The Return of Euthanasia to the Discourse

Not long ago I raised the matter of the debate over euthanasia, and how it had seemed to disappear at the turn of the century. My reading of that situation was that that was a particular battle in the culture war that the right had won, and that after that, the more easily in that it is the concerns of the right that get press, it fell by the wayside as other issues came to the fore--of which there were no shortage in the conflict-ridden twenty-first century.

However, the subject seems to be sneaking back into the discourse--for reasons that have little to do with the culture war, and much more to do with what is always behind the culture war in the end, hard economics. Simply put, if policymakers of a certain ideological background had long lamented the aging of the populations of the industrialized nations (whether sincerely or strategically, as an excuse for attacks on a welfare state they despise) the trend is today much more advanced, and the costs of an older population (lower work force productivity, the pension and health care bill) weigh the more heavily after an epoch of miserably slow economic growth by even the officially favored yardsticks, such that those who regard the situation as economically or fiscally intolerable are that much more ardent in their view, that much more insistent that the situation has reached the point of "crisis."

At the same time this century's horrors have tended to make what a short time ago was unsayable increasingly "normal" in those societies that so pride themselves on their respect for human rights, with this most certainly including the idea that society would be better off if it just got rid of a lot of people who are from the standpoint of those who hold power a burden--with the COVID-19 pandemic a major moment here. Thus did assistant editor of the Telegraph Jeremy Warner write in a piece titled "Does the Fed Know Something the Rest of Us Do Not With Its Panicked Interest Rate Cut?" that from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents"--all of which, together, can be taken as a suggestion that in seeing the virus as a beneficial reduction of the burden of the elderly on society he was only saying what a great many of the policy elite were thinking. And certainly said elites acted as if this were indeed what they thought as they consistently opposed public action to address the crisis--downplaying the seriousness of the problem (cases going down, this will pass, disappear when it was just getting going), making every effort to reduce such action as was to be taken on the problem to "personal responsibility" (patronizingly telling individuals to "wash their hands," "not touch their face," and use "social distancing"--yes, that'll save the world!), and then when the pressure on them to do more became inescapable belatedly and less than half-heartedly implementing ill thought-out, inadequate, leaky, little-enforced measures they abandoned altogether at the first chance as the media helped make COVID-19 part of the culture war and its extreme stupidity, denigrated public action ("hygiene theater"), derided those who took a different view (as "lockdown addicts"), and played up any "out" they could (not least, widely publicizing overoptimistic studies of vaccine effectiveness that encouraged a "Just get yourself vaccinated and all will be well" narrative) on the way back to the "herd immunity" policy those elites wanted all along and quickly got as they took a "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" attitude, and sneered at those who refused to be part of the piles as pathetic little cowards deserving of public contempt. ("Suck it up!" said the billionaire to the schoolteachers, as the press applauded his "leadership.") In spite of the fact that, contrary to their herd immunity pseudo-science, the pandemic did not simply pass but became endemic with mutation after mutation of the kind that lockdown pooh-poohing Establishment "experts" said couldn't, wouldn't, happen, and against which the highly touted vaccines turned out to be far less effective than the initial reports promised (instead of 95 percent effectiveness rates, long-term efficacy and robustness in the face of mutations, the vaccines have been more like a typical flu vaccine in the level of protection they afford), translating to one new wave of infection after another, they hastened to declare the pandemic over as the media spoke of the public simply choosing to get on with their lives as normal, and in extreme contrast with the "worthy" victims of those tragedies that, being useful to its Agenda, Authority insists on fulsomely commemorating forever such that at the mere mention of said tragedies anyone concerned for the "good opinion of society" is obliged to pull the "smelled a fart" face the stupid equate with gravitas, the pandemic's victims--the billions sickened, hundreds of millions suffering prolonged and even possibly permanent damage and disability and shortened life expectancies, and even at the undercount implied by the gap between official deaths to disease and "excess" deaths during the period, the millions who died directly of infection (and those left behind, the widowed, the orphaned, and all the rest, among many, many others whose suffering went beyond the conveniently, countably bodily)--were ignored and quickly forgotten, the passing of even the rich and famous victim of the disease scarcely remarked so that one only learned their fate later when they thought "I wonder what happened to them . . ." and looked them up in an object lesson in what it is that makes for the unworthy victim.

Amid that extraordinary devaluation of human life one can hardly be surprised if the idea of the aged being enabled--and maybe encouraged--to do away with themselves as they cease to make the rich richer were made respectable again, with little outcry from the kulturkampfers of the right. All as, of course, the super-rich make it very clear that they will not be the ones "going home," they, unlike the mere serfs, having every intention of living forever, indeed ascending to godhood, with their anticipation of that outcome seemingly reflected in their investment in artificial intelligence creating the biggest bubble in the history of the world.