Insisted Suicide

A Secular Altar for Sacrifice

Human Sacrifice is back on the menu, only this time not to Huitzilopochtli, but rather to Canada’s national healthcare system.

I am not here to comment on the decades-long bioethics debate on the issue of assisted suicide — or, as it’s referred to in this case, “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD). I find it abhorrent. I have seen people in the throes of dying clinging on to life for a litany of reasons: children, prayer, or to endure until the very end… All whom I have visited at their deathbeds still had something going for them, even on the verge of death.

Allow me to offer some thoughts on this ongoing phenomenon. In a very literal way, the American Boomer Conservative aversion against socialized medicine has come true. The death panels came not by assigning who would get care and wouldn’t (although they have done so, based on race), but by getting people to come to the panel with open arms to accept their demise rather than to face adversity. What’s worse is that it’s being advertised in a rather in-your-face fashion even to those who are not actively seeking it.

While the US does not have a healthcare system quite like Canadian Medicare or the UK’s NHS, we too have suffered a systematized destruction of meaning or animating spirit that came with the biomedical security state that emerged in 2020. Americans had lost their businesses, jobs, congregations, and everyday interactions. Those who could work from home watched the separation between their jobs and personal space vanish. New gods were made, whether out of the fear of dying, the sin of being the one to transmit sickness to the vulnerable, or — in nations like Canada and the UK — the fear of overwhelming the sacred health services.

As G.K. Chesterton once wrote:

Once abolish the God and the government becomes the God.

In America, the state has either replaced the sacraments and doctrinal lifestyle of its people, or it has corrupted them for its own ends. Whether it was the baptisms at the site of George Floyd’s overdose, or rainbow flags at the churches that did survive the pandemic, Americans are fed a new religious dogma to accommodate a great revival, a great reset, if you will. Now, in a time when people are working less and are more lonely than ever before, more and more people feel that the country is going off the rails. One must find a viable path forward. What is the way out?

Many Americans don’t see one at all. The old spirit of taking on adversity and conquering it, a nation of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” had staved us off from the depths of depression and more. When we look to others for an example, we see our neighbors to the North compliantly offering themselves and their children on the altar of human sacrifice once more in order to save money for the health service and to cull the excess population — as if Ebenezer Scrooge agreed with Jonathan Swift’s modest proposal to fix our current ills.

Liberals were so up in arms about Trump and a possible age of authoritarianism that they wrote a book about it: Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America (2018) by Cass R. Sunstein. In fact, that kind of authoritarianism can happen here, just wrapped in a flag of old N95 masks and HRT. After all, if so many Americans feel spiritually and materially lost, how easy do you suppose it is to bridge the gap from transitioning children and having non-binary adults in powerful government positions, to opting to give assisted suicide the nice-sounding name of “Medical Assistance in Dying”?

We Americans, with our federal system of 50 different state governments, witnessed from afar how bad the covid tyranny could be in places like Canada and Australia. In Australia, concentration camps were set up, and unvaccinated Canadians couldn’t even leave their provinces, let alone their country. What is to stop progressives in America from pushing things in that direction in their pursuit of an egalitarian, utilitarian utopia? In places like Dallas County, Texas, access to vital monoclonal antibody treatments (a treatment that probably saved my life as a transplant patient) during covid was assessed based on race. So if you didn’t have a listed preexisting condition and were White, you were prioritized last.

Human sacrifice is well back on the menu in the West, for the secular, credentialed gods we made, like Fauci and others. This corpo-speak for assisted suicide will soon make its way to the United States, and we must be prepared.