Transvaluation of Ethics

It astonishes me – the casualness, the callousness, the stupid matter-of-factness with which people can discuss euthanasia. People discuss putting their family members to sleep with only slightly more gravity than putting a pet to sleep. Why is abortion given a greater level of discretion in conversation than “pulling the plug”? Because starving someone to death and taking them off life support is considered a more humane way to kill them than vacuuming off their limbs and crushing their skull?

Let it be known that I don’t want anyone deciding when it’s time for me to die. I’ll fight to the last moment, thank you. And the same goes for my family. There’s all kinds of pious crap put out by religious fanatics (and they are fanatics, when we’re talking about neglect and murder) — all kinds of garbage about not using extraordinary means to save us. Who decides what’s extraordinary? The world? By this logic, why use CPR on a drowning victim? It may be their time, right? I hate this with my whole heart. I will fight to the end, I will sustain my family with everything in me, and I will not set an example of pushing myself out on an ice flow so as not to be a burden. That’s the culture of savages, not of Christ. People are not burdens, they’re not expendable, and they’re not ‘in the way’.

In fact, when I hear the words of Christians justifying the Culture of Convenience, the Culture of “Don’t get in my way” (to borrow from Franky Schaeffer), of “Don’t burden me”, I breathe and spit. This is the Enemy we’ve known from of old, and it has infected the minds of the faithful with the silky foulness of the demonic.

It’s worse, of course, to kill someone or abandon them or neglect them to death than to talk about killing them. But the fact that there’s no shame, that’s it’s considered a normal part of polite conversation makes me want to vomit. And I’m supposed to express condolences at their loss? That kind of “sensitivity” is the same kind that would congratulate someone for fornicating, because they’re now in a meaningful relationship.

Human life is an absolute value. I really hate this culture, its transvaluation of ethics, and all it represents. Most of all, it represents a culture of sacrifice, as Rand pointed out. A culture of expending some for the sake of others. You see it in our resource wars, in the way we drive on the freeway, and in the institutionalization of medical care not as a saving charity but as a kind of semi-benign curse. After all, we’re the only country of this level of wealth where you can go bankrupt from receiving medical care, and die when the last pennies run out. Every other society with this much money, considers that barbaric. Here, we figure the laws of the market outweigh the cost of sustaining your existence.

Scorn, derision, excrement upon this culture.