Progressing toward decay: How the modern leviathan state destroys living humans in the name of a theoretical 'humanity'

The New York Times generated some controversy this week by publishing an article on the previous remarks of a Yale economics professor named Yusuke Narita. Narita has become infamous in his native Japan for suggesting that the best way for the island nation to avoid its looming demographic crisis is to have its older citizens commit mass ritual suicide. The suggestion that a few generations of Japanese natives should commit the grisly samurai disembowelment ritual of seppuku caused an understandable outrage across the country.

Despite the horrific implications, the New York Times is happy to promote this language because it allows the paper to focus on a topic that is a favorite target for liberal outlets: the serious demographic issue that Japan is facing. Young people in Japan are simply not marrying or even having children. The birth rate was 1.34 births per woman in 2020, well below the necessary replacement rate, and has been trending steadily downward.

While the plummeting birth rates in Japan are having a serious impact on its society, the problems are not unique to that country. Most modern affluent countries are watching their birth rates decline steadily, but Japan has been somewhat unique in its opposition to Western solutions.

America and many European nations have attempted to use immigration as a way to bolster their aging populations in hopes of keeping their pension and welfare programs from collapsing. Japan is often selected as a target for liberal publications because it has rejected mass immigration in favor of preserving its culture and way of life. Despite progressive efforts to shame the country into open borders, there seems to be little interest among the citizens who actually live there.

Most modern welfare states were built on the model of continuous growth, the promise that there would always be a larger and younger generation to pay for the benefits of their elders. Cratering birth rates are causing a serious problem with that math equation, and Japan has rejected the idea of transforming its population through immigration in order to make up for the demographic shortfall.

This leads some to suggest that the only way the country can make the math work is the removal of the elderly, a group that social engineers see as nothing but a financial liability for the state.

Canada is now becoming famous for its very aggressive policy of offering “assisted dying” to members of its population that it deems undesirable. The country has killed thousands of its own citizens and has pushed aggressively to expand the program at every opportunity. Canada is now offering euthanasia to the mentally ill and to poor people who are too ashamed to go on living because they are unable to pay rent or feed themselves.

The notoriously polite country is even pushing euthanasia on retired veterans for whom it can no longer bother to provide care. Veteran Christine Gauthier told Canada’s House of Commons that she was offered euthanasia when she complained to a government employee that she was not receiving the care she requested.

In one passage on a Canadian health care site, government officials lament their inability to properly explain to indigenous people why their elders should embrace euthanasia. Apparently, the government faces a linguistic hurdle, as some of the indigenous dialects lack the proper vocabulary to explain that the state must murder the elderly to stay fiscally solvent.

Canada is a country where people read land acknowledgments at the opening of every public event to show that they honor the indigenous people who once owned the land on which the meeting is taking place, but Canada also does a lot of complaining about how it cannot properly articulate to the same indigenous people why the state needs to wipe out a generation of their elders.

Obviously, Japan and Canada are two very different cultures, but for some reason the modern solutions are always the same. Either open your borders to unrestricted mass migration or start wiping out your elderly and others who are deemed a burden to the state. Even this choice seems like a false dichotomy, as social engineers eventually end up demanding both. Mass migration can act as a temporary patch with all kinds of serous side effects, but after a generation or two of living in their new country, most descendants of immigrants see a similar drop in their own birth rates.

This means that the modern welfare state will inevitably return to euthanasia as a solution for its demographic problems. Democrats and the media mocked Sarah Palin for her suggestion that death panels would be the inevitable destination of government health care, but just over a decade later, this seems to be the only solution that progressives can come up with.

In a similar vein of modern dehumanization, just a few weeks ago a Norwegian professor, Anna Smajdor, made waves by suggesting that brain-dead women could be used as surrogates for couples who could not biologically have children in a journal of theoretical and medical bioethics. As a general rule, anyone who describes herself as an “ethicist” is a sociopath whose opinion should be immediately discarded.

Obviously, this suggestion is horrific and deeply dehumanizing. It conjures dystopian science fiction imagery like "The Matrix," the movie in which humans are artificially grown and harvested by uncaring robots, or the later novels in the "Dune" series, where grotesque aliens use the heavily drugged females of their species to artificially grow other living beings.

Read the rest at The Blaze.