Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Sergey Khudiev
[REGNUM] Former Dutch Prime Minister Dries van Agt - and his wife Eugenie - were subjected to couple euthanasia. Their deaths are part of a growing trend in the Netherlands of spouses, often older ones, voluntarily dying together. This is presented as something good and romantic, worthy of imitation.
However, this indicates that euthanasia has long ceased to be “getting rid of unbearable suffering,” but has simply become a suicide encouraged by society. When euthanasia was first introduced, we were talking about exceptional cases when a person dies in any case and experiences severe suffering, from which a “good death” should save him.
But, as conservatives predicted, it is now applied to almost everyone who expresses such a desire - and it is difficult to understand where the line is between voluntary consent and pushing a person out of life.
This means a profound ideological shift - in Christian culture (this is also true for other Abrahamic religions) suicide is viewed as a grave sin. It is a sin to commit it, a sin to incline towards it, a sin to provide the means for it. Moreover, if a suicide can be partly excused by mental illness or some other serious suffering, then there can be no excuse for those who helpfully offer him poison.
In pagan cultures, from ancient Rome to Japan, this was not the case - committing suicide could be considered a completely acceptable, even sometimes honorable way out of a difficult situation.
In Europe, the taboo persisted for quite a long time by inertia among non-believers. It was taken for granted that a suicide should be pulled out of the loop, and having been pulled out, provide him with psychiatric help - the person is clearly seriously ill, in this case it is necessary not to “respect personal choice”, but to prescribe a course of treatment. Then the saved one will be grateful for the rest of his life.
But as the Christian heritage faded, powerful forces came into play interested in people killing themselves. The aging of Europe's population means that the number of users of social services - pensions, healthcare and the like - is constantly increasing, while the number of taxpayers is decreasing. Moreover, advances in medicine have meant that people, on average, live significantly longer than before.
Any system strives to optimize costs - and killing a person who is no longer a taxpayer (but, on the contrary, only consuming resources) is much easier and cheaper than treating him.
As leading British moral philosopher Baroness Helen Warnock said back in 2008, some, such as those suffering from dementia, are bound to die. “If you have dementia <…> you are wasting many people's lives <…> your family's life and national health resources.”
Of course, not everyone has the courage for such directness - but the state’s motive here is clear. Recent scandals in Canada, where euthanasia was literally forced on people they did not want to spend money on, show how this works. On the other hand, the same cultural shift - the erosion of not only faith, but also the attitude towards life associated with it - makes people susceptible to pressure from the purveyors of death.
I once saw a cartoon on the Internet of two white men in neat suits coming to an African village and saying: “We are atheist missionaries. We announce to you that you will suffer without any meaning, and then you will die forever."
This view of reality, in which life is devoid of higher meaning and irreversibly ends at the moment of physical death, leaves a person defenseless in the face of the temptation to get rid of all meaningless hardships and fall asleep forever.
Rejection of traditional religion deprives a person of trust in God and the hope that temporary sorrows will turn into eternal joy. Individualism deprives him of solidarity with others. A person perceives himself as truly unnecessary, neither to others nor to himself.
The only meaning that remains in life is the pleasures that can be obtained from it. But pretty soon the balance between pleasures and hardships turns out to be unfavorable - and the person himself seeks to be killed.
Euthanasia will be a powerful temptation in our country too, because the population is aging, just like in Europe, and the European example of savings will already be before our eyes.
But a society that does not see meaning in the lives of its economically disadvantaged members is doomed to go wild - and then die in order to cede its lands to other peoples.
And here it is important to decide on your values from the very beginning. Human life is worth living. Every hour of it has a meaning that is not always clear to us, but deep. The sick must be treated, the suffering must be numbed, the sad must be comforted - and not killed.
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