Reductio Ad Absurdum

There's an old move in logic called reductio ad absurdum: reduce to absurdity. You don't argue against an idea; you agree with it, let it be completely true, and walk it all the way to its final destination. If the destination is monstrous, you've shown the idea was rotten from the start.

In 2016, Canada legalized Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) narrowly: you had to be terminally ill, your death "reasonably foreseeable." In 2021, they took that "terminal" requirement out; now you only had to be suffering in a way that wouldn't get better. The next step is already scheduled for 2027: an expansion to people whose only condition is mental illness.

Terminal, then not terminal, then not even physical. Each step framed as more compassionate than the last.

Early last year, two researchers, Jamil and Pearce, published a scenario analysis in the peer-reviewed OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying. They were explicit that there was no government plan behind it; they took a premise already in the polite version — that an assisted death also saves the system money — and followed it down, ending up at a price list for human beings.

When you see that price list, you know the premise of MAiD is poison the whole way up.

I didn't open on this morbid topic to talk about policy. I opened here because you and I do the exact same thing with our own symptoms, every day. And it has a name.

In Germanic New Medicine, we call it hanging healing. You had a symptom and it got better. Then it came back. You resolved it again, and it came back again. And again! Until you've stopped believing "better" is possible. Maybe you've even been told it's degenerative.

But a symptom isn't a malfunction. It's part of a special biological program you run - unconsciously, the way you grow your fingernails - in order to make evolutionary changes. You're supposed to complete a special biological program. You're supposed to make meaning of your existential isolation, change your psyche, brain, and body, and walk out of the process a more robust version of yourself.

You 2.0.

Hanging healing is when you never finish. You keep relapsing onto the conflict, because you're avoiding suffering on two levels: resolving it, and (underneath that), even facing it.

So the special biological program can't complete. It reopens and reopens, and you relapse onto the worst parts of it: the existential isolation and then the epi-crisis (the hardest part of the healing phase).

That's what "chronic" and "degenerative" conditions are: not a body that forgot how to heal, but an evolution that keeps getting interrupted by you, because you learned that suffering is the enemy.

Except you're suffering the whole time you're trying to avoid the suffering.

So the villain isn't the suffering. It's the avoidance of suffering.

The mechanism is, the more you run from what you don't want to feel, the more absurd everything gets.

You can't break a natural law. If you act like you can, Nature follows your pretense down to the absurd.

First it's a whisper you can talk yourself out of. Then it's a tap on your shoulder when the problem you already resolved comes back. Then it's a slap: a diagnosis, a new identity. Then, if you keep refusing, you get a cosmic two-by-four to your life. It isn't cruelty; it's a smoke alarm getting louder because you keep ignoring it.

What this means is, you can face your suffering at the whisper stage. You don't have to wait for the two-by-four.

As Joseph Campbell said, the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Your repeating symptom isn't the problem; it's a signpost pointing at a cave you've avoided so completely that you forgot it's there.

It turns out, walking into that cave is actually anticlimactic compared to the long-term suffering of hanging healing. Your path out of the absurdity of hanging healing is to turn toward the symptom and ask what is this for? What am I getting out of it? What will I lose when I let it go?

The moment you accept that your suffering means something — that you, through your biology, create your symptoms for a purpose (which is to evolve) — the special biological program can finish.

After that, the one who walks out of the cave is the treasure: the version of you the whole thing was building all along.

When the suffering is coming and the rescuer isn't...who do you want to be?

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"Government Economics of Expanding Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying to Vulnerable Populations and Ethical Implications of Allowing the State to Control Death," Feb 28, 2025

"Contextualizing the Dead Donor Rule in an Era of Voluntary Euthanasia," July 8, 2026

"Death by Organ Donation: Doctors raise possibility of retrieving organs from MAiD patients while they are still alive"

"DWDC response to a recent article about medical assistance in dying (MAID) and organ donation," July 24, 2026 (the DWDC response is to the National Post article, not to the New England Journal of Medicine publication)