Health has been replaced by Dealth. What is Dealth?

Dealth = Health + Stealth + Death

Dealth is the means by which health is sublated (yes, indeed, pretentious Hegelian words are required), by stealth, so it negates/alters/transcends itself. Thus the doctor is no longer the healer: rather, the doctor is the certificated poisoner.

As everyone who has experienced COVID-19 must know, the word ‘pharmaceutical’ comes from the Greek work for poison, pharmakon. The word for the remedy is the same as the word for the poison. Pharmaceuticals are like ‘sanctions’ in this regard. If one says ‘I sanction what Putin is doing in Ukraine’ then it is hard to tell whether one is approving or disapproving of it. The same goes for pharmaceuticals: one cannot tell whether the pharmacist is healing you or murdering you.

Now , courtesy of Westminster, we have legislation for the following:

• Abortion up to birth: alright, alright, fact-check, abortion is decriminalised if carried out by the mother up to birth; and
• Death by request for the terminally challenged.

We need to change our language for all of this, so we can tell the truth about it. A century ago men started to talk about ‘eugenics’, the science of good birth, and ‘euthanasia’, the practice of good death. For some reason, ‘euthanatics’ never took off.

But we should remember that the first ‘eu’ was also a ‘u’. This was Thomas More’s Utopia, a ‘good place’ that was a ‘no place’: which Thomas Carlyle called Weissnichtwo and which Samuel Butler called Erewhon. Perhaps we should rename ‘eugenics’ ‘ugenics’: instead of ‘good birth’ we should call it, more honestly, ‘no birth’. Isn’t that what we want, really? No birth? And it should be clear that, behind all the enthusiasm for euthanasia, we seem to be suffering from a mass elite sense of unreality by which we are in denial of death: we say we want a good death but in fact what we want is no death, uthanasia: a way of somehow avoiding all reality of death. Play computer games, ask ChatGPT and Siri and Alexa to do everything else for us, and keep posting pictures of Michelin starred food and sunsets in Miami – forever.

The King is Dead. Long Live his Facebook Page.

So what we want is UGENICS and UTHANATICS and, to supply them, a NATIONAL DEALTH SERVICE.

In his Erewhon Samuel Butler played the typically modern sort of reversal trick whereby a thing becomes its opposite. I suppose Shakespeare played this trick all the time, with men acting as women dressed as men, all that Comedy of Errors, As You Like It stuff. But it was very popular in the 19th century. Feuerbach said: “God did not create Man: Man created God,” thus launching Marx and Nietzsche into the stratosphere. The death-of-God became – a god. And finally Butler said: “To be ill is a crime; to commit a crime is to be sick.” Well, in our godless, transvestite age, it should come as no surprise that the state no longer bothers with criminals, except to Lucas-Dockery them, i.e., reform them liberally, and that the state finds being ill very awkward. The state does not want to care for the sick so much as pension them off somewhere, or force them into long-term systems of torture, or kill ‘em.

We seem to be at the second stage of our revision of old Christian morality. Christian civilisation, c. 1600, said:

• Transvestitism is art and only for actors
• Homosexuality is an unnatural temptation
• Marriage ideally organises everyone into sexual pairs
• Suicide is a mortal sin
• Sin is always worse than suffering

whereas our new unnamed British-Global religion says:

• Transvestitism is a sign of inner nature
• Homosexuality is natural
• Marriage is to be redefined so anyone can do it with anyone
• Suicide is a perfect remedy
• Sin is unmentionable; and suffering is embarrassing unless we write about it on Substack and ‘own’ it

If you add together all the elements of Abortion, Assisted Dying, Black Lives Matter, Christianicide, Decolonisation, Diversity-Equity-Inclusion, Gay Marriage, Islamic Civil Service, Lockdownery, Mass Immigration, Transgenderism, Zombie Apocalypse then we have something like a loose ragbag of a secular religion.

The original Israelites are sometimes said to have originated the god YHWH out of their battle cry, ‘Yahu’ or something similar. In the same way, I suggest that the deity of the modern pronoun will be ‘Buhu’ (in Hebrew BH), standing for the characteristic cry of this victim-blaming, victim-shaming, victim-claiming, victim-preening creature.

In a changed moral world the National Dealth Service will supply death-before-birth and death-at-any-point-afterwards-on-request. Perhaps we’ll be able to vote for the involuntary ‘assisted dying’ of unwanted colleagues and family members. Oh, of course, since no one will be born in the natural way, we’ll have lots of IVFs as oft-aborting women try to become mothers after the dismay of their careers. Men will probably refuse to become fathers except by sperm donorship and absolute indemnity from responsibility (millionaires like the Telegram chap may voluntarily claim responsibility as a sort of Facebook charitable performance). Fifty per cent of children will be raised by dewlap-faced homosexuals and rivet-faced lesbians, and will emerge in a pleasant haze of cannabis into a fluid world where everything will be true. In fact, the coming state will, by decree and technology, engineer an entire two-tier reality in which, privately, we will be able to be as Racist, Misogynist, Homophobic as we like, since AI will be responsible for our public utterances, and will filter all our posts. But within our own reality, inside the headset, we will be able to slaughter our enemies as if we are in the Book of Samuel or Grand Theft Auto. The brain pan will be the naughty jar. We may even live forever in our virtual realities, long after the doctors of the National Dealth Service have switched off the machine.

Anyhow, it seems to me that in an age in which the government is threatening to pay more for death-by-medicine than for life-by-medicine that we are entering a new era. And the way to recognise this is to declare that the National Health Service is now a National Dealth Service.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.