How progressive middle managers want you to place your trust in official experts
The Labour-dominated Westminster parliament approved the third reading of The Terminally Ill Adults Bill (commonly known as the Assisted Dying Bill) by only 314 to 291 votes after defeating amendments that could have offered some minimal safeguards, such as forbidding doctors from pre-emptively presenting assisted suicide as a care pathway, which could be dangerous with patients in a deep state of melancholy or suffering from mild dementia. Only the unelected House of Lords may now revise the legislation before it becomes law. It comes as little surprise the French Parliament also recently passed analogous legislation. Contrary to media portrayals, the policy does not come from a large grassroots movement, but straight out of the World Economic Forum playbook via a spider’s web of NGOs and charities. Just as the technophile professional classes look forward to extending their lives through AI-guided medicine, epigenome reprogramming, somatic and cognitive augmentation, they seem happy to relieve plebeians of their suffering through end-of-life ceremonies.
Some may argue that we already have euthanasia in all but name, leaving millions of atomised commoners to while their time on a cocktail of audiovisual entertainment, comfort food and risky medications, which in combination often have undisclosed side effects. With a reduced quality of life and limited personal independence, especially with long-term medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, angina, atrial fibrillation and most ominously dementia, sooner or later we’ll end up in hospital at the mercy of medics who may decide whether to keep us alive or give us life-shortening palliative care.
As early as the 1990s the Liverpool Care Pathway provided a framework for the triage of worthy and unworthy patients, by prioritising different approaches depending on the perceived quality of a patient’s remaining life, which in the case of lonely dementia patients is likely to be very diminished. While a public outcry led health authorities to phase out the Liverpool Care Pathway in 2013, only seven years later, tens of thousands of covid patients were given high doses of midazolam, which Dr Luke Evan MP described as essential to a good death and asked the then Secretary of State for Health, Matt Hancock, to check if supplies would suffice.
Groupthink
In her many prime-time TV appearances promoting her Assisted Dying Bill, Kim Leadbeater MP exuded her complete deference to the medical establishment. While Labour politicians often like to appeal to our compassion for the weakest in society, their underlying assumption is that we all share the same belief system, espoused by the progressive mainstream media. They look on the experts behind the covid lockdowns as tech deities whose conflicting logic must never be questioned. They worship the likes of Anthony Fauci and Chis Whitty with a quasi-religious zeal. To question these messianic figures provokes not just unease, but accusations of betrayal, as though one has violated a moral or spiritual covenant. I know from dealing with my extended family of past and present Labour activists which subjects and celebrities to avoid in polite conversation. It’s seldom a good idea to question Greta Thunberg’s saintliness. However, judging from books I’ve seen on prominent display in the houses of Labour-activist relatives, the likes of Bill Gates are also held in great esteem, despite his obsession with overpopulation. Unlike many on the cultural left, I’ve swung from a position of population pessimism in the early 2000s, when I believed the expansion of consumer affluence could not scale to the projected peak population of 10 billion human beings, to a more optimistic stance. Yet the peak oil event came and went in 2008 as living standards, by common metrics such as access to electricity, clean water and life-expectancy, continued to improve across the former third world. Not only did obesity become a bigger health challenge than undernourishment, but policymakers began to worry more about an ageing population with fertility rates dropping way below replacement level.
Sacred Cows
Nothing compares with the biggest sacred cow of them all, the NHS. Labour activists will typically blame all its failings on Tory cuts and creeping privatisation, while turning a blind eye to its one-size-fits-all attitude to healthcare as well as its growing obsession with mental health surveillance. While we once hoped our public health service could save us, the onus is now on us to save the NHS through our compliance with public health edicts, namely to put the common good before narrow self-interest.
It does not take a huge leap of imagination to see how public health groupthink could persuade civic-minded but atomised individuals to make the ultimate sacrifice for the common good of younger generations. Online infuencers and soap opera storylines could subtly lionise assisted dying volunteers as symbols of virtue doing their bit to help combat climate change or free up valuable healthcare resources.
End of Life Ceremonies
Once planned life termination is normalised, funeral companies or social services could organise celebration-of-life events to let relatives and old friends say their last goodbyes. While farewell ceremonies may seem a good way to end your life if you’re a well-connected high-achiever suffering from a terminal illness, other prospects loom for the lonely with limited financial means and whose only social life is online, a cohort that’s likely to grow over the coming years.
Is it completely beyond the realms of possibility that community care coordinators, with a little help from AI agents, could first identify lonely individuals with decreased autonomy and then invite them to a celebration-of-life event with all their favourite music and food as well as long lost friends and distant relatives contacted after trawling through social media. In their absence, creative community care coordinates could recruit people from a similar cultural background or reach out to occasional online acquaintances to wish farewell to someone about to transition to the next world. The scary bit is that the prospect of one last party with old and new friends could persuade many to agree to high-tech euthanasia.