Have You Considered Dying?

The Collapse of Will, Reason, and even Character

File: 'At the Deathbed' by Edvard Munch, 1895, Bergen Kunstmuseum.JPG - Wikimedia Commons

I feel like I said this last week, though I can remember barely anything lately, but I recently found The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia’s Substack. If you like good writing about culture, you’ll enjoy it very much. His piece yesterday on the Annoyance Economy is a must-read. And earlier in the week, he proffered Ten Warning Signs that our current knowledge system is collapsing. He makes the poignant and depressing observation that you generally don’t find the name of a massive cultural shift, like the Renaissance, until something like 200 years after it has happened, which means that if you’re in the middle of it, you might miss it altogether. One sign that our current era is going the way of all flesh is that it is increasingly not the case that scientific studies are able to be replicated, and that, more times than anyone would prefer, the fake study is published and believed long after the real one has been forgotten. Another sign is that it is becoming easier to get a job out of the humanities than STEM. “Art history majors,” he says, “now have an easier time finding a job than computer engineers.” University costs are going up at the same rate that quality is going down. AI is ubiquitous, but it is also, in Gioia’s opinion, “ridiculous.” Rather than me listing all ten, you should go read the piece, if you have time. Gioia thinks that we are on the cusp of some kind of new romanticism, which is a fascinating thought.

Anyway, after a nice hour with the Honest Broker, I happened to come across the tragic news that The New York legislature has passed a bill allowing assisted suicide, and somehow the news fit in quite perfectly with Gioia’s tenth sign which is, “We hear constant bickering about ‘fake science’—from all political and ideological stances. Nobody talks about ‘true science.’” Apparently, the term ‘fake science’ did not really exist before the last century. “In those days,” says Gioia, “science was considered emblematic of truth. If it was fake, it wasn’t science. But when the knowledge structure collapses, science loses its privileged access to truth. At the final stage, it gets harder and harder to distinguish science from propaganda. We are now living in that nightmare scenario.”

With that in mind, let’s just look at Life Site’s reporting of this grotesque development in the Empire State.

The so-called “Medical Aid in Dying Act” would allow patients given a prognosis of six months or fewer to live to be prescribed euthanasia drugs, upon affirmation by two doctors that they have “decision-making capacity.” “I’m overjoyed that the Senate is now joining the Assembly in passing the Medical Aid in Dying Act — a truly historic and compassionate step forward for New York,” said Assembly sponsor Amy Paulin of the bill, which has the endorsement of the Medical Society of the State of New York, New York State Academy of Family Physicians, the New York State Psychiatric Association, the New York State Nurses Association, the New York State Bar Association, and Women’s Bar Association of the State of New York. “After more than a decade of advocacy, we are finally on the brink of giving terminally ill New Yorkers the autonomy and dignity they deserve at life’s end,” Paulin, a staunchly pro-abortion Democrat, said.

It’s so nauseating to think of anyone devoting an entire decade of life to such a project. There is a ghoulish picture of Kathy Hochul at the top of the article.