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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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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.

Entertaining rant, as always. Also a juvenile preoccupation with aesthetics and going out in a blaze of glory as if everyone in the world should aspire to be a Shonen manga character like you do, as always.

I find some germs of agreement in your disgust with state-sanctioned suicide and asking someone else to do the job for you. That said, I wonder if you've ever known any genuinely suicidally depressed people? Your uncharitable projection of a pathetic need for validation and someone to "rescue" them may be true for some of the people seeking this last resort, but I would guess that many of them really, truly are in so much pain that dying seems like the only escape from an existence of undending, hopeless misery. Whether they are entirely rational (some are, some aren't) and whether there might be some cure for them (in some cases there is not) is beside the point. They really are, subjectively, suffering as much as someone with locked-in syndrome or constant physical pain.

There are a number of good arguments for requiring that people "do it themselves," but "don't be a pussy!" isn't one of them, and neither is "make it awesome." These people aren't you. They don't care about whether they make a grand statement or go out in a blaze of glory. This is like demanding that someone who doesn't believe in or care about God say a prayer before dying. Your aesthetics are not theirs, nor should your aesthetics shape public policy. Go ahead and beat your chest and use every muscle in your face to produce a sneer of epic proportions, they don't care because they are so depressed that they don't care to the nth degree. Fortunately I have never suffered from suicidal depression but I know enough people who have that I can easily imagine the response to one of them finally taking this step of asking for state assistance, and KulakRevolt sneering at them that they're pathetic pussies. Their response will be, quite simply, "Yes, and?"

From a somewhat more rational perspective, as others have pointed out, the usual suicide methods have a high enough failure rate, with the possibility of winding up not dead but maimed, paralyzed, or brain-dead, inflicting further suffering on both yourself and your loved ones, that it's not unreasonable for someone who lacks your go-jump-in-a-volcano aesthetic to prefer a surer, safer method. And the more spectacular methods (jumping in a volcano, walking off an ice flow, swimming with great whites) similarly seem to be unreliable and/or gruesome. (Ironically enough, while suicidally depressed people generally care not at all about their own lives, they do often still care about the people they will leave behind, the people who will have to clean up the mess they make, etc., which is often the only small deterrent that does keep them from doing it themselves.)

They really are, subjectively, suffering as much as someone with locked-in syndrome or constant physical pain.

There's really no way to know this from outside of that person's perspective. Depression is often characterized by depressive delusions. I see no reason to take them at their word that they are suffering any more than we should take them at their word that the universe is a dismal joke.

I also don't accept that being really sad all the time is nearly as bad as being in agonizing pain.

I also don't accept that being really sad all the time is nearly as bad as being in agonizing pain.

Obviously no one truly knows what someone else is feeling. But if you think major depression is just "being sad all the time," you have probably not known someone who dealt with major depression. The fact that it's all in their head (literally) does not mean the suffering isn't real.

True, but it also doesn't mean the suffering is real, or at least that it is comparable to living with actual chronic pain.

True, but it also doesn't mean the suffering is real, or at least that it is comparable to living with actual chronic pain.

Clearly the suffering is real unless you believe they are outright lying. As for whether it's comparable, what's the difference between telling someone living with chronic pain "it's not that bad" and telling someone with depression "it's not that bad"? How do you ajudge that someone with depression isn't "really" suffering as much as someone in chronic physical pain? It's not as if chronic physical pain is any more objectively measurable outside the head of the person suffering it. (Hence skepticism about things like fibromyalgia.)

Most of us have no trouble believing in physical pain because we've all experienced it, but if we haven't experienced mental anguish like chronic depression, it's easy to think "They're just sad all the time, that's not comparable to real pain."

I do not think people who claim to suffer from depression are any less reliable reporters of their own subjective experiences than people claiming to suffer from physical pain. In both cases, there are certainly people who exaggerate their suffering or for whom the pain is literally "all in their head," but the fact that the suffering may come from something other than stimulation of pain nerves doesn't make it less real.

Clearly the suffering is real unless you believe they are outright lying.

No, there's a third possibility, which is that they're sincere but deluded. Which we know is the case on many other axes, since depressive delusions arrive in the box with depression.

Most of us have no trouble believing in physical pain because we've all experienced it

There's also a mechanism that makes sense. Nerves send a pain signal to the brain, and brains translate that signal into the qualia of pain. Pain that originates within the brain is much harder to understand. Dysfunctions of the brain present a malfunctioning mind, as opposed to a properly functioning mind responding to a malfunctioning body. If the mind is compromised, we have every reason to treat its claims with suspicion.

No, there's a third possibility, which is that they're sincere but deluded. Which we know is the case on many other axes, since depressive delusions arrive in the box with depression.

I'm not sure there is a meaningful difference between "You are experiencing psychological pain" and "You suffer from a delusion that you are experiencing psychological pain."

I'm not saying we should encourage people with depression to kill themselves, obviously. Just that if you accept that some people experience so much suffering that suicide is a rational option, I don't think you can draw a hard line between "people suffering from physical pain" and "people suffering from psychological pain" and say the suffering of the former is real but the suffering of the latter is not.

OK, here's my effortpost. I have a few minutes, and I haven't given this topic the treatment it deserves.

Partly because I follow Andrew Sullivan and Chris Rufo on Twitter, I've seen a lot of detransitioner stories. These are usually natal women who transitioned to become boys in their adolescence, and then ended up regretting it. What strikes me about it is how many of them report having been depressed, having been introduced to the world of transgender ideology through the usual very online spaces, and then seizing onto it for three specific reasons: (1) because gender dysphoria is elastic enough to be a plausible cause of their unhappiness, (2) because it is a salient transgressive ideology and therefore permits them to scapegoat their families and culture for their misery, and (3) because transitioning is a big project that they can start one step at a time and work slowly toward along a well-lighted path, with social support and a feeling of accomplishment at each step along the way.

There has been a boom in adolescent girls transitioning, and this is a population known for booms in various sociogenic mental health illnesses: eating disorders, self harm, even sociogenic Tourettes, the last of which pretty squarely indicates its sociogenic fingerprints.

Now, many of these sociogenic illnesses are no joke. Eating disorders, self harm, and medically assisted gender transition have potential lifelong consequences. But the Tourettes thing! The reports indicate that somehow its sufferers get "stuck" in their sociogenic Tourettes -- who can fathom what that feels like "from the inside," but it is a clear case of girls suffering from some kind of delusion, where neurology conclusively rules out the usual Tourettes etiology, where they nonetheless insist they are unable to stop their tics even while they protest that they wish they could. There is no known neurological basis for their disorder, but they swear they are unable to stop their tics. Do you believe them? It's hard for me to really commit to a clear yes or no on that question. The best I can say is that there is a real disorder there, but it's hard to know where the disorder stops and the mind starts. Probably the self and the behavior, via the borrowed identity that the behavior is premised upon, have become conjoined. It isn't a meaningful question to ask whether they are capable of stopping, because doing so assumes the distinct identity of a rational mind that can observe the behavior from outside of it, in the way that someone with a broken arm can observe the source of the pain -- or even that someone with classical Tourettes can observe the source of the errant neurological signals, because they show up on the relevant diagnostic tests. I think there's an analogy to depression here, a meaningful analogy which at least requires us to raise an eyebrow to any sort of confident equivalency between depressive misery and physical pain. How unlike do we think they are, really? Is a clinically depressed person more or less able to get out of bed, shower, and have a productive day than a sufferer of sociogenic Tourettes is to stop exhibiting tics? Intuitively they seem to be in a similar category.

Anyway, imagine that we broadly accept the concept of medically assisted suicide as a treatment for severe depression. We'll put in lots of checks and balances, lots of consultations, require doctors to line up and swear on their souls that there's no alternative: pick your policy suite. What occurs to me is that we started with the same policy suite of checks and balances to avoid premature transgender HRT and surgery. And those checks and balances weren't enough. Arguably the checks and balances contributed to the problem, in the sense that they engendered online spaces dedicated to guiding people through the process, and presented a neat and exciting problem for depressive people looking for social affirmation and a sense of accomplishment in breaking down a big challenge into bite sized chunks and overcoming them step by step.

So whatever procedural safeguards you set up around medically assisted suicide for mental illness, as soon as that pathway is open legally, a subculture will spring up to guide people through it. They will study the criteria and share stories about meeting or not meeting the criteria, about their experience with this doctor or that, which will cumulatively provide a series of beacons for passing through all of the checkpoints that you've established. It will become a project for exactly the population of adolescent girls who are currently transitioning.

And the worst part is that these girls, the ones who fall prey to sociogenic Tourettes, sociogenic transgenderism, sociogenic eating disorders and sociogenic self-harm behaviors -- they usually grow out if it if they can be kept safe for a few years. They are usually fine in the long run! So the result of legally assisted suicide for depressed people, no matter how hard you try to prevent it, will be a lot of dead girls who would have grown up to be healthy and well adjusted women, and a lot of bereaved families who could perhaps be forgiven for believing that society murdered their little girl.

What we need to do, IMO, is to find alternative ways for girls in this group to try on some new and transgressive identity that does not cause lasting harm. Bring back the goth subculture. Have them try out being a lesbian. Let them practice witchcraft, or voodoo, or satan-worship. Maybe try being a Christian to rebel against particularly new-age parents who can't be shocked by the old ways: have them sneak out to attend church when they're supposed to be at volleyball practice, furtively study a bunch of catechisms, discreetly get baptized, and have their shocking and tearful coming-out announcement to their parents. The trick will be in setting up the subculture and making sure that it all feels properly transgressive. Maybe these Tourettes influencers on Tiktok are the answer to all of these problems, and by boosting their signal we'll be able to crowd out all of the other avenues of harm. But for fuck's sake, don't help them kill themselves.

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