist their pressures. It does not, however, happen often that the plight of being outcast may stretch to embrace a generation as a whole. This may, however, be happening now.

Several generational changes have been noted during the post-war history of Europe. There was a ‘boomer generation’ first, followed by two generations called respectively X and Y; most recently (though not as recently as the shock of the collapse of Reaganite/Thatcherite economics), the impending arrival of the ‘Z’ generation was announced. Each of these generational changes arises from more or less traumatic events; in each case, a break in continuity and the necessity of sometimes painful readjustments, caused by a clash between inherited/learned expectations and unanticipated realities, were signalled. And yet, when looking back from the second decade of the 21st century, we can hardly fail to notice that when confronted with the profound changes brought about by the latest economic collapse, each one of those previous passages between generations may well seem to be an epitome of inter-generational continuity.

Indeed, after several decades of rising expectations, the present-day newcomers to adult life confront expectations falling – and much too steeply and abruptly for any hope of a gentle and safe descent. There was bright, dazzling light at the end of every one of the few tunnels which their predecessors might have been forced to pass through in the course of their lives; instead, there is now a long, dark tunnel stretching behind every one of the few blinking, flickering and fast fading lights trying in vain to pierce through the gloom.

## Intergenerational Inequity

This is the first post-war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility. Their elders were trained to expect, matter-of-factly, that children will aim higher and reach further than they themselves managed (or had been allowed by the now bygone state of affairs) to dare and achieve: they expected the inter-generational ‘reproduction of success’ to go on beating their own records as easily as they themselves used to overtake the achievement of their parents. Generations of parents were used to expecting that their children will have a yet wider range of choices (one more attractive than another), be yet better educated, climb yet higher in the hierarchy of learning and professional excellence, be richer and feel even more secure. The parents’ point of arrival will be the children’s starting point – and a point with yet more roads stretching ahead, all leading upwards.

The youngsters of the generation now entering or preparing to enter the so-called labour market have been groomed and honed to believe that their life task is to outshoot and leave behind the parental success stories, and that such a task (barring a blow of cruel fate or their own, eminently curable inadequacy) is fully within their capacity. However far their parents have reached, they will reach further. Or so they, at any rate, have been taught and indoctrinated to believe. Nothing has prepared them for the arrival of the hard, uninviting and inhospitable new world of downgrading, devaluation of earned merits, doors showed and locked, volatility of jobs and stubbornness of joblessness, transience of prospects and durability of defeats; of a new world of stillborn projects and frustrated hopes and of chances ever more conspicuous by their absence.

These last decades were times of unbound expansion of all and any forms of higher education and of an unstoppable rise in the size of student cohorts. A university degree promised plum jobs, prosperity and glory: a volume of rewards steadily rising to match the steadily expanding ranks of degree holders. With the coordination between demand and offer ostensibly preordained, assured and well-nigh automatic, the seductive power of the promise was all but impossible to resist. Now, however, the throngs of the seduced are turning wholesale, and almost overnight, into the crowds of the frustrated. For the first time in living memory, the whole class of graduates faces a high probability, almost the certainty, of ad-hoc, temporary, insecure and part-time jobs, unpaid ‘trainee’ pseudo-jobs deceitfully re-branded ‘practices’ – all considerably below their acquired skills and eons below the level of their expectations; or of a stretch of unemployment lasting longer than it’ll take for the next class of graduates to add their names to the already uncannily long job-centres waiting lists.

A capitalist society like ours, geared in the first place to the defence and preservation of extant privileges and only in distant (and much less respected or attended to) second to the lifting of the rest out of their deprivation, is high on goals while low on means. The graduate class has no one to turn to for assistance and remedy. People at the helm, on the right or the left side of the political spectrum alike, are up in arms in the protection of their currently muscular constituencies – against the newcomers still slow in flexing their laughably immature muscles, and in all probability deferring any earnest attempt to flex them until after the next general election. Just as we all, collectively, regardless of the peculiarities of generations, tend to be all-too-eager to defend our comforts against the livelihood demands of yet unborn generations.

While noting that ‘anger, even hate’ can be observed in the class of 2010 graduates, political scientist Louis Chavel, in his article published in the 4th January 2011 issue of *Le Monde* under the title *Les jeunes sont mal partis*, asks how much time will it take to combine the rancour of the French contingent of baby-boomers infuriated by the threats to their pension nests, with that of the graduate class 2010 who have been denied the exercise of their right to earn pensions. But combine into what, we may (and should) ask? Into a new war of generations? Into a new leap in the pugnacity of extremist fringes surrounding an increasingly despondent and dejected middle? Or into a supra-generational consent that this world of ours, prominent as it is for using duplicity as its survival weapon and for burying hopes alive, is no longer sustainable and in (already criminally delayed) need of refurbishment?