Last year my home country’s state media, Danmarks Radio, made a documentary about a man traveling to the lowlands in order to seek assisted suicide. The documentary was lambasted by its critics for its one sided depiction of assisted suicide as solely positive thing, and devoid of criticism on the subject – something not even its most ardent defenders could disagree with.
In the ensuing reemergence of the topic into popular discourse, I would often wrap up the long list of reasons why assisted suicide is abhorrent up in a joke that all it’d be good for would be to cut expenses on elderly care and rid us of those god damn boomers.
It quickly occurred to me, however, that this joke, might actually be much less unlikely that I initially thought.
Part One: The Cultural aspect
The first reason for this is cultural; the youth throughout the Western world have developed a deep, burning resentment of the boomers as most of the cultural, political and economic shifts that have made modernity unbearable can be aptly laid at the feet of their boomer parents.
From leftism, to the Stakhanovite work ethic, crendentialism, over-regulation of the economy, the opening up of the Western world to mass immigration and the outright refusal to pass on any wisdom or wealth to the newer generations, boomers have done much to make the youth hate them.
Something that is further fermented by the youth worship coming from the climate crowd which has claimed over and over that the old in their ignorance have ruined the planet and it is up to the youth – by agitating for the right grifts of course – to save it.
The result? A consensus among millenials and zoomers – though still not formulated in these terms, that they have been born and raised to essentially function as serfs for their parents’ generation.
The pandemic has simply been the cherry on top. Showcasing that the boomers (through the political class) would happily ruin their children’s mental health, destroy their chances of future economic prosperity and take from them what should have been the happiest days of their lives, all so they themselves can live 89 years and 2 months, instead of 88 years and ten months.
For a personal example there were plenty of articles from left-wing youth in my home country ranging from decrying the harm that sanitary fascism had caused them, to referring to boomers as ”greedy pigs” for throwing their children under the bus, to outright calling for a generational tax as payment for the lockdown.
And this is not to mention that the topic of outright removing the elderly has been brought up in an intellectual setting. As a Yale professor recently called for the Japanese elderly to commit mass suicide, as well as ”broaching the topic of mandatory euthanasia”.
For these reasons I doubt the understanding that assisted suicide will lead to the elderly euthanized against their will do much to dissuade the masses from its implementation.
If anything it’ll likely increase enthusiasm for the practice among some age groups.
Part Two: Economics
The other part of this is simple economics; The pension system was never intended as a simple means of care for the old, by design.
As most parts of the modern welfare state, the pensions were an invention of Prussia.
However, the stated goal of this system – a tax on the citizenry that’d go to provide for the elderly when they became too old to earn their own living, was never the intended goal of the Prussian state, as most Prussian citizens taxed for it would die before being able to enjoy the benefits of the system.
The actual goal of the pension taxes where simply that. Taxes to further finance Der Preußische Staat and fuel its war machine.
While most of the West no longer spends much of its budget on military, the pension system still serves its goal as a well propagandized tax.
It is here worth mentioning that the pensions paid to the State are not put in a personal savings account for the individual taxpayer, but treated as any other part of the state income. While the pension expenses are being paid out to those currently on pensions at any given time.
What is immediately striking about this system is how much it resembles a pyramid scheme.
In order for it to work there must at any given time be more people paying into the system than there are being propped up by it.
That will cease to be the case once the boomers hit retirement. Simply due to the shear size of their generation compared to the millenials and zoomers.
The resulting collapse of the pension system – as well as the exodus of such a huge part of the workforce, will likely be severe enough that it could crash national economies, should the state actually maintain the system.
As it is inevitable that the boomers will retire over the next ten or so years, governments will be pressed to deal with this issue under threat of financial collapse. And assisted suicide to slowly remove the excess retirees seems a simple solution. Especially as a centralized authority wouldn’t even need to enforce mass euthanasia. The hospitals and retirement homes, doubly so in the public sector, will happily euthanize any patients exceeding their budgets on their own.
Especially as any type of workplace tasked with helping people who cannot fight back will inevitably become flooded with sociopaths in search of easy victims to play with.
Conclusions and predictions
There will at least be a strong attempt to implement assisted suicide across the western world.
Due to the economic nature of trying to alleviate pressure from a dysfunctional status quo, the most likely parties to implement it will, in my eyes at least, not be ones on the far left, but the corrupt, managerial corporatist parties of the center.
The countries most likely to implement it will be Germany, and Denmark. Germany due to its predominant managerial corporatist politics, rampant progressivism and deeply totalitarian culture and Denmark due to it’s heavily ingrained disdain for its elderly.
The rest of Scandinavia I am less sure about; Norway has the most totalitarian culture in Scandinavia, but also has enough oil reserves that it could afford a pension crash. Sweden is undergoing too many social changes as a result of not only mass immigration but also a resurgent right to make accurate predictions for.
The last of the likely candidates for implementing assisted suicide is Italy, as it has already seen a push for a referendum on the practice (although one that was shut down by the Constitutional Court), has an already geriatric population and is well known to follow whatever trends are declared on high from the European Union. Should Berlin follow Brussels in implementing the practice, Rome will be quick to follow as well.
One last, though less likely candidate would be the United Kingdom, due the increasingly authoritarian states in the archipelago that have already done much to imitate their former colonial subjects (Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with the US being a notable exception). My guess is that it would first be implemented in Scotland by the SNP, though it would still be probable that the Tory government force it through in England.
Assisted suicide will likely not gain 50+1% support, nor does it need it.
The topic merely needs to be high profile enough in the popular discourse that it gives an excuse for implementation.
Since most of the public either does not understand that the policy will lead to mass killings in the retirement homes or view it as a good thing there will not be a public outcry, let alone any actions that’d actually prevent the policy from being passed.
And the aforementioned radical minority in support of the practice, will make it easy to maintain for decades to come.
And in this regard I most sincerely hope that I am wrong.
