"Suffering? I'll show you suffering!" - and the leftist impulse

Insofar as it has any positive program (and in fact this is a double-negative, not a positive) the alleviation of suffering could be regarded as the focus of leftism - arising at its early roots in abolition, pacifism, socialism, feminism etc. 

My Glasgow friend, the writer Frank Kuppner, used to intone the phrase "Suffering? I'll show you suffering!" whenever some leftist, feminist journalist (invariably upper class, public school, Oxbridge educated; then straight into a prestigious and high profile newspaper job) embarked on yet-another account of the abuses, adversity and prejudices of her hellish life...

For modern people the problem of suffering in the world; and the socio-political intent to eliminate or reduce suffering (or, at least, the suffering of particular groups such as workers, women, or blacks), has come to seem The Primary problem of Life - the primary objective of life. 

Yet, suffering cannot coherently be made the centre of a moral system. And indeed 'suffering' itself is an incoherent abstraction of billions (at least) of individual responses to billions of different - labile, fluctuating and often utterly specific - situations. 

As so often, there is a colossal but unacknowledged and denied assumption at work here - that all these billions of adverse feelings to billions of specific instances and circumstances - can, should and ought to be considered together; and dealt-with by one or a few generalized socio-political solutions of the type that constitute leftist politics and ideology. 

And, even give that all these assumptions were true and reflected reality; the resulting ethic of diminishing suffering is one that has many consequences which would be considered self-contradictory if clearly apprehended and comprehended. 

Because when reducing the suffering in this-life becomes the priority, it trumps life-itself; as with the mainstream acceptance and advocacy of abortion; where the priority is to reduce the suffering of the mother and or the child - even at the cost of killing the child. 

It is quite normal to express the ethic that it is better not to be born, than to be born to suffer; not to live, than to live in (presumed) great suffering - and this also justifies the grossly sub-replacement reproductive rates that characterize the entire developed world.   

It is quite normal to envisage a massive (but suffering-free!) reduction in global human population ("giga-death") as a mechanism for reducing global suffering due to some imputed cause or another; or even to save the 'suffering planet'. 

There is no great mystery to all this. Suffering (like pain, fear, humiliation or any other of its subtypes) is a consequence of many possible causes of many types; and furthermore is not a fixed quantitative result but varies according to attitude, explanation and treatments. 

A person can be - often is - made to suffer by evoking resentment against real or imagined persecution for supposedly class, race or sex (etc.) reasons. And then more people can be made to suffer 'vicariously' by empathic identification with (alleged, often fictional) supposed-instances of such suffering! 

The left has developed an 'economy' of suffering. Suffering can be imputed to some groups while others are blamed for that suffering; suffering can even be imputed to the planet, biosphere, ecosystem or environment. 

After a couple of centuries of expanding and permeating leftism, and especially since the explicit emergence of a leftist world government last year; Suffering is now Big Business.

Indeed, suffering is now the biggest of all world enterprises! With multiple and linked agencies and bureaucracies engaged in the identification/ creation/'raising awareness', validation, and allocation of suffering on one side...While on the other side is a vast and ramifying state-media-charitable-corporate apparatus for (allegedly) preventing and alleviating suffering. 

Leftism has become a global machine for creating, amplifying, and spreading suffering; even as it claims to be alleviating - or, at its transhumanist extreme actually abolishing - suffering. 

Modern Leftism is - insofar as it has any positive content - a meta-ideology of suffering. 

We can regard this 'meta-ideology of suffering' as an almost inevitable consequence of abolishing God, the spiritual and the after-life. 

If this mortal life really is our only experience - then its rationale can only be related to our current state of experience. 

The ideology of suffering has therefore been made public and socially-manipulative by the bridging concept of altruism; so that ethical persons are supposed-to-be concerned primarily to alleviate the sufferings of as many others as possible. (i.e. the philosophical system termed Utilitarianism.) 

But when the transcendental and spiritual have been wholly removed from public discourse and life (ignored, excluded, denied, forgotten); now we can observe an accelerating centripetal tendency towards short-termist certainty rather than long-term strategy; and a focus on the experienced-self rather than the inferred and alleged suffering of others. 

Therefore the terminus of the leftist ideology of altruistic is selfish negative impulsive hedonism. 

And the only way to be sure of avoiding suffering is to die (either immediately or as soon as suffering is too great) - die painlessly and quickly. 

Hence my prediction of a (imminent) mass epidemic of fear-motivated, resentful-spirited and despairing suicide. 

And this leads to damnation - not because it is suicide as such; but because such attempted self-annihilation was motivated by the sins of fear, resentment and despair; which amount to rejection or  denial of the reality and Goodness of our loving God the creator. 

A culture of suicide

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We live in a culture of suicide: a culture in which pleasure is the only good must inevitably be a culture of suicide since pleasure cannot be guaranteed - and when life has more suffering than pleasure, and the future prospect is bleak: why not suicide?

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It is ironic that when 'life' - vitality, gratification, comfort, fun - is the primary goal, then the opposite predominates.

So that the whole argument boils down to short-termism versus long-termism.

The short-termist lives on a knife edge; but usually obliterates suffering ASAP with technology or any other available distraction.

The long-termist response is that when suffering overtops pleasure, then suicide should be considered seriously, and postponed (never utterly rejected) only if the long term quantity of pleasure outweighs the short term quantity of pain.

(But why should we suppose that gratification is arithmetical?)

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"But, who knows what the future will bring... The safest thing is to die now, before there is a chance for anything bad to happen..." This sounds like parody - but surely it is precisely mainstream belief of teenage ethics, mainstream pop culture ethics, mainstream media ethics: the positive value placed on a beautiful corpse.

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Then there is the intense interest in euthanasia, when pleasure is insufficient to compensate suffering then die; indeed why not die - get yourself killed - before you get to that point, to be on the safe side.

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(Of course, it is equally insane to hold the view - which seems mainstream in the Roman Catholic Church, that it is on the one hand a duty for society to do anything and everything that the application of modern technology can devise to sustain human existence, and at the same time to regard the hastening of death - for instance by withdrawal of this modern technology - as utterly morally abhorrent.

(Apparently - by this reasoning - people must intervene technologically to prevent corporeal death, then must sustain at all or any cost whatever form of living-death may be a consequence of such intervention.

(But this is monstrous nonsense, and is indeed a variant of political correctness. A proper moral perspective on death surely entails an understanding that there is a right time and situation to die, and right level of intervention to prevent death - varying by context - and an acceptance of fate insofar as it can be discerned. And a recognition of the moral chasm between killing and letting-die.)

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What is remarkable is that suicide is not endemic.

But maybe it is endemic, in the sense that political correctness is suicide - since any self-blinding, mandatorially non-consequential reasoning is implicitly suicidal.

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[Note added - plus of course, the endemic suicide of awareness - the suicide of awareness from continuous distraction by compulsive and continuous usage of the mass media and electronic interpersonal communications, organized busyness, overwhelming pleasurable inputs including - junk food/ high cuisine, intoxicating or energizing drinks, drugs, sex, dreamy physical pleasures such as baths and sunbathing, exercise, shopping, fashion, fantasy... or whatever. Without the ability for most modern secular people most of the time to escape at will into such immersive stimuli - so abundantly provided by modern society - it is likely either that 'things would change' or else that actual physical suicide would be much commoner.)

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(The politically correct are engaged in creating a society which they, personally, would find intolerable. How do they imagine that they would cope? Answer: they won't cope. They imagine that will either let themselves die or, if that is too slow or creates too much suffering, they will take matters into their own hands.)

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I strongly suspect that a suicide fantasy lies behind the hedonism and political correctness of modern society. The idea that if, when, things don't work out - and it is time to pay the costs of recklessly self-gratifying and evasive policies, then there is a 'way out'.

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All of this depends on the belief - unique to intellectuals living under modernity - that the soul is unreal and that there is no existence after death.

A belief in the unreality of the soul is a crutch to hedonism.

Extinction after death is the 'get out of jail free' card for political correctness.

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Suffering in the world

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Since we are creatures of this world, we are motivated by a desire to attain pleasure and to relieve suffering; yet since we are transcendentally-orientated creatures this desire cannot be primary.

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So long as we perceive suffering in the world - even if that suffering is just insufficient pleasure or mere boredom - then we will be motivated to end it.

Indeed, we are motivated to end suffering everywhere and for everyone for all time - simply as a matter of security.

(Because so long as suffering happens, it could happen to us - and if there is no more suffering, then we need not fear it.)

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But suppose that there was no such motivation to end suffering - either because all suffering has been ended, or because all suffering as been ended so far as we know.

What then?

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Do we imagine that when all suffering has been ended then we can shift our aspiration to higher things?

Do we really think that is what would happen?

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Is this, in fact, what we observe?

Are the societies that suffer least, those which aspire highest?

Are those individuals who are most free from suffering, also those individuals who have their sights set on the highest ideals?

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 Do we, in a word, conceive high ideals as luxury goods?

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(And what is our society's idea of higher things, anyway? Well, obviously we don't mean religious ideals, because as a society we don't believe in God, nor even the immortal soul. And spirituality without religion is just psychotherapy - so just another way of seeking pleasure; not higher at all. Like the lifestyle arts - restaurants, clothes, holidays... merely fashions, therefore the opposite of 'high'. Ummm - The Arts?  Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rembrandt - that kind of thing... oh, I forgot, we are beyond all that now; shock, disgust, subversion - that's what we like, isn't it. Not exactly 'high'. Philosophy and Science?... well, this is just getting embarrassing, we've just got rid of these and replaced geniuses with committees of sensible bureaucrats. How about having unrestrained and passionate political discussions in bars and cafes, is that it? Exploring new forms of sexuality and morality - are these the higher things? Somehow it doesn't seem right... Simmering self-loathing and slow cultural suicide? -Now you're talking! Those are the sort of high ideals that we love.)

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Or could it be that high ideals are, in some way or another, a product of suffering - or, if not exactly suffering, of a state of discontent?

Um - yes, that is right.

Isn't it?

It is our suffering that prompts us to look beyond the mundane.

(Prompts us - but does not force us.)

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Is suffering then good?

Obviously not.

As worldly creatures we are, and must be, motivated to escape suffering in some sense.

But suffering is - if not good - surely necessary in this world.

And - surely - a primary devotion to the elimination of suffering (i.e. the new religion, the new 'Christianity' indeed) is therefore not merely utopian or futile - but is actually evil.

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Repeat: although suffering is obviously not good; a primary devotion to the elimination of suffering is actually evil.

Because suffering is a prompt to look higher, to look beyond.

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I am saying that it is - not that it ought to be: suffering just is that which prompts us to transcendence; suffering that ultimately derives from the perceived insufficiency of the world.

We just are creatures who perceive the world as insufficient.

And the only way we can get rid of this perception is to kill it.

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We cannot make the world sufficient, we can only kill the perception that the world is insufficient.

But we can do that: for most of the people, for most of the time.

And that is, of course, precisely what we are doing.

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Indeed, although we are, and must be, and should not try not to be, creatures of this world; a primary devotion directed at anything of this world (including the elimination of suffering) is evil.

Our primary devotion must be The Good - the transcendental Good, a something not of this world.

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Or else we (and everyone else) might as well be dead, or never live in the first place, as the surest means of avoiding suffering...

... just as we 'put down' a suffering animal; whom we suppose not to have a soul, and whose role is to serve humans and/ or be happy - and if the animal can no longer serve humans nor be happy and is suffering, then it might as well be dead

- so we kill it.

And anything else we suppose not to have a soul - from humane motives - to eliminate suffering.

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Here is the hard bit.

The real sin here is not in the killing, whatever its scale, but in the reason for killing.

A soul-less society of soul-less individuals (that's how we perceive ourselves), killing soul-less entities as and when... necessary; because it is rational to kill soul-less entities when they suffer, or will suffer, or may cause suffering...

Note the paradox.

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Suicide and sin - and what attempted suicide sometimes tells us about belief in the afterlife

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Is suicide sin? I believe that the correct answer is that it may be.

(Wrong answers are that suicide is always a sin or never a sin.)

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Patients suffering from the rare condition of severe endogenous depression, including psychotic depression, are experiencing what is perhaps the worst of all forms of human suffering - and have the highest suicide rate of any groups.

Endogenous depression comes upon people - often out of the blue and without any sufficient precipitant - like being struck-down with an illness: indeed endogenous depression bears all the hallmarks of an illness come upon a person, and will spontaneously resolve after about a year (assuming the sufferer is still alive, has been kept alive).

It is among these people where you sometimes see mercy-killing-suicides - as when a loving mother smothers her sleeping children then kills herself because she perceives the world as so utterly horrible a place that she wishes for nothing more than to protect her children from it.

Now, I would have thought that this (extremely rare) kind of suicide cannot possibly be regarded as a sin from a Christian perspective - it is an absolute tragedy, but (so far as we can tell) there is in it no trace of pride or defiance.

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On the other hand, the 'attempted suicides' (or parasuicides) which are so frequent an occurrence (I used to see several 'overdoses' every night when I was 'on call' as a junior doctor - only a small proportion of whom died) are typically and very obviously sinful since they were often motivated by hatred and the desire for revenge.

(e.g. A person who said they were thinking 'this will show him' as she took the tablets. Or another who slashed his wrists reportedly thinking, 'she'll be sorry now!')

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Suicide can be an existential act of defiance against God - it can be an ultimate destruction of Good in which a person takes a step further from polluting and defacing their God-given body, to actually destroying it. Suicide can be a prideful assertion that this life, this body is mine - to do with as I wish up to and including annihilation.

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But is it annihilation that is being sought by the suicides among endogenous and psychotic depressives? Sometimes, probably, but is hard to say as a rule - clearly it is escape from this world which is being sought, an end to suffering without hope; but from this into what?

Extinction or perpetual sleep, perhaps; or escape to a better place?

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But what is fascinating is the implicit, sometimes explicit, sense that parasuicides (attempted suicides) often report that after they have killed themselves, when they are dead, they will still in some sense be around to observe the consequences (e.g. gloating over the misery and guilt of those who have been hurt by their suicide).

Clearly, there are some people - people who are apparently non-religious and anti-Christian and indeed acting under wicked motivations - who have a deep underlying assumption that when they kill themselves it will not be the end: that death is not extinction.

They 'believe' this assumption of an afterlife, in the sense of belief meaning 'live by' - thus they live-by this assumption of the reality of a life after death, even to the point of killing themselves (or trying to) on the basis of this assumption.

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This is one line of evidence that belief in 'life after death' (that death is not the end of experience) is pretty much built-into humans (or most humans) and that the modern profession of disbelief, or profession of belief that death is extinction, may be a shallow, artificial and weak cultural construct.

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In Case of War, take the Suicide Pills: When Social Apoptosis meets spitefully destructive totalitarianism

A few months ago I formulated the term Social Apoptosis as a model which may help to understand the way that Western Civilization is eliminating itself. 

The idea is that in the individual cells of multicellular organisms, or individual organisms in social animals such as humans; there are evolved mechanisms by which individuals (and probably groups of such individuals) delete themselves from society, by choosing not to reproduce. 

Such apoptosis can be understood as intended to pursue "strategic", long-term and overall benefit at the expense of short-term and individual benefit; so that the individual has some kind of built-in "programme" to sacrifice its own survival and reproductive prospects in order that larger goals may be achieved. 

 

Something of this kind certainly seems to be at work in Western Civilizations; both individually - where a majority of the native populations choose either not to reproduce at all, or to be subfertile (with much below replacement levels of offspring). 

Modern societies exhibit little in the way of what used to be regarded as natural instincts for self defense or survival - there is a much greater observable concern to avoid avent moderate or brief suffering and pain than to stay alive and leave-behind children. 

(The idea that it would be thought necessary to encourage people to defend themselves and their conditions, or to have children, would have seemed bizarre to most humans throughout history!) 

And apoptosis apparently also operates at a societal level, where whole nations (essentially all Western nations) have for some decades tolerated, and often enthusiastically embraced, multiple policies whose consequence is self-extermination - even when self-extermination is explicitly stated and aimed-at. 

 

Of course; there are many other external and top-down factors at work. But I feel that there would have been a great deal more in the way of mass resistance and refusal if it was not that so may individuals and groups apparently regard themselves are deserving of elimination. 

This widespread sense that "we" - as individuals and societies - deserve to be eliminated, meets with a leadership class that is increasingly motivated by a spiteful desire for destruction. 

A leadership class that demonstrates an implicit - and sometimes explicit - personal satisfaction at the suffering of individuals, and the decline of social institutions. 

 

One reason why unrestricted world war is now such a high probability, is this combination of a Western Civilization that feels it ought to be eliminated, and is motivated by the desire for elimination; with a totalitarian leadership class that would enjoy creating a situation in which this elimination would happen on a rapid and massive scale - accompanied by the greatest possible degree of human fear, misery and suffering. 

 

(While it is only The West that is ruled by a class many of whom are actively seeking destructive war on any excuse, or none; it only takes one side to make a war. Or rather, the only alternative to war in such circumstances, is passive acquiescence to being genocided.)

 

In a spiritual sense; this is understandable in terms of the elimination of religion, and indeed the reality of the spiritual, from the minds of modern Men. 

Our publicly operative metaphysical assumptions are utterly nihilistic; we are taught and believe that there is no purpose or meaning to our lives, or indeed to life itself. All is accident and determinism.

In The West it is fashionable, and publicly approved, to regard Mankind as a plague upon the planet - and the universe... 

The obvious conclusion is that we should eliminate ourselves. 

 

This is our situation here and now; and one reasons why the prospect of explosive and wholesale destruction seem to be increasing all the time.  

An implication of this spiteful-suicidal synergy is that The West will continue to destroy its own military capacity, even while trying to escalet wars on mutliple fronts. 

So "They" want war - but they are Not planning to fight a war... 

What does this imply?

 

To me it suggests that if, or when, They get the war they so much want, involving Western populations who deeply feel that they deserve to die; instead of trying to win the war by fighting - the leadership class will implement a mass distribution of "Suicide Pills". 

Thus there will be a war, and from fear and despair, encouraged by a monothematic propaganda onslaught; the Western masses will kill themselves in droves - the Suicide Pills enable the masses to kill themselves without suffering, and fear of suffering is the only thing that stands between many people and desired annihilation.

That is my prediction. Sooner or later we will be hearing about a plan to distribute Suicide Pills, freely, to the Western Masses - to be used "compassionately" in case of the third world war that is the leadership class's major current project. 

 

Of course, painless death will rather thwart the desire to inflict suffering - and the sadistic demons won't like it... 

On the other hand, the Master Agenda is that of Satan - and that is self-chosen damnation, of which a pretty reliable preparation is to die in deliberate and unrepented sin. 

To kill oneself in fear and despair (and, probably, in a state of seething resentment against God and Jesus Christ) is itself a rejection of Heaven, and the willed choice of Hell.   

What exactly is wrong with (mass) euthanasia/ assisted suicide/ humane murder?

Mass euthanasia - humane murder, or "medically-assisted suicide"; is already established in many nations, and will probably expand to become the statistically-normal cause of death.

The reasons are 

1. That the ruling class want this to happen; and 

2. That many people in The West want it - for themselves. 

And they want this, because their fundamental understanding of human life - including their own lives - is that it is purposeless and meaningless. This conclusion (whether explicit of implicit) is almost inevitable when our society assumes (as well as argues) that there is no creator God - therefore no purpose generally or for individual persons; no spiritual world; and no possibility of existence beyond death. 

Without meaning or purpose, life is merely a matter of current feelings - a balance between pleasure and suffering. 

Many people live in fear of suffering; and because they are so afraid of future suffering and will do almost anything to avoid the unbounded possibility of sufferings; they have rendered themselves willing dupes to the machinations of evil. 

Religious prohibitions against suicide have near-zero traction nowadays; because most Western people solidly believe (and our society assumes in all its functional systems) that death is followed by total annihilation.

For such people, the "problem" is therefore how to die without suffering; and this seems to require that they will be humanely-murdered by... someone else; ideally, killed just at the point when the prospect or actuality of severe and lasting suffering becomes probable.

People also believe (or, at least, behave as if they believe) that this point can be established, and suitable death-inflicting mechanisms decided, by a sufficiently rigorous bureaucratic procedure.   

Against this there are explicit religious prohibitions - but hardly anyone nowadays takes religion seriously when its demands conflict with perceived personal interests or societal pressures. 

Also against this is a deeply buried, inarticulate, usually uncommunicable gut-feeling of the wrongness of a world of bureaucratically-decided death - no matter how painless it might be. 

Yet this feeling of wrongness, probably because it cannot be coherently expressed in the context of modern ideology, is too feeble to counteract the strength of social pressures when these are implemented in laws and procedures; and when endorsed by officialdom, mass media, celebrities, and peer group/ neighbours. 

I therefore find it useless to argue against those many who advocate the introduction, spread or normalization of assisted suicide; because the arguments I can use all assume the atheist-materialist utilitarian world view - and thereby actually worsen the underlying spiritual problem. 

The bottom line is that if you regard your life as purposeless and meaningless, then naturally it becomes merely a matter of subjective expediency how and when you die, or get killed.

When life has no meaning, death can have no meaning. 

When life is a matter of being got-through as pleasantly as possible; then the same applies to death. 

To tackle the real issue requires deepening the discussion to a metaphysical level, the level that addresses the ultimate nature of reality and our relationship with it. 

Unless someone is prepared to have such a metaphysical discussion, then nothing substantive and positive can be done for them. 

And this applies at the societal level, even more than at the individual level.

When people are trapped by their false bottom-line assumptions, then nothing helpful can be done that fails to confront the falsity of these assumptions. 

And for that to happen, absolutely needs their cooperation in the process. 

 

Suicide Pills will be welcomed by many/ most of the public, for at least three reasons

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. 

"They" Want Us Dead - but dead too-late, too soon, and dying in fear and/or despair

The subject of death is becoming mainstream in modern materialistic culture - but, of course, death is framed by our evil-motivated Leadership class in ways that (if the frames are accepted) with induce us to choose damnation instead of salvation, and such as to corrupt as as much as possible. 

There are many aspects to death. One is that, in this entropic world, we will die. Another is that we dwell in God's continuing-creation, and God therefore can influence the way we die. And then there is our own freedom. 

I therefore assume that God (by his creative work) engineers the best "time to die" for us; within the constraints of entropy and the freedom of other beings (including, but not only, human beings). The best death is when - from our freedom, we willingly agree that this is the time to die - at which point, the process of death (which happens in time) will begin. 

But this best way to die is precisely what the weight of modern culture attempts (on the whole very successfully) to thwart - by two main means (although there are many others). 

The first is to induce us all to cling to life, for as long as possible - so that we will not consent to die when it is "our time" (and God will do everything possible to ensure that we - and those we love - know it is time). Hence the clichés such as "stay with me" that present dying as always a failure of will, a giving-up in despair. 

A good deal of modern health services are built on exactly this assumption - that everybody ought to want to stay alive, at whatever cost, for as long as possible -  hence the truly vast expenditure of health and social care in sustaining human life far beyond its biological span. 

But the vital thing to remember is that this artificial sustaining of life is only possible because that is what so many modern people are choosing. It is not difficult to die, and people will die when they are ready - when, at the deepest level, they have chosen to die. 

The other corruption is to regard death as something that ought to be done with the minimum of suffering, and therefore - to be on the safe side - we need to arrange to be murdered (assisted dying) before there is "too much" suffering. 

This discourse is rooted in extreme and chronic (existential) fear - the fear of what might happen to us...

Combined with such an extremity of fear of suffering that even a few minutes of pain (such as might result from actual suicide) is intolerable to contemplate... 

Ancient Romans used (apparently calmly) to kill themselves with a sword or knife - but modern Man demands (literally demands, as a human right) painlessly to be murdered by someone else, with legal approval, by some technological contrivance that is claimed to eliminate suffering. 

In the materialist culture of the mainstream West, there can be no conceptualization of faith and trust in God; not even trust that God will ameliorate our subjective experience of suffering at the time of death (as seems to happen in so many animals). 

Neither do we trust God to know when it is our "time to die" and will provide us with that knowledge when the time comes. 

Consequently there seem to be a lot of "bad deaths". One is the death of someone who is clinging to life for every last moment until overwhelmed by entropy - and total body failure supervenes - and whose soul is, presumably, dragged "kicking and screaming" into the after-life state. Which seems like a very bed preparation for the choices to be made at that phase of our lives. 

Another bad death is one who mistrusts God, or more the reality of God, and dies in a despair so profound that he cannot summon the courage to anticipate enduring even a few moments or minutes of suffering en route to the after-life.  

Another bad death is suicide; which is death too early - before the "time to die" - which happens when suicide is motivated by sin - sins such as fear, despair, or resentment ("that will show them!") 

A common things seems to be the death of those who have rejected their "time to die" and who have chosen to live on in a state of what must therefore be unrepented, hence probably cumulative, sin. In other words, who have (for weeks, month, perhaps many years) been progressively corrupted in soul by their embracing of fear and despair; such that when they eventually die they are significantly worse people than if they had died when God believed that they should best die. 

If such a corrupted soul accepts salvations in the after-life - which opportunity is, of course, open to all - they they will take much less of themselves through resurrection to eternal life. 

What I mean is that we can only take-forward what is good in us, and must leave-behind what is not-good. So those who die later will need to repent more and therefore shall take-forward less than if they had accepted death when God chose was the best time. 

(In other words; if there is a best time to die; then dying later than that time will be worse; when best and worse are judged by post-mortal and Heavenly standards.)

If we accept this idea of there being, for each person and spiritually-speaking, a time to die - and that this time is known by God; then it is indeed obvious that there is vast current propaganda otherwise. 

A denial of there being a time to die. 

And the colossal cultural effort to persuade people that their time of dying is an event to be decided by anything-other-than God: e.g. by "individual choice" of mortals who have accepted/ chosen annihilation after death (i.e. choice in context of materialist metaphysics); or chosen and administered by The System in some combination of Global Establishment/ State/ Law/ Media/ and Health (or Death) Services. 

The therapeutic perspective on life runs so deep that we don't even notice; yet points (again!) towards mass suicide

It is deeply strange to contemplate the extent to which people believe that the main purpose of life is therapeutic - by which I mean, that people believe the main purpose of life is to deal with the problems of life. 

The fact of life and living is taken for granted, and the problems of living become the dominating focus. 

 

It's like asking: "what is the purpose of life?"; to answer: "striving to overcome misery and suffering". 

Yet - if this really was so: Why life in the first place? 

 

And yet, if you ask modern, high-status, kind, compassionate, and "enlightened" people; they would very likely state that some version of "striving to overcome misery and suffering" is the highest moral and ideal activity that they can imagine.

That - indeed - is the modern idea of what a "good person" would do. 

Twenty-first century "Christians" (if you can find one) would agree - and would regard Jesus as the best Man who ever lived exactly because he went around healing people, feeding the poor, raising the dead - and eventually set up a church that (allied with government), "made the world a better place" through taking practical action to overcome misery and suffering.

 

Apart from the philosophical/ theological/ ideological superficiality and weirdness of adopting a double-negative conceptualization of life and living - this is strategically-feeble as a motivator compared to some actual positive goal. 

And when the double-negative understanding of life and morality collapses; it often leaves-behind (the sin of) despair; because the realization dawns that if my life is striving to overcome suffering, then the only certain answer is death and annihilation of that life. 

 

In a world where death is understood as utter annihilation of the self; a life-focus on the alleviation of suffering is the precursor to a culture of death attained by suicide.   

The common attitude that Men in general, Western Man specifically, and people-like-us in particular, are a "cancer on the planet", likewise feeds the implication. 

 

And further; if anything like social apoptosis is going-on, such that the spiritually-defective are inclined to eliminate themselves; then the predicted mass distribution of Suicide Pills becomes not just rationally defensible, but something regarded as the highest kind of altruistic morality of which modern Man can conceive. 

     

From euthanasia to assisted suicide... Not so much a slippery-slope as jumping off a cliff

I have been observing the suicidal-turn of Western culture for considerably more than a decade. Its beginnings lie back many decades ago, while I was still a medical student. 

At that time, the issue was called euthanasia, and was focused upon people whose suffering was regarded as severe and intractable, and who were incapable of killing themselves - and their Right to have somebody-else kill them. 

More recently, there was a focus on dying "with dignity" - which meant without suffering; so that the debate expanded to include people who could kill themselves - but apparently only in ways that would cause them pain or suffering. The Right being requested was for somebody-else to kill such people pain-lessly, instead of them killing-themselves pain-fully. 

Now, we call it "assisted suicide"; and have reached the point where there is no question of "need", but instead the Right demanded is to be killed pleasantly by somebody-else. With the picture painted of a happy death by drowsing off into permanent sleep while outdoors in some beauty spot - such as a National Park. 

When the question of creating a bureaucratic system for legally allowing some people deliberately to kill other people; there were warnings that this was morally a slippery-slope. 

Well, if we examine the rationale behind such proposals, and the speed with which the Right to be killed has expanded from a handful of people per nation to... everybody; the issue has turned-out to be more like jumping off a cliff from strict-morality and unfortunate necessity, plummeting down into pure amoral (i.e. immoral) convenience and consumer choice. 

The reason for allowing legalized murder has gone from being a last-ditch and desperate remedy for those terminally ill or agonizingly suffering, to a lifestyle preference.    

This is one of those (many) situations in which a top-down strategy meets mass acceptance; because in our Godless materialistic society, the bottom-line for values, for morals, for laws is simply utilitarian human psychology - that is, what people want, what makes people happy, what makes them feel less miserable... 

And this is a matter of inference, unsupportable assertion, and subjective opinion. A situation in which the apparatus of propaganda and ideology has the greatest scope; and where the prevalent sins of this age - fear, cowardice, demotivation, resentment, dishonesty and (most of all) despair - can operate freely and without trammel. 

Unless the trends reverse (and encouraged by deliberately engineered war, civil violence, disease and starvation); we will surely soon be seeing suicide become a publicly explicit and media-favoured lifestyle strategy; with the Western bureaucracies providing whatever necessary facilities. 

In the spiritual war of this world; to have mass suicides of people for such reasons as loss of all hope, fear of the future, refusal to tolerate the possibility of pain, and despair at the present - is a Big Win for the powers of evil. 

Because these would be deaths happening in a state of self-chosen damnation: that is, dying while decisively rejecting the reality of God and the promises of Jesus Christ.

There is, I believe, the maximum possible scope given us for post-mortal repentance (however we die). Death is not the end...

Yet our decisions in mortal life make a permanent difference; and to leave this life in such a spiritual state as (apparently) those who express a desire to be killed pleasantly while contemplating a beautiful view...

Well, this is very far from a fertile seedbed for repentance.   

Since Social Justice/ Political Correctness/ New Leftism is essentially a suicide cult (not a religion) - what next?

*

In response to my post arguing against labeling New Leftism (or modern Liberalism or Progressivism) as a religion:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/is-social-justice-political-correctness.html

Alan Roebuck, at The Orthosphere, extended the argument to label the modern Left a suicide cult:

http://orthosphere.org/2015/05/21/contemporary-liberalism-is-a-suicide-cult-not-a-religion

Suicide cult seems a reasonable, two-word, working definition of what Christians are up-against - encapsulating the standard, view among all mainstream and powerful leaders such as politicians, officials, educators and the mass media.

So let us proceed on that basis: that what we are dealing with in the modern Liberal, Progressive Left is a type of suicide cult; and plan accordingly.

*

Evidence that the Left has, over the decades, evolved (or mutated) into a suicide cult is abundant - the Left has lost its utopian aims, and has become almost entirely oppositional and destructive, Activism is about hunting down and destroying dissent - no matter how small scale, nobody is exempted, and there is no sense of proportion.

Actual advocacy of death is currently focused on the extremes of life  childhood and old age - with encouragement of contraception, abortion, sterility or the smallest-possible families (in a context of media, official and educational-institutional encouragement to frequent and unconstrained sexual activity).

At the other end of life there is a long-running and unrelenting campaign for the elderly, and terminally- or incurably-ill people who are experiencing (or expect to experience) low quality of life to 'have the right' to be humanely murdered in order to shorten, minimize or avoid suffering.

In sum, the modern Left does not offer any basis for living the examined life among the intellectuals, and is experienced among non-intellectuals as in violation of common sense and direct personal experience. It survives on the basis of bribery and distraction, and gets its motivations by inculcating guilt (among the elite), resentment (among the masses) and open-ended entitlement among a coalition privileged 'victim' groups.

*

As the triumph of the Left becomes more complete two things will happen:

1. The gross inadequacy of its world model as a basis for human life will become harder to conceal.

2. By its continual encouragement of destructive resentment and entitlements and paralysing guilt; the Left will destroy its own basis to provide the resources necessary to bribe, distract and cocoon the population.

If this happens gradually and linearly, then the dependent majority can be sustained for a considerable period by concealed inflation and borrowing and ever-increasing expropriation of an ever diminishing productive minority. By the time the real situation is apparent, modern society will be hollowed-out and cannot recover - and Christians will be reduced to a tiny, crushed and exploited minority.

But if the situation gets worse suddenly and exponentially, then awareness of the situation may dawn before destruction is fully advanced, and there may be a window for mass repentance and Christian revival: a Great Awakening.

*

The real Christians need to be ready for this, if it happens - every Western Christian will need to become a missionary to the best of his or her ability. The situation will be made difficult by the rising of Antichrist figures - fake Christians, who are perhaps 90 percent Christian but the missing 10 percent is the essence - lacking which the do more harm than good (as is their intent).

But the flip-side is that real Christians may be 90 percent non-Christian - but the 10 percent of Christianity that they do have is precisely the needful!

Having said this, missionaries can only help with the consent of those they are trying to help; and the biggest obstacle is (what seems to be) the corrupt and depraved state of the mass of the modern population - their moral inversion; their rejection of virtue, beauty and honesty; their embrace of wickedness, ugliness and lies.

*

In the end, and whatever the society he dwells-in, each individual is responsible for his or her own salvation (salvation cannot be forced-upon him); and God will sooner or later bring each and every Man to a point of realizing this as a fact, and one which requires a choice: yea or nay.

But Christians can help influence this choice, at this point of decision; by planting seeds of good doctrine, good behaviour, and the example of soft, open, and warm hearts. Our love will be communicated to those who need and would most benefit from it, by invisible and unknown means.

Each soul, as it hovers on the crux of decision, will be able to take this Christian work into the balance.

So the answer to the question - What should Christians do, confronted by the vast power of a majority suicide cult? - is simply to do the right things, as ever, and as much as you can, and in whatever situation you find yourself...

And derive hope from the faith that all good is noted and used, nothing goes for nothing, under God's all-seeing eye.

*

The coming cult of altruistic/ suffering-avoiding suicide

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.

Is there any *right* to have a "pain-free and peaceful death"? (aka wholesale humane murder)

*

From today's issue of The Independent (the most Leftist of British mainstream newspapers):

Locked-in syndrome sufferer Tony Nicklinson, who lost his High Court battle last week for the legal right to end his life when he chooses with a doctor's help, died today...

Last week following the legal ruling, Mr Nicklinson's wife, Jane - standing by her weeping husband's side - described the decision as "one-sided". She said: "You can see from Tony's reaction he's absolutely heartbroken." They said they intended to appeal against the decision.

Mr Nicklinson's daughter Lauren said last week that the family would keep fighting to allow her father to die "a pain-free and peaceful death". "The alternative is starvation," she said.

"Why should he have to starve himself to death when he could go (die) in a safe home with people that love him? "To think that he might have to waste away and starve himself to death is horrific and it makes me feel quite ill, to be honest."...

After the ruling, Mr Nicklinson said in a statement issued by his solicitors, Bindmans LLP: "I am devastated by the court's decision.

"I am saddened that the law wants to condemn me to a life of increasing indignity and misery."

Asked what would happen if the appeal fails, his wife said: "Tony either has to carry on like this until he dies from natural causes or by starving himself."
*

Almost all of the British mainstream media, and especially the BBC, are campaigning for euthanasia on request - starting-with some rare cases of chronic paralysis such as the above - but as the speaker makes clear, what is being asked for is nothing less than the legal right to "a pain-free and peaceful death" - which is de facto the legal right to being humanely murdered, including the legal right that somebody act in the role of humane murderer.

*

This is not at all shocking to the modern secular Leftist, because their evaluation of life is purely hedonic - and when the balance between pleasure and pain tips too far in an adverse direction they regard it as the duty of the State to end things - simply out of compassion for suffering.

Of course, the vast majority of humans throughout human history have had painful deaths, unpeaceful deaths - deaths without 'dignity'.

For example, two of my greatest Christian heroes Blaise Pascal and Fr Seraphim Rose suffered horrible terminal illnesses lasting for some weeks. They would have been prime candidates for humane killing.

But in fact, most people have bad deaths - and by the criterion of 'a pain-free and peaceful death' would be 'deserving' of humane killing.

So this is not a trivial or minor matter, not at all - once the principle in is place that deaths ought to be pain-free and peaceful then the vast majority of people will be humanely killed - not least to be 'on the safe side' when suffering seems a likely prospect and to prevent it.

*

Of course there have been pagan societies of the past - such as Ancient Rome, or the Japanese in the Samurai era - when suicide became almost the normal way to end life.

But these societies did not kill themselves in order to avoid pain and be peaceful - (as I understand it) the Patrician Roman killed himself to avoid all his property being confiscated by the state if he were executed; a Japanese noble in order that his death be equivalent to death in battle.

*

Mr Nicklinson, 58, died at his home in Melksham, Wiltshire, this morning following a rapid deterioration in his health after contracting pneumonia over the weekend. He had suffered from locked-in syndrome following an accident in 2005 and wanted a doctor to be allowed to terminate his life...

Professor Penney Lewis, professor of law at the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King's College London, said today that Mr Nicklinson's plight would continue to raise questions about a change in the law, after being denied the right to die by High Court judges last week in a landmark ruling.

(Emphasis added.)

*

What is clear is that this has nothing to do with a 'right to die'. It is clearly acknowledged that this man could refuse food, as he apparently did for the days leading up to his death (reported elsewhere), and then he would die - and in fact he died within a few days of refusing food.

The whole crux of this campaign is not the right to die, but the right to die painlessly - which is de facto the right to be killed before there can be any suffering.

It has a conceptualization of life that regards any form of suffering, even temporary and terminal suffering such as humans have endured through all history - as utterly intolerable, such that nothing is worse, such that being murdered humanely is a right and to murder humanely a vital social function.

This just has to be the most clear cut example of moral inversion which can be envisaged; going against the most basic and uncontroversial and universal Natural Law.

And yet this is now the mainstream, normal, enlightened viewpoint among modern Western elite opinion - such that those who hold it are moralistically angry and outraged that anybody could object to their proposals.

*

Just take this on board.

The campaign to legalize wholesale humane murder is not an extrapolation, not science fiction - this is what is happening now.

This is the state of cutting edge, widely-supported secular morality.

This is not something being covertly or indirectly argued - it is a straightforward proposal supported by many or most high status people, pretty much all the mass media and university ethicists and experts of many stripes.

People feel good about themselves for supporting wholesale humane murder, because as good secular Leftists they regard suffering as the worst thing.

People feel very angry against those who block wholesale humane muder, they hate the people who oppose wholesale humane murder - because these people are cruel, they are deliberately inflicting suffering upon helpless people at the end of their lives.

*

The situation is beyond parody: the situation is an everyday fact of modern life.

*



Note - I would not like to give a false impression: I remember clearly what it was like to believe that wholesale humane murder - properly done, by decent sensible properly-trained people - would indeed be a vital element in continued human progress. To my former secular hedonic self, removal of that basic terror of the process of death seemed like a fine thing, crucial to peace of mind. To object was evil, reactionary, insensitive, indifferent. We moderns had got beyond such barbaric harshness. Only since I became a Christian did the scales drop from my eyes.

*

The power of the self-damned to hurt God - the greatest temptation of evil?

*
There is a strong tradition in mainstream Christian theology, deriving ultimately from Platonic philosophy, that because of the perfection of God and the absolute happiness of the blessed in Heaven - therefore God and the blessed look upon the existence of Hell and the sufferings of the damned as 'a good thing' - and their joy is not in the slightest degree impaired by the continued existence of unrepentant evil, pain and misery.

I regard this idea as pernicious nonsense - and a gross under-estimation of the temptations of evil - despite that the view is articulated by some of my very favourite, most loved and most revered theological mentors such as CS Lewis and Thomas Traherne.

It is truly monstrous to suppose that Heavenly perfection is unimpaired by the existence of evil, and that indeed Heaven-dwellers contemplate the misery of those who reject God with satisfaction - and the fault lies in giving priority to an abstract, absolutist, 'mathematical' concept of perfection derived from Platonic philosophy and cramming Christianity into this philosophical strait-jacket.

Philosophy really has no place to be thus usurping revealed Christian theology, and philosophy should firmly be shown the door when it leads to such an horrific reductio ad absurdum.

*

Another factor leading to this absurd conclusion is that classical theologians want the Satan and the damned to have no power over God - their view of God is so absolute and infinite that it is inconceivable to them that any individual created being could have the power to disturb divine equanimity - and from this they infer that, in effect, God doesn't care about the damned (because if He was to care, then that would impair His perfection).

However, this is precisely to miss the temptation of evil - in which the deepest motivation is precisely to harm God, to cause God pain and sorrow.

*

This is a common attitude here on earth: people inflict suffering upon themselves in order to harm other people.

At the most extreme, some suicides are motivated primarily by this form of hatred - a man kills himself in order to try and ruin the life of his girlfriend - "That will show her how much she has hurt me!".

And in general, many a person will 'cut off his nose to spite his face' - or take a 'dog in the manger' attitude.

That is, the dog lies in the manger where he is uncomfortable and cannot eat the hay - but does it because it stops the cows from eating. The dog makes himself miserable from pleasure at contemplating the irritation of the cows.

(Getting pleasure at the anger, distress and hurt of other people is called 'winding people up' in Britain, and is a favourite pastime of teenagers and comedians - and generally approved-of in the mass media, especially when the victims are regarded as undeserving of sympathy). 

*

I suspect, indeed, that although this seems like a petty and rather trivial kind of motivation and behaviour, that it may be one of the very gravest of all sins.

Be that as it may - it must be acknowledged that it works. The dog in the manger really is annoying to the cows; and the hatred-motivated suicide really often does cause misery to survivors, perhaps lifelong misery.

And when Satan (brightest of angels) rejected God's gift of happiness and descended into a pit of pride, hatred and eternal suffering - he really did cause God sorrow - and perhaps that sorrow is eternal.

To acknowledge the reality of God's sorrow is the only way we can comprehend God as infinitely loving; and this is much more important for us (as Christians) to understand than the scope of God's power.

*

And this power to hurt God is given to even the humbles, weakest and apparently most insignificant of Men - this power which is intoxicating to Pride: the power to use our own, self-inflicted suffering to 'get back' at God, to wound Him, to 'show Him what He has done to me...'.

It is the power of the hate-filled suicide, and it is a real power, and a very real temptation: the temptation to destroy oneself for the pleasure (and it is a real pleasure) of defying and hurting the creator of the universe, our Heavenly Father.

Even such puny creatures as ourselves can do this thing - it is within our ability - and it will give an everlasting satisfaction which (for some people) more than compensates for everlasting misery.

*

(This attitude is perfectly explicit in such anti-heroes as Milton's Satan, Mozart/ Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, or the later philosophy of Nietzsche: an exultation in pride accompanied by an open-eyed embracing of the consequent misery: the assertion that it is 'worth it' to live miserably in despite of, in defiance of, God: the arrogance of one who will 'pay the price' to 'be himself' and not what God wants him to be.) 

*

Damnation really is a choice, and there really is something to be said for it in terms of this dread-full, pride-full defiance. This is what must be renounced in order to be saved - and it should not be too surprising (even though a matter of endless sorrow) that some Men and Angels do choose evil, with all that entails.

It seems like a terrible bargain in every way - and it is - but sometimes, for some people, pride is stronger that anything else - even at the cost of permanent misery.

*

Why do cynics loathe religion?

*
Actually, it is a loathing underpinned by fear - the combination producing the kind of venom most eloquently and savagely expressed by HL Mencken; but replicated in a watered-down form by the New Atheists, self-proclaimed Skeptics and the like.

This is not a matter of merely rejecting religion; it is the business of making anti-religion into a focus of life; of not merely not practising religion but wanting the whole thing stamped-out, once and for all; so that it will be gone forever,

The reason is quite simple: cynics live only on their pleasures, and religion wants to take them away - or some of them at least.

The cynic finds no meaning, purpose or permanence in life - mortal life is everything, and the cynic's own life is (of course) primary, and the present moment and near future are the most certain - and this situation is only valuable (only tolerable) insofar as it is pleasurable (or at least not an active state of suffering).

The worst thing that can happen to a cynic is to suffer - therefore cynics favour humane murder (euthanasia) for themselves and others; and quick, painless suicide on demand ('assisted' suicide) as the bottom line, safety net in life.

But for the cynic, living is a matter of getting-through life as best as may-be; and this is achieved with the assistance of pleasurable habits and pastimes - like alcohol and other drugs, good food, travel, sports; and sex, as and when the chance arises, with whomsoever is fancied, and involving whatever activities are most enjoyable.

Religion threatens this whole package of a maximally-pleasurable and minimally-suffering life - thus religion directly threatens the primary coping mechanism of the cynic, the whole cynical modus operandi.  

This is why cynics are hardline in their intolerance of religion - they correctly perceive that religion attacks their basis of existence; and for what appear utterly nonsensical reason! - yet a species of nonsense that carries extreme conviction and that most people find highly motivating - so that religious people will reject pleasures and choose suffering, in the name of their religion.

Terrifying.

For a real cynic, religion is something rationally to be hated.
*

Pride/ Wishful Thinking - versus futility and shirked responsibility

There are always defaults in (what pretends to be) "reasoning" - and defaults are assumptions, not necessities.

Currently, the default assumption is that individual human beings are accidents of causality and randomness, products of physical processes and biology, motivated by evolved instinct... 

And, as a product of more fundamental causes and accidents, each human being therefore has no genuine significance - everybody is inessential; and to believe otherwise is a delusion of pride or sheer wishful thinking. 

Modern Man's default and underlying assumption is: "I don't matter to the universe, or to the world."

And insofar as modern humans matter to anyone, it is framed in terms of providing material, or maybe psychological, "help" to "others"... which, if thought about consecutively, means no more than that we are supposed to help each other to... help-each-other.

Against such a background; anyone who asserts (or even believes privately) that he has a significant cosmic role to play - a destiny in terms of "the cosmos"; is regarded as stupid or dangerous; maybe a childish daydreamer, insane with arrogant pride, or a would-be manipulator and dominator of others.  

And of course any of these might be true, in particular persons.

But they do not exhaust the possibilities.  

It should be recognized that there are very serious - indeed lethal - adverse consequences from an affected humility or conviction of insignificance. 

For a start, there is no basis for taking responsibility for anything at all! - and this fundamental evasion, this refusal to be responsible for one's existence, life, behaviour - is mainstream and encouraged.  

And if we have no spiritual or cosmic role, not even potentially; then life is reduced to mere hedonism - seeking pleasure and gratification, avoiding suffering and misery. And that tends (with uncertainty of expectations) to reduce towards hedonism in the short-term and for-sure; hedonism in here-and-now. 

(Which is why modern people are - compared with their ancestors - so weak-willed, demotivated, and cowardly.)

Also; it tends towards a lowering threshold of suicide - that is disposing of ourselves (preferably without suffering)... whenever it happens to be convenient, or apparently expedient.

(Suicide has become popular on the metaphysical assumption - which is unique to modern Western people - that death is annihilation, the end, and leads to nothing-else.)

Modern Western people therefore see no reason why we should not dispose of ourselves in order to avoid the risk of future suffering, if that currently happens to be what we want... 

(This is what is entailed by regarding "quality of life" as the justification for staying alive.) 

But - if we have no ultimate (cosmic, spiritual, eternal) significance, even potentially, as individuals - then we are just cogs in a machine, bits of a computer program... so there is no solid, objective reason why others should not dispose of us, whenever it suits them (i.e. whenever some kind of pseudo-plausible justification can be cobbled together). 

And this is what we find...

In the past, it seems that people justified themselves, saw reason for existence, not individually but in terms of their loyal membership of a family, clan, tribe... later of a nation.

That's gone. 

Now; it's either justification for each individual person, or no justification at all. 

Clear, simple, difficult. 

And if it is to be justification for each individual person, there can be no shirking of individual responsibility. 

We are each, therefore, of cosmic significance; each life is important to creation; and each person just-is responsible for his own life.

That's the proper default. 

We cannot hide behind service to some "group-good" - because we don't really believe it, so we don't really act upon it. 

It's a fake excuse. 

  

Zooey wins! - and, explaining Seymour's suicide

*

I have just re-read (for the first time since I became a Christian) JD Salinger's three most religious stories: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, Zooey, and Seymour: an introduction.

I enjoyed them all, but most appreciated Zooey.

RHTRC struck me as a perfect short story, but - in terms of Salinger's ouvre - transitional; Zooey is IT, a perfect short story that is uniquely and 100 percent Salinger; and Seymour crosses the line from short story into a kind of fictional essay.

*

As well as its brilliant character delineation, dialogue, density and description; I was fascinated by the religious aspect of Zooey - and the light it shone on the big unifying question of the Glass chronicles: why did Seymour commit suicide?

*

Zooey begins with Salinger's characteristic eclectic, syncretic 'perennial philosophy' New-Age-ish -type spirituality; and builds towards Salinger's most wholly-Christian epiphany - the famous Fat Lady parable at the end.

This trajectory is one which is - apparently - undergone by Franny, Zooey and Buddy; but not by Seymour.

*

Seymour's suicide was - I believe - caused by what Walker Percy termed the 're-entry problem.

(see WP's Lost in the Cosmos and my earlier blog posting http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/03/re-entry-problem-for-artists-and.html )

This is intrinsic to any worldly spirituality - perhaps to any non-Christian religion - which does not include a heavenly afterlife with a process of theosis - or movement of the human towards becoming a Son of God.

Seymour seems to have had only a vague kind of transcendental belief (he does not quite seem to believe that Truth, Beauty and Virtue are objective, real - and to the extent he does he regards them as immanent - within nature - rather than supernatural).

Indeed, Seymour's spirituality is characterized by a belief in reincarnation rather than afterlife.

*

Yet reincarnation (even if true) is no answer to anything - or rather it is merely a superficial answer to specific questions (such as explaining a person's character and behaviour) not ultimate questions.

Reincarnation merely pushes the problems of life backward or forward, without providing any understanding of the human relation to The Good, to reality, to meaning or purpose.

*

Seymour argues (I think) that this worldly life here on earth is perfect - if only we looked at it correctly.

The fault is with people and their perspective.

But Seymour apparently couldn't get the right perspective and keep it. He could get himself into the correct frame of mind for periods, but would at some point have to re-enter the perspective which saw the world as mundane, painful, full of ugliness, lies, cruelty, short-termist selfishness.

And it was this re-entry which he found unbearable; and which (it seems to me) led to his suicide.

*

Seymour simply could not live up to his own ideals, his own aspirations - could not maintain his own temporary achievements.

And, lacking a conception of Original Sin, and lacking a belief in the possibility of Christian salvation - he had nowhere to go, nothing to turn to but (as he imagined) extinction and (he hoped) an end to his own suffering.

*

The abstract conception of God - thoughts prompted by commencing Philip K Dick's "Valis"

I read quite a few Philip K Dick novels and stories back in the early 1980s, and have always regarded him as one of the very best science fiction writers - although no more than adequate as a prose artist. But I have never re-read any of his books, and indeed to some extent avoided them - as one does with effective dystopias.

Partly this was due to a very unpleasant 56 hour weekend stint as the solo doctor resident and on call in a psychiatric hospital; when I made the mistake of reading the powerful  Time Out of Joint during the gaps between clerking and treating psychotic patients.

The novel is about a man for whom the paranoid delusion of all the society being organized around him is literally true - and I found it very unsettling to read the novel then talk with people who believed themselves to be in more or less the same situation - which set me to wondering about myself... It was, altogether, a very meta-Philip K Dick situation, like being inside one of his dystopias.

What I retained from the totality of PKD was a suffocating sense of the meaninglessness of life - life in general - which was brought into awareness (but not created) by the artificiality of his technologically enwrapped (and often off-world) environments. A world where the difference between a robotic animal and a real one, between a replicant android and a human, is almost impossible to discern - a world where the animal or human is not significantly different from a robot or replicant: both equally arbitrary and mechanical.

I have just bought and begun reading Valis, a novel which was written shortly before Dick's death and which is a semi-autobiographical  account of his later years of brooding on an experience of his which was either a divine enlightenment or a psychotic break or some combination.

The events of the first chapters (which are all I have read) depict a burnt-out Californian society of the early 1970s, in which the protagonist and his circle are all ex-druggy, hippy, hedonistic types suffering from heavy casualties of extreme loneliness (existential isolation), suicide, psychosis, neurosis and nihilistic cynicism - so it is not an enjoyable read, so far!

But what is portrayed is metaphysically the avant garde of what has (minus the LSD) since become mainstream in The West. In the first place, it is the futile struggle of people who have rejected God, the soul, the afterlife etc to find meaning in a world of mortality which they have further degraded by mechanistic explanations;  but in the second place (so far) there is the almost-equally-futile attempt of people to escape from this dead-ly set of metaphysical assumptions into a very abstract conception of God.

The protagonist has (like Philip K Dick) experienced a kind of revelation - which may or may not be from God - involving a pink beam of light; and this is interpreted (so far) in terms of physicsy ideas of God as 'information'. Friends of the protagonist with 'simple' Christians faiths (a cancer patient who has a rosary beside her bed) are rejected as a faith of naive wish-fulfilment which does  not take seriously the metaphysical problem of suffering... the striving is clearly for a very pure, abstract, physics-like faith in a God who fits in with the world of computers, information, archives, science, technology, psychoactive drugs and so forth.

What seems impossible for the hero is a faith based on God as primarily our loving, heavenly Father. That simple thing seems difficult, or impossible, to picture or believe - instead the abstract God is no sooner proposed than He gets bogged down in abstract metaphysical dichotomies concerning omnipotence versus helplessness, goodness versus suffering, meaning versus meaninglessness... any solution to these problems seems contrived, arbitrary and unconvincing.

So on the one hand there is the visceral  nature of human (or animal) suffering - a friend plans and kills herself calmly and without passion, a friend's cat runs out under the wheel of a car and is crushed, a friend dies after pain, blindness, deafness from cancer and radio-/ chemo-therapy and so on... While pitted against this is a very abstract, intellectual, information-theory, pink light beaming across the void type of understanding of God.

There is a gross mismatch between the nature of the problem, and the search for a solution. The proper answer, which is to understand God not a a set of abstract metaphysical properties but as our Father, and other people as His children and our siblings, and other things in the environment as being alive-like-us (rather than us being dead-like-them)... the protagonist is pre-immunized against these obvious and effective and satisfying answers and explanations as being too obvious, too simple, too much in conformity with what we would most wish.

The frame for explanation has narrowed from eternity to... well not even to the span of the mortal life of Men; rather it has narrowed to the span of the mortal life of one single consciousness... Then this assumed frame (a frame which was not really possible, and certainly not mainstream, until very recently in human history - and only in a minority of people and situations) has been accepted as utterly compelling - and any other frame is regarded as simply childish and stupid...

How could this happen? How could such a very socially and historically contingent world view ever be supposed to be entailed so strongly that to deny it is seen as foolish and unintelligent and weak?

What evidence is there that the people who adhere to the atomistic, alienated nihilism of the 1970s drug-devastated Californian milieu have a superior wisdom and insight almost all humans who dwelt in other times and places?

There is a truly cosmic level of arrogance, of pride, about all this - is there not? Combined with a truly cosmic level of condescension that amounts to despising almost everybody, everywhere and at all points of history.

In sum, a staggering degree of evil.

Yet, this evil metaphysical system spread from California to the rest of the West, where it now rules supreme and is enforced upon us a million times every day at every level of public discourse from the government, civil administration and legal system down through education and health care to the all pervasive mass media and casual human interactions.

PKD was certainly a canary in the coalmine, with respect to noticing and describing and diagnosing. I will be very interested to see whether he was able to solve - through the course of this novel - the deep problems he so acutely experienced; but I fear that he will not. Simply because he was looking in the wrong place, and had ruled-out or rejected the right place.

The one place where he would not search happened to be the place the answer was hidden - because he already 'knew' the answer and had rejected it. Indeed the whole edifice of evil PKC depicts was built upon this prior rejection.

And the evil was experienced as inescapable precisely because - given that a priori rejection - the evil was inescapable; just as you cannot escape from a burning building if you have already decided that the fire escape is the one and only route that leads nowhere.

  

Why atheism leads to (increasingly short-termist) hedonism, then despair

If there is no God, and this world is a merely-determined/ accidental and purposeless happening; then life is also purposeless.

If life has no external and shared meaning, then all that matters is how we feel about it - so life reduces to psychology.


Our innate psychology includes all kinds of instincts including loyalty, courage, appreciation of beauty, natural virtue... but with atheism these are accidental and contingent consequences of our past evolutionary history - and their meaning is in-the-past; and that meaning was only to enhance our differential genetic replicative success (because people are organisms, and organisms are only disposable contingent gene-controlled robots that exist to promote gene replication).

We may feel the pull or push of natural ethics or 'higher instincts' but they have no validity for 'my' actions, 'here-and-now'.

Therefore psychology reduces to the pleasure-suffering axis.


In other words; the only psychology that can be justified (for me, here, now) is my feelings, now = hedonism (the principle that the axis of my pleasure-suffering is the only 'ethic').

Current - here-and-now - feelings are the only relevant factor; because the future cannot be reliably predicted and the past may be forgotten or memories may be false.

Hedonic feelings are the only self-justifying feelings, because (by circular definition) feeling good is better than feeling bad. And because (with atheism) nothing else matters.

So with atheism hedonic feelings are the only thing left-standing.  


And when short-term pleasure/ happiness, gratification is the only bottom line; then as soon as it is absent, life is worthless.

If we come to believe that our own personal happiness is in decline or impossible - or simply currently insufficient: too weak or too infrequent - then we shall (we realise) despair - sooner or later. And there can be no reassurance against this despair, because such despair is rational.

Under such circumstances, only the deluded manic or the manipulative psychopath can be consciously happy with life - and even they are vulnerable to downswings.


What happens then? Look around.

We see a society incrementally being overwhelmed by a tidal rise in despair; caused by atheism and the ethic of hedonism.

Amping up the pleasure is ineffectual - unless it could be made overwhelming and continuous (which is the false promise of transhumanism - a world of engineered permanent euphoria). And all pleasure is (apparently) subject to 'habituation' - pleasure fades unless there is novelty, or increased dose. This seems to be a biological built-in.


(This is why atheism so quickly devolves from pleasure-seeking - like the middle 1960s radical-leftist, libertine hippie ethic of promiscuous sex, hedonic drugs, and rock & roll... To the 1970s-and-onwards ethic of suffering-avoidance - with its hopes of a 'therapeutic' totalitarian world government that will prevent any kind of personal, social, planetary suffering. The change is from pleasure-seeking to pain-avoidant: from stimulant and euphoriant abuse to mass mediation with tranquillisers, mood-stabilisers, and antidepressants; from aiming-at a positive and pleasurable socialist utopia - to a society structured-around preventing the angst caused by global warming, microaggressions, racism, sexism, unbiological sexuality and sexual identity etc.)


Atheism, as it becomes mainstream, then mandatory (in public life) leads to rational and increasing  despair; from which there can be no escape while atheism prevails.

The solution should be, but isn't, obvious: to re-examine our arbitrary and evidentially-unfounded assumptions regarding the fundamental nature of reality.

(These ultimate assumptions concerning the nature of reality are termed metaphysical.)


But once a person, or a society, is already-in the depths of atheism-induced despair; then it becomes increasingly difficult to make the metaphysical effort to escape, because real escape seems impossible, hence effort is futile and (here-and-now) counter-productive. 

Despair is the fruit of atheism, and despair is perhaps the worst of sins; because it destroys the belief that escape is possible.

Hence mass human despair is the sin most deeply desired by the devil. 


Note: In psychiatry - the highest rate of suicide - and of death from refusal of drink and food and lack of self care - is among the severely depressed: i.e. those who are in the grip of self-fulfilling despair. Captive animals in despair cease to reproduce despite protection from predators and adequate provision of food and shelter - precisely analogous to the modern atheist populations of The West. 

Further note: If you join the same dots in a different way; you can see why atheism tends strongly to supporting the demonic agenda of subversion all good values; and opens the atheist to the ultimate demonic goal of value inversion (evil is virtue, ugliness is beauty, lies and fakes are truth) - in the sense that when value inversion becomes socially-expedient (as it is now) there is no strong reason to resist it, and many reasons to embrace it. 

Every life is a failure?

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I am re-reading Colin Wilson's easily book Religion and the Rebel (1957) which begins with an autobiographical essay describing the period of his teens and early twenties when it seemed to him that every human life was a failure - and his own determination not to fail.

I can remember feeling almost exactly the same way - and indeed I think it is an almost inevitable perspective for any reflective atheist who sees human life purely in terms of mortal life - and excludes the possibility of a pre- and post-mortal life.

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The basic problem with all mortal lives is death - and that is why from a purely mortal perspective all lives must be seen as a failure.

Because when mortal life is all there is, then there can no 'right time to die'.

Death either leaves unfulfilled the potential of early promise, or cuts-short achievement at its peak, or else it comes after achievement has declined - and after a period of dwindling, suffering, dependence...

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This leads to the temptation of suicide (or indirectly engineering one's own death) among those who wish their life to make a satisfying trajectory and whole, by timing their own death.

(This, for instance, seems to have been a Samurai ideal, and is also found among Western 'Romantics' of the past couple of centuries.)

Well, that is the theory - but if we are honest with ourselves - at a gut level a life terminated by suicide does not really strike us as a success; even a calm or a more-or-less calculated suicide such as Arthur Koestler and his wife's suicide pact; or an indirectly by self-engineered demise like Lawrence of Arabia killed by habitually reckless driving, or the multitude of those who die of 'accidental' alcohol or drug overdoses in a context of deliberate addiction.

So, from a secular perspective, all biographies are tragedies of one sort or another; all lives are (more, or less) wasted.

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So, when is a life not a failure? The answer is that some lives are a success when considered from the context of eternity. If we take a step back from mortality, we see that mortal life looks very different.

From the perspective of a believer in pre- and post-mortal life, mortal life is a finite episode in an unmeasured 'eternity' coming both before and after. Such a period is of extraordinary significance, however it turns-out - and at least some human lives can be seen as extremely positive in their nature and achievement.

Indeed, it may well seem that many, perhaps most, human lives have been successful in these eternal terms - in other words, success in life is that we are in a better situation at the end of our mortal existence than we were at its beginning.

Of course, by this account, failure is also possible; which is why success from an eternal perspective is an objectively meaningful evaluation - and not merely a matter of sticking-on an arbitrary 'success' label.

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