"It's Jung," I answered, "who keeps talking about the law of opposites. The death wish is subjective. But we translate it into its opposite form--in this case, the objective. We want other people to die--to suffer--to bear our load--to take our responsibility. We hate. What did you say about your old folks? Vengeful and persecuting and parasitic? That's the death wish turned wrong-side-out. Or--take this pair of opposites. We have applied reason to extending life. So we have automatically obliged ourselves to apply reason to death. That is a psychological consequence of administering life--stretching it, maintaining it--of baby-saving and so on. Only--being egoists--blind to the basic laws of instinct--we won't kill anybody. Millions of Russians, maybe, but not one American. It's even against the law for a person to kill himself, for whatever merciful and laudable a reason. So what? We insist on our right to save and maintain every life. We also insist on dodging the resultant duty at the other end of the natural spectrum: death. The living have no recourse left but to extravert their death wish. To hate others because of the hatefulness of the trap they're in." "How do you work it out?" "In the better world," I said, "a person who had enjoyed the long conscious control of his life would feel somewhat responsible for controlling his death. When he got useless, he would give up. He would regard it as rational--and as part of that 'greater love' that almost no man, these days, hath a sign of." "Voluntary euthanasia?" "Why not? And if you came a header and couldn't do it for yourself--the state would do it." "Do you think," Tom said with asperity, "that the people would permit anything like that? Or think of it as _idealism_? Why--it's a sin--!" "Sure. Sin. It's one of the sins that keep the churches full and the heads and hearts of the folks empty. Vested interest." "How many people would do it?" I shrugged. "Couldn't say. You've seen cases. You'll likely witness another--my own--before long--" "Good God! I'm sorry--Phil--!" I laughed and he relaxed--visibly. "The mass of humanity," he went on after a time, "hasn't that kind of insight, education, nerve--" "No. Maybe not. Hasn't--as I'd put it--even that much access to its own instincts. Doesn't know even that clearly the relationship of ideals to acts. Of material gains to inner responsibilities. That's the trouble with the mass of humanity. It decides to use atom bombs--the work of a few geniuses who, left to themselves, might not." "Appalling," Tom said. "Sure. But the moldboard plow is just as deadly as the bomb in the hands of the common mass. And the implications of plows are much easier for the common jerk to understand than the implications of nucleonics. But he doesn't. So why worry about atomic bombs? Merely another aspect of the same, deep, and ubiquitous nonsense." We sat awhile. "What," Tom finally said, "will the better world be like?" "Woodsy," I answered.