Our Pathological Aversion to Suffering is Destroying Us

Nearly a third of Canadians (28%) think that doctors should be allowed to ‘assist’ in bringing about the death of people who are afflicted by homeless. Roughly the same number (27%) think the same ‘treatment’, if it can be called that, should be meted out to those who are merely poor.

That’s according to a recent poll carried out by Research Co. The same poll also showed that one in five Canadians were fine with Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD - Canada’s euthanasia program), being handed out to anybody for any reason, regardless of health conditions or circumstances.

That a sizable minority of Canadians — who we’re always told are the nicest people on the planet, remember — think it’s ok for the state to put down stray people as though they were feral dogs, is bad enough. Perhaps even more alarmingly, half think that killing disabled people is fine, and a slim majority, 51%, think that MAiD is an acceptable outcome for people who have been trying to get medical help but can’t access it.

People like Sophia (not her real name), for example, a 51-year-old Ontario resident who was killed through MAiD last year after trying and failing for two years to secure better social housing. All she was asking for was a home free from environmental pollutants such as smoke and chemical cleaners, which were triggering her allergies. Instead she was handed death.

Or how about former paralympian and veteran, retired Cpl. Christine Gauthier.

Gauthier, who has been trying to get a wheelchair ramp installed at her home for the past five years, recently told a Canadian Parliamentary committee: “It was just getting too much and unbearable. And the person at VAC [Veterans Affairs Canada] mentioned at that point, ‘Well, you know that we can assist you with assisted dying now if you'd like.’ And I was just shocked because I was like, 'Are you serious?' Like, that easy, you're going to be helping me to die but you won't help me to live?”

“You’ll help me to die, but you won’t help me to live”. What more can we expect from our current neo-Marxist woke culture, the philosophy of which raises ‘possession of power’ to the supreme metric by which we must all measure our lives? What could be more logical, in that framework, than concluding that, for the powerless — like the poor, the homeless, and people who can’t get their local health system to install a wheelchair ramp at the house — death is preferable to continuing their disempowered lives?

Certainly, that was the conclusion two so-called ‘bioethicists’ from the University of Toronto recently reached. In a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (ha!), Kayla Weibe and Amy Mullin argued that people who are living in “unjust” conditions should be able to receive MAiD, even if they don’t actually want to die.

“We understand ‘unjust social circumstances’ to be circumstances in which people do not have meaningful access to the range of options to which they are entitled,” they wrote in the abstract to the paper, adding “People in these circumstances would choose otherwise (i.e., not to die), were conditions more just.” They went on: “we use a harm reduction approach, arguing that even though such decisions are tragic, MAiD should be available.”

Only the abstract is available for free online, but the National Post quotes them as arguing within the body of the paper: “To force people who are already in unjust social circumstances to have to wait until those social circumstances improve, or for the possibility of public charity that sometimes but unreliably occurs when particularly distressing cases become public, is unacceptable,” … “A harm reduction approach acknowledges that the recommended solution is necessarily an imperfect one: a ‘lesser evil’ between two or more less than ideal options.”

Think about what Wiebe and Mullin are saying here. Effectively their argument is that every person is entitled to have everything they want; that if they can’t, even in the short term, it’s because of ‘unjust’ social systems, and that the best response to short term ‘suffering’ in this manner is opting for death. No wonder we have doctors telling parents that if their son doesn’t have his penis removed immediately, or their daughter her breasts cut off to relieve the anguish of having to go through puberty and teenagehood, that their child will die. It’s the exact same framework. Death is preferable to even temporary suffering of any sort, because any suffering is unjust.

To think this way is, of course, to take aversion to discomfort to a pathological level. All human life entails some level of hardship. Indeed, it’s hardship that makes life in any way meaningful. Without hardship there is nothing to strive for, no goals to be reached, no satisfaction of effort paying dividends. With no real risk of failure, even the striving is meaningless. We need something to kick back against, we need impetus driving us forward, or what’s the bloody point? Suffering isn’t something to be feared and avoided at all costs — especially at the cost of one’s own life. It should be embraced. Suffering, striving, hardship, endeavour: these are the processes that will teach you who you are and why you exist. They are the things that make life worth living. Without the possibility of disaster, there is no triumph, there’s just eternal nothingness.

But at the heart of this deep pathology is a yearning for utopia: that false and perhaps satanic notion that there is a perfect world, that we can all be perfectly happy all the time, if only we can engineer the right conditions.

That invocation of utopia surfaced in another way recently, in a discussion between Lex Fridman and Manolis Kellis, a computational biologist at MIT. Kellis is excited about the rise of AI, which he believes will finally, finally, usher in the utopia humanity has long been waiting for.

"I see AI as perhaps leading to a dramatic rethinking of human society,” he told Fridman. “If you think about the economy being based on intellectual goods that I'm producing, what if AI can produce a lot of these intellectual goods, and satisfies that need? Does that now free humans for more artistic expression, for more emotional maturing, for basically having a better work-life balance? [Imagine] being able to show up for your two hours of work a day, or two hours of work like three times a week with, like, immense rest and preparation and exercise, and you're sort of clearing your mind and suddenly you have these two amazingly creative hours. You basically show up at the office as your AI is busy answering your phone calls, making all your meetings, you know, revising all your papers etc, and then you show up for those creative hours and you're like: ‘Alright, autopilot, I'm on’, and then you can basically do so so much more that you would perhaps otherwise never get to because you're so overwhelmed with these mundane aspects of your of your job. So I feel that AI can truly transform the human condition from realizing that we don't have jobs anymore, we now have vocations.

“There's this beautiful analogy of three people laying bricks and somebody comes over and asks the first one ‘What are you doing?’ He's like ‘Oh, I'm laying bricks’. Second one: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m building a wall’. And the third one: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I'm building this beautiful cathedral’. So in a way the first one has a job, the last one has a vocation. If you ask me: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Oh, I'm editing a paper’, then I have a job. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m understanding human disease circuitry’; I have a vocation. So in a way, being able to allow us to enjoy more of our vocation by taking away, offloading some of the job part of our daily activities.

Fridman: “So we all become the the builders of cathedrals?

Kellis: “Correct.”

Fridman: “Yeah, and we follow intellectual pursuits, artistic pursuits. I wonder how that really changes, at a scale of several billion people, everybody playing in the space of ideas, in the space of creations.”

Kellis: “So ideas … maybe for some of us, maybe you and I are in the job of ideas, but other people are in the job of experiences. Other people are in the job of emotions, of dancing, of creative artistic expression, of, you know, skydiving and you name it. So basically, again, the beauty of human diversity is exactly that: that what rocks my boat might be very different from what rocks other people's boats What I'm trying to say is that maybe AI will allow humans to truly, like, not just look for but find meaning. Sort of … you don't need to work, but you need to keep your brain at ease and the way that your brain will be at ease is by dancing and creating these amazing movements, or creating these amazing paintings, or creating, I don't know, something that sort of changes, that touches at least one person out there. That sort of shapes humanity through that process. And instead of working your mundane programming job where you, like, hate your boss and you hate your job and you say you hate that darn program etc, you're like: ‘Well I don't need that, I can offload that, and I can now explore something that will actually be more beneficial to human to humanity because the mundane parts can be offloaded.”

It’s a beguiling vision, isn’t it? A world in which everybody would be free to pursue to the greatest degree their own passions, whatever those might be. A world not only free from want, but also from any sort of hindrence. A world, as Weibe and Mullin might put it, in which everybody has “meaningful access to the range of options to which they are entitled.” A just world.

But there’s a problem.

In my last essay I argued that the rightful purpose of government is to keep citizens safe, not only from outside threat but also from the inherent dangers of unfettered innovation. It is the curse of a writer to always think of a better way to phrase something after you’ve hit publish. Truth be told, I wasn’t totally happy with that essay when I completed it, but it’s taken some more mulling to get to the root of why that might be.

I think the answer is this: in that essay, I treated government safetyism and capitalist innovation as diametrically opposed forces, positing innovation as the force which keeps society moving forward, and safetyism as a natural break lever which stops innovation running too wildly off the rails. But having considered the matter more, I wonder whether they are in fact two heads of the same chimera. Think about it: every single innovation ever has always been rolled out with the same promise: that it will make our lives easier, simpler, safer, longer, and more comfortable.

There’s a saying in marketing circles: you’re not selling a drill, you’re selling a hole in a wall. Every marketer knows that the way to sell any product is to posit it as the solution to a pressing problem or need. Want to ensure a steady supply of food even when the rains fail? Try agriculture! Need to carry a heavy load from one place to another? Let me introduce: the wheel! Tired of getting drenched every time a storm passes by? I present to you: the house! And so it goes on all the way up to the present day. We now have an app for everything, including the very basics of human life: gathering food, securing shelter, even finding the perfect life partner — that’s Wolt, Rightmove and Tindr, all neatly packaged in a format we can access with that now most indespensible of tools: the smartphone. Where has it gotten us? Isolated, overweight, sleep deprived, and on the precipice of locking ourselves into an inescapable digital prison, all in the name of ‘convenience’.

Kellis is a cunning marketer. We have a problem, you see — a real problem, not the kind that marketers like to make up. Too many of us are chained to bullshit jobs by financial requirements that leave us unable to pursue our real interests and passions. That really does represent a very real opportunity cost for humanity — and it always has. How many budding Nicolai Teslas are unable to gift the world their innovations because they’re having to spend 40 hours a week on pointless and mindless busywork? How many have we lost over the years to the rigours of subsistence farming? Well, fear not! Soon AI will take over the busywork, leaving us all free to pursue artistic and intellectual endeavours.

But it’s a pretty ‘bougie’ sort of utopia, as the kids like to say (or ‘bourgeois’ for the older folk among you). It’s the sort of utopia that a middle class intellectual would dream of. What about the people who don’t fit this rubric? What about people who are mentally or physically unable — or even simply uninterested and unwilling — to take advantage of the range of options to which they are entitled? Should we just kill them through MAiD?

Kellis himself knows that his utopian vision is flawed. He says so himself (my emphases):

“What I told my students is: You're not going to be replaced by AI, but you're going to be replaced by people who use AI in your job, so embrace it, use it as your partner and work with it rather than sort of forbidding it, because I think the productivity gains will actually lead to a better society. That's something that humans have been traditionally very bad at — every productivity gain has led to more inequality — and I'm hoping that we can do better this time; that basically right now a democratization of these types of productivity gains will hopefully come with better, sort of, humanity level, um, improvements in human condition.” 

Wait, what?! Every single innovation of the past has led to inequality but this one will hopefully be different, just: because?

Why would it be? Kellis doesn’t know, he just hopes it will.

They say that madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. If so, Kellis is surely mad, as is anyone else who thinks that we’re just one more innovation, one more convenience-giving device away from utopia. We’re not. The sane prediction to make here is that the AI revolution and the exponential gains in productivity it will bring about will create the least equal society humanity has ever seen: a two-tier humanity in which Kellis and his friends are free to lead lives of intellectual pursuit, while everyone deemed ‘not reaching their potential’ will be mercilessly euthanised for the sake of society. After all, to borrow another Marxist phrase, why bother keeping all those useless eaters about? If they’re not leading what the neo-Marxists consider meaningful lives, they’re just a drain on society’s resources.

The question that desperately needs both asking and answer is this: When the stakes are ‘death’ for anyone who doesn’t find ultimate fulfillment in the next iteration of progress, can we really afford to simply sit back and let the experiment run yet again? Or do we need to try a different path, one that involves embracing, rather than pathologically shunning, trial and tribulation?