Sarah Holland-Batt

And so, you know, it stretches, as I said, back to Plato, who, you know, Socrates makes this argument that, oh, once a carpenter can no longer do their work, well, you know, that should be the end of their medical treatment, that should be the end of their access to healthcare.

they're essentially on the scrap heap.

And then as you move through time, you know, there's a very kind of prominent Jacobin play, The Old Law, in which, you know, men and women are executed at 80, sorry, men are executed at 80, women at 60.

And this is this kind of old, this play, The Old Law, which is by Thomas Middleton and a number of others, is sort of the progenitor of this kind of dystopian thinking that tracks all the way through

all the way through to the 21st century, essentially, writers repeating the same idea that, you know, well, because society doesn't value the old, we'll kill them off, you know, through euthanasia, through all sorts of different means in these dystopian novels.

But the end result is the same, that writers are seeing in dystopia the aged actually just killed off altogether.

Yeah.

Well, Brave New World is a world essentially of stasis where the objective is not to age, not to change, to be completely stable and constant and

to not have meaningful, deep, loving relationships.

So everyone is a sort of stable, productive citizen until they sort of reach the age of 60, in which they get sent to hospitals for the dying, where they don't receive visitors very often because it's rare to have close relationships.

Their death is treated with indifference and they're left with televisions blaring in front of them all day.

It's a very similar kind of situation.

to aged care facilities.

In fact, it's a sort of direct metaphor.

So while elements of Huxley's Brave New World are really kind of far out there and quite abstract from the lives that we lead today, when you look at the way in which Huxley writes about the elderly, you really see him questioning these same kinds of questions that I'm raising.

You know, this idea of, well, what value do we place on old age and old people?

not much and that they're essentially segregated and sent away to die on their own.

This is not too far from the reality of many elderly people in aged care.

So it's sort of prescient, I think, well, it's a prescient novel in loads of ways, but in particular, you know, Huxley really sees already the reality of aged care facilities for many people in this novel that

that sort of predates the profit geared scenario that we see in the sector today.