Offering rationales for killing inconvenient people is nothing new for the New York Times. That paper’s editorial page, for instance, has been a fervent supporter of child murder since Roe vs. Wade was incorrectly decided a half-century ago. It has never been content to rest on its laurels. Four years ago, it reached new heights with a story titled When One Is Enough. In this gripping essay, a woman explains how she decided to kill two of her in utero triplets to avoid a catastrophe. “I’m going to have to move to Staten Island,” she tells us, “I’ll never leave my house because I must care for these children. I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.”
Having solved the problem of avoiding the dual shames of living on Staten Island and shopping at Costco, the New York Times is up for just about anything.
It is no secret that Japan is in a demographic death spiral. The number of Japanese over 75 now outnumbers those under 20. Every year, the number of Japanese retiring is about 25% greater than that of Japanese born. In a couple of decades, they will be at the point where the number of retirees outnumbers those in the workforce, and no one knows what happens then.
This past Sunday, the New York Times ran a story by an assistant professor at Yale named Yusuke Narita offering a very simple solution.
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?”
Narita, it should be noted, is 37 and lives in the US. So, if his policy is adopted, he is not at risk. Funny how this is sort of a universal feature of extreme solutions.
Not to be outdone, “thought leaders” on the left developed a Pavlovian drool at the thought of arbitrarily killing people who were not themselves.
My colleague Jim Thompson hit this in a post titled ‘Big Thinking’ PhD Thinks That Old People Maybe Should Consider Killing Themselves. Please give it a click.
The idea of killing the weak, the infirm, the helpless, and the powerless is about as old as socialism/Marxism. While modern leftists in the West have shied away from openly proposing firing squads and gas chambers, they have been actively medicalizing the slaughter of the helpless. We’re all familiar with the mass slaughter of the unborn brought on by an immoral and vicious Supreme Court majority and sustained by other equally corrupt and vicious politicians, judges, and quack physicians until sanity finally prevailed in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health. That battle still rages, particularly in sex-selective abortions and the targeted killing of babies with Downs Syndrome.
Euthanasia has seamlessly transitioned from the bizarre “death with dignity” slogan to state action to rid itself of someone it doesn’t consider useful.
A Canadian veteran who requested assistance in having a chairlift installed to make her home wheelchair accessible was informed the government would not pay for the chairlift. Instead, it would happily pay for what the Canadians charmingly call MAID, for “medical assistance in dying.” Several Canadian veterans requested treatment for PTSD and were told they looked like candidates for MAID instead of expensive, open-ended psychiatric care. The subtext was unmistakable: your value to society is zero; please kill yourself. In Oregon, Medicaid refused to pay for a woman’s cancer drugs, but they helpfully sent her a brochure on physician-assisted suicide. In France, a woman was drugged and restrained by her doctor and then euthanized after she refused to assent to being murdered. A French court acquitted the doctor. Belgium has sanctioned what, in my view, amounts to the involuntary euthanasia of prisoners. Unsurprisingly, euthanasia is frequently accompanied by organ harvesting.
Never fear; doing the right thing by killing yourself is fulfilling and makes a great commercial.
The idea that old people should kill themselves is the hallmark of primitive and barbaric cultures. It is at odds with Christianity, violating either the Fourth or Fifth Commandment, depending upon your denomination. To the extent it was discussed in those circles that professed atheism and utilitarianism, it was kept very quiet. When Colorado Governor Dick Lamm announced in 1984, “We’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life,” he was widely lampooned. Folk singer and satirist Tom Paxton even composed a song in his honor:
Major social changes don’t happen instantly. They need to percolate a bit, usually with the assistance of our self-appointed cultural elites. These changes, though, follow a fairly predictable path. They start out as avant-garde where only a few of the edgy participate. Then they become socially acceptable if not legally recognized. Once the activity is legalized, the velocity increases to encompass active encouragement of the activity. We’ve gone from vice squads arresting homosexuals in bus station restrooms to Dustin Hoffman’s Midnight Cowboy to Brokeback Mountain, to Obergefell vs.Hodges, to the discovery of “homophobia” (lolol) and a television advertising environment where finding heterosexual couples is a rarity all in in the span of just 60 years. You can trace the same path with transgenderism or any other social change.
Given the trajectory of euthanasia from killing those who could not object to promoting death to those who are mostly healthy to killing those who do object, it is difficult to view the suggestion of mass suicide as a method to rescue Japan from an economic Chornobyl as anything other than the first stop on the way to the mandatory extermination of the elderly. There is also no reason to believe that slaughtering the elderly to fix Japan’s coming economic meltdown will remain unique to Japan any more than we should think that our elderly won’t have their coffee drugged to make them amenable to “death with dignity.”
Like communism, utilitarianism is always just one little, tiny murder away from perfection.
One final thought for those who think Dr. Narita is onto something.
Rome’s church is Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini (Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins). It is most famous for the Capuchin Crypt. This crypt contains the bones of over 4,000 friars of the Capuchin Order, most of which arrived from across Europe and the Holy Land when the church was dedicated in 1631. The disarticulated bones form part of the church.
The plaque leading to the crypt is the epigraph, “Quod tu es, ego fui, quod ego sum, tu eris.” What you are, I once was; what I am, you will be.”
Death comes for us all. Increasingly, the post-Christian, utilitarian world we live in is not interested in that death being natural or voluntary. Every law recognizing assisted suicide brings us, inexorably, to the point of a latter-day Aktion T4 program. That the New York Times published this story shows just how far down that path we’ve traveled.
