Modern Western secular man explicitly and as an inward experience feels himself to be worthless and evil, and
deserving of (what he imagines will be) annihilation by death.
He is
afraid of dying, however, and is increasingy clamouring for widespread and convenient euthanasia
(humane murder, suffering-free legal-murder) - and specifically wants this for himself (not just for other people).
On
present trends there will soon and increasingly be a kind of 'cult' of
suicides among the baby boom generation - suicide seen as a public duty, a
positive act: an act of ultimate altruism.
This will first emerge among the elderly intellectuals of post 1945 generation as they hit their late seventies; but will soon spread to ever younger and fitter people as a morally-admirable safe-option - the logic for this is
already in-place.
As such Western people die, they will do so with much public boasting, a smug and warm glow
at their own generosity in 'making way'; and in expectation of the gratitude and admiration of the population that they have brought-in from elsewhere to replace them.
The younger migrant population, of course, never had any intention of supporting, nor indeed the ability to support, a truly massive, alien, older generation of Westerners through long, unproductive and dependent old age. The idea is indeed ridiculous (despite that so many people seem to believe it).
The dawning prospect of a slow death of suffering from starvation and neglect will only increase the mass desire for pain-avoiding suicide among the declining natives - and encourage people to dress-it-up in a pseudo-morality of self-sacrifice - the kind of thing modern elites are so expert at accomplishing.
Absolutely. It's another aspect of what Malcolm Muggeridge called 'The Great Liberal Death Wish'. Literally in this case. There are very deep and sinister compulsions at work here - the unthinkable becomes the do-able becomes the socially responsible. Celebrities and the liberal intelligentsia are already frantically virtue-signalling on this subject, but those who will suffer most deeply are the poor and lonely and most easily-confused and exploitable - those for whom life allows the least margin for error. The Sexual Revolution wreaked particular havoc among this caste of people in this way as well.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to don my father's Old Labour hat for a moment and call it another bourgeois attack on what's left of traditional working-class mores. But it's also an attack on the West, very stark and plain in its symbolism - 'we don't want to live any more, please take our place. Kill us off if you have to.' I also remember you saying once that we'll see a spate of these kind of suicides if things ever get really bad in our societies - war, invasion, economic collapse, ISIS-type activity, etc. Again, people will present it as the right - indeed noble - thing to do
We are surrounded by a culture of death, as Pope Jon Paul II flagged up many times. Finding reasons to live, both individually and collectively, and finding the moral courage and spiritual flair to articulate those reasons is fast becoming the War of the Ring of our times.
@John
ReplyDeleteOn further refelction, the most appalling thing is that this is the ultimate expression of the 'Anything but Christianity!' mind-set which characterises Western Intellectual life. (I know, because I used to be an adherent.)
The Intellectual elite know that (real) Christianity really does make people happier and function better, motivates them, provides hope and courage - and somehow that makes it even worse, makes them despise it even more. In this context the culture of death is not merely the choice of 'quality of life' and the escape from suffering - it is truly an existential choice of damnation.
(I should add that I do NOT - as a generalisation - agree with some Christians that suicide is always and necessarily a sin. It may be, and at times it clearly is. Some sucicides are horrible acts of aggression against others. Others are a failure to take life seriously, and a predeful and selfishly motivated rejection of the primary realities - and the suicides we are talking about may fall into this category. Some are a consequence of intoxication (alcohol, drugs) which itself may (or may not) be culpable. But at other times I think suicide is a response to suffering that seems inescapable and when the person can find no hope. With some severely psychotic - especially melancholic - patients there seems to them to be little alternative - and so far as I can perceive such suicides are not sinful but ought to evoke great compassion.)
Can we see this as possibly a good thing?
ReplyDeleteAs someone said, new paradigms come into being because the members of the old guard die off.
Modern civilization needs to die, and clearly the people most committed to it have lost the will to live, after having created it and lived by its values.
Well, such people seem irredeemable, so how will a new world emerge without a massive dying off of the people most committed to the old world?
I wonder if something like this did not happen during previous periods of change. Maybe at the end of the Middle Ages people who rejected the new materialistic values began to quietly die off in despair, or at least reduce reproduction.
Didn't Gregory Clarke show that England experienced an increase in people with certain character traits and values that made the modern world possible, due to differential reproduction?
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ReplyDeleteNot the main point of your post, I know, but since your comment mentions aggressive suicide, here is A.E. Housman:
ReplyDeleteGood people, do you love your lives?
And have you ears for sense?
Here is a knife like other knives
That cost me eighteen pence.
I need but plunge it in my heart,
And down will come the sky,
And Earth's foundations will depart,
And all you folk will die.
In the short term, it actually serves the interests of the elites to have an ageing population in developed western nations rather than getting rid of the old. That is because such societies are easy pickings for a lot of the nefarious agendas being pushed by the elites, such as mass uncontrolled immigration from the developing world. After all, they will always argue that we need all these people in order to do the work and pay taxes in order to offset the ageing population (of course the economics of this rarely stacks up, and it is usually the case that such groups end up being a net cost to the public purse. But it is still an argument that will have some currency or perhaps short term viability). Moreover a population skewed towards the old or the infirm is likely to be incapable of resisting an invasion by hostile populations. This is what has largely been happening in Old Europe in the face of the so-called "asylum seeker" invasions from the Middle East and Africa. It is also the case in western nations that a large proportion of younger, able bodied, native men are more marginalised and have little stake in society, and so have little incentive to defend those societies from external threats.
ReplyDeleteIt is likely that once you have a situation of large scale economic or social collapse, the elites will decide they have little use anymore for the old and they will likely be liquidated. But for now, the old still serve a strategic purpose for the elites. Which largely explains the increased emphasis on things like positive ageing and 'Seniors' as another important vested interest/lobby group in western nations. It is largely a means of brainwashing ageing white populations into embracing their long term racial demise by identifying more with their short term situation of getting older.
"He is afraid of dying, however, and is increasingy clamouring for widespread and convenient euthanasia (humane murder, suffering-free legal-murder) - and specifically wants this for himself (not just for other people)." Then again, not just for himself, but specifically for other people - be he one of the heirs, or one of the medics, or one of the others who, patronizingly or nanny-like, just knows best.
ReplyDeleteI think not only of what one encounters regularly (at least in this 'pioneering' corner of Europe), but of R.H. Benson's Lord of the World (1907).
And perhaps, by analogy, of Lagerkvist's Bödeln, ("The Hangman" or "The Executioner", whether in prose of dramatic version: 1933-34).
I look both eagerly and with trepidation to trying Trollope's The Fixed Period (1882)...
David Llewellyn Dodds