When COVID hit, we took the desire for life as a given. Now, have we forgotten what it means to die well?
To the ancient Greeks, how you died was just as important as how you lived.
Herodotus describes the happy life as: having lived virtuously, doing honor to the gods and your country, dying in the noblest way possible, and being buried in honor by your family.
Now, without anybody noticing, the people in power have taken charge of regulating how we can die. The prime of example of this is to be found in — you guessed it — the response to the pandemic.
At least from what I’ve heard recently, there are no approved treatments for COVID. There is the vaccine, but that prevents, not treats, the disease. Three treatments are being pushed as legit: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and monoclonal antibodies. Although there seems to be evidence that these work, the use or promotion of them has been completely prevented by the people in power. The FDA won’t discuss them, and social media has cancelled them.
Now, I’m not here to promote hydroxychloroquine, etc., or to even assert that they are effective or legit. To do so is way beyond my expertise, and insubordinate of me, as I am no doctor.
I am, however, one of those people who’s into philosophy and human rights, and so I figured I would bring up the deeper issues underlying the cancellation of the COVID treatments.
For one thing, it is not disputed that, when people are dying on ventilators from COVID, they often request treatments such as hydroxychloroquine. Invariably, doctors blatantly refuse to prescribe such treatments. When I heard that, I thought: What do you mean? They’re dying anyway; might as well see if hydroxychloroquine works for them.
I don’t mean to be callous, but that’s what medicine should do: it should do the utmost it can to save a patient, as opposed to inflexibly following regulations on a virus we don’t even know how to regulate.
The problem isn’t the lack of knowledge about the virus, and the problem isn’t the doctors who are working to save patients; the problem is this: civilians are being told how they can and cannot die. If a patient wants to risk their life to try hydroxychloroquine, the authorities are preventing them, because of its being an unconventional death that is insubordinate to the health directors.
This is not how it should be.
Two years of lockdown. I could make a very long list of all the ways the lockdown has been corroding away at civilization. Yet it is not only continuing to be harmful to the civilians who must deal with the collapsing economy, deteriorating mental health, and confusing new regulations; it is an insult to humanity, people who should be able to die as they see fit, and be buried by their families (oh yeah, lockdowns prohibited funerals, too).
We have an unalienable right to life. But I also want a right to death.
For your whole life, government tells you how you should treat your neighbor, doctors tell you what to take, and social media tells you how to act. All well and good. But in the moment it takes me to die, I want to do so fighting for something, in an independent act that no one can cancel.
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“I like to think that everyone has something deeper in their life, be it religion or only drink.” -The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton
