Should we pay people to die?

[Secret Chief]

That's the normal reaction to something like this.

There must be a lot of abnormal people on RF then.

 

[Secret Chief]

They're trying it with transhumanism and that's just as bad.

It is. Just think of a 300 year old Trump.

 

[osgart]

Devaluing people will certainly lead to oppression, cruelty, and disaster. Looking at people solely for their utility, importance, and natural benefit would lead to a society where cruel judges would take over, and no one would live free from tyranny. Paying people to die is a big step in the direction of tyranny, and undermines democratic freedom. Not to mention it's a disgusting and offensive idea.

One should ask themselves if they want to be judged this way, or have a more free and safe society instead. Who is going to be the judge? Should everyone have to worry about meeting the criteria for living life? Who decides?

Talk about taking the love out of life.

 

[Mock Turtle]

They're trying it with transhumanism and that's just as bad.

A separate issue really. Perhaps all the excess will be siphoned off to Mars, after Musk has shown us the way.

 

[Revoltingest]

You use cheques? How quaint!

He still drives a horse & buggy to the general store for a sarsaparilla.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Devaluing people will certainly lead to oppression, cruelty, and disaster. Looking at people solely for their utility, importance, and natural benefit would lead to a society where cruel judges would take over, and no one would live free from tyranny. Paying people to die is a big step in the direction of tyranny, and undermines democratic freedom. Not to mention it's a disgusting and offensive idea.

One should ask themselves if they want to be judged this way, or have a more free and safe society instead. Who is going to be the judge? Should everyone have to worry about meeting the criteria for living life? Who decides?

Talk about taking the love out of life.

I tend to agree, but with not much hope that life will become more equal in the future, perhaps such a scenario will come into play.

 

[Sand Dancer]

Good movie. I recommend watching it all the way to the end.

I haven't seen it in forever. I sure wish Netflix still sent DVDs out.

 

[Sand Dancer]

You may have read that, but I think that for the human species that is definitely wrong. There seem to be many societies, going right back to early times, in which the knowledge and experience of elders has been regarded as of value to the tribe. It seems highly likely that for a creature such as Man, who relies to such a degree on the power of his brain for survival advantage, passing on knowledge from one generation to another would have massive benefits. Child-rearing, which in the human species takes such an extraordinarily long time, again due the brain, is also something that traditionally has been shared between the generations, providing another role for older members of the tribe that are past child-bearing themselves.

Oh, it was just that author's opinion, not mine, but from an evolutionary standpoint it probably makes sense. Socially, however, it's horrible. I do like the Native cultures' focus on elder wisdom. I wish we would go back to multigenerational, or even clan, care taking. With smaller families, kids and the elderly get farmed out to workers who don't love them. It's very sad.

 

[Sand Dancer]

No, that's disgusting and seriously morally depraved. The idea that we're overpopulated or will become so is a misanthropic lie providing cover for the revival of eugenics. It must be rejected lest horrors ensue. We're actually set to have the opposite problem - a shrinking population due to plummeting birth rates. We badly need to start having children in developed countries because we're gonna have a ton of old people and not enough young people. This is already causing problems.

That is why it is often helpful for those from developing nations to be here to offset the shortage.

 

[Sand Dancer]

From the perspective of an ecologist, not at all. The world is interconnected, particularly global ecosystems and ecosystem services. The impact of humans is global, and some scientists have taken to calling the present era the "anthropocene" for precisely this reason. IIRC current proposals are putting the start of it right around when human population started to skyrocket (along with human impacts). Other proposals suggest placing the start of the anthropocene somewhere around the development of agriculture.

In any case, it's pretty much agreed that humans have significantly overshot the carrying capacity - something that wouldn't have been possible without technology - and the sixth mass extinction is the result (along with climate change, which is symptomatic of this larger issue of human activities). The interplay of the various bits of the IPAT equation vary by region though, so it's not incorrect to point out the weight of the P, T, and A factors are different regionally as you're doing here. But it is also important to understand we're dealing with global, interconnected systems that aren't happening in an isolated vacuum from one another.

There are folks who don't like globalism and don't want help from developing nations. It's like they think it's them vs us.

 

[Sand Dancer]

It is. Just think of a 300 year old Trump.

 

[exchemist]

Oh, it was just that author's opinion, not mine, but from an evolutionary standpoint it probably makes sense. Socially, however, it's horrible. I do like the Native cultures' focus on elder wisdom. I wish we would go back to multigenerational, or even clan, care taking. With smaller families, kids and the elderly get farmed out to workers who don't love them. It's very sad.

From an evolutionary viewpoint it makes sense for human beings to live on past their reproductive age, for the reasons I tried to explain. Human knowledge, handed on from the experience of older people, has survival advantage for the tribe and for the genes they share. That means it is a trait that should be selected for by the evolutionary process.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

That is why it is often helpful for those from developing nations to be here to offset the shortage.

This is exactly the "great replacement" that people have been talking about - Western workers being replaced by third world immigrants in their own homelands. No, they need to stay in their countries and we need to fix the mess with ours.

 

[RestlessSoul]

You use cheques? How quaint!

Well I still have a chequebook but I couldn’t tell you when I last used it.

 

[Heyo]

That is, if the population does become a strain on (Earth) resources and might lead to calamity (in the future), should we offer inducements (financial or otherwise, and which might benefit relatives or others) for those who might want to end their lives, for whatever reasons?

Please discuss.

While I'm against the proposal for reasons already stated, I'd argue that population control by birth control is important. I have said before that the carrying capacity of earth is 2 billion people with a moderate western lifestyle. We are currently eating away our resources. The oceans are over fished and the rain forests get burned away. We are producing climate gases in a way that could lead to a catastrophe some decades away. Many regions are scarce in fresh water.
The problem is not if we have enough to eat but if we have places enough to ****. We are like the yeast in wine which dies of poisoning itself with its excrements long before it dies of starvation.

 

[Debater Slayer]

This is exactly the "great replacement" that people have been talking about - Western workers being replaced by third world immigrants in their own homelands. No, they need to stay in their countries and we need to fix the mess with ours.

No, it isn't what people often talk about concerning the "Great Replacement," a specifically ethnically supremacist idea. Let's not use the absurdity of one idea (i.e., paying people to die) to advance a debunked one rooted in hatred and fearmongering.

The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites,[a][5][8] the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced with non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans.[5][9][10] Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States.[11] Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview.[12][13][14] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Great Replacement "has been widely ridiculed for its blatant absurdity."[3]

Great Replacement - Wikipedia

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

No, it isn't what people often talk about concerning the "Great Replacement," a specifically ethnically supremacist idea. Let's not use the absurdity of one idea (i.e., paying people to die) to advance a debunked one rooted in hatred and fearmongering.



Great Replacement - Wikipedia

Some use it racially, not all do. I don't see anything incorrect about it, anyway. It is a thing that's happening. I'm not going to ignore reality. I see it happening all around me.

 

[Secret Chief]

This is exactly the "great replacement" that people have been talking about - Western workers being replaced by third world immigrants in their own homelands. No, they need to stay in their countries and we need to fix the mess with ours.

You mean we need to in effect make the world population even higher than it's projected to be? How many billions do you think we should aim for? And why?

 

[Debater Slayer]

Some use it racially, not all do. I don't see anything incorrect about it, anyway. It is a thing that's happening. I'm not going to ignore reality. I see it happening all around me.

Any population has valid reasons not to want their numbers to decline to the point of losing self-sufficiency in industry, employment, etc., but the specific idea of "great replacement" has no solid basis in reality. It's used racially more often than in other contexts.

This is a good evidence-based elaboration on why population levels eventually level off and don't just magically blow up:

Public Health and Overpopulation: The United Nations Takes Action

 

[Quintessence]

Given I don't tend to believe the predictions of the various religions, and hardly see them contributing to the harmony of the planet, I'm more worried as to the mess that might unfold in the future - and as to too large a population being just one aspect - such that perhaps societies might find ways to control overpopulation. This isn't about religion or no religion, it is more about what future societies might have to resort to if and when life becomes unmanageable. How far can you see into the future?

When a species become overpopulated, the signs and symptoms resolve the problem without any need for intervention. Humanity's constant meddling is what got it and the rest of the biosphere into this sixth mass extinction event to begin with. There is no need to overthink any of this and come up with solutions. The solutions already exist and are already being deployed by inherent limits in nature. There is no need to do anything at all. Some humans simply believe they should do something or want to do something.

As far as that conversation goes, with the P factor one either throttles birth rates or death rates, and there are many, many ways to do that. Paying humans to die is possibly one of the least viable death rate throttles I've heard of and its a cultural non-starter. I don't blame some others in this thread for calling that out as nonsense.