Thursday 16 June 2011

The Veterinary Society

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Pondering the current British discourse on the necessity for legalizing and regulating euthanasia, I realized that under the prevailing Secularism, Leftism, Liberalism, Political Correctness we inhabit a veterinary society.

Our humane ruling elites see themselves asif caring vets, and the rest of us asif the animals they care for.

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To a vet, the existence of animals is conceptualized purely in terms of their degree of contentment.

The kindly vet's job is to keep their animal clients happy and healthy, and to relieve their suffering.

And when the kindly vet sees terminal suffering, his instinct is to reach for the humane killer.

The kindly vet who sees a suffering animal wants to 'put it out of its misery'.

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But since humans are sentient and spontaneously spiritual, the vets need first to persuade us that we are indeed animals; and our existence ought to be conceptualized purely in terms of our level of contentment.

In this, the vets have succeeded.

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Soon we won't need the vets, we will all carry our own humane killers, we will live a lifestyle (not a life) dedicated to pleasurable distraction - and when the prospect of suffering seems too great, we will put ourselves out of our own misery.

That is our modern secular notion of eu-thanasia - the 'good death' - a swift and painless end to a pleasurable life.  

Simple - and attainable!

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3 comments:

@CLANicholson said...

But all of the pressure for assisted suicide, or whatever term you want to use, is coming from within. You say that the powers that be have succeeded in making the populace view their lives as almost disposable, and hence caused this desire for a change in the law, but it's the interested populace that is the much more vocal group, so a more direct way of arriving at the current state is simply to say that interested members of the populace have been thinking for themselves.

Bruce Charlton said...

@CLAN - the current state of 'enlightened' debate with respect to assisted suicide is a result or thinking based on false premises - the debate is set up such that all options lead to monstrous implications.

In a nutshell the mainstream debate sees the options as approximately threefold: being a cruel vet (who does not care about animal suffering) or else being a humane vet (who wants to put an end to existing and terminal suffering) or to be a humane AND farsighted vet (who wishes to preempt inevitable suffering, by killing now rather than waiting for the inevitable).

But just where things would end-up once the veterinary perspective has been thoroughly accepted as an organizing social principle is hard to predict.

I suppose it depends on who controls veterinary education, who controls the law, who controls resources - things like that.

Brett Stevens said...

"Our humane ruling elites see themselves asif caring vets, and the rest of us asif the animals they care for."

I recently read Jim Kalb's great book The Tyranny of Liberalism, and I like what he had to say about the power of administration there. Our elites like it because it does not appear to be a political decision, only a "healthy" one, to adopt things like PC or smoking bans.

They're even trying it with the whole carbon-caps-for-global-warming shenanigans, which to my mind is to block a political decision to limit our population by savaging the welfare state.