Section 4

Where the question came from

Care should hold the corridor, not close it. Then medicine learned to hold a body for years.

Every civilisation has asked what care is at the end. Every tradition has given an answer. No tradition has closed the question.

The reason is plain. What the question assumes changes as the corridor changes. The answer at the threshold is not the answer anywhere else along the way.

In the fifth and fourth centuries before the common era, the Hippocratic tradition set down a principle. A physician should not give a deadly drug, even if asked.

For more than two thousand years that was medicine’s main commitment at the closing. Care should hold the corridor open, not close it.

The principle held while medicine’s power to hold a corridor was modest. And while, for most bodies, the closing took weeks, not years.

In the late twentieth century it came under pressure. Medicine learned to hold a corridor at level four, with permanent support. Medication. Dialysis. Ventilation. Tube feeding. Support for the heart. That power outran the corridor’s capacity to be widened back to where it could run.

A body could now be held in a narrowed corridor for years. Even decades. Sometimes the corridor could no longer be read as the person’s own. The person’s reading of themselves was suppressed by sedation. Broken up by dementia. Worn thin by what the support itself required.

Applied unchanged to these cases, the old principle gave an outcome the structure does not endorse.

The corridor was extended at the cost of the person it was supposed to be a corridor for.

Medical ethics in the late twentieth century answered with autonomy. The person’s authority over their own body, including the conditions of the body’s exit.

In 1976 a court extended that authority to the family of an unconscious patient. Advance-directive law grew through the late twentieth century: instructions a person makes ahead of time, for when they can no longer speak. In the early twenty-first century several jurisdictions made assisted dying legal. This is the institutional record of a shift medicine is still completing.

The structure reads the same shift, and places it in the operator.

The right to exit is not a new principle brought in from outside medicine. It is the operator, applied at the closing.

It is the person’s authority over their own life, come into force at one threshold. The threshold where levels one to four can no longer hold the corridor open as one the person can still read from inside.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 9 — End-of-Life Care and the Right to Exit. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/09-end-of-life-care-and-the-right-to-exit/. The film, The structure’s unpaid debt: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-9.1 to APP-9.5.