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DO IT YOURSELF, PUSSY... assisted suicide and the total state
Replying to /u/freemcflurry 's thread below
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Shanti De Corte A 23 year old French Woman has died via assisted suicide. She was 17 when she survived a suicide attack in Rome… despite suffering no physical injury she developed PTSD and 6 years later was given the fatal injections after a panel of doctors signed off on it.
This is not an isolated incident. I hear stories almost every month of young to middle aged people with decades left to live, often with some physical ailment not even catastrophically disabling (loss of sight in one eye, chronic pain, disability of a limb… things vastly less than paraplegia)… and many that are effectively assisted suicides on mental health grounds alone… I can no longer find the story, but was explicitly assisted suicide for chronic depression.
Now there have been many pieces about the slippery slope of assisted suicide and moral arguments… and of course there are going to some progressives or ardent libertarians who insist this is all a perfectly fine choice for a consenting adult to make… but I don’t really care about all of that…
The overwhelming sentiment I have to all of this is crude but simple:
DO IT YOURSELF, PUSSY
The idea someone with less than full locked-in syndrome should get medically assisted suicide is not only insane… its aesthetically revolting.
If you can't summon the will to do it yourself even with full use of your physical faculties (of which suicide only requires one functional finger), then clearly you aren't emotionally competent to assign the task to someone else, and are quite frankly beneath such a grandiose gesture.
I've read multiple books by men who committed sepuku. One was a westerner who was paralyzed from the chest down (and didn't feel a thing)... another was a Japanese writer who, for a myriad of psychological and philosophical reasons, choose to do so in all its pain despite being in fine (actually peak) physical shape, Both of these I found eminently respectable. Whether one agreed with either man, the courage and will involved in either act revealed a beauty of spirit and rendered their logic something that had to be engaged with....
For adults (allegedly physically and mentally competent according to the state that accepts their signature) to choose not just death, but death in the hands of some bureaucrat/matriarch appointed by the state and medical establishment... to seek the return to the womb, and infantilizing comfort of some schoolmarm telling them "everything will be ok", of the disgusting toxic surrender to the surrogate mothering of a "Death Doula"…
This deserves not our pity or concern but our contempt and hatred.
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Say what you will about school shooters or suicide bombers... of the columbine shooters or 9/11 hijackers...Their rejection of this life and the world had the grandiosity and horror such a choice deserved. In their pain, rage, hate, and nihilism they at least had the dignity to let out a primal scream in their rejection of life.
At the hour and venue of their choosing they made their statements, and expressed everything they felt was a summation of their lives without even a thought to compromise... what statement are these assisted suicides making!?
To decide, out of all places on earth, you want to die in a hospital surrounded by the beeps and stench of piss covered by industrial cleaner? To choose for the hour of your demise the half hour slot the office clerk could find on the schedule? To choose as your last confessor the obese nurse some state bureaucrat selected out of the set who were working that day?
This is contemptable. The final farce of the cradle to grave welfare and biomedical security state.
I imagine these depressive but physically fine adults hoping that maybe this extreme expression, this final most extreme plea for help will extract from the uncaring state the love and affection their teachers promised but never delivered. That they might finally receive the love all the utilitarian and progressive rhetoric promised them... that the institutions they've come to see as father, mother, and lover will react to their pleas with all the affection and benevolence they've been taught to expect from neither parent, priest, or partner...
maybe as the bored RN tells them "Its alright, just a little sleep" they'll delude themselves into thinking that's what they've received... the matriarchy's most intimate soothing coo...
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These people and institutions deserve our hate not for taking life but for the ritualistic mockery they make doing it... The Aztec heart cutters at least had a style and didn't lie about their knives... and the sun god was vastly more appeased than whatever "Comfort and dignity" is supposed to be assuaged by the syringes, hypocrisies, and economical hospital decoration.
The final sublimation of that most extreme, personal, and human of choices into the banal indifference of the bureaucratic state.
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If someone is to reject life and all bonds of the living, then let them lead the police on a high speed chase before crashing into a wall… let them go to Vegas and drink themselves to death… let them wander off into the pale white of an ice-flow or chart their boat into the eye of the hurricane... let them blast their brains out on the floor of the state senate, or commit seppuku in the magic kingdom under the unblinking gaze of mickey's plastic mask... let them crash planes and bulldozers into buildings, or their bodies into the surf or concrete after defiant jumps...
And if one lacks the will and resolve to express their death with all the violence and horror a choice to take one’s life deserves… then clearly they also lack the seriousness to surrender their life to another.
Let them prove they truly lived at least a minute before they died. Let out a primal scream before disappearing beyond the vanishing point.
There may be value in keeping suicide a crime. If you're suffering so much you want to commit suicide, perhaps you should at least be suffering so much that you're willing to commit the crime of doing it.
Suicide may or may not be technically criminalized, but it feels like a crime in the sense that it is an illegitimate action. We have a society, and society disapproves of your suicide. Suicide is selfish, antisocial, and transgressive; it is not part of the plan and not how the world is supposed to work. Suicidal people may be keenly aware of this, and it might cause them extra suffering. Not only do they bear the burden of ending their life, but also of traumatizing society by performing an illegitimate action. The illegitimacy of suicide makes it extra traumatic for everyone involved because the public and the individual recognize the marginal suicide as small atrocity.
However, the trauma may have some upsides. I will not even argue it effectively deters suicide: I do not know if it does. But even the suffering caused is unnecessary, it might not be useless. This is because as OP alludes to, carrying out the transgression and forcing it onto society makes the suicide mean something. It is an atrocity that demands attention. It might show something is deeply flawed in the mental health system, in modernity, in how we approach aging, so flawed that it would allow something so horrible and so illegitimate to happen. Intuitively it is obvious from a humanistic perspective that if the rate of suicide in society goes up, something is deeply wrong. It may be in the interest of society for everyone to suffer and behold the horror rather than develop means of softening it or defining it out of existence, so that we do not forget.
One might protest that forcing suicidals to suffer more than they otherwise would for the sake of society is cruel because they are victims, and therefore they do not deserve it. But most criminals are also victims, born into disadvantage one way or another, and yet we punish them anyway, because their actions are illegitimate. Punishing suicide attempts seems pretty ridiculous, and posthumously dishonoring suicide victims seems uncouth in this day and age, but insofar as one believes suicide is worthy of being considered socially criminal, for suicidals to reckon with that social standard and transgress it in order to carry the suicide out seems like an appropriate "punishment" for the "crime".
Euthanasia is the rejection of this. It asserts that some people are qualified to legitimately choose to die, and society should provide a legitimate channel to do so. This is detraumatizing because people legitimately choosing death is now part of the plan; that's just how the world is; we have a system for it. It reduces the suffering of sucidals, since they no longer have to commit a grave transgression and can simply go through the legitimate channels, and also of society, since some number of horrific suicides are now legitimate euthanasia cases (which can even be framed as a positive thing, since the marginal euthanasia is preferable to continuation of life after all). The extreme version of this is the argument that everyone has an unalienable right to end their own life e.g. due to bodily autonomy or revealed preferences, the natural implication being that we should provide trauma-minimizing legitimate channels for anyone to do so if they so choose. But even if we insist euthanasia be gatekept to those meeting some qualifications, it is easily imaginable that suicidal people on the margins will aspire to meet the qualifications rather than survive, and illegitimate suicides may be downgraded from "atrocity" to "should have went through the proper channels". Thus suicide is made bureaucratic banal, which is what OP does not want to happen, because we should remember that suicide is insane. If it is going to happen, it should at least happen for extreme and salient reasons, and we should feel it.
To elaborate on the legitimization of a former social crime, we can draw an analogy to one that has already happened: welfare. Welfare is, to put it in the meanest possible terms, the legitimization of being dead weight. Producing less than you consume is fundamentally antisocial since someone else must make up the difference, and you don't even have productive family willing to internalize your losses. When illegitimate, deadweights are extra socially traumatic: they starve, or riot, or steal. It is a small atrocity; things happen that aren't part of the plan and hurt everyone involved. But in modern society where we have wealth and compassion to spare, we make deadweights part of the plan on pragmatic and humanitarian grounds: we create a legitimate channel to be a deadweight, namely, welfare. You can produce less than you consume, just show you have the proper qualifications and do the paperwork. Since people on welfare no longer have to starve or riot or steal, and nor does society have to deal with them doing so, the amount of trauma and suffering is actually reduced. The number of deadweights might not have gone down, but the marginal welfare recipient is now a marginal contributor to a banal statistic, not a marginal atrocity.
But there is a big difference between welfare and euthanasia. When we put people on welfare, we are sponsoring the hope their situation might get better. The main qualification is that they are trying to find a job. When we euthanize people, we are sponsoring the concession that their situation will never get better. The main qualification is that they are not trying to survive. There are various arguments for why welfare is inevitable or even desirable, or that there is a endgame of post-scarcity UBI utopia as net productivity rises. While there may be some dissent and criticism, welfare has already been integrated into society's value system.
The prospect of that happening for euthanasia is troubling, to say the least. To demand to suicidal people DO IT YOURSELF may be a reasonable safeguard.
I am not actually categorically against euthanasia. Policy in real life is complicated. But I think it's important to consider the effect I described, because mere suffering reduction is too simplistic of a model in the face of value drift.
it does not make sense to me that people are not traumatized by someone around them that is suicidal, yet become traumatized when the suicidal person kills themselves. its like they dont care about the suffering of the suicidal person as long as he is living, but when he kills himself then they are affected. to me its selfish to require someone to continue living miserably when they would rather die.
I dunno, dealing with actively suicidal people is pretty traumatic.
My uncle died of COVID last December. His son had a psychotic break, convinced himself that he could trade their lives, and attempted suicide twice. From what I hear on the other side of the country, my aunt and cousins are spending as much time dealing with his commitment and the fallout as they are with my uncle’s actual death.
Even just hearing that someone you love has considered suicide is a weight. A challenge to find another way before an irreversible “mistake.” It’s not that people flip a switch and start caring. The main difference is what actions are even left to take.
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