VN Alexander – Off-Guardian Nov 17, 2024

In his 1962 short story “2BR02B” (pronounced, to be or not to be), Kurt Vonnegut imagines that, in response to overpopulation, the US government might create a “Bureau of Termination,” where citizens can go to have themselves put down.

Before any new baby can be allowed into society, someone has to volunteer to die to keep the population number fixed. Otherwise, infanticide is the remedy.

At the end of the story, a 200-year-old artist, who has been painting a mural in a maternity ward waiting room, witnesses the murder of two officials and the suicide of a father who was compelled to make room in the world for his new-born triplets.

The artist then calls the bureau to make an appointment for himself. The woman answering the phone thanks him profusely,

Your city thanks you; your country thanks you; your planet thanks you. But the deepest thanks of all is from all of the future generations.

Later, Vonnegut continues to ponder the perils of government-run population control in “Welcome to the Monkey House,” which predicts the commercialization of euthanasia services, Ethical Suicide Parlors, with drop-in appointments available.

Science fiction, such as Vonnegut wrote, often imagines the future of a techno-enhanced longevity side-effects in a negative light.

In most countries today, euthanasia is still illegal. But that is changing.

Transhumanist elites, like Schwab and Gates, are investing desperately in new bio-tech, hoping they will be able to keep their fast-aging bodies — or at least their codes — alive in perpetuity. Meanwhile, the movement aims to help the rest of us end our lives prematurely.

Euthanasia Commercialized

Today, in a dozen or so countries and a couple of U.S. states, euthanasia is legal under strict conditions: almost always the person must be terminally ill. Some countries, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland, have very few restrictions.

Consequently, these countries have become travel destinations for those interested in mortality tourism. Yes, paid guides are available.

As if unwittingly parodying futuristic sci-fi dystopias, commercial termination services promote themselves as technologically advanced, offering the latest in quick and painless death.

Forgoing the old reliable pharmaceutical route, such as the state imposed on Socrates, a new Swiss company called Sarco provides a space capsule-like unit (to take one to one’s “last home”) that serves as an air-tight chamber where toxic gas quickly does the customer in.

“Sarco” is short for “sarcophagus.” Marketing realized that retiring into one’s royal sarcophagus has got to seem better than getting into a coffin. Nevertheless, the Sarco does look a bit like a futuristic coffin, if not like—because of its angular positioning—a purple crotch rocket.

With an unnecessarily aerodynamic shape and design aesthetics also reminiscent of a canister vacuum cleaner, the Sarco is available in several color options for people who want to “get help to die [sic] without being terminally ill.”

To avoid legal responsibility, Sarco employees do not push the button to release the gas. The button is located inside the coffin and the customer has to be the one to initiate to lethal protocol, so that he himself might his quietus make.

Government-run Euthanasia Today

World Economic Forum protégées Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland have endorsed new medical assistance in dying (MAID) laws in Canada for the terminally ill or disabled. Initially, also offering the “assistance” to those who merely had a mental illness, after public backlash, that privilege has been delayed: the state can’t help off depressed persons until after March 17, 2027.  But interested parties can subscribe to updates, to be first on the waiting list.

Currently, to be euthanized in Canada, a person must “have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability,” or “be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability” (i.e., getting old?), or “have enduring and intolerable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated under conditions the person considers acceptable.”

Under discussion is whether or not the “assistance” can be extended to “mature” minors.

When retired Canadian corporal Christine Gauthier, whose legs are paralyzed but who is otherwise healthy and physically active, requested a stairlift, a veterans affairs case worker offered her medical assistance in dying instead.

We can see where this is going.  First, they came for the disabled….

This lends credence to the crazy idea that transhumanism is the new eugenics. Kit Knightly in the Off-Guardian has recently opined in the same direction about new legislation being pushed in the UK.

The Ethics of Euthanasia Are Complicated: I Speak from Experience

Over twenty years ago, my own father—who had exhausted every treatment for throat cancer—alone with no family to comfort him, took a toxic cocktail he mixed up on his own. He lived in the Bible Belt, where euthanasia is not only illegal, but inconceivable. Although the drugs severely disabled him, he took over a week to finally succumb, during which time he and the family suffered great pain.

At the time, I wished that there had been someone or some agency to help.

In such a situation, where euthanasia is illegal, the family is vulnerable to predators. I wrote a novel Naked Singularity in which I explore this eventuality: a male night nurse sees an opportunity to take advantage of a daughter who is desperate to end her father’s suffering.  As when abortion is illegal, DIY strategies don’t often work out so well.

My novel was published by Permanent Press in 2003 and won a “best of 2003” award from the Dallas Observer. (The story takes place in Texas.) Reviews say it is “beautifully written” and “gut-wrenching.”  The audiobook, read by the author, has just been released on all platforms.

Incidentally, the audiobook cover art is by Anthony Freda, the same artist who did CJ Hopkins’ book cover, which has gotten him into so much trouble with the German authorities.

I don’t expect any significant problems, though sometimes, the “S” word is censored online and I wonder if this will chill discussion about the novel and the new audiobook. Let’s all pretend difficult issues should not be discussed in public. If you need to work through a difficult question, you ought to call one of the government’s official help lines. That’ll fix you.

I should note that Naked Singularity is fiction and any resemblance of any of the characters to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. But even more importantly, for artistic reasons, it was necessary to alter and invent to convey what I intended.

God, Law, or Art

Somewhat famously (or infamously) Vonnegut was agnostic about a God. He was a leader in the Humanist movement that sought to keep religion out of government. And he wasn’t a big fan of secular government intrusion into personal morals either.

As with all ethical questions, options can only be weighed within the specific context of each individual.  According to a general consensus, only an elderly, terminally-ill person who is suffering might be aided in ending his or her life. Heated debate follows any proposed exceptions to this rule, and this is to be expected, and accepted. Hard choices are difficult and unformalizable by nature.

When considered as a moral question, rather than an ethical one, euthanasia is seen out of context and in black and while.  Euthanasia is wrong; God decides when people die.  If that’s true, I’m not sure I agree with God’s reasoning, knocking off the young and healthy or making the elderly suffer, as He is sometimes wont to do.

Having grown up in the Bible Belt, I have made a great deal of effort to find a way to believe in the meaningfulness of every life, while at the same time rejecting the idea of a divinely-bestowed purpose, which would rob us of our free will.  I am now a card-carrying secular teleologist.

When I wrote that novel, I was a member of several secular humanist associations—and I did a nationwide book tour speaking to these groups. As I look back now twenty-years later, secular humanism seems a bit transhumanism adjacent. This may be because both modern movements, rejecting religion, seem dead to art as well. Humanist have lost the thread of the great Humanist literary tradition.

Vonnegut is an exception. He was a humanist who was also a good artist.

All bureaucracies want to find an algorithm to solve complex problems. I wish there were always a way to arrive at the best decision through some logical process—follow commandments, consult a flow chart maybe, or ask Chat-GPT—but this will never be possible.

This is why we have culture, art, literature—to provide the metaphors through which we can gain an understanding of difficult situations. Although we can become wise this way, we will never find the perfect answers.

When the state muscles in on culture’s territory, it makes a mess of things. A government cannot take up the function of culture or community. Why? The state puts itself above the individual, promoting sacrifice for the good of one’s country.

Suicided by the State

Just as those sci-fi writers predicted, think Logan’s Run or Soylent Green, Canada is trying to normalize self-slaughter as a courageous, selfless option. What is particularly egregious about what is happening in Canada is that—the moment euthanasia was legalized—the government began marketing the service to citizens, as a way, I imagine, of cutting end-of-life medical outlays. When such assistance is “offered” by government, which cannot be called disinterested, it automatically takes the form of coercion.

Pushing an individual to make a sacrifice for “the greater good” is always unethical; remember that as the New Eugenicists invert that rule, trying to gaslight you into believing that it is the highest ethical stance to sacrifice yourself when you are told to do so by the Technocrats and Bureaucrats.

That’s Got to Be Scary

Climbing into a plastic 3D-printed purple capsule, and reposing oneself before pushing a kill button is not my idea of a peaceful death.  Putting the responsibility of the act on the individual, as Sarco does, circumvents the legal prohibition against actually killing another person. It does nothing to alleviate the anxiety of the one committing suicide.

Facing one’s own death must be terrifying.  As I put it in my novel,

To be conscious at that threshold beyond which everything you ever thought, did, and loved has no consequence. All value lost. And then to step toward it. It’s unnatural.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, who faced a death sentence at one low point in his life, felt

the chief and worst pain may not be in the bodily suffering but in one’s knowing for certain that in an hour, and then in ten minutes, and then in half a minute, and then now, at the very moment, the soul will leave the body and that one will cease to be a man.

Although the transhumanist crowd would be quite happy if five or six billion plebs succumbed to the shot, the next bioweapon, starvation, or nuclear radiation in the next couple of years, they seem to absolutely dread their own deaths—perhaps because many of them are atheists and do not have a heaven to look forward to.

Instead, not unlike some of their religious fellows who value pristine souls above sullied flesh, they try to deny the reality that life is entangled in its physical form. And they dream of encoding themselves in “the cloud.”

Although a person cannot be captured by a digital code (as I have argued at length on The Posthumous Style Substack), a common literary trope is the idea that a person can at least be memorialized in a poem, thereby attaining a kind of immortality.

I rather like that idea of seeking immortality through good deeds, legacies, or art: it’s all I’ve got. When I think about the universe eventually growing cold, I cannot bear it.

If not I, then my children, or someone else’s children, or if not humans, then extra-terrestrials, and so on.  There was something in that, yes.  Or better yet, my contribution might continue in the form of thought, a philosophy more solid than any rock, longer lasting than any Rembrandt, more robust than any old god’s dogma.

Why does continuity feel so important? The scaffolding up of good will, so that somehow, someway, progress may come of every human life and the whole business of living be somehow worthwhile.

That, of course, also comes from Naked Singularity, a tragic love story, a family memoir, a confession, a stab at immortality.

AI as the new Arbiter

Yuval Noah Harari may want us to stop thinking for ourselves and, instead, follow the directives of our AI avatars (“who know us better than we know ourselves”). It’s all laid out for us in the humorless corporate speak of his and Schwab’s best-selling WEF manifestoes.

Every state or church that has tried to force its ideology on people has caused great suffering. The AI technocracy that is being rolled out today to take over the function of ethical/moral arbiter will be absolutely merciless, by nature—worse than Golem.

As difficult and painful as it is, we have to work out our own moral quandaries in conversation with our families and our communities. And we may let Art, which has neither the force of God or Law, be our gentle guide.

—

VN Alexander PhD is a philosopher of science and novelist, who has just completed a new satirical novel, C0VlD-1984, The Musical. You can read and follow her SubStack here.

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