Twilight of the Patriarchs: How Old Men Wage Wars on Futures That Are Not Theirs to Live
In 2019, Raphael Samuel, a young man from Mumbai, declared his intent to sue his parents for giving birth to him without his consent. Many scoffed, but his words carried the strange clarity of someone not numbed by convention: a moral refusal to romanticise suffering or justify blind creation.
“There’s no point to humanity,” he said. “So many people are suffering. If humanity is extinct, Earth and animals would be happier. They’ll certainly be better off. Also, no human will then suffer. Human existence is totally pointless.”
His antinatalism was not rooted in nihilism, but in a radical kind of care, a mourning for a planet devastated by human appetite, and a love wide enough to include the unborn, the voiceless, the vanishing. He did not seek erasure, but release: a world where harm no longer multiplied by default, where life was chosen only when it could be sustained with dignity and gentleness.
His reckoning was not despair. It was clarity – difficult, luminous, and utterly inconvenient.
The death drive of power
Contemporary wars, tragically, embody this pointlessness perfectly. They are not wars of liberation or necessity but wars of delay, wars of denial, wars of death waged by men long past the expiry date of courage. In an age of technological ingenuity and ecological collapse, we could be dismantling borders, redistributing wealth, and repairing the wounds of centuries. Instead, we see missiles tracing obsolete ideologies in the sky, drones humming like flies around wounded geographies, and leaders – mostly men, mostly old – compulsively clinging to destruction like it’s the only script they’ve memorised.
The contrast is almost obscene. The young crave continuity – of breath, of touch, of uncertain joy. They desire long, peace-filled lives rippling with laughter, sex, music, films, kisses under starlight, and conversations that spiral into dust and dawn. Their energy is expansive, oriented toward adventure, complexity, and the unknown.
But at the helm of nation-states sit men on the brink of their biological expiry, curled around launch codes and bunker-buster fantasies. Men whose imaginations are rusted shut, who greet the fear of irrelevance with the appetite for apocalypse. It is not the young who want the world to end – it is the dying, dragging us with them.
From warriors to risk-free tyrants
But history has never been this pathetic. There were wars before, too – bloody, imperial, tragic. But those wars were not waged by war managers with spreadsheets and speechwriters. They were led by men brimming with youthful energy, however misdirected – riding into battle, facing risk with their own bodies, driven by grand, if flawed, visions of the future.
Today’s wars are bureaucratic tantrums thrown by men too old to dream and too scared to die, issuing death from air-conditioned bunkers with hands that tremble not from conscience, but cholesterol.
History once knew warriors who bore the burden of violence not from a distance but in the marrow of their own bodies. Alexander marched with his men into Persia; Napoleon rode into cannon fire at Marengo; Shivaji ducked blades on horseback through the Sahyadris.
Even those who fought for empires – like Horatio Nelson or Tipu Sultan –were not exempt from the consequences of their ambition. Their charisma was not manufactured by PR teams; it emerged from blood-soaked terrains where strategy, survival, and sacrifice coexisted. They were not architects of press briefings but commanders of consequence, men whose fate was inseparable from the wars they unleashed.
The twentieth century, too, had its titans, flawed or otherwise – leaders whose lives bore the scorch marks of their decisions. Subhas Chandra Bose led troops through Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia, sleeping under trees and commanding barefoot revolutionaries. Charles de Gaulle defied Nazi-occupied France from exile, building a resistance with little more than his voice. Stalin, for all his brutal authoritarianism, stayed in Moscow during the Nazi siege, rallying a battered Soviet people from within the flames.
Even Churchill, imperialist and problematic as he was, wrote his speeches as war drums and stood daily in the debris of a bombed-out London. These were men shaped by trenches, prisons, and exile, not television studios. If their wars were unjust, they were at least personally implicated in the gamble.
Now compare this with the war-mongers of today – men who conduct conflict through drones, proxies, and slogans, far from the dust and death their decisions generate. Vladimir Putin, once a KGB operative, now orchestrates a grinding war from behind layers of propaganda, sending conscripts into trenches he will never see.
Benjamin Netanyahu, decades older, greenlights airstrikes from behind concrete bunkers while the children of Gaza suffocate under rubble. Joe Biden authorised bombings with bureaucratic calm, a war manager insulated by distance and deniability. Donald Trump, meanwhile, threatened nuclear annihilation on Twitter, treating weapons of mass destruction as tools of ego and theatre – his tantrums more dangerous than his policies. Narendra Modi, far removed from the frontlines, weaponises military rhetoric as a nationalist election spectacle.
The senile old men do not march; they monitor. They do not risk; they calibrate. They are not made by war – they manufacture it, algorithmically and otherwise.
Also Read: The Superior Nothingness: Caste, Fantasy and the Shudra Delusion in Kerala
But even that comparison flatters the present. For the leaders of old – brutal, flawed, tyrannical – they knew the wager. They entered war with the certainty that if their vision failed, the gallows awaited – whether strung by their own people, their enemies, or by their own hand. Tipu Sultan fell in battle defending a crumbling kingdom; Hitler swallowed poison as his empire collapsed; Mussolini was lynched by his own citizens; Gaddafi was dragged through the streets of Sirte; Saddam Hussein was hanged by a court that inherited his wreckage.
Whatever their crimes, they took the risk with their own bodies. Today’s rulers do not. Instead of the “risk takers” of the past, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Skin in the Game) calls them “risk transferers” – men who initiate catastrophe but remain untouched by its gravity. Their wars are not gambles but market strategies, designed not for victory but for duration, not to win but to never end. Even if failure comes, it is already insured: a villa in an offshore island, guarded by private armies, sheltered by financial treaties and digital firewalls.
They are not warriors. They are asset managers of war, clerics of collapse, hoarders of apocalypse who’ve made themselves too rich to die and too distant to fall. As Sarah Chayes (Thieves of State) and Oliver Bullough (Moneyland) warn in their indictment of modern kleptocracies, these regimes are not deviations from democracy but its successful hollowing-out – rule not by ideas, but by extraction. This is why Israel and Iran are different – though both ruled by senile patriarchs, one fights with the confidence of impunity, a risk transferrer, the other with the desperation of historical siege, a risk taker.
One trades war like stock, the other clings to it like prophecy. One knows he won’t be killed; the other is not sure.
A world inherited in ruins
If the younger generation sees only hopelessness in this world, why blame them? It is not their design. They did not vote for climate collapse, codependence on algorithms, or a return to trench warfare. They inherited a world scorched by the dreams and delusions of those who came before, who promised progress and delivered ecological catastrophe, burnout economies, and pandemics of both virus and meaning.
Even the basic coordinates of adulthood – stable employment, affordable housing, lasting intimacy – now shimmer like unattainable myths. To the young, a permanent job is a fantasy, a home a luxury, and a future a fog of anxiety. To ask them for faith in the system is to ask the wounded to believe in the sword.
These wars are manufactured precisely to run away from the real, pressing, entangled problems of the present: climate breakdown, job insecurity, ecological displacement, emotional collapse, and the unbearable nearness of systemic reform. War becomes a form of regression – a comforting reversion to primal drama. It allows the old order to delay its reckoning by staging theatre on battlefields, while the future burns elsewhere, unacknowledged.
Instead of offering the younger generation a Lebensraum – a living space teeming with biodiversity, breathable air, clean water, and the quiet dignity of cohabiting with flora and fauna, with colours and music, hugs, and kisses – the old men offer dust and ash. What could have been meadows are now minefields. What could have been oxygen is now smoke.
Their quick-fix solution to the complexity of the present is not regeneration but reduction – reduce the world to rubble, reduce futures to footnotes, reduce life to numbers. Their vision of order is not lush with possibility but choked with exhaust.
Instead of addressing the living wounds of our time, today’s ageing patriarchs confront only the ghosts of their own unresolved pasts. Their toxic masculinity isn't merely in their posture or politics – it’s in their refusal to see the present as real, and the future as worthy. They legislate against memory, wage war against loss, and bomb civilians for pride. Their wars are therapies in disguise.
While the younger generation grapples with climate grief, algorithmic overload, housing anxiety, and emotional precarity, and the possibility of many other pandemic outbreaks, from long-buried viruses or newer mutants, the old, knowing all too well that their end is too soon, rehearse Cold Wars and colonial grudges. One lives in survival mode; the other in delusion.
The nation-state today resembles a metonymic extension of the crumbling patriarchal family – its architecture, its paranoias, its decay. At its head sits the senile father-figure, suspicious of every sound, every knock at the door, convinced the world is out to kill him. Shadows become threats, dissent becomes treason, and the mere demand for a livable world is read as insubordination.
The borders of the state are like trembling nerves; every ripple is met with an overreaction. The state, like the paranoid patriarch, no longer protects – it projects.
Meanwhile, the younger generation – estranged from the old coordinates of belonging – has begun dreaming differently. Cut off from traditional modes of bonding and their attendant structures of control, from rigidly bordered families to securitised nation-states, they imagine a life less burdened by enclosure.
Their longings resist fences – whether around homes, genders, or nations. They speak in the grammar of fluidity: of bodies that blur binary, of identities that slip through census categories, of relationships that do not obey bloodlines. They seek not dominion, but drift. Not empire, but entanglement. Not war, but interbeing.
But what is offered in return is not peace – it is a recalibrated warfare. Not tanks and trenches, but drones and data packets. Not compulsory conscription, but algorithmic surveillance and targeted instability.
The architecture of violence has become subtler, more insidious – coded into platforms, border technologies, and even job markets. The war doesn’t knock on your door anymore; it arrives in your notifications, your burnout, your visa rejection, your suspended account. What the older generation calls “security,” the younger experiences as a slow disintegration. Warfare, once visible, now wears the face of daily life.
The architecture of regression
There was a time, even in war, when history moved. The great wars of the twentieth century – horrific as they were – carried with them ideological struggles that imagined futures, however violently. Revolutions, decolonisation, liberation movements: their wars were also wagers on a different world.
Leaders stood for visions – of socialism, freedom, nationhood, and resistance. But today’s wars defend nothing new. They are status-quoist in intent, managerial in execution, and cynical in spirit. Where once war was a brutal instrument of transformation, it is now an anaesthetic that preserves power by numbing dissent. The frontline, too, has shifted: once a place where visions collided, now a space where algorithms are tested and markets secured.
Though mad they were, even Hitler, Mussolini, and other youthful warlords of the twentieth century were, in their own distorted ways, attempting to script a new world. Their visions were monstrous, their means unspeakable – but they were still facing forward, imagining futures, however deranged. They were young men, deluded perhaps, but alive to the arc of time – they believed history had room for them, that decades remained in which to carve their dreams into stone.
Contrast that with today’s leaders, whose gaze is fixed not on the horizon but the rear-view mirror. Trump peddles a pastiche of 18th-century America–whitewashed, wild, and winged with guns. Netanyahu resurrects Biblical dreams, turning ruins into blueprints. Modi’s rule invokes an even more spectral fantasy: a pre-Mughal, pre-Muslim, pre-Christian India – a purified Aryavarta scrubbed of syncretism, complexity, and contradiction.
“One Nation, One Vote” – the ballot-box rhythm of Aryavarta’s imagined unity. Viktor Orbán dreams of a pre-multicultural Europe, Erdogan imagines a neo-Ottoman revival, Xi Jinping mythologises the Middle Kingdom, and Putin stages imperial cosplay out of tsarist nostalgia. In the name of the future, they promise the past. These are not dreams – they are regressions, embalmed in nostalgia and wielded like weapons. The past is not a lesson to them but a bunker. While the young reach for what might yet be, the old men retreat into what never was.
Even the technocrats who claim to look forward – those who trade in rockets, A.I., and climate-proof bunkers—carry the same failure of imagination. Elon Musk, for instance, does not dream as a new human being forged in the crucible of planetary crisis; he dreams as a historic relic of apartheid Africa, armed with code instead of a whip.
His Mars is not a leap in human consciousness but a colonial rerun, complete with hierarchies intact and empathy outsourced. For all his rhetoric about interplanetary survival, he exhibits no interest in the social evolution necessary for it. There is no vision of justice, only engineering; no ethics, only escape velocity. The body may be launched into the future, but the mind is shackled to a supremacist past of the apartheid South Africa. In this, Musk is not an outlier but a symptom – another architect of a future without futurity, a tomorrow built from the wreckage of yesterday’s power.
Also Read: Empuraan: The Malayali Shudra Imagination and Its Paradoxical Struggle Against Fascism
These old men, with their imaginations forged in the warm, womb-like comfort of social sameness among cousins, caste-kin, temple festivals, familiar gods and dialects, cannot fathom the psyche of the younger generation. Their formative ideas were shaped in tight-knit enclosures of race, region, religion, and routine, where difference was either invisible or cast out. They were protected from the world even as they claimed to rule it.
In contrast, today’s youth are born into a vortex of multiplicity – of playlists in five languages, friends across continents, genders beyond binaries, and truths that don’t sit still. They grow up navigating Instagram algorithms, refugee crises, K-pop, queer theory, and climate dread, all before breakfast. What was once a fortress is now a flux. The irony is sharp: those who shout the loudest about the future are the ones least capable of imagining it.
Their nostalgias were formed in a world designed to exclude difference; today’s children live in a world where difference is the atmosphere itself. And so the old respond not with listening, but with law and order – with bans, bulldozers, and firewalls – because they do not recognise the world their grandchildren already inhabit.
Radical longing: To live
Maybe the difference between Hitler and Mussolini on the one hand, and Trump or Putin on the other, is not merely one of age, but of generational becoming. The youth of the early twentieth century, who followed fascists into war, did so under the illusion that they were birthing something new, even as they were, in fact, defending, like today’s senile patriarchs, the crumbling architecture of race, language, and bloodline in a world fast dissolving under the tide of modernist capitalism.
Hitler and Mussolini, for all their talk of revolution, were selling the dream of a disappearing enclosure – a tribe resurrected through technology and terror. But the youth they commanded had never been offered another view. They did not possess the epistemic privilege of the other side of the imperialist divide. They had not seen the world, only maps drawn by their own nations. The nation, to them, still held mythic coherence.
Today's youth, however, live in a shattered prism. Their world is social media, VPNs, polyglot playlists, collapsing climates, and memes from Gaza to Guwahati. They cannot un-know the other. They do not have the luxury of exclusion, only the fatigue of too much exposure. Nationalism, for them, is not a holy idea – it’s a glitchy algorithm, a surveillance net, a sponsored reel.
That, perhaps, explains why the youth after the Second World War and the youth of today are also different. Those mid-century generations began to glimpse the ‘other’ not through textbooks, but through the haunted silences of their parents – men returned from battlefields, women from bombed-out cities, families displaced by fascism or famine.
The knowledge was partial, filtered, often Eurocentric – but it opened a crack. They began to perceive suffering outside their nation, however dimly, and that flicker of perception became activism. It wasn't yet solidarity, but it was awakening.
There was a time when youth-led movements erupted with clarity and conviction, when the sheer weight of the future felt graspable – when students marched not just against war but toward a world they believed they could shape. The 1960s were ablaze with such hope: anti-war protests on American campuses, the global tremors of May 1968, the cries for civil rights, women's liberation, decolonisation, and sexual freedom.
Students were not only resisting authority – they were reimagining it. But today’s youth carry a different burden: not defiance, but exhaustion. Their fatigue is not apathy; it is the fatigue of overstimulation, of being hyper-informed but politically disarmed.
The dreams that once surged through streets now flicker as notifications. Every injustice is visible, livestreamed, algorithmically amplified – yet rarely met with closure, justice, or even coherence. Theirs is not a silence of indifference but a scream dispersed into noise. Where previous generations had movements, today’s youth have moments – brief, bright, burning, and then buried under the next tragedy, the next scroll. They are not failing to resist; they are struggling to breathe.
This is not to deny the protests erupting across campuses and streets today – from the chants of Iranian schoolgirls to the marches for Palestine, from Dalit student unions in India to Black Lives Matter uprisings, from the climate strikes in the Global South to solidarity movements in war-torn universities. But let us be honest: these are largely movements led by students who live on the receiving end of history—those marked by caste, race, gender, religion, region, and the brutal legacies of colonial extraction. They march not from comfort, but from necessity.
Their defiance is not a luxury of time, but a refusal born of daily trespass. Barring rare exceptions like Greta Thunberg, the broader student body, especially in affluent or dominant-majority societies, remains eerily quiet. The mainstream student’s response has been tepid, fragmented, and often confined to curated outrage or symbolic allyship.
The architecture of resistance today is lopsided, carried disproportionately by those with the least systemic power and the most to lose. The world burns, and yet, outside the margins, the dormitories of the privileged remain lit more by ring lights than by the fire of revolt.
What the younger generation inherits, then, is not merely a planet in ruin but a politics of mourning. They mourn not only lost futures but the very idea that the future could still mean something. And yet, in their music, in their protests, in their subtle reconfigurations of intimacy and labour, something is brewing – not quite resistance in the traditional sense, but a refusal to inherit the madness of their predecessors. They do not believe in the glory of death. They want to live. That, in a world addicted to decay, may be the most radical thing of all.
What we need now is not a bunker, but a march –a long, intergenerational, borderless march to freedom. Not just from dictatorships or occupations, but from the tired delusions of senile patriarchs who mistake their twilight for apocalypse.
A march against the cynicism that masquerades as realism, against the exhausted masculinity that fears tenderness, fears youth, fears the unknown. We want not death with dignity but life with adventure. Across the world, the young are ready—not for war, but for a new grammar of living. It is time we marched with them.
Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan is a Professor of English at Government Arts and Science College, Pathiripala, Palakkad. Under the name a/nil, he is the author of The Absent Color: Poems. A/nil’s book, Is There a Dalit Way of Thinking?, is forthcoming from Navayana.
The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
