Author: Niels Pilegaard

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.

 

Denmark is often held as some sort of Utopia by the Western world due to its welfare state and highly homogeneous culture. Much has been said about not just the positives, but also more recently, by the political right, the negatives of such a system. However, neither side has ever truly understood what the pros and cons of the Danish way are, nor what type of society would accept it in the first place.

The Danish way of thinking is, in many ways, self-contradicting and it is just as hard to wrap one’s head around it as it is with the Russian mindset. This would have been more apparent, were it not for the complete absence of conflict within the Danish state.

All societies have a more or less formal contract with their state, some founding principle that makes it legitimate in the eyes of the people: In the US this is the upholding of the Constitution; in China – to avoid a repeat of the starvation events under Mao and ensure everyone has food on the table. In Denmark, it is simply to preserve a state of comfort.

While the same is true of the rest of Scandinavia, the Danish mindset has evolved, for the most part, naturally, with little deliberation on the part of the state.

Danish culture has been in large part defined by the presence of the state, in ways that most free countries simply have not. The most apparent of which is family structure or, better said, the lack thereof as the individual is completely atomized.

The average Danish child will be placed into a kindergarten from the age of 3 – 4 years old with minimal interaction with their parents, as both of them typically are working full time to afford the bills that come with having the highest tax pressure in the world, and second worst purchase power parity in Europe.

Their middle aged parents do not fare much better, as divorce is frequent enough as to become ubiquitous. Here it is worth mentioning that Danish adolescents are among the first to move out of their parents’ home in Europe. While I do not see this as inherently negative, it does add to the overall state of disconnect within the family. This disentanglement is perversely mirrored in the usual treatment of the elderly in Denmark.

Children do not interact much with their parents after they move out, and the parents life is expected to go on as usual until they are too old to live on their own. At this point the overwhelming standard is to let your parents be institutionalized. This is so common to the point where any other arrangement is practically unheard of.

With the exception of the occasional visit, the parents are left completely out of sight and thus out of mind. It’s the polar opposite of Italy, where the child is expected to either move out at some point in their forties, or simply inherit the family home and take care of their parents until their death.

While abuse is not the absolute standard within retirement homes, it is frequently reported on. It is not unusual for horror stories of elderly, no longer capable of standing on their own and bedridden, to be neglected by social workers that simply don’t want to help them get to the bathroom, and instead leave them mired in their own fecal matter for several days.

Its not that anyone wants this abuse to continue per se, in fact the topic has had mainstream attention both in the media, among political parties, and in political satire for several decades now. The truth is quite simple, and quite depressing: No one cares.

This is not meant in the sense that people find the abuse mentioned above acceptable, they don’t. Instead no one really thinks about or wants to do anything to change things.

A far leftist and former friend of mine once said that the greatest boon of the welfare state was that it “liberated him from his own morality”. Thanks to it, he argued, there was no need to care about the homeless, the poor, his family, or anyone other than himself, because ”society will take care of it”.

While many Danes would feel repulsed by such a statement, there is a kernel of truth to it: The welfare state has in its own perverse way ”liberated” the individual from his morality and responsibility. This is at least in part what we are seeing with the disentanglement between families and the elderly.

Denmark is a deeply apathetic country, and the odd thing about this characteristic apathy, whether towards governmental overreach, abuse in the social sector or blatant corruption, is that there is barely any propaganda effort from the state itself involved. Rather there simply is a disinterest so ubiquitous as to become part of the background noise, as it permeates every part of the Danish worldview: both empathically, intellectually, and politically, in ways that often appear paradoxical.

The national self-image vexes between viewing ourselves as a small, irrelevant spot in the middle of Europe to extreme arrogance over our glorious welfare state, especially compared to those stupid Americans that are constantly shooting each other or going broke from their dysfunctional, obviously anti-human private healthcare system. Although self-contradictory at a glance, these two ideas can coexist in people’s heads at the same time without cognitive dissonance, as they are not two mutually exclusive ideas, but rather a single, logically coherent narrative that can produce diametrically opposed feelings depending on the context: This national narrative, referred to as “Lilliput Chauvinism” by the politician Uffe Østergaard, is best summarized as “we are small and irrelevant but our socially homogenous and deeply empathetic culture has resulted in the north – and in particular us, creating a much more humane, and happy society than the rest of the globe.”

Like how a faucet can produce either warm or cold water, depending on how you turn the knobs, the focal point of the narrative can be altered to hone in on either the inferiority aspect as a means to deflect criticism of flaws brought to the surface, or the superiority, to induce a delusional belief in the superiority of the Danish system – which therefore does not need to be altered, as there’s no need to change what is already as good as it gets.

Complementing this is the insular nature of Danish society. Not much is reported on or understood, or even paid attention to of our neighboring countries. There is some superfluous reporting on whatever happens in the United States, usually ripped straight from their legacy media, and sometimes Sweden (since the border with them is right next to our capital) but that’s about it. Rarely is anything ever reported about Norway, Germany or Britain. The cultural insularity of the nation solidifies it’s inferiority-superiority complex, since the country as a whole is simply not aware or interested in other ways of structuring a society.

For a personal example, a family movie I watched as a small child had a song in the intro credits with lyrics such as:

man er som man er det kan ikke laves om
man går rudnt og ser ud som maan gjorde da man kom
du kan drømme om at være en kineser I new yok
men man er som man er og det er godt nok.

En hest er en hest en kat er en kat
de er ligesåforskellige som dag og som nat…
og tyskere og svenskere er også en slags menesker
og rødhårede piger er kønne

You are as you it cannot be changed
one walks around and look as one did when you arrived
you can dream about beign a chinese in New York
But you are what you are and it’s good enough

A horse is a horse a cat is a cat
they’re as different as day and as night
and Germans and Swedes are people too I suppose
and read-haired girls are cute

The song is quite indicative of the mentality here. Danes are not devoid of humour, especially not when at the expense of our neighbours, due to historical beef turned banter (as is the case with practically all Old World countries). But there’s also this notion that what you are is pretty good, so there’s no need to do anything about it, or change, or improve. What you are is more or less “good enough”.

This is certainly not helped by the populace’s disinterest in seeking out knowledge or wisdom on their own.
It’s not that Danes are stupid, as the over representation among Nobel price winners for instance shows, but that their thinking is rigid. Knowledge is only gathered and created, and expertise only acquired within already established fields, such as the hard sciences, and outside them, is a dearth of intellectual curiosity. Appeal to experts is commonplace and expert opinion is paraded around by the media on a daily basis.

It is not without reason Denmark has not had a renowned thinker – neither globally, nor domestically, since Søren Kirkegaard. On a related note, Denmark has not created many cultural movements of its own for at minimum the last 100 years. More often than not, ideas are simply imported from abroad, as was the case with Lutheran Protestantism by the priest Hans Thausen or with the welfare state itself, originally imported from Bismarck’s Prussia, until it developed a life of its own here.

Much of this lack of interest can be traced back to the 1800s: Following the loss of Norway to Sweden during the Napoleonic wars, Denmark entered a cultural period known as Romantikken, or the romantic period. The core idea was that ”what was lost externally, must be won internally”. No longer was Denmark to pay attention to anything outside of it’s own borders, as it refused to look away from its rural landscapes through rose tinted glasses; effectively romanticising what was left of the country in an attempt to ignore the nation’s sorry state of affairs.

It is here we find the source of Danish Lilliput chauvinism, as both a coping and a defence mechanism against harsh reality, as it reminded us of our own inadequacy.

This can also be seen in the notion of the Janteloven, a set of laws unique to the fictional town of Jante, made as a satire of Scandinavia’s stigma against excellence:

Don’t believe you are anything
don’t believe you are as much as us
Don’t believe you are smarter than us
Don’t believe you are better than us
Don’t believe you know more than us
Don’t believe you are more than us
Don’t believe you amount to anything
Don’t laugh at us
Don’t believe anyone likes you
Don’t believe you can teach us anything

At no point has this order of affairs ever truly been disputed. While the central focus of the following era, the modern breakthrough, indeed was that the nation ought to cease its nostalgic ruminations and face cruel reality, the cruel reality in question was the suffering of the poor and the working class, underneath the classicist society. It was essentially proto-socialism. Created a century before Marx was even born and complete with deconstructive reinterpretations of established folklore to serve the anti-idealistic bend of the era. Added to these is a fear of going outside of the system.

Dissent is allowed, but only in predetermined ways by going through the system itself, never around it, and it is frowned upon to criticise individuals working in the bureaucracy as “just doing your job” is a commonplace and acceptable justification for state overreach. The result? A society unwilling to engage in the historical arena (with the blessing of its geography), uninterested in learning from others and dedicated to the alleviation of harm from its citizens, and one which has effectively produced an “end of history”-like scenario.

There are no conflicts here and with the exception of a brief almost bloodless invasion by – and immediate submission to – Nazi Germany in the 1940s, the notion that you need to defend what you hold dear, that there’s something it must be defended against, and whether it was even worth defending in the first place, is mute. In its place there’s a perpetual state of nothing ever happening.

It can be seen even in the language too: For instance, the standard response to being asked how are things going is “stille og roligt/quiet and calm”.
Another example is the word “hygge”. Which is often paraded around as the quintessential Danish word, as it has no direct translation. The approximate is a mix between “cozy” and “comfy”. That feeling of sitting and chilling with your friends and feeling pleasant while nothing is really happening.

I’m defining it because Danish does not typically make use of a direct word for “scary” or “horrifying” instead the most commonly used word is “uhygge”. It’s much like how Russian does not have a direct mainstream word for “safety” or “security” but instead uses “undanger” [безопасность].

As nothing is happening, and will never happen, conflict is viewed as unnecessary and abnormal if not to some extend unnatural, if it is ever placed in bigger doses than the occasional joke about the Nazis or drawing of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban here and there. The ability for, and conceptualization of, conflict taking place is not only absent on a national scale but on the individual level as well. No one is capable of starting conflicts and no one has the necessary mental reflexes to handle it.

This conflict avoidance leads to an odd form of moderation, where the victim of the state will always react to abuse by pleading. If the state overreaches, the reaction will always begin by admitting one is themselves guilty before stating that what’s happening is absurd. There won’t be any backlash, only a plead for a slightly thinner slice of the salami to be served this time around. This is arguably why the country has some of the highest anti depressant consumption in the world.

It is not that we batter our children into soulless drones, it’s that we don’t need to. Because the concept of conflict simply does not exist inside the little Danish world. As there’s simply no practical way of venting frustrations people simply give up trying or become bitter and resentful, as the shadow parts of the human mind are not being allowed to fully integrate. The populace may act nice but it is not good.

And if you dig deep enough down underneath that outer layer of niceness in a Dane’s psyche, you’ll find something you won’t like looking at.

Over the course of this past November, three countries were expected to see a wave of right wing success in their upcoming elections. Denmark, Brazil, and the United States, were embroiled in elections of great importance – not so much due to the next four years of government, but for the long term cultural trends they represent.

All three countries saw significant right wing success around 2016, followed by what is now a surprisingly successful pushback from their left wing status quo.

In America, this has been in the form of the disastrous last two years of the Biden administration as well as mediocre results for the right in the Midterms. Mediocre enough that Donald Trump’s future as the GOP’s main presidential candidate has been openly questioned.

In Brazil, a hostile state apparatus sought to quell the flames of support for Bolsonaro and the left has now successfully ousted him during this past election.

And in my home country of Denmark, our left-wing government had successfully taken on the mantle of populism to win the elections back in 2019, only to impose lockdowns and egregious breaches of the Constitution under the pandemic.

During the elections of this past November they not only managed to maintain an almost unchanged number of votes compared to 2019, the social liberal party that forced them to call an election over their continued breaches of the constitution and peoples trust have seen their voter base cut in half.

As a morbidly ironic cherry on top, several of the small villages of northern Jutland that relied heavily on mink farming voted overwhelmingly for the political party that destroyed their way of life.

Despite the large differences in the cultures of these three countries as well as how the reassertions have played out, the right-wingers in all three countries had developed very similar, but equally dangerous narratives on what should have happened;

These narratives all revolve around some form of revolution, wherein the capital P People have realized the tyrannical nature of the left and rise up, and through the Democratic Process push the country back towards Truth, Justice, and Liberty, and render us from corruption and progressive tyranny. It just so happens that it didn’t pan out that way.

The cause of this dissonance between right wing mythology and left wing reality however, is not to be found in some unknown source of leftist competence, or a successful propagandizing of the voters, but in the Right itself.
Specifically the populist savior mythos that the right has capitalized on since the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016.

Here, it is important to make a distinction between populist policies and populist savior mythos. Populist policies are merely whatever form of policies are written with the intent of appealing to the working man. Things like lowering immigration, or removing CRT propaganda from schools are contemporary forms of populist policies from the Right, while raising the minimum wage or giving more power to worker unions are examples of Leftist populist policies.

It should be noted that these policies do not need to actually be beneficial to the working classes, nor that being populist inherently means they’re harmful either. It is simply a label for any policy, good or bad that aims to appeal to the lower classes. The issue here, however is the mythos.

As it has resulted in the cult-like mentality that as long as the correct person is voted into power (Donald Trump being the best known example of this) victory is assured, as well as a distorted view of democracy.

The populist mythology was effective at the time, but was also simplistic and overly black and white. This is nothing new, it is in fact a historical norm for any successful narrative; the problem is that this time around there were no checks and balances within the Right that could mitigate the negative effects of the current party narrative.

This is usually done by having a well established elite that understands the shortcomings of the narrative, and knows which of the newer recruits to select for or filter out of the upper parts of the party hierarchy.
The checks and balances were not present this time around, however, and now the Right has a lot of people believing their own propaganda way too far up in the party.

The results of believing too much in the populist narrative in question have been overly naïve views on not just democracy but a genuine belief that there is a right side of history, that there will be a permanent victory over the forces of evil (the left), and that democracy unhindered and without interference will always move towards the side of the party that is on to the right side of history. At its core this is a surprisingly leftist and revolutionary way of thinking. Combined with a characteristically Protestant Christian form of moral prudence.

Since all actions are filtered through the lens of right vs wrong side of history, even the most benign attempt to persuade public opinion towards the right must be stomped out, with much more extreme prejudice than they’d display to even the most sadistically violent Antifa member, as long as it in any way is perceived as ”rude” or ”indecent” or a ”danger to Our Democracy”

What’s more, the criteria for what is ”immoral” is barely even dictated by anyone on their own side, but more often whatever far left propaganda manages to bubble up through the legacy media. In practice this means the Left can declare any rules of engagement they feel like, and no matter how ludicrous they are, no matter how obvious it is they themselves don’t take said rules seriously, the Right will enforce them upon their own and solely their own with unparalleled religious zeal.

It doesn’t matter that the Right themselves are aware that said propagandists are merely trying to manipulate them, nor does it matter what consequences following said propaganda will bring. As long as it touches their ideological blind spot of recoiling from anything and everything that is not pristine and principled, they will instinctively jump on the opportunity to throw as many spanners in the works of what any sane man would call their party fellows, until they have returned the Right to its state of ”principled conservatism on the side of democracy”. Which almost always is identical to a state of stagnant ineptitude.

Much of the Right’s current miserable situation is as a direct result of this segment. And as much as I hope dearly that at least some of these people will realize how wrong they were in following the ”will of the people”, now that the populace is kissing the hand of what they perceive as totalitarians on the wrong side of history, I honestly fear they’re too emotionally invested in their ideological framing for anything to convince them.

While it is impossible to have a political party without these people – just as it is impossible to be without any other form of narrative in an organization, too many of them have moved far too near the core of the organized right in far too many western countries. If the Right wants to regain its footing, it is to push it’s populist tendencies back out into the peripheries and ensure it’s core is more in tune with reality.

If the right instead chooses to preserve its delusional aspirations of sainthood it will experience the same filtering out and discarding at the hands of cruel nature as any other entities that proved unfit for their environment throughout life’s evolution on this earth.