Quo vadis, modernitas?

Who killed Brigitte Stegemann?

The case of Brigitte Stegemann is yet another horrifying example of where the slippery slope of allowing the public-health apparatus to tamper with human life can lead.

Canada’s progressive government has left yet another victim in its wake. Eighty-three-year-old grandmother Brigitte Stegemann passed away in the Lord on July 10 of this year, her earthly life brought to an end through the scandalous so-called “medical assistance in dying” program. Brigitte was indeed seriously ill, suffering from stage-four cancer. But she was also a believer, and therefore surely knew that, from a religious perspective, material life is not everything, but is to a great extent merely preparation for what comes next.

As believers and Christians, we know on these foundations that meaning can be found even in great suffering. Indeed, our own story tells us that God Himself chose the greatest and most unjust suffering in order to reveal through it the path to salvation. We know, furthermore, that suicide, and thus the modern form of techno-medical suicide euphemistically called euthanasia, is a grave sin, a rejection of the gift of life. Death is not a domain that can be brought under our control, nor should we seek to control it, because questions of life and death are, quite literally, not ours to govern.

The case of Brigitte Stegemann is yet another horrifying example of where the slippery slope of allowing the public-health apparatus to tamper with human life can lead. Brigitte was not fully conscious during the final months of her life. Her granddaughter, who was overseeing her medical care, had repeatedly made it clear to the hospital where her grandmother was staying that euthanasia was out of the question because of the patient’s religious convictions.

During July, however, the granddaughter went away on a ten-day summer holiday. During that period, doctors and healthcare staff once again decided to offer Brigitte the option of euthanasia. Although, according to other family members, it was plainly evident that Brigitte was not cognitively present (as she was reportedly giving incorrect basic information about her own life, such as the number of brothers and sisters she had), the doctors determined that she was capable of making the decision to undergo euthanasia herself.

It remains unclear from the available information whether anyone other than the healthcare staff actually heard the patient explicitly state that she wanted to undergo the procedure. What is known is that the staff maintain that consent was given. The fact that Brigitte allegedly told her family that she was afraid and that she was going to be “killed soon” apparently meant nothing to the techno-medical machine. Consent had supposedly been given, the paperwork had been filed, and the process had begun. And in this technocratic age, we know, nothing seems capable of standing in the way of processes, paperwork, and bureaucracy; not even weak, fragile, and fallible human beings.

On July 10, Brigitte was killed, and according to the sources, she never gave her explicit consent for what was done to her, not even at that point.

“Where is our society heading?” is a question that should always be asked after cases like this, no matter how commonplace they become. Many who follow my public work still have not fully accepted my thesis that today’s totalitarian supranational technocracy is not some future dystopia, but something happening right now, before our very eyes. People still find discussions of transhumanism, posthumanism, dehumanization, and the erosion of human personhood abstract. Yet all of these concepts ultimately point to one stark fact: at this very moment, the technocratic regime is systematically taking its victims, every single day.

The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century were systems built around great personalities and explicit aggression. The new totalitarianism of our age is based on suffocating pseudo-tolerance and murderous, ostensibly compassionate love. People are not necessarily killed because they have opposed the prevailing assumptions of the spirit of the age. Rather, they are killed simply because they have become surplus; because, after having been useful producers and consumers of societal hedonistic goods, they enter old age and become purposeless individuals whom our society simply has no place for - not merely in a physical sense, but even in a conceptual one.

Our age lacks the linguistic and intellectual categories needed to grapple with the condition of an elderly person like Brigitte Stegemann. In other words, we have no conception of a path to salvation that transcends the material sphere, nor do we possess any notion of the dignity of the human person that is not contingent upon circumstances. The patient must therefore be eliminated as the most expedient solution.

Mrs. Brigitte Stegemann was (and is) a child of God. That child was deprived of her life, and the differentia specifica of our age’s murderous machine is that it is difficult to identify a single person responsible for her killing. Brigitte Stegemann was killed by procedures, paperwork, and bureaucracy - and, of course, by individuals who willingly surrendered their humanity to technology and subordinated themselves to it. They became components of a broader murderous, yet clinically tidy, procedurally efficient, and seemingly superhuman octopus whose grip around the throat of our civilization is tightening ever further.

Søren Kierkegaard once wrote about how large numbers of people, subjected to certain harmful beliefs, can seemingly summon a demon that subsequently transcends their individual desires, acts according to its own destructive principles, and takes the power of decision-making out of the hands of the collective masses. The demon of our age is the demon of dehumanized technocracy. If anyone still thinks these issues are unimportant, or that speaking about them amounts to some kind of unjustified scaremongering, they should think again. The time to wake up has more than passed.

We wish Mrs. Brigitte Stegemann a peaceful encounter with the radiant face of our Savior. We wish the same for the other 16,499 victims of Canada’s murderous euthanasia regime last year.