Category: Creating Reality Page 1 of 7

History has cycles. When dealing with ideas about how to organize societies there are ideological and sub-ideological cycles. Various nations have been capitalist since the 16th century, but what the means kept changing, usually every 50 to 80 years. Britain started very protectionist. It had periods where imperialism and capitalism were very intertwined. It had laisszez faire periods. All of these were forms of capitalism, but they were quite different from each other. The Roman Empire is an empire from Augustus to the end, but the Rome of Augustus is very different from future Romes, with their serfs (something Augustinian Rome didn’t have), their German legionaires, and so on.

In our times there are people alive who remember two and a half transitions:

The transition from laissez-faire (in America) to New Deal.
The transition of New Deal to Neoliberalism.
The transition of neoliberalism to whatever the new system will be called. (This is not the old system, Trump’s crazed tariffs, export controls to major buyers, the severe cutting of research, etc… all show that.)

In China they remember:

The change from warlordism and Republicanism to Maoism.
The change from Maoism to Dengism.
The recent change from Dengism to Xiism.

Globally we remember multiple transitions as well

The transition from the multi-great power world centered on America/Europe to the Cold War world dominated by the USSR and US. (Note this transition involved two world wars.)
The transition from the cold war world to the unipolar superpower world with the US the world hegemonic power.
The current transition from the American hegeomonic world to whatever will replace it.

In energy technology we have one and a half transitions:

The transition from the coal world to the petrochem world;
The current transition from the petrochem world to the electrical world based on other power sources.

Note that the technological cycle is a LOT slower. (And yes, I’ve left out the digital/telecom, but you could easily make the same sort of schema.

There is also the environmental question, and that’s part of various cycles. We aren’t different from other cultures in this regard: one thesis for the fall of Mesopotamia from the world’s leading region for six to eight thousand years is environmental. They aren’t the only ones.

We have multiple changes income all once:

Sub ideological changes in how capitalism and democracy run in Europe and the US.
A more or less complete change in China from Dengism to Xi-ism.
A change to the world political system, with the rise of China and the weakness of America.
Environmental collapse
Climate Change

All of these at the same times. Not only is “nothing ever happens” bullshit (as it always was) but we live in a period of radical change, and it’s only going to become more obvious over time.

But there are people alive, albeit not many, who remember the pre-WWII world.

Change is constant. It seems slow to humans, but those who live a long life have seen a great, great deal of change. And we didn’t even discuss the way daily life has changed due to the change from the analog world to the digital one. (A change I personally think was probably more bad than good, though I certainly love large parts of it.) And, of course, there’s the revolution in war making technology, strategy and tactics, as big as the change to trench warfare, then the change to blitzkrieg and air war.

Everything changes. And if you have a perspective longer than a couple decades, everything changes pretty fast, actually. Certainly the world I grew up in, that I remember from the 70s and early 80s no longer exists.

In human affairs nothing is constant save change.

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Our Carefully Designed Hell Society

By Ian Welsh

On July 15, 2026

14 Comments

I was amused, in a “oh for fucks sake” way today when I found out that over 80% of workers experience anxiety on Sunday, thinking about return to work on Monday.

Then on Monday heart attacks spike. Thirteen to twenty-five percent higher than normal depending on the study.

Work is anything you do due to coercion. If you wouldn’t do the job if you didn’t need the money, then you’re being coerced by what Max called the whip of hunger. (These days also homelessness.) This is different from being a hunter-gatherer: nature didn’t deliberately set up a system where if you don’t work you die, it’s accidental. And hunter-gatherers are famous for not working when they have a surplus. (To be fair this is partly because it’s hard to store surplus, but many such societies actually forbid creating large private surpluses, as they understood where that leads.)

Now work because it’s truly necessary is fine, but as we all know, and as the late Graeber pointed out, something close to half of jobs are “bullshit jobs”. They either don’t need to be done, or they make the world actively worse. (That would include 90% of people working in finance, for example.)

What Graeber found is that people with “real” jobs, even janitors, might be unhappy, but they were a lot less unhappy than those in bullshit jobs making equivalent wages, because at least they felt like their job really needed to be done.

But this is a pattern that goes beyond jobs. The suicide pattern of teenagers is instructive: suicides drop a lot during summer vacation.

They also dropped during the Covid shutdowns, which I predicted at the time.

Because school sucks. You spend all day doing boring things that teacher tells you to. In the US at least you don’t even learn much, with massive rates of illiteracy because you aren’t really being taught (if that was the goal, it could be achieved much faster and more effectively) you’re being conditioned to do what your told, when your told, to give teacher what they want in the way teacher wants, and to keep your mouth shut when not called on.

You’re being turned into a good little wage slave. It takes years of coercive conditioning to make humans willing to put up with wage slavery and creating those people is the job of schools and teachers. Professors put the finishing touches on those who will wind up being senior wage-slave supervisors or otherwise entrusted with minor bits of power and expected to use it in the interests of the masters.

Adults have heart attacks because work sucks so much. Kids kill themselves.

We created this, as a species. We did this to ourselves. Is there truly no better way we can come up with?

Character and Destiny

By Ian Welsh

On June 4, 2026

8 Comments

From 2012 to 2014 this blog’s project was a large number of pieces on ideology, and quite a few have been about character: how it is created by experience, and how specific types of character (like sociopathy) are selected for amongst our leadership classes. I want to reprint some of these, because they’re fundamental and at least half my readership has never read them.

We’ll star with “Matters of Character”.

Let’s parse this out:

1) Character (personality), determines how people act.

2) While part of character is clearly genetic, much of it forms out of our experiences. Different experiences create different types of character. As a simple thought exercise, you would be a very different person if you had been born five hundred years ago in, say, Central Africa, than you are today.

3) As children, our primary experience is of school. We are a very schooled society, with the upper classes starting school at age 5 or so, and continuing into their mid twenties. Twenty years of schooling is not uncommon. Fifteen to sixteen is completely normal.

4) This schooling takes place when we are forming much of our character, when we are most susceptible to having our character changed.

5) In addition to this, we are influenced by media of various kinds (including books), our parents, and our peer group.

6) Different time periods form different characters, as do different nations, because people born in those times and places have different experiences. The more synchronized events are, as Newberry has noted, the stronger this is. In a mass media society, with relatively fast technological and social change, it makes sense to speak of generations. The character of people born 20 or 30 years apart in modern societies will be different, and within cohorts similar experiences will tend to create somewhat similar patterns of character.

7) Society is nothing except people and their creations and interactions over time. Walk around an old neighbourhood one day, and look at the buildings, the road, the trees and think about all the people who made everything you see, and all the people behind those people. Read the laws, and know that people made those, and enforce those.

8 ) Because society is just people, past and present, the nature of society is formed by our character.

9) If we want a different society, we must deal with matters of character.

10) Because we should be leery of engaging in eugenics, for reasons which should be obvious, changing society involves changing character through changing our lived experiences.

11) Everyone’s character matters, but some people’s character matters more than others. The more power someone has, whether that power comes from political position, charisma, force, or money, the more their character matters.

12) Leaders inform the character of people. People tend to act up, or down, to their leadership.

13) Money is permission. The more money you have, the more you get to decide what other people do. This can be directly through hiring them, or indirectly by buying the products of other people’s time. As the market society has spread to more and more of our lives, what we do is what gets paid for.

14) Who we give money to, and be clear that what banks, government and financial institutions do is decide who gets money, and what they get to spend it on, determines much of the lived experience of adults, and indeed of children outside school, and with the rise of for-profit schooling, inside school.

15) Money positions are of three main types. Elected (taxes); officers (CEOs and so on who control a lot of money that isn’t theirs); actually rich (the money is their own).

16) In all three cases who gets that money is a social choice. Billionaires are a social choice, created by government policy including tax policy, and the entire structure of how profits are booked. Multi-millionaire CEOs are a social choice, created by tax and other laws as well as social norms. And politicians are a social choice, especially in a democracy, but even in autocracies, though in such societies few people’s active and passive consent is needed.

17) If we select for positions of power, whether monetary, political, or charismatic, people whose character is such that they do not insist on good outcomes for the majority of people, then those outcomes will occur only by chance, if the happenstance of technology and environment aligns in what amounts to random fashion. Having not been planned, having not been understood, any such prosperity and freedom will not last.

18) If society is just us, and is a matter of our character combined with environment and technology, then we must consciously choose what we want our character to be. If we look at how we raise children and see that it is not creating the sort of people required for a happy, free, healthy, and prosperous society, then we need to change how we rear children. This is a social decision, not an individual one: we can choose a different type of learning (not necessarily schooling), we can choose a different type of media, we can choose to encourage different types of parenting (parenting styles have changed massively over the last 100 years, more than once).

19) We can also change how we select our leaders, both political and economic, to whom we give money, and for what purpose. We already do: Who makes money is a social choice, embedded in our tax code, laws (like “IP”), and monetary system. We can make other choices and create a system where people make money because they do good, not because they do evil (see “bankers”).

20) We can change our adult experience of the world, and when we change how goods and services are distributed (note that I did not use the word “money”), we will change our experience of the world, and in so doing we will change our character.

21) We can do so even if our current character is flawed. The politicians who ended Jim Crow were themselves mostly racists. They were racists who knew that racism was wrong. It is possible to look at one’s own character and know that it is simply a product of experience: to say “I am racist and sexist but I still know that is wrong.” It is possible to be involved in corruption (Kennedy Sr., the first SEC chairman) and decide to help clean it up, to end it. It is possible to have all the accoutrements of privilege (FDR) and turn around and change society mostly for the better.

We are all products of our time and place. We are all products of our parents and our experiences; millions of small events which shaped our character, for good, for ill, for kicks.

All of us (except maybe a few enlightened sages).

The full realization of how shaped we are is one of the watersheds of any voyage worth having. If you cannot look at yourself, and see how shaped you were, then you are trapped by those experiences, an even more limited and finite being than you need to be.

Once, however, you see the shaping, feel it, know it, and acknowledge it, then you are not free, but you have the potential to be more free, to change what you are and who you are, both individually, and as a group.

Character matters. It is destiny. Change your character, change your destiny. Change the character of nations; change their destiny.

Change the character of humanity; change our destiny.

The Haters Guide To Post-Modernism

By Sean Paul Kelley

On May 15, 2026

25 Comments

To be read while listening to the Beastie Boys, Sabotage, at full tilt. Speakers, not earbuds you nit-wit.

In the beginning, circa 1989-93ish, post-modernism was out of step with mainstream academia. Derrida was a curiosity. Baudrillard was simply too dense to understand. (Confession: Baudrillard’s book, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” is actually damned profound and prescient once you get past the kind of syntax that would make Yoda blush.) And Foucault, poor Michel (already dead by the time I attended university) was still dismissed as a fad—although of all the post-moderns Foucault’s work has aged the best and is worthy of respect. His discourses on the body, knowledge and the aggrandizement of power over all three by public institutions presaged neoliberalism. Credit where credit is due.

Sed tamen aberro . . .

Regardless, to the overworked and underpaid graduate students the post-moderns had the frisson of transgression. And nothing attracts the mediocre like a charlatan wrapped in the mantle of authenticity.

Eventually, those grad students became instructors, adjuncts and associate professors all over the country. Chipping away at the old ways by introducing Lyotard’s “incredulity towards meta-narratives” and Roland Barthes declaration that “the author was dead” both invalidating authorial intent and empowering the reader’s (usually baseless) interpretation, Derrida’s rejection of common sense and objective interpretations (known as ‘Deconstruction’) was the perfect mortar for the worst possible innovation.

It was probably Foucault, as his education included a substantial grounding in the history of science, who connected the dots leading from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, aka the observer effect, and grafted the concept onto his own thinking on the fluid and relative nature between institutions and power.

Then, in 1975 he took LSD. The experience changed everything according to Foucault. He completely revamped his work on human sexuality and its was here that sex took on the aspect of a social construct, to be negotiated. Sex was no longer an issue of pleasure, but of truth. (And thus our sexual identity politics were born.) Foucault’s popular discourse took on a life of its own, especially after his premature death in 1984.

The post-moderns soon expropriated wholesale the ‘observer effect.’ Unfortunately they abandoned rigorous analysis at the same time and like the good mediocre minds they were, adopted a pose I call, “la pose de Sarte.”*

With a highly dubious interpretation of science in one hand and quasi-erotic mojo in another students flocked to their lectures in droves. The ladies showed up for you. The men showed up for the ladies. And everyone ate up the half-baked but dangerously sexy contrarian theories on race, gender, and the negotiation of sexual identity.

Sometime between 2002 and 2014 when I returned to academia the entire coterie of post-moderns had infected all the humanities. And the observer effect acted like leprosy rotting the academy from every which way at once.

But the classes were full. Administrators took note. Professors got grants.

“Whoa, this grift is working?” They thought.

“Nicely done, Waldo.”

Now they’re wearing Zegna shoes and hand-woven black woolen Irish turtlenecks. Undergrad coeds hop in and out of their beds like Mae West on meth.

Soon they get published in peer reviewed journals by overworked and underpaid peers who just don’t give two fucks because university administrators have proliferated while tenured jobs have declined in nominal and real terms.

Big time college sports gobble up what is left of the academic budget, so universities start hiring half-assed adjunct professors and pay them slave wages.

And still, the post-moderns strike le pose, claiming their bullshit truth is equally as true as 2+2=4, when in actuality said theory is the the square root of wildebeest horns multiplied by baboon asses, divided by the Pyramid of Giza plus the Sphinx.

Making any sense yet?

It should not. It should boggle the mind, as not one iota of the post-moderns nonsense theorizing is scientifically provable or falsifiable. It’s bunkum. A weak attempt to prove there is no such thing as objective reality to anyone but the observer.

While working on my second masters I signed up for a seminar on the history of human sexuality. This was 2015 and we deconstructed the biological focus of traditional theories of sexuality. Now there was a masterclass of freeway rubbernecking idiocy. After that nonesense, we discussed Foucault, Jameson and finally Deluze, who more than any other post-modern flagrantly conflated science and mathematics to justify nothingness and subjectivity’s role on the observer’s effect, especially on sexual identity.

Give you one guess what conclusion we arrived at: sex is a social construct.

To be fair, gender is a social construct. The Thai’s have three genders, masculine, feminine and khathoey, or ‘Lady Boy.’ Kathoey are fully integrated and accepted into mainstream Thai, Cambodian and Laotian society. But sex, sex is not a construct.

I can prove the objective reality of sex’s falsifiability as a social construct.

Question: can you have an orgasm? Answer: yes. Then you are male or female.

Answer: no. Well, I respect your commitment, snip-snip, but you are neither male nor female.

Why would the professor care about any of this? He has tenure and his agenda. Besides, he’s getting laid more than Hank Moody in Californication.

Meanwhile the students grow stupider yet simultaneously more arrogant as they adopt le pose.

A vicious cycles ensues and we now find ourselves in the present moment, slaves to time’s relentless arrow.

But as the close neared its end it was time to put up or shut up. Yes, I know how to be a good suck up of a student and get high marks!

So, I wrote my research paper on the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and his catamite. I got an ‘A’ but the course, well, to be generous, it was a shit show of moral degeneracy and complete intellectual absurdity.

I’d have been better off in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. At least I’d have had more fun.

————————

*Sarte: French existentialist philosopher of high regard and mortal enemy of Foucault.

What Is Post-Modern Thought?

By Sean Paul Kelley

On September 5, 2025

11 Comments

Until I went back to graduate school 12 years ago, I really had little exposure to post-modern thought. Let’s just say after getting my master’s I’m very familiar with it now. It just wasn’t taught in the 90s when I got my bachelors. But now? I got a rude awakening.

Post-modern thought is not a complete philosophy like say the Enlightenment or the Renaissance, or even Aristotle’s great efforts at systematizing human experience. Nor is it an ideology. What the totality of post-modern thought represents, both its Continental version and its Anglo-American offshoot, is a highly adaptable toolset to critique the modern world, to learn to understand it in very uncomfortable but real ways: a toolset that alters a persons perception away from preconceived notions they are often born and indoctrinated into at an early age, that will inevitably challenge their view of the world and the processes that dominate their lives. But it is not an ideology like capitalism—backed up by the fantasy of Chicago School economics, or socialism or Communism. It is incomplete, not a totality of ideas for living and creating government like the Enlightenment philosophers imagined.

That said, the collection of post-modern thought is a highly worthwhile corpus of texts to read, which soon becomes a very useful toolset to engage in modern and ancient texts, modern media, nationalism and government. At least, that’s been my experience. Yes, I know I kind of repeated myself. Sue me.

Perhaps an example will be efficacious. Let’s go with Foucault’s discussion of the nation owning a person’s biology. An excellent example from my own life is my father had stem cells harvested to rebuild the cartilage in his knee several years ago for a procedure in Mexico. He had the stem cells harvested in the US and they prohibited the export of them to Mexico. So he had to start all over. I can think of many other examples, such as female body autonomy in the United States. I would never have conceived of my own nation owning my biology, but when I consider that corporations can now patent DNA Foucault’s ideas first ring true and second increased my analytical rigor towards just how much power “they” have and how little choice I truly have. Not to mention how my choices are only growing less and less as we go full fascist and I grow older.

Why do I bring this up? I have no idea. It’s 2:11 AM central time and I can’t sleep. My unsleeping brain got stuck on Foucault so I decided to write this up. Maybe I should read some Foucault next time. That guarantees sleep.

Is Consciousness Reality’s Organizing Principle? (Beyond Biocentrism, by Lanza and Berman)

By Ian Welsh

On August 28, 2025

25 Comments

Quantum mechanics is seriously weird. The majority of us have a model of the world based primarily on Newtonian physics. We believe in cause and effect. The universe is a giant machine following laws, and if there wasn’t a single conscious being in it, those laws would still be the same.

But in quantum mechanics particles like photons don’t exist as particles until observed. If a photon is given the choice of two paths, it takes both as a wave, but if measured and observed to see which path it took, it then takes only one.

The key point here is observed. If a measurement is in the past, the photon doesn’t choose which particle path it took until observed. (It may decohere, it doesn’t choose which way to decohere. Or that’s Lanza and Berman’s argument.)

Schrodinger’s cat is an attempt to scale this up to macro, and to show how absurd it is. “The cat is both alive and dead.” (It doesn’t really work, because the cat is conscious and observes.)

Lanza has written a series of books on Biocentrism, each more extreme than the last. Beyond Biocentrism is the third in the series.

Biocentrism takes the quantum physics at its face and tries to extend the consequences. It argues that nothing really exists except in potentiality (a range of possibilities) until it is observed by something that is conscious. This doesn’t have to mean a human, presumably any conscious being will do the job. Lanza discusses bird and fish and bats and dogs, all of whom observe the world differently than them, but I’d point out that evidence is coming in that at least some plants (almost certainly trees) are conscious. Perhaps single celled entities are, and we keep finding those in places like Mars and the subsurface oceans of moons and so on.

Lanza notes that the conditions for life, especially Earth life, are very specific. From atomic constants to the moon impacting the Earth in just the right way and winding up not orbiting the equator, nor destroying the Earth, the odds against a garden world like ours are astronomical. Even the odds of a universe existing which allowed for life in theory are astronomical.

Biocentrism resolves this by putting consciousness first. Concrete reality is formed by consciousness, so physical laws must confirm to what is required for life, since it is biological life which gives rise to consciousness. The odds go from astronomical, to “they had to support life, so they did.”

Lanza’s interpretations of the consequences of quantum mechanics or even of quantum mechanics itself aren’t always orthodox. For example, there’s a delayed choice experiment called the quantum eraser, in which finding out something in the future seems to change the past.

While delayed-choice experiments might seem to allow measurements made in the present to alter events that occurred in the past, this conclusion requires assuming a non-standard view of quantum mechanics. If a photon in flight is instead interpreted as being in a so-called “superposition of states“—that is, if it is allowed the potentiality of manifesting as a particle or wave, but during its time in flight is neither—then there is no causation paradox. This notion of superposition reflects the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Lanza interprets this as “no the change actually occurs in the past and there is a causation “paradox”, though in biocentrism it’s not a paradox, since consciousness is primary.

I don’t claim to know who’s right about this. Hopefully an experiment will be devised which resolves the issues. But Lanza brings it up in part to rescue free choice.

As you may be aware, experiments show that by the time we become consciously aware of making a decision, the decision has already been made. Biologists can tell that we’ll do something before we believe we’ve made the decision. Since neural activity is fundamentally quantum, Lanza attempts to rescue free will by suggesting that the decision is indeed made when we believe we did, it’s just that it changes the past thru the act of observation.

Without something like this, we are, in fact, biological machines and free will is an illusion. Blaming or taking credit for anything you have ever done, or anything you are, is ludicrous. You are just a cause and effect machine and your idea that you’re in control of any of it is an illusion. (Why that illusion should exist is an interesting question.)

I don’t consider myself qualified to judge Lanza and Berman’s work on Biocentrism. It might be substantially right and it might not be. But I do think he makes a good case that the science (which he describes at great length, including having appendices with the math) doesn’t allow us to cling to Newtonian or even Einsteinian views of the universe or our place in it. Something weird is going on when consciousness is required to cause packet collapse. Indeed, he even includes one experiment where the effect was scaled up to macro, though still a very small macro.

The world is strange. Far stranger than the still reigning consensus “folk” models suggest, and while biocentrism may not be correct in all its details, it’s worth reading and considering, because it takes quantum mechanics weird results seriously and tries to reason from them, rather than around them in an attempt to preserve as much of the older systems as possible.

At the same time, we must always be wary. After all, post-Newton very few people outside of some religions would have argued against a clockwork universe, and it turned out that informed opinion was, well, wrong. (Which doesn’t mean God made the universe in 7 days or any such nonsense.)

Still, this is the cutting edge, and we know at the very least that it puts a few nails in the clockwork universe’s coffin and at least a couple into the relativistic universe. To ignore it, and to pretend that consciousness isn’t much more important than we thought it was is head in sand style thinking. And Lanza isn’t some quack. His interpretation may be unorthodox, but he understand the science.

I think this, or one of the other Biocentrism books is very worth reading. Even if you wind up not buying the whole package, you’ll be forced to rethink what you “know.”

***

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Hell Is What Humans Deserve

By Ian Welsh

On December 12, 2024

19 Comments

I don’t know how to explain this to readers, but I’m going to try.

If you want to live in a good world or good society, certain types of behaviour have to be off the table and the response to them has to be harsh and overwhelming.

Understand the next statement: Anyone who will take what they want from someone else just because they are stronger is a threat to you.

The moment you say “none of my business” when someone abuses their power, you have created the conditions for Hell.

This is why certain behaviours have to be opposed. Genocide. Rape. Torture. Elites making the price of medicine a thousand times the cost.

Now, in the Middle East, Israel wants Greater Israel. They haven’t been shy about it. All of their neighbours and even some of their non-neighbours are in danger if Israel expands and grows more powerful. All of them are in danger if Israel eliminates the near enemies: Syria, Hezbollah and the Palestinians because they will then be able to turn their full power and attention (and that of America) on new enemies with lebensraum.

This is so obvious I shouldn’t have to state it.

And Israel is a threat to America, too. They control your politics (no, don’t even) and make your rulers do things that are evil and against American interests, and certainly against the interests of the vast majority of actual Americans. Yeah, they aren’t genociding you, but as millions are homeless you’re spending billions on helping Israel commit genocide.

Israeli cops teach American cops how to brutalize Americans the way they brutalize Palestinians. Everything American elites are willing to do Palestinians they are willing to do to you if they ever decide it’s in their best interest. If you think they have the least fellow feeling for you you are so stupid I’m surprised you can keep breathing.

Hell is hell because evil is tolerated or even admired and suckers who do good are despised. Heaven is heaven because evil is not tolerated and people who do good are admired and emulated.

Update: Israel is now 20 miles from the northern border to Lebanon in Syria. But Syria falling is no big deal, honest.

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Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase

By Ian Welsh

On November 25, 2024

15 Comments

Nothing saves money on people who are old, disabled and unable to work like just killing them.

Covid killed mostly old people. That saved the government money in the long run, although in the short run it was expensive, except for Sweden where they just euthanized their old people with Covid instead of treating them. (Gave them opiods even when they had enough oxygen and drugs.)

Since Covid, however, there’s been an unfortunate increase in people who can’t work because they’re chronically ill.

This isn’t hard to understand. Britain is massively importing young people who can work, or older people who have lots of money, but at the same time the number of people who are liabilities, financially speaking, is exploding. If you have a liability the easiest way to get rid of it is to… get rid of it.

Canada’s in the same boat, and these bills will spread.

Assisted suicide isn’t automatically a bad thing, mind you. If people were properly supported and cared for I’d support it. People who are in a ton of pain and won’t get better ought to have the option.

But when the government is whining about benefits and cutting them, as in Britain, one doesn’t expect this is being done from a humanitarian impulse. And the medical and social workers, in hospitals and palliative care centers that are overstretched and don’t have enough nurses or doctors or beds, well, convincing someone who’s taking up time or a bed to just die already will have to be pretty tempting, sometimes even with somewhat good motives: to free up resources for people who can be cared for.

But, of course, what will often happen is that chronically ill people or homeless types who could live for quite a long time and with proper care could be fairly happy will wind up dead because in Britain and Canada we don’t help them enough: to get enough housing, food, help and pain meds (given the way we’re so scared of opiates.)

Wikipedia lists some known cases of abuse of the law:

In 2017, a mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy was told by a doctor that not applying for MAID was “selfish”. Her daughter was in the room when the conversation took place and described the experience as traumatic.^[71]
In 2018, Roger Foley was being treated for cerebellar ataxia at an Ontario hospital. Foley alleged that his only options were to be forcibly discharged from the hospital and then treated by an organization that had previously failed to provide him adequate care or apply for MAID. Foley hired a lawyer for a charter challenge.^[72]
In 2019, Alan Nichols successfully applied for MAID while being hospitalized for suicide ideation. The reason given on his application was hearing loss.^[1]
In September 2021, Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Malaysian woman, applied for MAID citing fibromyalgia as the reason. However, in conversations and recordings shared with friends, she mentioned financial hardship and social isolation as additional factors influencing her decision.^[73]
In February 2022, an anonymous Torontonian suffering from extreme chemical sensitivity syndrome with the pseudonym Sophia had a medically assisted death after failing to find affordable housing that was free from tobacco smoke and other chemicals.^[74] This case was addressed by her health care provider in testimony provided to the Special Joint Committee on MAID, and was referenced in their final report.^[75]

One can safely assume there are many, many more. The fact is that even doctors and social workers think some lives are worth more than others. No one who’s spent time in the medical system believes otherwise.

The West is in decline. Our elites are wedded to austerity as a “solution”. They often, probably usually, feel that people who are non-productive are useless eaters and a burden on the state.

That combination is going to lead to a truly vast expansion of measures intended to get people off benefit rolls.

In a way assisted suicide, or euthanasia, is the most honest of those policies and maybe even the most merciful. There’s nothing honest about deliberate policies which make people homeless, leading to most of their deaths, after all. Politicians know that winding up on the street long term is essentially a death sentence, they know that policies like mass immigration without increasing the housing supply to match will cause homelessness, so they know their policies cause homelessness and death but they can pretend it’s an unintended side effect.

Just killing people is at least not hypocritical.

***

Close to the end of the annual fundraiser, which has been weaker than normal despite increased traffic. Given how much I write about the economy, I understand, but if you can afford it and value my writing, I’d appreciate it if you subscribe or donate.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Creating Reality Page 1 of 7

We Live In Epochal Times

Our Carefully Designed Hell Society

Character and Destiny

The Haters Guide To Post-Modernism

What Is Post-Modern Thought?

Is Consciousness Reality’s Organizing Principle? (Beyond Biocentrism, by Lanza and Berman)

Hell Is What Humans Deserve

Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase