The value system that I promote has two pillars.
First, for as long as we live, to have an optimal sexual experience.
Second, to end life in a comfortable death.
Accurate self-knowledge enables us to realize that, in some respects, it would be better to be dead than alive.
Our current technologies do not allow us to extend our lives indefinitely (which would give life an entirely new quality). As we will be dead anyway after not too long a time, our lives are a quixotic struggle against windmills, or, even less nobly, comparable to the attempts of a lab mouse trying to escape its fate while trapped on a treadmill.
Only the fact that we can experience the extreme pleasure of orgasms gives us (if not logically, then at least emotionally) a reason to stay alive. This is why herbal supplements that improve sexual health, such as Tongkat Ali, are so important.
The awareness that we can realistically only strive for an optimal sexual experience, followed by a comfortable death, is what I would like to call the second stage of enlightenment. This ideology will remain appropriate for as long as our technologies do not allow us to extend our lives indefinitely.
Only people who believe that they will be rewarded after death for spending their lives in sexual repression can realistically favor social orders that minimize the quality of their sexual experience.
As for the second pillar, a comfortable death, humanity already possesses some technologies to make death more gentle.
We do not have to suffer painfully through terminal illnesses like cancer. We could, and often can, make dying much more bearable with the wise use of opiates.
We can already eliminate the pain of life-saving and life-improving surgical procedures through the use of sedation (though this technology is open to improvement).
We could expand the use of sedation to situations that involve a certain risk of horror, such as flying in an aircraft in distress. It would be progress if passengers could choose to be sedated on all commercial flights. For it is not death itself we dread, but the pain and horror of dying consciously under certain circumstances.
To manage one’s end of life in a manner that ensures it will be gentle is, of course, in principle equivalent to suicide. Even though life is not ended abruptly, or even prematurely, preparing to die gently already means that one takes one’s death into one’s own hands. This is a huge intellectual advancement over merely trying to avoid death.
Time is on my side. Human technology is advancing, first towards engineering our comfortable deaths, and then towards engineering indefinite life spans. The ideologies that are appropriate to these capabilities will follow, as always, with a certain delay.