My mind has decided to be creative today, so I wrote a short essay, feel free to criticize and comment. Please remember that English is not my native language...........
Death doesn't solve any problems
Essay by Victor Bjoerk
In Sweden, a typical wealthy European country, we have a unique history of good recordkeeping since roughly 250 years ago. The central bureau of statistics keeps track on just about anything from human height to cheese consumption.
As in most of what we call "civilized" parts of the world we have a really low infant mortality, Actually it is so low that 997 out of 1000 babies will celebrate their 5th birthday.
The life expectancy is also high by international standards, 79 years for men and 83 for women, but the gains for each year are getting smaller and smaller.
The "natural" aging process is in fact so dangerous that you have a probability of dying between 80 and 81 that is over 500 times the odds of dying between 20-21.
The Swedish government is famous for constantly warning about the threats and dangers of just about everything, just look at the recent example of ZnO in sunscreens. Also they constantly give health messages to the public on how we should improve our lifestyle.
Despite this it seems that we are stuck with a "death wall" between 80 and 85. Actually 40% of Swedish people will die between their 80th and 90th birthday of aging.
This is in part a good scenario since we consider it better to live to 80 than 30, but we are still stuck with this "death wall" of the typical age-related disease that overlap lifestyle-related disease.
Many people are deathists and supporters of death through aging, they think terminal age-related illnesses are acceptable as a part of life. Some even describe it as something beautiful and that the torturous aging process brings more "value to the youthful years, and makes people less egoistical" and that people should just accept getting frail and sick.
However beautiful some people may think the aging process is one things remain clear, The amount of resources the elderly care costs is going up to such astronomical levels in Sweden that we soon won't be able to cope with caring for all the people with long-term age-related diseases. Producing more children is one solution people are talking about,( like they would want to work in the elderly care)
A philosophical question I would like to ask deathists is the following….
Is life in the form as you are currently really such a worthless thing that you need to die to replace it with the eventual possibility of life in another dimension to reach "peace"?
In the world of today we are on the border of being able to extend human life by a large factor, perhaps even indefinitely, and more and more people view the defeat of aging as realistic, perhaps even in a few decades. I've asked many people the question if they would want to extend their lifespan and surprisingly often the answer is no because they think it's so natural and beautiful to die of old age although they of course does not deny the excruciatingly horrible manner which aging often kill people in.
In our mindset many of us are sticking to the, upon when I'm thinking about it, rather grim idea of "generational change". As one may see it is something that goes through society in many aspects.
Children are constantly hailed to the skies because they are viewed as "the future" and old people are treated badly because of the subconscious stupid thinking that they shall soon die to make room for new generations. (Obviously it is not like that in the Japanese culture for example.)
Recently I felt very disturbed when watching a demonstration against the closure of a school in my local area, Many children, followed by a few teachers where marching across the town passing the town hall, with banderolls reading "remember that WE are the future, NOT you".
The idea of generational change is inhuman; it is built up for discrimination as it is today where old people are denied medical care because children are seen as more important.
Likely when technology progresses to the point where we can talk about "eliminating the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year" as the biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey puts it, those kind of views will be skewed.
But it's still interesting the reason to why old people are treated badly. Although I am young I've been working extra on several nursing homes. Many nurses have often worked on the same place for more than 20 years. They are so used to seeing suffering that they do no longer understand what suffering is; also they feel hopelessness because there isn't much you can do to help them.
Therefore they don't mind doing anything non-essential with them and they are objectified as care objects, not even allowed to go outdoors during the summer!
Hence, instead of chatting with the still lucid old people they leave them alone sitting as soon as they have the opportunity smoking or eating cookies. Many old people I've been talking to describes nursing homes are "storages".
There is no difference between an old person and a sick child, That should be understood.
Death doesn't solve any problems, Instead it creates problems, for example in several scientific areas as for example particle physics where experiments may take years or decades to complete and also by the fact that as humans become more and more knowledgeable more time is necessary to have qualifications and perspective to keep up the progress. Just a few decades ago you didn't need high school level education to perform many tasks.
The generational change needs to become a thing of the past. Children do not have a larger "right" to life than old people.
Currently we are so used to being oppressed slaves of the terror reign of aging that we do not dare questioning the "right" of aging to kill and torture old people.
Time to prioritise that the basic human right to life as stated by UN in fact is guaranteed.
So I end with a question that I really think we should ask ourselves.
Why is it so important to replace person A with person B?
Edited by VictorBjoerk, 13 May 2009 - 01:44 PM.
