The White Disease 2025: How Grandparents Became Enemies

The article confronts the widespread narrative about selfish seniors with academic studies and data. It shows that the 'grey vote' hypothesis has been refuted, that seniors are net givers of intergenerational transfers, and that their critical media literacy is in many respects better than that of younger generations. Meanwhile, the influence of disinformation on elections is an order of magnitude smaller than the influence of the narrative framing by established media.

In Čapek's play, Doctor Galén tends to the sick who are old and useless. They are victims of the white disease, a mysterious contagion that kills exclusively people over the age of forty-five. The young are safe — and therefore indifferent. The daughter of one of the patients comments coldly: after all, the disease "makes room for a new generation."

Čapek wrote The White Disease in 1937 as an allegory of fascism. But his most chilling insight was not about dictators. It was about how easily a crowd accepts the idea that some people are expendable — and how willingly it closes ranks at their expense.

Less than ninety years later, we live in the midst of a different, softer variant of the same narrative. Under communism a rhyme went around — "Grandpa and Grandma are eating up the sandwiches" — the elderly as a burden that a progressive society must rid itself of. Today we phrase it more elegantly: "Pensioners vote selfishly, only for themselves." And we rarely ask who really profits from this narrative.

The notion that the elderly form a monolithic voting bloc driven by material self-interest has a precise name in political science: the "grey vote" hypothesis. And a precise status: refuted.

Achim Goerres, a political scientist at the University of Duisburg-Essen and a leading world expert on the voting behaviour of older age groups, analysed data from Britain and Germany in an extensive study for the journal Electoral Studies (2008). He found no evidence that ageing voters systematically prefer more economically conservative parties. The voting preferences of the elderly are shaped above all by a generational imprint — that is, the formative historical experiences of their youth — not by current economic interest. In his book The Political Participation of Older People in Europe (2009) he developed this thesis. Reviewers of the book, including John A. Vincent of the University of Exeter, summarised his conclusions unequivocally: fears that an ageing population will lead to democracies dominated by old people who abuse their numerical majority are a "myth."

A comprehensive analysis by the WHO and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (Greer et al., 2021) identified three mistaken assumptions underlying the whole narrative: that there is a necessary conflict between spending on old age and other priorities; that older voters have homogeneous interests; and that these interests are pitted against the interests of the young. None of them holds up against the data. Carole Easton of the Centre for Ageing Better formulates the key finding: inequalities within generations are greater than inequalities between them.

In the Czech context this is borne out by a STEM/MARK survey for Seznam Zprávy (2025): the main concerns of the elderly are not pensions but corruption and deteriorating social relations. They vote according to values — not according to their bank balance.

If anyone in the family is "selfish," the data point to a paradox: it is, paradoxically, the youngest who are the net recipients. A landmark pan-European study by Albertini, Kohli and Vogel (2007), drawing on data from the SHARE project in ten countries, finds that the net flow of private intergenerational transfers — of both money and time — runs from older to younger. Transfers from parents to adult children are more frequent and more intensive than in the opposite direction. Even people over 70 remain net givers.

A study by Litwin et al. specifies that the elderly are net providers of help up to roughly the age of 80, when both financial and time transfers are counted. A Czech study by Hubatková of the Research Institute for Labour and Social Affairs (2014) confirms the same for the Czech Republic: most monetary transfers flow from older to younger, especially from parents to adult offspring.

The figures are telling. In the United States, 78% of Generation Z homeowners received financial help with a down payment on housing — most often from their parents (LendingTree, 2023). Czech grandparents are among the most active providers of grandchild care in Europe. Commercial childminding in the Czech Republic costs, according to the platform Hlídačky.cz, an average of CZK 199 per hour, which makes it possible to estimate the enormous economic value of unpaid grandparental labour. And SHARE data from 12 European countries show that access to grandparental care increases the probability of mothers' employment by 13 percentage points.

A Harvard study by Bloom et al. (2020) put the productive non-market activities of people over 60 in Europe at EUR 9,700 per person per year — approximately EUR 1.1 trillion in total, equivalent to 8% of GDP. Eurofound (2025) estimates the opportunity cost of unpaid family childcare in the EU at EUR 470 billion (4.1% of GDP).

Those "selfish" grandparents mind their grandchildren so that their daughter can go to work. They chip in on the mortgage so that their grandson has somewhere to live. And on Sundays they cook lunch for the whole family. Then they go to the polls — and commentators write that they "selfishly voted for populists because they were promised higher pensions." As if the elderly, who lived through Normalization, the transformation and the asset-stripping of the 1990s, were incapable of recognising corruption and manipulation when they see it. As if their vote did not stem precisely from the fact that they see the gap between proclaimed values and actual conduct — a gap to which, thanks to decades of experience, they are more sensitive than a generation raised on media soundbites.

The third pillar of the story of selfish pensioners is the claim that the elderly are especially prone to political manipulation — and that their vote is therefore worth less. Academic research refutes this, but in a way that is uncomfortable for both sides of the debate.

The key discovery was made by the psychologists Nadia Brashier and Daniel Schacter of Harvard University in the study Aging in an Era of Fake News (Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2020). Drawing on data from two independent studies — Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) and Pennycook and Rand (2019) — they found that the ability to distinguish true from false headlines improves with age, rather than deteriorating. In a controlled environment, older adults outperform younger ones.

At the same time, however, a study by Guess, Nagler and Tucker (Science Advances, 2019) found that Facebook users over 65 shared seven times as many articles from disinformation websites as the youngest age group. How is this possible?

The explanation lies neither in stupidity nor in naivety. Brashier, Umanath, Cabeza and Marsh (2017, Psychology and Aging) identified the key mechanism: when a false claim contradicted stored knowledge, older adults relied on that knowledge and rejected the untrue claim, whereas young people were more susceptible to the processing-fluency effect — a false statement that sounded smooth was accepted more readily. Accumulated knowledge functions as a protective shield. The problem arises where the senior lacks knowledge — in the digital environment, which they came to late and in which they have not developed navigational skills. The weakness of the elderly is the technology, not their judgement.

This is precisely where the conceptual core of the whole debate lies. Jang, Mortensen and Liu (2021, American Behavioral Scientist) tested four types of literacy — media, information, news and digital — and arrived at a surprising result: only information literacy (the ability to find and verify information) predicted the ability to recognise fake news. Classic media literacy — understanding narrative framing, recognising hidden interests, the critical analysis of news reporting — had no statistically significant effect on the identification of disinformation.

This means that there are two independent competencies which public discussion and research alike routinely conflate. Critical media literacy — the ability to recognise that a news programme is manipulating through its choice of topics, its framing or the omission of context. And digital information literacy — the ability to recognise a fabricated article, manipulated content or a hoax on a social network. A person may excel at one and fail at the other.

Rasi, Vuojärvi and Rivinen (2021, Adult Education Quarterly) confirmed this in a systematic review of 40 media-literacy programmes for the elderly: 35 of them focused exclusively on digital skills — how to use technology. Only a handful developed the critical analysis of established media. Research and interventions thus systematically neglect the area in which the elderly may be more proficient than the young — and target the area in which they are weaker.

The media attention devoted to the sharing of disinformation by the elderly is disproportionate to the actual scale of the phenomenon. The study by Guess, Nagler and Tucker — the most cited in this field — contains a key absolute figure that did not make it into the headlines: 91.5% of respondents did not share a single disinformation article. The sevenfold figure refers to seven times a very small number. The study's title signals as much itself: "Less than you think."

Allen, Howland, Mobius, Rothschild and Watts (2020, Science Advances) placed the problem in the context of the entire information ecosystem: disinformation makes up only 0.15% of Americans' daily media consumption. Television accounts for roughly five times all news consumption on the internet. Allcott and Gentzkow (2017, Journal of Economic Perspectives) calculated that for disinformation to have influenced the outcome of the 2016 US election, a single fake article would have had to persuade 0.7% of voters to change their vote — equivalent to the effect of 36 television campaign ads. Guess, Nyhan and Reifler (2020, Nature Human Behaviour) found no measurable evidence of an effect of disinformation websites on voting decisions.

The influence of chain emails on voting behaviour has never been empirically quantified. There is not a single peer-reviewed study measuring how many of the elderly changed their vote on the basis of a chain email. It is a presumed phenomenon with no measured effects.

By contrast, the influence of the narrative framing of television news is well documented — and stronger by orders of magnitude. DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007, Quarterly Journal of Economics), in a famous natural experiment, demonstrated that the introduction of Fox News into American towns shifted the Republican vote share by 0.4–0.7 percentage points and persuaded 3–28% of new viewers. This effect is orders of magnitude greater than any documented influence of disinformation.

Allen et al. (2020) sum it up: the causes of public misinformedness more likely lie in the content of established media or in news avoidance — not in disinformation spread on the internet.

There is a tempting thesis that the generation which lived through communist propaganda is naturally more resistant to media manipulation. The truth is more nuanced.

Academic inoculation theory (McGuire, 1964; van der Linden and Roozenbeek, 2019) confirms that deliberate exposure to a weakened form of manipulation builds resistance. The game "Bad News," in which participants themselves create disinformation, demonstrably increases the ability to recognise it. But no peer-reviewed study directly tests whether lived experience of totalitarian propaganda functions as a natural inoculation. It is a theoretical hypothesis, not a verified fact.

What the studies show is more complicated. Pop-Eleches and Tucker (2017, Communism's Shadow, Princeton University Press), in the most extensive empirical study of communist legacies to date (157 surveys from 88 countries), demonstrated that the experience of communism has a clear effect on political attitudes — lower support for democracy, greater demands for state security. A study in Problems of Post-Communism (2024) produced a counterintuitive finding: citizens with longer exposure to communism trust the media more, not less. The lack of trust grows as the communist past recedes — which suggests that present-day conditions (the oligarchisation of the media, political colonisation) matter more than the historical legacy.

The key is a distinction introduced by Quiring, Ziegele, Schemer et al. (2021, International Journal of Communication): media scepticism versus media cynicism. Scepticism is a critical evaluation of the competence and performance of the media — analogous to academic reasoning. Cynicism attributes malicious motives to the media. The surprising empirical finding: scepticism correlates positively with overall trust in the media (the sceptic reads more news from more sources), whereas cynicism correlates negatively (the cynic rejects the news wholesale).

Shirikov (2024, Political Communication), in a study of 60,000 Russian respondents, found that Russians can recognise fake news comparably to Americans, but have difficulty accepting true critical news. Sonin (2025, Becker Friedman Institute) formulated a model of the "reverse cargo cult": authoritarian regimes lie not in order to persuade, but so that citizens come to believe that everyone everywhere is lying — and lose the appetite for change.

The experience of totalitarianism thus produces neither immunity nor defencelessness. It produces a mixture of scepticism and cynicism, the decisive factor being which way the balance tips. Mishler and Rose (1997, Journal of Politics), in a study of nine post-communist countries, found that scepticism tends to prevail — citizens evaluate institutions pragmatically on the basis of their current performance. And in the Czech context, where trust in the media reaches 31% (Reuters Digital News Report 2024, Václav Štětka), low trust may be a rational response to real problems — the oligarchisation and political colonisation of the media — rather than an irrational legacy of totalitarianism.

The view of the other end of the age spectrum is, moreover, more disturbing than is usually admitted. A study by Ibrahim et al. (2025) demonstrated that the algorithm of the social network TikTok systematically favoured the political content of one party during the 2024 US presidential election. Research by the University of Oregon revealed that 91% of TikTok users aged 18–25 reported a shift in their political orientation during regular use of the platform — a figure that must be read with the awareness that it is a subjective self-assessment, not an objectively measured effect.

A systematic review in the journal Societies (MDPI, 2025), encompassing 30 peer-reviewed studies, concludes: adolescents and young adults are in a formative phase of cognitive and political development, which makes them especially susceptible to the subtle influence of algorithmic content selection. FTC data show that young adults in their twenties report losses from fraud more often than people over 60, even though older victims lose substantially higher amounts per case.

Czech research on media literacy (Palacký University and STEM/MARK for the RRTV, 2021) contains a key nuance: the volume of media use and content creation does not automatically mean higher critical thinking. Among the younger generation in particular, the gap between content creation and analytical ability is wider than among the middle generation.

Pehlivanoglu et al. (2023), in the first study to directly compare young and older adults in judging the truthfulness of news, found no significant age differences in overall accuracy. For ordinary (non-COVID) news, older adults were better at labelling fake news as fake (90% success) than at confirming true news as true (74%). Ramos and Van Boven (2025, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General), in a study of 2,500 adults, found no evidence of cognitive decline — but they did find that the 55+ group is markedly more partisan, and it is partisanship that shapes how critically they evaluate the accuracy of news.

Every generation is manipulable — but through a different channel and a different mechanism. The elderly have stronger critical media literacy (recognising framing, hidden interests, narrative manipulation) but weaker digital information literacy. The young have the opposite profile. The real influence of disinformation on elections is smaller by an order of magnitude than the influence of narrative framing in established media — yet public debate and research alike focus almost exclusively on disinformation.

The fundamental asymmetry lies in the fact that while the vulnerability of the elderly is publicly discussed and used as an argument against the worth of their vote, the vulnerability of the young is taboo — or even celebrated as "political engagement." And yet it is precisely those who want to lower the voting age to 16 who ought to explain why a 17-year-old TikTok user is a more competent voter than a 70-year-old pensioner who has survived three political regimes — and who, in a laboratory test, recognises fake news better.

But there is another, less discussed mechanism of manipulation — and it is connected not with age but with social isolation.

A study by Peterson et al. (2025), covering over 40,000 respondents in nine European countries, demonstrated that lonelier individuals are statistically significantly more likely to support the populist radical right. A standard deviation's increase in loneliness raises the probability of such a vote by 10–38%. Kevin Munger, a political scientist cited in a BuzzFeed News analysis, characterises the populists' target group: "They are alone, relatively well-off, alienated, stuck in places where they know no one, feeling anger. And they have access to the internet."

This is not a description of pensioners alone. It is a description of loneliness as a political category that cuts across generations.

In the United States an analogous mechanism of devaluation was applied to unmarried women after the remark about "childless cat ladies" in 2021 — a remark that branded American politics as dominated by people who "have no direct stake in the future of the country."

The data, meanwhile, show that 63% of single women voted for the Democratic candidate in 2020 (AP VoteCast), and research by the University of Melbourne identified a stronger sense of linked fate with other women as the explanation for their more progressive attitudes. According to data from the 2024 European Parliament elections, 21% of young men under 30 voted for the far right, compared with 14% of young women.

Both groups — lonely seniors and unmarried women — face narratives that question the legitimacy of their political participation by pointing to their supposedly insufficient "stake" in society: the elderly allegedly "will not live long enough to bear the consequences," the childless allegedly "have no direct interest in the future." It is a mechanism of exclusion masked as concern for the public interest.

In the Czech context there is an unmistakable pattern: the strongest political movement of the past decade grew to a considerable extent on the targeted courting of the elderly population. Not because it offered a systemic solution — but because the rest of the political spectrum was actively driving this group away.

The political scientist Petra Guasti (Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University) explains this structurally: for politicians the elderly are "an ideal group of voters, because they have more or less the same interests. Young people, by contrast, are a very heterogeneous group, which is one reason they are forgotten." The Constitutional Court itself stated in January 2024 that the interests of young people are significantly underrepresented in politics.

But the problem is not that the elderly vote — the problem is how politicians work with this group. The "rouškovné" face-mask bonus, one-off gifts, promises of indexation just before elections — these are not reforms, they are bribes. And, paradoxically: the more the younger generation attacks the elderly for "letting themselves be bribed," the more the elderly identify with the politician who "is the only one who takes them seriously." A self-fulfilling prophecy arises, in which the contempt of one side feeds the loyalty of the other.

Pension reform, meanwhile, has remained untouchable for over twenty years. Commission after commission, pillar after pillar — no reform has survived more than a single electoral term. The cause is structural: a four-year electoral cycle makes it impossible to link the accountability of the current government to the results of a reform whose effects will become apparent over a horizon of decades. Instead of systemic change, what is practised is the simple buying of votes with small top-ups above indexation. And the label of "selfish pensioners" serves as an alibi — why reform the system when it is easier to blame its victims?

Čapek's The White Disease is generally read as a warning against fascism. But its deepest layer is more universal — and precisely for that reason so disturbingly topical.

The play warns against indifference masked as reasonableness. The young in Čapek's world are not evil — they are indifferent, because the disease does not concern them. The daughter who observes that the disease "makes room" is not cruel — she is pragmatic. And it is precisely that pragmatic indifference towards a group of people "whom it does not concern" that enables the rise of the tyrant.

The Ukrainian theatre company Virymo!, which staged The White Disease on an international tour in 2023–2024, drew attention to the correspondence between the plot of the play and the events the world has experienced in recent years — not only the COVID-19 pandemic, during which part of the younger population expressed open indifference to the threat facing the old, but also the broader trend of dehumanising "unproductive" groups.

This is exactly what happens when we turn grandparents into enemies. Čapek would have recognised in it the precise mechanism he warned against: a crowd that sacrifices those it deems expendable, and does not know that it is thereby sacrificing itself.

Research consistently shows that the story of selfish pensioners rests on three refuted assumptions — that the elderly vote as a bloc, that their interests are opposed to those of the young, and that they are more easily manipulated than other groups.

In reality, private intergenerational transfers flow predominantly from older to younger up to roughly the age of 80. The elderly vote on the basis of values shaped by historical experience, not solely because of the size of their pension. In laboratory tests they distinguish true from false news better than younger adults. Disinformation makes up 0.15% of media consumption, whereas narrative framing in established media demonstrably shifts voting behaviour by percentage points. And the vulnerability of the elderly to chain emails has never been empirically demonstrated as a factor influencing elections — unlike algorithmic manipulation on TikTok, which shapes the political identity of tens of millions of young people without their being aware of it.

The real threat is not the "grey vote." It is the political instrumentalisation of generational conflict, which systematically obstructs structural reforms and deepens social cleavages. The researchers Barilari and Mastrorocco (2025) document a self-reinforcing cycle: the political resignation of the young leads to an even greater focus by parties on the elderly, which further deepens the young's disengagement from politics.

The solution is neither restricting the voting rights of the elderly nor lowering the age to 16. The solution is the recognition that the generational cleavage is a smokescreen obscuring class inequality — and that the real dividing line does not run between generations, but within them.

Čapek's Doctor Galén offered a cure to all regardless of age — the condition was to stop the war. The crowd trampled him. Not because he was too much of an idealist. But because he offered a solution that required people to stop dividing themselves into those who matter and those who "make room."

Transparency of creation:

The concept, structure and editorial line of the article are the work of the author, who drew up the content outline, set the key theses and directed the entire creative process. Generative AI (Claude, Anthropic) was used as a technical tool for research, fact-checking and fleshing out the author's draft.

The author edited the outputs throughout, verified the key findings and approved the final wording. No part of the text was published without human review. All factual data were verified against the publicly available sources cited in the text.

This procedure complies with the requirements of Article 50 of EU Regulation 2024/1689 (the AI Act) on the transparency of AI-generated content. #poweredByAI