The young man who hacked 19 people to death at a care home in Japan is exotic of method but modern of purpose.
Crazy or not, his motives sound perfectly sane and rational to anyone inhaling the Zeitgeist of today’s medicine: “My goal is a world in which, in cases where it is difficult for the severely disabled to live at home and be socially active, they can be euthanised…”
Satoshi’s rationale sounds as if it might have been borrowed from some major cultural figures of the past, George Bernard Shaw for one.
Already in 1910 GBS advocated a wholesale cull of the old and disabled. With the prescience one expects from a great writer, he specified gas chambers as the best expedient of getting rid of the people who are “more trouble than they are worth”:
“A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”
What better reason does one need for mass murder in our progressive world? Shaw must have taken his cue from Darwin, the guru of modernity, who advocated euthanasia to accelerate otherwise slow natural selection:
“It is the selection of the slightly better-endowed and the elimination of the slightly less well-endowed individuals, and not the preservation of strongly-marked and rare anomalies, that leads to the advancement of a species.”
Margaret Sanger, the pioneer of birth control, saw not only euthanasia but also infanticide as beneficial: “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
Our contemporary Peter Singer, bizarrely described by some as a philosopher, asks a rhetorical question: “Why… should the boundary of sacrosanct life match the boundary of our species?”
Of course according to Prof. Singer our sex life shouldn’t ‘match the boundary of our species’ either. He’s a vociferous advocate of heavy petting, as it were – no one can accuse Peter of specism, although perhaps poor Mrs Singer might accuse him of something else.
Milan Kundera doesn’t see much difference between people and animals either: “Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.”
Satoshi thus has his finger on the pulse of modernity. The pulse beats universally, even though his method of administering mercy must owe something to the Japanese obsession with knives – where else is self-evisceration seen as the preferable method of ending one’s life?
But one could argue that stabbing old people is more merciful than the practice common in our dear NHS, where those seen as hopelessly ill are simply left to die of starvation, thirst and neglect. This is supposed to be consonant with the doctor’s sacred right to withdraw therapy.
It’s also supposed to be consonant with the Hippocratic oath, whose modern version endorses euthanasia: “If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.”
The hypocritical disclaimers to the Hippocratic oath aside, one can safely say that inside every philosophically modern doctor lives a Dr Kevorkian, or perhaps a Dr Mengele, trying to get out. And modern laws conspire to make sure he does get out.
As seems to be the case with every modern perversion, it’s Benelux that leads the way – they don’t call those countries low for nothing. In Holland, euthanasia is responsible for two per cent of all deaths.
In 1990 alone Dutch doctors killed 20,000 patients without their prior consent. Shortly thereafter euthanasia was legalised, and doctors began to kill in earnest. Moreover, two-thirds of euthanasia cases aren’t even reported, in 20 per cent of the cases the patients don’t ask to die, and in 17 per cent potentially life-saving treatments are available.
With the government’s endorsement, both tacit and explicit, doctors thus play not so much God as Satan. Brainwashed Dutchmen approve, though the old people not so much: many of them are scared of going to hospital because they think the doctors may kill them. They sense unerringly that, when euthanasia becomes legal, before long it’ll become compulsory.
Active euthanasia still isn’t legal in Britain, as it is in Benelux and Switzerland. But one hears complaints all the time that our aging population is putting a great burden on the state’s fragile shoulders. A wholesale cull of the crumblies and hopelessly ill is increasingly broached as a valid solution.
To a godless, philistine society it’s not human life but physical comfort that’s sacred. When the former diminishes the latter, what was unthinkable before becomes desirable now – and pragmatic post-rationalisation is never in short supply.
Satoshi Uematsu will doubtless be sent down for administering euthanasia without proper credentials. But once he’s out, he should come to Europe: there are jobs for men like him.
In my lifetime I have nursed, at different time, four elders to their final breath. Three were in hospice care, in my home but I was the one to sit by the bed as a life slipped away. In each case, I was given a unique opportunity to learn a greater reality than the simplistic ‘slow death is unfair’ and why we should not be allowed to play God.
First of all, those who believe that interrupting a life is humane and ends suffering are only looking at the flesh. But when the dying person slips into what I call ‘twilight death’ a type of coma where eyes are shut and communication is done, perhaps the soul is being challenged to make one last shot at eternity. Some are more stubborn than others and it takes longer.
We put so much value on the flesh and it’s importance to life. But it is the condition of the soul that determines one’s true value. Of course, only those who believe in a Sovereign God and after life would understand this. It’s called accountability and we all will be faced with it on our own. Would you want someone interrupting your last chance because it is inconvenient for him/her?
Wonder if Stephen Hawking would have an objection to the definition of ‘valuable’ as ‘independent of need’?
H. L. Mencken said ‘Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood’. He could have replaced ‘misunderstood’ with ‘implemented’. Darwin managed to be a festival of dangerous ideas all by himself. His theory applied to the natural world but he over-estimated of the power of selection (i.e. the rate a which it worked) from the results of selective breeding by pigeon fanciers and the like. He speculated about the lack of selection in modern societies and appeared to endorse some remedial selection as if we were farm animals. That we find some conclusions objectionable doesn’t mean that they are wrong or that they will force us to accept morally unacceptable policies. Population genetics (or practically any form of genetics) did not exist as a discipline in Darwin’s day. He did not know how slowly natural selection really worked (we still have lots of time before the lack of any selection would have significant deleterious effects and he did mention a few types of ongoing social selection that could counter it.
As for the ‘do gooders’ and the eugenicists, they were given far to much credit in their hey day but now appear to be mediocre. Time will probably also demolish the present crop. In short, advocates of the implementation of new policy ideas should be subjected to a full scale Aristotelian grilling so that any ignorance, misunderstanding , bias and immorality can be exposed.
I’m only a young man, but remain troubled on a daily basis by the nihilistic content of the society in which I grew up. A lot of it is seen in popular television shows, particularly those aimed at adolescents. Massive hubs such as YouTube are a hot bed for all sorts of truly savage content, and never mind the more explicit sites.
When the only force capable of stopping us murdering our own grandparents is Islam, you know there is a crisis.
No sympathy from this quarter, sorry. This is the generation which approved abortion, for the sake of their greater comfort. Millions of the not-yet-born children were “culled” just so those inconvenient extra kids could be got out of the way.
Now they discover it is their turn. . .
(Weren’t they warned it would lead to this?)
We are the beneficiaries, so to speak, of the slippery slope syndrome.
I am not generally a fan of the Roman Catholic Church. However, they are right about the sanctity of human life from conception.
As soon as this gold standard is fudged; that it is OK to abort at some later stage of pregnancy, the gate has been opened to abortion on demand and later and later abortions. Then we get Peter Singer who thinks it OK to kill off babies who have actually been born, up to the age of three months, I think it is.
According to him, because they have no self awareness or capacity for forward thinking they have no more intrinsic worth than a cabbage.
After demolishing the sanctity of life in this way, we move on to the old and demented, the insane…and then? According to the left, often if one doesn’t agree with them, one is possessed of a phobia, ie one is mentally ill. You can see where this is heading…
The slippery slope syndrome is widely applicable. In economics, for example, the abandonment of the literal gold standard has led to the world’s present huge indebtedness and the madness of negative interest rates.
It is a function of nihilism and relativistic thinking which has abandoned all absolute standards and will lead to the destruction of our civilisation. This is the curse of liberalism.