I DREAMED that one had died in a strange place
Near no accustomed hand,
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
And planted cypress round;
And left her to the indifferent stars above
Until I carved these words:
”She was more beautiful than thy first love,
But now lies under boards.”W. B. Yeats
“Assisted suicide” is becoming increasingly normalized in advanced industrial societies.
The Canadian situation has been discussed extensively, where a poll recently implied that a quarter of the respondents favored assisted suicide being made available on grounds of homelessness or poverty, but the issue is somewhat less conspicuously coming to the fore throughout all of modern civilization.
The French regime has recently proposed new legislation towards enabling “active euthanasia” or assisted suicide; Portugal legalized it last year, just after Spain, New Zealand and Ecuador. Euthanasia deaths in Europe and Canada increased by a full quarter during 2023, and the year before, with almost 25 000 euthanized in Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands, saw an increase in more than 100% from 2017. Lobbying by advocacy groups in Europe coincide with a persistent increase in popular support, and many legislatures now see the issue repeatedly on the agenda.
The phenomenon, or rather, the emergent social construction of an institution of a state- and corporate-assisted suicide, is a quite fascinating example of how a radically secular anthropology and worldview get made manifest in concrete social practice.
What’s at the heart of this issue here is namely a certain view of the human being. The emergence of the modern institution of euthanasia is an intimate expression of the very meaning of human dignity as it’s shaped and framed by technological society under capitalism.
Basically, it reduces to use-value within an ontology and a set of worldviews that enclose the human being within a meaningless materialist universe:
Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the
society at large:“To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere
restriction of the sense in which we understand ‘concept,’ but means a far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot give an adequate account in terms of operations.”
Bridgman’s prediction has come true. The new mode of thought is today the predominant tendency in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and other fields. Many of the most seriously troublesome concepts are being “eliminated” by showing that no adequate account of them in terms of operations or behavior can be given. The radical empiricist onslaught thus provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals—a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior.Outside the academic establishment, the “far-reaching change in all our habits of thought” is more serious. It serves to coordinate ideas and goals with those exacted by the prevailing system, to enclose them in the system, and to repel those which are irreconcilable with the system.
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
At the forefront of the discussion is the notion of a quantifiable “quality of life”, the lack of which marks the trigger point where you’re permitted to die. When it’s ok to snuff you out. This demarcation is significant. The point is not that anybody has an inherent, inalienable right to kill themselves for whatever reason. It’s that the corporate state, when a life is objectively worthless, will now deign to give its fiat to approve a socially and psychologically emergent death wish.
The problem is that “quality of life” as an objective state of affairs is lifted straight out of the terminology for grading commodities. The notion would make no sense in the early-modern era. Even as a metaphor, it would sound totally incommensurable.
Moreover, in a secular and racist capitalist order, any notion of an objective “quality of life” is going to be a proxy for class status, economic power, as well as an expression of the racial hierarchy. To use this concept as a threshold for when the corporate state gets to suicide you is as close to a soylent green dystopian nightmare you can possibly get.
And the marketing of a euthanasia industry as a catalyst for the entire process renders it literally the very same thing as the Nazi death camps, except more hypocritical and sinister.
50 000 dead in only Canada since 2016. Those are astonishing numbers.
There are of course significant profits involved, too. Already in 2017, the annual revenue from the euthanasia industry in Canada, Switzerland and the Netherlands amounted to about $50 million, and the savings of eliminating almost exclusively useless eaters and unprofitable members of society in a period rife with looming pension crises and bankrupt public funds are obviously more than welcome.
But what’s really the problem here?
Why are we to judge people suffering unbearably, who simply want to hasten their own demise? And doesn’t these arrangments really just enable them to more freely make their own decision, to render effective an expression of their own sovereign and unblemished will for determining their own ultimate fate? Who cares, then, if all of this also happens to generate revenue or allows us to cut some expenses at the same time, isn’t that just a happy windfall in the midst of a dreadful situation?
There are of course arguments we can muster against the institutionalization of a state- and corporate-assisted suicide. Most systems of normative ethics provide good ammunition. The most robust is found in Catholic moral theology and its teleological expression, but there are plenty of purely utilitarian objections to be raised, some of which have been indicated in the above.
Still, the most important discussion is the existential one.
As Varun said today, the closed, mechanistic universe of modern industrial society offers no hope. There’s no space for it, no window towards the transcendent to let air and light in. It’s all the blind idiocy of meaningless determinism, and to paraphrase a Swedish euthanasia advocate, the prospect of suicide offers hope of escape when no more drops of hedonistic pleasure can be wrought out of the gray rocks that populate our vast cosmic prison.
But with merely the dark reflections of the shards of a lost hope — with even the slightest prospect of real truth and beauty, be it inescapably doomed to eternal oblivion — anything in the world can be endured.
You know my history. You know why my withers are quite unwrung by the fear that I was bribed – that I was lured into Christianity by the hope of everlasting life. I believed in God before I believed in Heaven. And even now, even if – let's make an impossible supposition – His voice, unmistakably His, said to me, ‘They have misled you. I can do nothing of that sort for you. My long struggle with the blind forces is nearly over. I die, children. The story is ending,’ would that be a moment for changing sides?
Would not you and I take the Viking way: ‘The Giants and Trolls win. Let us die on the right side, with Father Odin.’
C. S. Lewis. Letters to Malcolm.
Many of these issues were also discussed in a broader context on today’s Aesthetic Resistance podcast:
That CBC article on this topic of euthanasia indicated that the issue was medically assisted death in cases in which patients were very ill, not able to recover, and certain to die in the near future. The statistics may seem high, but when considered as part of the total of all people who die in one year, the number may not be very high, especially if the number is increasing only because doctors are now required to report a practice that was always common and done informally (the patient’s pain increases, so increase the dosage of medicine to relieve pain until a fatal dose is reached). The article mentioned that there are some who want to offer assisted suicide to people with mental health problems and no means of material support. Fortunately, this is being opposed and debated, but not enough.
One could wonder about the rationale for wanting to assist a severely depressed person in killing himself. Perhaps the thinking is that a person shouldn’t kill himself in a messy way that is going to traumatize others or cause costly cleanups and delays in the train schedules. Perhaps it is seen as a type of suicide prevention in that the person asking for assistance could be talked out of it in most cases and would benefit from counselling and provision of some essential material support. Perhaps this could be a pressure tactic on government—"Look, we have hundreds of people here asking for help in dying because they are homeless and abandoned. Shouldn’t we be giving them homes? The government must do something?”
Or this could be eugenics, something very sinister that involves a slow drift toward a final solution for problems that our society has failed to solve humanely. As Vanessa Beeley’s article points out, Bill C-7 in Canada does include provisions that open the way to euthanasia for people who are mentally ill and not terminally ill. The CBC article stated that the Health Canada report indicated in 2023 “3.5 per cent of all MAID [Medical Assistance in Dying] recipients—463 people—did not have reasonably foreseeable deaths” (i.e. they were not terminally ill and there were other options besides dying). In 2021, this number was 223, about half the 2023 figure. That is not insignificant.
These articles failed to discuss what checks and balances are in place. Who is supervising all this? Does a doctor uninvolved in the treatment do an impartial review the patient’s file? Do lawyers or judges review the file? Who signs off on this legally? It’s not only the destitute and poor who are threatened by euthanasia laws. Family members who want hastened access to inherited property would have motives to encourage euthanasia, bribe doctors and lawyers, or make donations to hospitals. The ethical quagmires just worsen as the bureaucratic momentum seeks to include new categories of people eligible for Medical Assistance in Dying, which could more honestly be called legalized killing.
Great piece, your first part too. I would add that the assisted suicide is a bit predatory, preying on the mental “weakness” of the societally vulnerable. Anyhow, I was glad that you were back on the podcast this week. You always have such insightful things to say.