You've probably heard of the "suicide pod," a breakthrough in Canadian "healthcare" or, if we're being honest, the end result of socialized medicine.
As my colleague Teri Christoph reported, the pod effectively allows someone to commit assisted suicide painlessly, as one woman recently demonstrated:
It's called a "suicide pod" -- also known as the "Tesla of euthanasia" -- and it's a creepy-looking, coffin-like contraption in which those looking to end their life can simply push a button and have the whole thing over with in about ten minutes. Easy peasy; no other humans, and certainly no God, necessary.
The suicide pod took its first life this past Monday when a 64-year-old woman from the U.S. ended her own life in a forest on the border of Switzerland and Germany. All that is known about the woman is that she was from the Midwest and was somehow immunocompromised. And now she's dead, likely thinking her life no longer held value.
I was struck with how its creators and supporters tried to frame this. They say it's "dying with dignity," and that this is a "good death."
This older woman isn't the first. A young woman in the Netherlands also used this pod to end her own life. It inspired my colleague Bob Hoge to write something both Christoph and I thought was poignant:
We were once a people of dreams and aspirations for ourselves and for our families. Now, in Western thought, it seems like a cult of doom has taken over—climate change will kill us all, our reliance on energy and plastic bags will be our ruin, and we’re all secretly racist in our deepest heart of hearts.
Hoge's words rang a bell. This kind of thing has been talked about before, described almost to the letter, down to how these suicides are framed and the dread environment they're taking place in.
It all happened in a short story many people probably don't know about, but is responsible for many different types of horror entertainment they see nowadays.
In the 1890s, a man named Robert W. Chambers release a series of short stories collectively called The King in Yellow. The stories revolve around a play of the same name that, once you read it, will slowly drive you mad. Chambers never reveals the play in totality, leaving that up to the reader to imagine the horrors (or forbidden truths) within. The series of short stories would go on to inspire one of the most influential names in horror, H.P. Lovecraft. While this kind of cosmic horror would be described as "Lovecraftian," it's Chambers who actually began this trend.
One of the short stories in The King in Yellow is called "The Repairer of Reputations," and in the book we see an all-too familiar scene to us living now in 2024. It follows a man named Hildred Castaigne who, after suffering a head injury, becomes obsessed with the aforementioned play. Reading it, he begins to believe he is destined to become the king of an imaginary empire, and teaming up with a man named Mr. Wilde, aka the "Repairer of Reputations," begins to advance his delusions until he ultimately meets tragedy and violence.
However, within this short story, one of the most standout things is that the U.S. had legalized institutionalized suicide. Called "Lethal Chambers," people can enter into these rooms where they are painlessly killed:
The French and Italian cafes and restaurants were torn down; the whole block enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and converted into a lovely garden, with lawns, flowers, and fountains. In the centre of the garden stood a small, white building, severely classical in architecture, and surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns supported the roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble group of "the Fates" stood before the door, the work of a young American sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three years old.
[...]
The Governor was finishing his reply to the short speech of the Surgeon-General. I heard him say: "The laws prohibiting suicide and providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been repealed. The government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the community will be benefited by the removal of such people from their midst. Since the passage of this law, the number of suicides in the United States has not increased. Now that the government has determined to establish a Lethal Chamber in every city, town, and village in the country, it remains to be seen whether or not that class of humans creatures from whose desponding ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief thus provided." He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The silence in the street was absolute. "There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome, let him seek it here."
The world this takes place in is dystopian, where the moral fabric of society has been torn and the value of human life has been more or less forgotten. There is a detachment from human suffering. No one tries to help anyone anymore. If you're having a bad time, simply walk into the chamber and end it all. Suicide is routine and a popular choice to dealing with despair.
This was supposed to represent a society that had decayed almost irreparably, to the point where a shared madness had taken hold of all of us.
And here we are. Chambers' horror short story slowly becoming a normalized reality.
Feeling like you have no hope? Feeling like it's all too much. Help is just one suicide pod away. Climb in and die a "good death" with "dignity." There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome, let him seek it here.
This is supposed to be a horror story, but now that story is bleeding into reality. We don't see it because the nuanced arguments masked as care, and the normalization of seeing human life as less important than it actually is, but rest assured, in a saner world this would be absolute horror.
