"Suicide pods now legal in Switzerland"
I've been in the process, since my last substack/blog post, of crafting a rather long musing on various issues tied to this topic. Many of them, as I've long suspected, being root causes of the very issues that have haunted our whole society for the last 20+ months. So look for something in the next coming week or two (I just finished a huge translation project that has occupied much of my extra writing time, which explains why I've been rather silent on here for the last few weeks...).
Before I offer you the link to the article that I alluded to in the subject header, I'd kindly ask that you allow me to share some rather pertinent excerpts from two interviews with one Stephen Jenkinson (if you've been following my musings for some time, the name should sound "slightly" familiar haha). His thoughts on this complex issue have always deeply resonated with my own, especially as even in our death, we are seemingly turning to "more technology", "more alienation", and "more de- and trans-humanization"...
"How I feel about euthanasia is irrelevant. Whether I approve it or not is irrelevant. But I can certainly wonder about it. I can have some discernment about it that's free of any feelings--relatively speaking free--and here's what I come up with, really quickly.
Euthanasia is a death phobic culture's solution to dying. Euthanasia is being decriminalized by cultures that remain death phobic subsequent to the decriminalization. That's the great mystery. If a death phobic culture legitimizes euthanasia, it's because the euthanasia is consistent with the death phobia. It doesn't challenge it. It doesn't re-educate about it. It's maintained by the euthanasia, right? And what does that look like on the ground?You don't have to die! you don't have to put up with it. You don't have to learn how to do it. You don't have to be its servant. You don't have any obligation to come to an understanding that's deeply unwelcome. You have none of these things and when you decide and you have the the agreement of a couple of physicians who sign off on the fact that you're not nuts... That you're not nuts!?!?!? Yeah, that you're not just depressed... But you're dying in a death phobic place. If you're not depressed, it's questionable whether you're even engaged in the thing.
[...]
The instinct to supply over and over again, solutions, the mania for solving and solving and solving, is generally a mania that's undertaken at the expense of learning how things came to be. Because there's no appetite for learning inconvenient, unsought, unwanted realities. There's only an appetite for escaping them and leaving them behind and solving them.
Okay, so then the solutions that are generated by a mind, or a people, or an era that wants to leave its desperately unwanted recent past behind generates what kind of solutions? Solutions that continue to bear the problems that they're trying to leave behind, that's what!
Let me give you a very concrete example. Where I live, province by province in Canada, they're going through the motions of crafting a legal formula to make euthanasia legal. It's going to happen all across the country, and in fairly short order. The belief of the politicians of course is this is what the people want, so it's a bad thing to be against...
But I'm not running for office, and so I'm free to actually be honest about it and so here it comes:
Euthanasia, when it's legalized, will be an expression of the death phobia that mobilized it, NOT the resolution of the death phobia. In other words, the dominant culture of North America is a death phobic proposition, and it's resolutely death phobic, and when it signs off on certain solutions to the death problems, like suffering and pain and so forth, when it signs off on those solutions, you can be sure that the death phobia will remain intact and that the death phobia, as a germ or a viral reality, is inside the solution, because a death phobic culture will not endorse solutions that are not consistent with the death phobia, you see.Because all the solutions are an expression of what? Of the belief system. Of the place and the time. Then they don't resolve the belief systems, and simply continue them."
Now for the aforementioned link.