Transcription
We're going to play you a clip from 2010 from the Aspen Institute meeting from July, I think July 8th, 2010, in Aspen, Colorado. It happens every year. It's a nonprofit organization where the deepest thinkers, or their facsimiles, congregate in Aspen to talk about where we should go next. Lots of chin-tugging, lots of pomposity, lots of clichés getting thrown around, but occasionally the truth is told, particularly by the more autistic participants. And there's no one more autistic in the Aspen Institute class, of course, than Bill Gates. And that's not an attack on Bill Gates. In fact, it's said with gratitude because people like Bill Gates tend to say things out loud that other people wouldn't because it just emerges.
So in 2010, Bill Gates made the case that, hey, we may get to a point where we have to impanel some kind of group of officials to decide, is it really worth the cost of keeping these people alive? And he actually said that. And the reason that we need to reassure you of that and actually play this clip is because over 10 years later, this clip reemerged and it found its way onto the internet and social media, and all the people in charge basically had a conniption and bent over backwards and forwards and sideways to tell you that this wasn't real. This was misinformation. Over at the Associated Press, the AP, the fabled newswire, they dispatched their misinformation reporter to bat this down. No, don't believe your eyes. Bill Gates did not say this, and he certainly didn't mean it. And there's something sinister about that. And if you think there is, you're the crazy person. And so it kind of died because when people are told that the thing they just saw isn't real and they're fools for believing it, it does, even in the kind of most rigorously independent mind, sow that seed of doubt that maybe I'm misinterpreting this. But you're not misinterpreting it. You never were misinterpreting. If you haven't seen this, watch. Here's Bill Gates in 2010.
"That's a trade-off society is making because of very, very high medical costs and a lack of willingness to say, you know, is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient? Would it be better not to lay off those 10 teachers and to make that trade-off in medical cost? But that's called the death panel. Uh, and you're not supposed to have that discussion."
Oh, you're not supposed to have that discussion. Bill Gates would like to have that discussion. Of course, there's Bill Gates making the math-based argument that, hey, is it really worth it? You've got this old person, this old person, no name, but just some old guy who's dying and all attempts to revive him and keep him alive are fruitless and stupid because he's not a billionaire. He doesn't have adrenochrome. It's not worth keeping that guy alive. I mean, really, sub-par, whatever. But we could take that money. Let's say it cost a million dollars. Bill Gates just said, let's say it takes a million dollars to keep this guy alive for a couple extra days when he's going to die anyway. And that's money that could be spent on teachers.
Now, by the way, you can tell how antique that clip is, 16 years old, because people were still saying in 2010, we need to do something about education in this country. Nobody thinks that now. There's no effort to reform American education. Who cares? You're sending your kids to a public school, that's your problem, serf. So, all meaningful education reform efforts are basically dead. You go to a cocktail or dinner party with rich people, they're not fretting over the state of public education. They don't care because that's a completely different class of people and God knows what they do. We'll pay lip service to caring about them. I love black people so much, but we're not actually going to try to bring them into the rest of society with like a decent education. Like, we've tried that for 60 years. It didn't work. Clearly, they're immune to it. And so, we're going to kind of pretend that everything is fine. And we're instead going to talk about what's going on at, you know, Trinity or Spence or Buckley or whatever our, you know, private schools we sent our kids to. But anyway, back in 2010, that was still a kind of resonant debate point. We could use the money for education. It cost a million dollars, but what's so interesting, and you know, that's not probably wrong. I mean, it's very expensive at the end of life. And maybe we should reassess our understanding of death itself. And maybe we should have a conversation about what happens after death. And maybe people wouldn't be so desperate to stay alive if there was a promise of living forever. If there was religious faith, there was a belief in something beyond the material. It wasn't just Amazon deliveries that this life meant something. But we're probably past that at this point from the perspective of official America, the West, the leadership in every western country. Like this is all there is. And so living forever in this life, in this body is the goal. And they're trying, of course, famously to do that. That's what transhumanism is. But we're not having any of those conversations. Of course, there's no solace in death. If there's nothing after death, then how can you feel peaceful about it? It's just the end. Like, what did this all mean? Nothing. So, people get panicky and we spend, it's true, Bill Gates is right, an awful lot of money in the final weeks of life.
But what's so interesting is we spend an awful lot of money on a lot of things. And no one ever suggests that maybe that money could be spent, I don't know, on something more fruitful or decent or life-affirming. So, for example, Bill Gates says it cost a million dollars theoretically to keep the average old serf alive. Probably better just to have killed him. He clearly thinks that. But you don't hear Bill Gates say, "Well, you know, it cost $4 million for a single Patriot missile. It cost over a billion for a Patriot missile battery. We seem to be handing those out to Israel and Ukraine every week." We certainly did for many years. Maybe that money could be spent, I don't know, on education or on roads or on nicer airports or on public parks or libraries or anything other than killing people. You never hear that because it doesn't offend them because it's killing people and killing people makes them feel powerful. And in general, as you assess this debate over euthanasia, end-of-life care, whatever we're calling it, keep in mind that it's not simply a debate about money and science. It's a theological debate. And there's clearly a theological component to this. The enthusiasm that some bring, not all, but some bring to this debate, the enthusiasm with which they call for the deaths of other people, whether it's in Ukraine, whether it's in Iran, whether it's in your local hospice, is unusual. It's not rational. Actually, it's almost as if there are certain people who feel they derive power from controlling the deaths of others, even from causing the deaths of others. Actually, that's understating it. It's not that there are some people who seem as if. The truth is there are a number of people who definitely do derive power from that. And it's not just Lindsey Graham. It's many. And there is an almost one-to-one connection between the people who are enthusiastic about sending complex missile systems to various parts of the world so other populations can kill each other and the people who are enthusiastic about, I don't know, abortion on demand for its own sake. Abortion, just a good thing. Just a good thing. Ending life, a good thing because it's freedom and euthanasia, all kind of connected. And there was a time when people studied things seriously, or the American version was seriously, slightly more seriously than say, a Wikipedia entry, when it was widely understood that there was a connection between the Nazi euthanasia program, the Nazi murder of the Jews and Gypsies and Poles, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, that these were all kind of connected, that people like animals, once they taste blood, tend to be incited to draw more blood. It's a pretty recognizable principle. You see it all around you. But for some reason, since the Second World War has been reduced to a single story and codified in museums, there's really nothing else to learn other than the Germans are bad. Very few universal principles are drawn from the horrifying experiences of the Second World War and the horrifying behavior of the Nazis and of others. By the way, it wasn't just the Nazis who behaved like animals. It was a lot of people because war brings out the worst, always. But those lessons are no longer taught. No universal lesson about anything is taught. It's always specific to a time and place and to people. And lost is the deepest of all truths, the most recognizable of all truths, which is the capacity for that kind of behavior resides in every human heart and in every soul. People are the problem. Not one specific group of people, but all people. They can do this. And the willingness under certain circumstances to do this never goes away. It's inherent to people. And that's why once again, more Europeans have been killed by the state in euthanasia programs since Hitler killed himself in April of 1945 than during the Nazi regime. Which is not to say that modern European countries are Nazi regimes. It's only to say that the capacity to kill the weakest, the inconvenient, the "useless eaters" among us, whether it's unborn children or the elderly or people with complex emotional problems, people who suffer from seasonal depression or whatever. Anybody who's not pulling his own weight, anyone who's in a moment of weakness, who can't fight back, anyone who's annoying, anyone who's a burden, the temptation to kill those people, to solve the problem once and for all, resides in every human heart. And so it takes quite an act of will to keep the ugliest of human desires at bay. It requires structures that prevent people from doing everything they are able to do. And the more power people have, the greater the range of horrifying possibilities. When you can do something, you're tempted to do it. And some of the things you do will be dark because that's the way people are, have always been, and always will be. And so for generations, in some cases thousands of years, we have had structures in place to keep the powerful from abusing their power. And those structures have disintegrated bit by bit over time.
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