Whatever we gain in one sphere we lose in another. Death, for instance, though quantitatively defeated by modern medicine, has re-emerged qualitatively on the plane of survival. Adaptation has been democratized, made easier for everyone, at the price of abandoning the essential project, which is the adaptation of the world to human needs. Significantly, therapeutic efforts concentrate mainly on the exhaustion phase, as though the main aim were to extend the stage of resistance as far as possible into old age. Thus the big guns are brought out only once the body is old and weak, because, as Reich understood well, any all-out attack on the attrition wreaked by the demands of adaptation would inevitably mean a direct onslaught on social organization i.e., on that which stands opposed to any transcendence of the principle of adaptation.
Partial cures are preferred because they leave the overall social pathology untouched.
Dates themselves serve to pigeonhole and circumscribe us. At his death the noble bequeathed a vitality to his heirs which drew vigour from the past. This link between age and the starting-post of measurable time is not the only thing which betrays age's kinship with power. I am convinced that people's measured age is nothing but a role. It involves a speeding up of lived time in the mode of non-life on the plane, therefore, of appearances, and in accordance with the dictates of adaptation.