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September 26, 2024 - 1:00pm
As the home of Dignitas, Switzerland has long taken a benign view of euthanasia. But it seems that portable gas chambers are a step too far. On Monday, an American woman killed herself in a Sarco pod, a 3D-printed capsule which kills its inmate with nitrogen. Several people, including a photographer, have been arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting suicide.
Although its inventor likes to boast otherwise, this is not quite a world first: Alabama recently executed a murderer using the same technique. But instead of the unlovely William C. Holman Correctional Facility right off Alabama State Route 21, the death chamber in this instance was placed in a picturesque bit of forest in the Jura Mountains.
A photo taken shortly before the event shows an interior with comfortable soft furnishings and a travel pillow of the sort you buy at airports. The official description is “luxurious”; and while I would not go that far, its setup bears an uncanny resemblance to the comfy sleep pods which can now be found in university libraries and airports.
And why not? As its inventor Philip Nitschke — Newsweek: “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide”, The Economist: “the bad boy of the euthanasia movement” — explains it, he had initially built a suicide bag, with a breathing mask which pipes out carbon monoxide. But people didn’t like the “plastic bag factor”. People may want to die, but they have aesthetic expectations.
Hence the suicide pod, which allows the consumer to “choose either a dark or transparent view, so you can take the machine somewhere if you prefer a certain view”. The doctor, for the record, would pick Australia’s northern desert at sunset for his own untimely demise.
There is nothing new about the glamorisation of euthanasia. For decades, Dignitas’s stock-in-trade has been to portray its services as an occasion for a family reunion, with choice of music. Its brochure described the clinic’s setting with lines such as “beside lies a tiny lake; a little waterfall dabbles.”
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SubscribeI think this is the rational end point of atheistic materialism. If life and existence aren’t suffused with meaning by a creator who put you here for a reason, to do something you must continue living to discover, then life becomes something to be enjoyed when it’s good and to be tossed away when it becomes painful or even inconvenient. This is why progressive politics in our era has increasingly turned into something like a death cult. Demands for “rights” increasingly have to do with the supposed freedom to kill or to die on demand. Pregnant with an unexpected child that it would inconvenience you to raise? Kill it. Doing anything you didn’t consent to or plan for would be immoral. Sick or depressed? Kill yourself. Why go on suffering for no reason? You were arbitrarily coughed up here without your input to struggle meaninglessly. Death, like life, has no moral dimension that would make either one distinguishable from the other. As a practical matter, death, in a universe with no God, is the end of experience and, therefore, pain so it’s seen more and more as the solution to every thorny existential problem.
Viktor Frankl, in his Man’s Search for Meaning, describes his experience as a trained psychologist put into the Nazi death camps. He saved the lives of many men who, their families dead and their lives unbearable, were on the verge of suicide. He writes that the men would say they were going to end it all because they no longer had anything to expect from life. Frankl would tell them, maybe that’s true, but life may yet have something to expect from you. By placing the man in service to life rather than life in the service of the man, he convinced many men to go on living in unimaginably bleak circumstances. Many survived. I think Frankl’s philosophy – called Logotherapy – is the only way back to sanity in a culture wrecked by radical selfishness and a nihilistic obsession with individualism.
“….by a creator who put you here for a reason….”. It sounds like you approach this from a religious perspective. That is your right, but what about those of us (a majority where I live) who do not adhere to that religious view?
I’d suggest you adopt the religious view. I’ve tried it without the religious view for 25 years and it doesn’t work any other way.
I think that having offspring serves much the same purpose.
If you’re one to wonder about your purpose in life, that purpose is concrete and you are now emotionally attached as a protector/provider/mentor to some degree for the remainder of your life.
Seriously.
You’re wrong. It’s a culture war. Your way leads to death and civilizational collapse.
You’re right, unfortunately. Look where the moral slide we’re in right now has lead us. Why do we still have suicide hotlines? We can’t seem to agree anymore that killing yourself is a bad thing. How would someone talk someone else out of committing suicide if suicide is now packaged as the answer to all life’s insoluble problems? As far as I can tell, it was only the belief that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the Everlasting had set His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter that made trying to stop suicidal people from carrying out their plans comprehensible. If death really is the best answer to pain, suffering, depression, ennui, sickness, etc.then why shouldn’t we promote it to everybody who wants it?
You are probably right but most people are materialists and want a choice of when and how to die. If you want to change this you need to convince people which you will fail to do if you castigated them for subscribing to ” radical selfishness” and ” nihilism” which makes you sound as though you consider yourself to be better than them.
I don’t consider myself to be better than them; I consider the way of thinking I’ve come to after many years of trying to do things the same way as them to be better than theirs. Life doesn’t owe us anything, we owe life. If you go around bitterly complaining that life hasn’t given you what you want, and you’re an atheist, who are you complaining to? It’s senseless. How about forgetting about what you want and open yourself up to the possibility that life needs something else from you and you’d better listen for when it calls you? And whenever it calls you for whatever you need to do, you’d better be there. In other words, you don’t decide when the show’s over. You might be needed on stage after you want it to be done.
I wonder how wealthy you are or how much good luck from inheritance you have had.
I’m not wealthy, don’t come from money, and I haven’t inherited anything and don’t stand to, although I’m not sure what that has to do with what I said about adopting a worldview that promotes a sense of duty to life and a faith that life has a purpose for you as an antidote to nihilism, despair, and suicide.
Shades of Futurama…
Perhaps the rise of death cultism – whether de-growth environmentalism or assisted suicide, or simply gender dysphoria and childlessness, is telling us something about our species. Maybe our collective species consciousness is not so distinct from the collective consciousness of the biome it occupies, and the imbalances we have created within that biome are leading to these kinds of reactions.
What if, instead of 8 billion humans on earth, we had only 100 million? Would we have fewer assisted suicides and boys pretending they were girls?
It’s an interesting idea, But maybe as a species we’ve peaked and now we’re just idiots who inherited everything.
When I hear that idea, I’m always reminded of Asimov’s Foundation series, in which he (prescient master that he was) first articulated the idea of a degenerate civilisation relying on technologies it had forgotten how to engineer and no longer really understood.
I take the opposite view. I consider us to be a very young species, which in evolutionary terms is pretty accurate. Whilst our sense of history may make us seem old (there are no precedents for that ‘sense’) we might well be undergoing the kind of ‘growing pains’ that are inevitable once we’ve divested ourselves of certain illusions: the most egregious of course, being that we were “created”.
That’s not to say we mightn’t just blow ourselves to smithereens; but if we can work our way through the “loss of illusion” stage then there’s nothing to suggest we couldn’t continue to evolve and look back on these centuries in the way a mature adult looks back on the follies of their teenage years.
Hm. In every society I’ve ever seen or even read about there are some leaders and some followers. To get to the ideal “Everybody is equal and happy” seems counterintuitive, simply because each person is genetically different. So first you have to be able to control the gene pool……..
My point about lack of historical precedent isn’t about what’s already happened, but our sense of whether we’re “old” or not as a species.
I’ve not referred to gene pools, happiness or equality.
I agree that most societies are split between “leaders” and “followers”. I’ve always regarded myself as a “leader” without any “followers”.
I would think a person who says the idea that life is created is an “egregious” illusion should at minimum know things like where life came from, how the universe came into existence, and the source and nature of consciousness before ruling out a creative intelligence. And, even if you knew the answers to these questions, you’d still have to look at the deplorable consequences brought about by the loss of the “illusions” you refer to at scale and question whether there isn’t some fact about consciousness, whatever that might be, that requires those “illusions” in order to survive.
Does it matter whether or not there is a “creative intelligence”? However you spin it, we have free will. That is the important thing.
Very true. Our great burden.
I’m having a heap of fun exercising my free will.
Yes, it does. If the universe came into existence without an exercise of will by an intelligent being for some purpose then there can be no “why” to anything; there’s only “is”. If everything only is, it makes no sense to make normative (ought) statements about anything. We can say that things are a certain way and if we ask “why?” and we work our way down the turtle stack of “how” answers, we will finally hit bedrock at an “is” and have to conclude the “why” question itself is incoherent. And if we die and our consciousnesses die with us and experience ends, there is no moral import to existence at all. There is no consequence to any of our actions beyond their immediate effect. Let’s say we have free will. Some of us will choose kindness, fairness, and charity and some of us will choose cruelty, dishonesty, and selfishness. Indeed, cruelty, dishonesty, and selfishness carry a distinct advantage if your primary interest is getting power. If preferring kindness, fairness, and charity to cruelty, dishonesty, and selfishness is just a matter of each person’s preference, what can it matter which one a person chooses? To say this doesn’t matter is to miss the fact that the highly selfish, destructive behavior we see from many people today is a direct result of the conclusion that there is no moral reality.
I appreciate that this idea of a “collective consciousness of the biome” for the human species all sounds a bit “woo-woo” but there is a good well researched example albeit in prokaryotes :
Bacteria have this system called quorum sensing that does all sorts of neat things in order to optimise the survival of a bacterial colony (including stopping cell division). One of the inputs to these systems is the availability of chemicals (food) the bacteria need to thrive.
I have a possibly misplaced faith that homo sapiens is demonstrating a similar process right now – although I think the limiter for us will be fresh, imbibable water not food.
Fascinating details. Thank you Elaine.
One pictures Sol Roth obediently submitting to his state-mandated death to the tunes of Vivaldi and scenes of daffodil fields. Next, we’ll all be eating people.
Soylent Green.
A Utilitarian wet dream.
That pod would look great with a wooden door
maybe also some flapping arms and a Dalek-like voice shouting “Exterminate! Exterminate!”
It is vaguely reminiscent of a Reliant Robin.
More like a Sinclair C5.
I wonder how long it’s going to be before you can “help your family get by after you are gone” if you agree to a hunt as your modus operandi. Emphasis on die.
The Sarco pod is to death what elective caesarean is to birth.
So what. Its for individuals to decide and most people support physician assisted suicide. You may emote about that or also exagerrate that Canafa’s MAID is encouraging disabled people into suicide ( a lie) but this will happen in tne UK and you will need a coping strategy.
Surely though staying alive has also been technologised and marketed to the highest bidder, often controlled by doctors who have no real sense of ‘quality of life’. Few people really die ‘naturally’ anymore.
What a miserable, unkind article. Has the writer given any thought to the person who was relieved of her suffering thanks to this procedure? What’s wrong with consumerism per se? Why should this development be monstrous? It is the alternative – of a slow, agonising and pointlessly painful death – that is monstrous.