When (not if) the plan for mass free distribution of painless-suicide pills gets unveiled; it will be welcomed by many or most of the Western public - for at least three reasons:
1. Fear: Because so many people fear that they will suffer while dying.
It doesn't matter that prolonged or extreme suffering is usually preventable - because some risk of a painful death cannot be eliminated... except by pre-emption. (Prevention is the best cure!)
And 2020 shows how easily extreme fears can be whipped-up by the Establishment, and how resistant the most-terrified can be to reason or reassurance...
Probably because - in a world that believes death is annihilation - health has taken the place of religion (including for most churches); and current suffering (of almost any degree or duration) becomes regarded as an intolerable violation.
2. Altruism: Because some people regard the death of people such as themselves as a benefit for the world.
"With me and mine out of the way; there will be more for everyone else."
Indeed, plenty of people claim to regard human beings as a plague on the biosphere - whose elimination would be better for all other living things... and much better for The Climate!
Thus suicide is an expression of ultimate altruism! In a world where avoidance of suffering is the highest value - the best way permanently to reduce our carbon footprint, to walk lightly upon the earth, to minimize finite-resource consumption - is to offer our own death as a willing sacrifice to the goddess of environmentalism.
3. Despair: Because the mass majority are materialists who, at bottom, regard reality as purposeless and meaningless; and who therefore live only for the satisfactions of this-life.
Such people have no strong reason to stay alive - because their life is going nowhere except death, and has no meaning except whatever comforting "delusion" they themselves try to invent.
Therefore; as soon as life starts to go badly - overall; then why bother with it?
For such reasons as the above; I suspect that plans for mass provision of painless suicide pills will find themselves pushing at an open door.
Especially if the Western Establishment succeed in escalating the Fire Nation and Arrakis conflicts into all-out world war - with its high-likelihood of causing widespread violence, disease and famine; then the Western masses will be biting-off the hands of state-sanctioned death-draught feeders, in their eagerness to get hold of the medicine.
Indeed; it seems far more likely that the masses will protest against the ineffectiveness (or "inequity") of suicide pill distribution, then to protest against the Establishment encouraging suicide.
