Theme from M*A*S*H†

One of the great friendships in all of animated comedy began in an unlikely time and an even more unlikely place: a suicide booth in the year 3000. Of course, I'm talking about 20-something slacker Fry and his buddy Bender, some sort of wonderful mechanical man. Fry, mistaking the closest suicide booth for a phone booth, stepped into the booth where he met the then- suicidally depressed robot. The two managed to escape from the suicide booth, setting up one of the great exchanges in the pilot episode:

Bender: I'm a bender. I bend girders, that's all I'm programmed to do.
Fry: Were you any good?
Bender: Are you kidding? I was a star. I could bend a girder to any angle. 30 degrees, 32 degrees, you name it. 31... But I couldn't go on living once I found out what the girders were for.
Fry: What for?
Bender: Suicide booths.

Like nearly everything in Futurama, when you peel away the hilarity there's a much deeper layer there for you to think about. Could there in fact be a distant future in which the purposeful taking of one's own life not only isn't taboo but is actively encouraged for those who would wish it? The basic rationale for the suicide booth concept was laid out in a now 115-year-old short story, The Repairer of Reputations, in which the distant future being envisioned was the year 1925. In the story, the Governor of New York spoke to introduce the first "Government Lethal Chamber":

"The laws prohibiting suicide and providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the community will be benefited by the removal of such people from their midst. Since the passage of this law, the number of suicides in the United States has not increased. Now that the Government has determined to establish a Lethal Chamber in every city, town and village in the country, it remains to be seen whether or not that class of human creatures from whose desponding ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief thus provided." He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The silence in the street was absolute. "There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let him seek it there." Then quickly turning to the military aid of the President's household, he said, "I declare the Lethal Chamber open," and again facing the vast crowd he cried in a clear voice: "Citizens of New York and of the United States of America, through me the Government declares the Lethal Chamber to be open."

While a fundamental right to life has been celebrated by Western political thinkers for centuries, a corresponding right to death has proven far more controversial and, to many, abhorrent. But the contemporary debate on the subject rarely even considers the full breadth of the question. It focuses on the ethics of allowing euthanasia for the purpose of ending human suffering by allowing patients who are terminally ill, in extreme pain, or facing a severely impaired quality of life due to injury or illness to end their lives with dignity. Certainly this is an important debate to have, complicated--as I'm sure Jim knows--by the bit of the Hippocratic Oath in which doctors pledge: "I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan."

But the understanding of the freedom of self-termination associated with the concept of the suicide booth is far more expansive than this. You don't need a doctor's note, you don't need an externally "valid" reason to end your own life. Simple existential weariness, intense dissatisfaction, or mental disquietude are no less valid reasons for voluntarily exiting existence than is terminal illness.

The reasons for allowing this seem clear. One of the great truths underlying the logic of natural selection is that not all beings that come into existence are meant to be in the time and place in which they find themselves. For these creatures, when the paradox is revealed circumstance corrects the cosmic error. In many ways, our mastery of our environment has disrupted this cycle, leaving self-selection for existential departure the only defensible replacement for it (the alternative, preferred at present by social attitudes, is dogged and often purposeless persistence in the face of misery and paradoxical existence). Most of us know from experience that there is a great deal of mental anguish that must be endured by the sharp and self-reflective mind. The demands of sentience can simply be too taxing, particularly in the absence of overriding faith or hedonistic indulgence.

Given these realities, it seems only logical that the right to life would be balanced by the right to end one's life in the time and manner of one's choosing (provided, perhaps, that the process is minimally disruptive for others). But as novel as the idea of the suicide booth--or a voluntary "lethal chamber"--is, it reinforces the prejudice that such an act must necessarily be unpleasant, lonely, and desperate. This is, I suppose, an artifact of the view of death that is so pervasive in our culture--namely, that it's something unspeakably horrible to be avoided at any cost (literally, considering the vast sums of money we spend on briefly extending the lives of people who are irrevocably on their way out). We might view self-termination as the antithesis of what I view to be an unhealthy obsession with immortality that seems so common these days. It is the acceptance--the embrace, even--of mortality as a necessary and perhaps desirable component of existence.

We can look elsewhere in science fiction to find an alternative to the cold, sterile, and frankly unpleasant vision of self-termination that seems inherent to the suicide booth (as brilliant as the concept is). In my favorite scene from Soylent Green, the protagonist's friend and partner, Sol, opts to end his life at a government assisted suicide facility after discovering the awful truth about one of the world's main synthetic foodstuffs, the eponymous Soylent Green (SPOILER: It's people!). You can watch the process he goes through below. It's portrayed as being a singularly moving and beautiful experience; the scene is more poignant when you remember that Soylent Green takes place in a vastly overpopulated, environmentally devastated dystopia where the images Sol enjoys are found virtually nowhere in the world anymore.



Sol died when he no longer wished to live and he did so in a manner of his choosing, resulting in an experience much more pleasant than that offered by a suicide booth. That scene epitomizes my own vision of a future where a humanitarian option for self-termination exists for those (presumably a fairly small minority of humanity) who, for whatever personal reason, realize, as Sol did, "I've lived too long." A beautiful and controlled departure for those who are ready to leave.

Ain't no rest for the wicked, 'til we close our eyes for good.


† In case you don't get the joke, the title of the theme from M*A*S*H is "Suicide is Painless."