blueming
if we can stand outside the borders of time
- Sep 21, 2018
- 253
When a person makes a suicide attempt, he is not sent to a hospital prison; instead, if he has followed proper procedures for signaling his intention, he dies. The most lethal, comfortable methods are widely available, and since suicide is fine, a competitive market arises to provide the most appealing methods. The power of the market is brought to bear on the problem of finding desirable ways to die. Not just "Ask your doctor if Obliviall is right for you," but also death arcades.
The market is a powerful instrument, and allowing it to solve the problems of suicide makes disposal relatively comfortable and efficient. No one has to cut his arteries or shoot himself fourteen times with a .22. Only rarely does someone jump off a tall building. Suicide is easy, painless, and guaranteed. Technology can go a long way toward undermining our unchosen, Nature-programmed, often irrational fixation on our own continued existence.
So everyone who wants to die may die. But to ensure that disposal is truly free, other costs must be removed from the suicide as well. Suicide has no stigma here. In kindergarten your kid's teacher has each student draw a picture on the topic of "When Would I Kill Myself?" It is very sad when children commit suicide - and many of them do, even in our world - but preventing them from doing so is not free disposal.
Many people do not want to die alone. People may sit with a dying suicide to comfort and even assist him without fear of imprisonment. Public policy allows suicides to donate their organs at a hospital. There is no organ shortage here, and since suicide isn't creepy at all, everybody wins.
Rather than spending tens of millions on suicide prevention efforts, the governing body spends money on campaigns to promote the right to suicide. Billboards, television and the internet carry the message that suicide is a sacred right, rather than the message that suicide is wrong and a sign of illness. PSAs remind people that "No One Owns You - Suicide is Your Right!" On the chance that suicide "contagion" is real and social proof removes a major cost of suicide, fictional and nonfictional accounts of successful suicides are broadcast widely in approving terms. Curricula in schools emphasize personal autonomy, vilify interpersonal possessiveness, and treat suicide as a positive life choice to be seriously considered.
These are excerpts I've taken from the book "Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide" by Sarah Perry, from the section in which she talks about a hypothetical "Land of Free Disposal" where suicide is truly free. It's not meant to describe a possible utopia - for example, I definitely don't agree with giving kindergarten children the idea and means to commit suicide when they're not old enough to understand what life and death even are. It's a thought experiment that tries to illustrate what a society that fully embraces suicide would look like, where every single person has absolute personal autonomy over their lives without any obstacles. This theoretical construct was made in response to someone called Bryan Caplan claiming that we already live in a Land of Free Disposal because according to him, there are so many tall buildings in the world we could jump off "freely" and because we don't utilize those free disposal services, life must always be worth living.
The market is a powerful instrument, and allowing it to solve the problems of suicide makes disposal relatively comfortable and efficient. No one has to cut his arteries or shoot himself fourteen times with a .22. Only rarely does someone jump off a tall building. Suicide is easy, painless, and guaranteed. Technology can go a long way toward undermining our unchosen, Nature-programmed, often irrational fixation on our own continued existence.
So everyone who wants to die may die. But to ensure that disposal is truly free, other costs must be removed from the suicide as well. Suicide has no stigma here. In kindergarten your kid's teacher has each student draw a picture on the topic of "When Would I Kill Myself?" It is very sad when children commit suicide - and many of them do, even in our world - but preventing them from doing so is not free disposal.
Many people do not want to die alone. People may sit with a dying suicide to comfort and even assist him without fear of imprisonment. Public policy allows suicides to donate their organs at a hospital. There is no organ shortage here, and since suicide isn't creepy at all, everybody wins.
Rather than spending tens of millions on suicide prevention efforts, the governing body spends money on campaigns to promote the right to suicide. Billboards, television and the internet carry the message that suicide is a sacred right, rather than the message that suicide is wrong and a sign of illness. PSAs remind people that "No One Owns You - Suicide is Your Right!" On the chance that suicide "contagion" is real and social proof removes a major cost of suicide, fictional and nonfictional accounts of successful suicides are broadcast widely in approving terms. Curricula in schools emphasize personal autonomy, vilify interpersonal possessiveness, and treat suicide as a positive life choice to be seriously considered.
These are excerpts I've taken from the book "Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide" by Sarah Perry, from the section in which she talks about a hypothetical "Land of Free Disposal" where suicide is truly free. It's not meant to describe a possible utopia - for example, I definitely don't agree with giving kindergarten children the idea and means to commit suicide when they're not old enough to understand what life and death even are. It's a thought experiment that tries to illustrate what a society that fully embraces suicide would look like, where every single person has absolute personal autonomy over their lives without any obstacles. This theoretical construct was made in response to someone called Bryan Caplan claiming that we already live in a Land of Free Disposal because according to him, there are so many tall buildings in the world we could jump off "freely" and because we don't utilize those free disposal services, life must always be worth living.
