For Euthanasia, “The Richest Societies are the Ones with the Most Suicides”

Chantal Delsol was born in 1947. The French philosopher, professor, and historian of political ideas, novelist and editorialist, founded the Annah-Arendt Institute in 1993. A disciple of Julien Freund, she belongs to the liberal conservative movement and has taken a stance in the past few years against the nihilistic destruction of society which homosexual unions and the consequent destruction of the family represent. She is a member of the Philanthropos Institute and was elected in 2007 to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.

When questioned by the journalist Bernard Hallet for cath.ch, the philosopher said she sees in assisted suicide a “form of ideologization”, since persons are encouraged to put on a performance in order to make their act seem legitimate to all of society. She says: “suicide is made into a performance...the better to prove that it is a good thing”.

The foundress of the Annah-Arendt Institute points an accusing finger at the syndrome that affects what we call our post-modern societies: “the hypnosis of perfection”. Indeed, in the age of technical progress, especially in the medical field, we have come to desire a perfect society in which tragedy, suffering, and evil have been abolished: “We have partially eliminated suffering with medical progress, but unfortunately, we have extrapolated a world without suffering.”

This paradigm shift is considered by the philosopher as the collateral damage of a triumphant materialism in societies from which secularism has driven away religion, and she makes a bold parallel: “These are the consequences of materialistic societies. It is a hard thing to say, but this is how Nazism began: with gentle euthanasia, lives that were not worth living, and doing the person a favor by killing him.”

Outlining this same observation, the philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj declared during the same congress that “the richest societies are the ones with the most suicides”.

Behind the question of suicide – assisted or not –, the French philosopher sees the frailty of the human condition in which we seek to “resolve” all our “questions”. Those who pretend to succeed in doing so, she warns, steer society towards a new form of totalitarianism: “The totalitarianisms of the 20th century sought to make men believe they were entering a perfect society where tragedy would be abolished”, “where justice would be fully realized”. “This did not happen, and a great disappointment followed. We find ourselves in the finite world and all the questions connected with our humanity remain. In our society, there is an inability to accept this situation”. Drive away the natural and it will only come galloping back.

The philosopher concluded that the increase in suicides goes hand in hand with the decline of “religion”, whose role is important “in helping us accept the imperfect world in which we live. Suicide largely reflects a refusal of this imperfection.” Drive away the supernatural and you are left only with the unnatural.