Why is the topic of assisted suicide on a page that’s all about life? If you look at the Tag-list, #life appears right after #meme and #evolution, but there are no tags for »death« and »suicide«.

The main reason is that assisted suicide has become a symptom of Western civilization’s decline. So-called assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 deaths in Canada, with other progressive countries like the Netherlands and Belgium not far behind. The issue here is not whether the increase in euthanasia-related deaths reflects needs better addressed after legalization, but rather the ontological and moral status of assisted suicide.

Before we discuss the issue of euthanasia, let’s confront death.

Death used to be a normal part of life in all civilizations until the recent Western one.

Without death, there is no life, just as without darkness, there is no light. That was once common knowledge until the rise of Western »science-based« medicine, which created the illusion of eternal life here on Earth. This science dismissed previous religious and esoteric symbolic explanations of »life after physical death« or reincarnations as non-symbolic, suggesting they could be achieved before physical death. As a result, death became the main enemy of life, something we must resist with all our (scientific) powers. A predictable consequence of this view is that we fear death, avoid talking about it, and refuse to symbolize it. Death is now seen as waste—a kind of garbage we want to discard as quickly as possible.

This brings us to the topic of suicide and assisted death, or euthanasia. The difference between suicide and euthanasia relates to the previously mentioned Western medicine.

Let’s be precise with the terms’ Western medicine’ and ‘Western science’. True medicine and true science recognize that they do not fully understand the complexity of beings or the universe. Scientism and false expectations about the powers of modern medicine create the illusion that there is some external force that can act as a substitute. True medicine understands that there is no substitute for an individual, and that the help we receive from medicine is similar to that from our friends. They assist us, but they cannot live in our place or act as proxies.

Such a »scientific« view of medicine in the Western world leads us to believe that there is an app for everything, including life and death. Luckily, these are two exceptions that nothing external can influence, which is the main reason artificial intelligence can never develop human-like qualities.

This leads us to reject the moral validity of assisted suicide or euthanasia on the ontological level.

Just as no one can help us live, no other person, as the individual facing death from the moment of conception, can help him in death. However, does that mean the option of help should also be dismissed?

No, if we understand ‘help’ simply as ‘help’ and not as ‘assistance,’ ‘assistance’ explicitly means that someone takes on a burden or part of a burden from another person. Helping a manager, literally, means partially unburdening the manager. Helping a friend paint an apartment means sharing the total burden between the two of you. In the case of death, assistance would only be possible if the helper were to, in a sense, die as well, which is clearly nonsensical.

If the option for assistance in suicide is rejected, what about help? Here, we face the challenge of individual sovereignty. While it is at least in principle possible to evaluate help in supporting life, since life persists, help in death cannot be evaluated because death is final (at least in the material world). If it is at least theoretically possible to regulate medical help in supporting life, it is impossible to regulate help in death.

Please note that there is a difference between »dying« and »death«. Dying continues and is thus supported by palliative care, while death itself is irreversible, entirely subjective, and beyond any shared understanding. Ontological death cannot be symbolized. It is not discursive and, to repeat, cannot be legally formalized. When someone dies, it can only be officially recognized as such.

Because physical death itself cannot be symbolized, it must be integrated into human symbolic systems through myths and religions. Help in death can only originate from intersubjective symbolic elaborations at the memetic level, not at the physical level. Death is a personal experience, and the only morally and ontologically valid help is memetic. Assisted suicide or euthanasia is morally unacceptable.