It's a long read and it's from a student magazine back in 2000 but I just finished it and it put my thoughts into words better than I could have myself!
Last Call
By Tim Selwyn
It is time we had a real debate about the nature of suicide. In the barrage of propaganda from the government, in which they use our money to convince us that we ought to keep living, they will never offer a philosophical justification. They bark, they demand, they tut-tut, they wag their finger and they organise conferences, and always the answer is the same: more money must be spent, the government is not doing enough. If the correct answer is more money and government intervention, the question itself must surely be wrong.
But the government, the medical-psychiatric-counselling fraternity, the coroners, the do-gooders and the media, collude in a consensus of denial because they do not want to face the home truths that suicide brings. Suicide is a personal act that is treated on a macro scale in most people's thinking; and it suits the interested parties in this self-enriching and self justifying game to keep people in ignorance of the issues behind their convenient approach. The hysterical reaction to an earlier (and subsequently unpublished) version of this article by the university counsellors illustrates the intellectual bankruptcy and propagandist nature of the suicide industry and the weakness of the press. The hypocrisy of the crusading zealots who claim to want a debate on the suicide issue is quite clear - they want the exact opposite: a soapbox for their lobbying and censorship of ideas contrary to their interests.
In an era where millions are spent to officially endorse mental illness, in an attempt to legitimise and normalise human weakness and insanity, we could be forgiven for thinking that the final decay of our society into an Orwellian freakshow of the Politically Correct variety is dawning like a mushroom cloud on the horizon. Ironically enough, it seems the more we try to be liberal the more illiberal the results. The crime rate soars as fast as psychologists emerge to create new and evermore implausible "syndromes" to excuse it. The weak feel vindicated and the evil are encouraged - disturbing times. Is it any wonder that some high-profile politicians of the left, acting unwittingly in their capacity as parental role models have had children who have suicided?
Would they ever suggest that maybe the parents should take reponsibility for their children's moral development and character? Or would they say it is the State's duty? Either way, they know in their hearts, after the rhetoric and the ideological dogma has been trotted out that it was the personal decision of their child, insane or not, and not any defect of government that is ultimately responsible. The significance of the values that their parents instilled in them will remain a moot point.
Is it any wonder that in our society where values are in flux, and self discipline is waning, that in this age of wealth and unparalleled access to hedonistic consumer goods, where the fear of war and destruction is a by-gone memory, where the life expectancy is still climbing ever upwards, that in this environment it is precisely because of this sterile and safe world that people can now suicide over the silliest things because we have the luxury to think about them and brood over them where once we were to busy eeking out an existence to worry about such matters. This may only explain a fraction of the youth suicides, and means that it is a good indicator of how economically well we are doing. If this minority cannot cope in a nihilistic society because they fail to value themselves, then so be it. It is their own fault and their own decision, we simply cannot reinstate compulsory military training so that the handful of would-be suiciders can be given meaning to their lives. This does not go down well in a society where, crazy as it seems, if noone is to blame then it is assumed that everyone is to blame.
All suicides are usually lumped together by the authorities regardless of circumstance. This suits the lazy-minded and adds to the shock value of the lobbyists generic and always hyperbolic claims of "crisis" so as to justify vast expenditure and gain kudos for the person who can cry wolf the loudest. The media can be relied upon to shame itself with a total lack of analysis. Because suicide as an issue defined in parameters set by themselves and has only one monolithic side, and no counter-argument, the "crisis" angle can merrily spin like a perpetual motion machine: there's a suicide - isn't it awful - everyone says the gummint should do something - isn't it awful etc. etc.
Well people suicide for all manner of reasons, none of which can be helped by intervention, and most of which should not. People will tend to kill themselves if they perceive they are in a desperately hopeless predicament. Information to put this predicament into perspective may assist in the cases of a minute minority. But we can never assume that our perspective is the right one for someone else, or that their answer is not the right answer: and if their anwer is suicide then so be it. If we can respect every other decision they make then we ought to respect the ultimate one.
As for suicide being a "selfish act," it's far more selfish that a person should want someone alive for their own benefit. Firstly, there is nothing wrong with a selfish act if it is as important to the suicider as it obviously is, and secondly, the point of other people's existence ought to be determined by themselves rather than others, as it would mean that we only exist as slaves with no recourse to the ultimate in self-determination: self-destruction. If suicide stands for anything it is that it is others who are selfish. Is it others, the government, who should determine that we must live? If we cannot choose to die then it follows that we cannot really choose to live, and that it undermines the value of living. Through history we see the religious and the government authorities removing people's right to the final escape, in their attempt to remain in control of life itself.
Then there is the alarming thought that it is the living who are wrong and the suicide was the one with enough courage to put an end to it all. It is our pride, and our patronising arrogance that leads us to scorn and then to lament the him or her. We ask ourselves why do people suicide, when maybe we should be asking ourselves "why do we live?" The authorities would never risk telling people the obvious, that they must discover their own reasons to live, in case people find they don't have any. Darcy Clay suicided the day before he was to play a gig at an anti-youth suicide concert - a potent message.
As in the case of war and euthanasia, it can be quite rational, humane and appropriate to kill yourself, but it is the other instances of suicide that some people are unwilling to recognise as being the act of a rational clear thinking adult with all the facts in front of them. Apart from clear-cut instances of people shouting that they're god and jumping off a building in a superman outfit, suicides from deranged people would not make up the majority. It is not good enough to claim that depression is a mental condition akin to insanity either; after all how many people have thought "I'm so happy I could die."? Is happiness a mental illness too? Depressed people can make rational decisions and who is to say that suicide isn't one of them. Afterwards they may well claim that they are glad they did not suicide - but so what? It is like claiming you are glad you didn't go to a place that you have no information about or even know where it is. It isn't good or bad; it is what it is - final.
On the other hand there are no doubt many instances of people who were very sorry they didn't suicide when they had the chance. The horrors of this current war in Chechnya being an obvious example, but also social horrors and a life of misery in our society may warrant a mercifully curtailed existence.
The contention here is that suicide itself is a morally neutral act. The issues surrounding it, and the person themselves can be evaluated but the act itself is like their birth: it just happens. The person has their own reasons, an outsider's evaluation of the circumstances does not affect that. Some people suicide to avoid their worse fears, rejection in love, financial oblivion, social stigmatisation, incarceration and so on. Some fears, like the former ones are acute, and some are obtuse and morbid, like the fear of a living the rest of one's life in a meaningless mediocracy, the futility of existence in a world where one's goals will never be achieved, and so on. In both instances it would be justified that a person who was so pathetic as to let one relationship be the end-point of their life deserves to kill themselves, and a person who really was unhappy and unfulfilled would be better off dead since their position would not likely improve. Once again - it's all up to them.
The old man sick of his wife found in the garage, the businessman facing bankruptcy jumping off a bridge, Darcy Clay, a cop who shoots himself on a deserted beach, Kurt Cobain, a man found hanging in the back shed, the girl with a baby fostered out who drowns herself, and the man who "autocides" by simply driving off a cliff - they had all just had enough. They are young, old, black, brown, white, men, women, married, single, rich, poor, conservative, radical and could be the person next door. The only thing they had in common is the only relevant one: they had all just had enough.
We won't see a big ad campaign praising them, praising their courage to cross into the unknown abyss, praising their stoic fortitude in seeing through what others could not stomach, praising their ability to determine their own fate, praising their strength of will to overcome their survival instinct. The old chestnut about it being the easy way out is ridiculous, it must be an incredibly difficult decision - one involving much thought and mental stamina. These suicides are as close to gracious as it can get, with minimal involvement of others and the only ethical qualm being the degree to which people dependent on them are affected. Instead of praise the government actively encourages the ones who don't have the balls to see it through, and who insist on playing out the farce and dramatics to gain attention. It is the endorsement of the Clayton's suicide, that most wretched and detestable pastime of the useless and weak: an "attempted suicide."
The people who have the most suicide attempts are the ones who most deserve to get it right. The attempted suicide cheapens and debases the real suicides, and is not an attempt at all but a fake. It is the manifestation of self indulgence and self importance, with an air of the drama queen to add spice to their own little tragedy. It is a cry for help that ought to be answered by a bullet.
Each time the fake is enacted it is rewarded. The pathology is replayed as the faker becomes addicted to the thrill of a near-death experience and the resultant, usually feigned, compassion. The faker uses it as a mark of character when, of course it is exactly a mark of defective temperament and denotes a weak character. To boast of such faking (and they can go on about it) is contemptible and disgusting.
Faking is also the bread and butter of the counselling racket. Counsellors typically mirror their clientele: losers. Losers who choose to justify themselves by fooling themselves into thinking they are playing God with people (whose mere act of ringing up or talking indicates they are a faker in the first place). They see their pointless jobs as a calling, but they ingratiate themselves to fellow losers in gossip sessions and drama scenes because they get a perverse voyeuristic kick out of it, not only for a feeling of self importance. Fakers helping fakers - how very convenient it all is, the real suicide rate after a call to a crisis line must be incredibly low, and (a corollary of that) what a wonderful success rate they must enjoy. More money for them. Come on callers join the party.
In this sickening collusion add the coroners to the list. Those lippy mavericks, who literally are judge and jury (and act like they are the executioners) have their act of parliament to gag the press on all suicides and are only too willing to join in the rounds of finger pointing, pontificating and engaging in activist blather with the usual lack of intelligence that marks this phoney debate. As far as answers go they contribute nothing from within the safety of their lofty and unelected office. The level of the coroners' arguments seems to be hovering around that of talk-back radio after the pubs have just closed. And as for the brain-dead media, we have long stopped expecting anything less than reactionary fumblings as far as critiques of the status quo go.
The final segment of resistance to home truths is, naturally, the people close to the suicide. Every family somewhere along the line will have suicides in the closet. And every time it is the same: "we had no idea? Why didn't we know? Why didn't they tell us something was wrong?" and "if they did we would have helped." And there is always the other questions: how could a person we thought was good do something so bad to themselves? We feel let down, excluded, even humiliated, by their secretive actions, as if it were a personal betrayal. And at the same time we may feel partly guilty that it was our fault, our negligence, our failure that contributed to it. And since we have all been in that situation we may even project this guilt and blame on to society at large. Suicides being individual-specific and circumstance-specific, some scenarios may well be aggravated because of some individuals' actions, such as persecution or abuse. But our feelings towards the tragic act is all so futile.
Although tragedy would imply inevitability, the act of suicide must be premeditated to some degree, and still require a decision at the ultimate point. Our seeming irrelevance to their lives (and their death) may leave us bitter, and even lead us to a healthy questioning of the value of our own lives. What we must not lose sight of in these situations is that they had their reasons. No matter how foolish, old fashioned, bizarre, or misinformed their decision it was their decision and we ought to respect it. If they really thought they had to die then they deserved to die. The ultimate privilege was theirs alone to enact, and is neither good nor bad, it just is. We can't do a damn thing about it, and it's time we stopped acting as if we could.
Last Call
By Tim Selwyn
It is time we had a real debate about the nature of suicide. In the barrage of propaganda from the government, in which they use our money to convince us that we ought to keep living, they will never offer a philosophical justification. They bark, they demand, they tut-tut, they wag their finger and they organise conferences, and always the answer is the same: more money must be spent, the government is not doing enough. If the correct answer is more money and government intervention, the question itself must surely be wrong.
But the government, the medical-psychiatric-counselling fraternity, the coroners, the do-gooders and the media, collude in a consensus of denial because they do not want to face the home truths that suicide brings. Suicide is a personal act that is treated on a macro scale in most people's thinking; and it suits the interested parties in this self-enriching and self justifying game to keep people in ignorance of the issues behind their convenient approach. The hysterical reaction to an earlier (and subsequently unpublished) version of this article by the university counsellors illustrates the intellectual bankruptcy and propagandist nature of the suicide industry and the weakness of the press. The hypocrisy of the crusading zealots who claim to want a debate on the suicide issue is quite clear - they want the exact opposite: a soapbox for their lobbying and censorship of ideas contrary to their interests.
In an era where millions are spent to officially endorse mental illness, in an attempt to legitimise and normalise human weakness and insanity, we could be forgiven for thinking that the final decay of our society into an Orwellian freakshow of the Politically Correct variety is dawning like a mushroom cloud on the horizon. Ironically enough, it seems the more we try to be liberal the more illiberal the results. The crime rate soars as fast as psychologists emerge to create new and evermore implausible "syndromes" to excuse it. The weak feel vindicated and the evil are encouraged - disturbing times. Is it any wonder that some high-profile politicians of the left, acting unwittingly in their capacity as parental role models have had children who have suicided?
Would they ever suggest that maybe the parents should take reponsibility for their children's moral development and character? Or would they say it is the State's duty? Either way, they know in their hearts, after the rhetoric and the ideological dogma has been trotted out that it was the personal decision of their child, insane or not, and not any defect of government that is ultimately responsible. The significance of the values that their parents instilled in them will remain a moot point.
Is it any wonder that in our society where values are in flux, and self discipline is waning, that in this age of wealth and unparalleled access to hedonistic consumer goods, where the fear of war and destruction is a by-gone memory, where the life expectancy is still climbing ever upwards, that in this environment it is precisely because of this sterile and safe world that people can now suicide over the silliest things because we have the luxury to think about them and brood over them where once we were to busy eeking out an existence to worry about such matters. This may only explain a fraction of the youth suicides, and means that it is a good indicator of how economically well we are doing. If this minority cannot cope in a nihilistic society because they fail to value themselves, then so be it. It is their own fault and their own decision, we simply cannot reinstate compulsory military training so that the handful of would-be suiciders can be given meaning to their lives. This does not go down well in a society where, crazy as it seems, if noone is to blame then it is assumed that everyone is to blame.
All suicides are usually lumped together by the authorities regardless of circumstance. This suits the lazy-minded and adds to the shock value of the lobbyists generic and always hyperbolic claims of "crisis" so as to justify vast expenditure and gain kudos for the person who can cry wolf the loudest. The media can be relied upon to shame itself with a total lack of analysis. Because suicide as an issue defined in parameters set by themselves and has only one monolithic side, and no counter-argument, the "crisis" angle can merrily spin like a perpetual motion machine: there's a suicide - isn't it awful - everyone says the gummint should do something - isn't it awful etc. etc.
Well people suicide for all manner of reasons, none of which can be helped by intervention, and most of which should not. People will tend to kill themselves if they perceive they are in a desperately hopeless predicament. Information to put this predicament into perspective may assist in the cases of a minute minority. But we can never assume that our perspective is the right one for someone else, or that their answer is not the right answer: and if their anwer is suicide then so be it. If we can respect every other decision they make then we ought to respect the ultimate one.
As for suicide being a "selfish act," it's far more selfish that a person should want someone alive for their own benefit. Firstly, there is nothing wrong with a selfish act if it is as important to the suicider as it obviously is, and secondly, the point of other people's existence ought to be determined by themselves rather than others, as it would mean that we only exist as slaves with no recourse to the ultimate in self-determination: self-destruction. If suicide stands for anything it is that it is others who are selfish. Is it others, the government, who should determine that we must live? If we cannot choose to die then it follows that we cannot really choose to live, and that it undermines the value of living. Through history we see the religious and the government authorities removing people's right to the final escape, in their attempt to remain in control of life itself.
Then there is the alarming thought that it is the living who are wrong and the suicide was the one with enough courage to put an end to it all. It is our pride, and our patronising arrogance that leads us to scorn and then to lament the him or her. We ask ourselves why do people suicide, when maybe we should be asking ourselves "why do we live?" The authorities would never risk telling people the obvious, that they must discover their own reasons to live, in case people find they don't have any. Darcy Clay suicided the day before he was to play a gig at an anti-youth suicide concert - a potent message.
As in the case of war and euthanasia, it can be quite rational, humane and appropriate to kill yourself, but it is the other instances of suicide that some people are unwilling to recognise as being the act of a rational clear thinking adult with all the facts in front of them. Apart from clear-cut instances of people shouting that they're god and jumping off a building in a superman outfit, suicides from deranged people would not make up the majority. It is not good enough to claim that depression is a mental condition akin to insanity either; after all how many people have thought "I'm so happy I could die."? Is happiness a mental illness too? Depressed people can make rational decisions and who is to say that suicide isn't one of them. Afterwards they may well claim that they are glad they did not suicide - but so what? It is like claiming you are glad you didn't go to a place that you have no information about or even know where it is. It isn't good or bad; it is what it is - final.
On the other hand there are no doubt many instances of people who were very sorry they didn't suicide when they had the chance. The horrors of this current war in Chechnya being an obvious example, but also social horrors and a life of misery in our society may warrant a mercifully curtailed existence.
The contention here is that suicide itself is a morally neutral act. The issues surrounding it, and the person themselves can be evaluated but the act itself is like their birth: it just happens. The person has their own reasons, an outsider's evaluation of the circumstances does not affect that. Some people suicide to avoid their worse fears, rejection in love, financial oblivion, social stigmatisation, incarceration and so on. Some fears, like the former ones are acute, and some are obtuse and morbid, like the fear of a living the rest of one's life in a meaningless mediocracy, the futility of existence in a world where one's goals will never be achieved, and so on. In both instances it would be justified that a person who was so pathetic as to let one relationship be the end-point of their life deserves to kill themselves, and a person who really was unhappy and unfulfilled would be better off dead since their position would not likely improve. Once again - it's all up to them.
The old man sick of his wife found in the garage, the businessman facing bankruptcy jumping off a bridge, Darcy Clay, a cop who shoots himself on a deserted beach, Kurt Cobain, a man found hanging in the back shed, the girl with a baby fostered out who drowns herself, and the man who "autocides" by simply driving off a cliff - they had all just had enough. They are young, old, black, brown, white, men, women, married, single, rich, poor, conservative, radical and could be the person next door. The only thing they had in common is the only relevant one: they had all just had enough.
We won't see a big ad campaign praising them, praising their courage to cross into the unknown abyss, praising their stoic fortitude in seeing through what others could not stomach, praising their ability to determine their own fate, praising their strength of will to overcome their survival instinct. The old chestnut about it being the easy way out is ridiculous, it must be an incredibly difficult decision - one involving much thought and mental stamina. These suicides are as close to gracious as it can get, with minimal involvement of others and the only ethical qualm being the degree to which people dependent on them are affected. Instead of praise the government actively encourages the ones who don't have the balls to see it through, and who insist on playing out the farce and dramatics to gain attention. It is the endorsement of the Clayton's suicide, that most wretched and detestable pastime of the useless and weak: an "attempted suicide."
The people who have the most suicide attempts are the ones who most deserve to get it right. The attempted suicide cheapens and debases the real suicides, and is not an attempt at all but a fake. It is the manifestation of self indulgence and self importance, with an air of the drama queen to add spice to their own little tragedy. It is a cry for help that ought to be answered by a bullet.
Each time the fake is enacted it is rewarded. The pathology is replayed as the faker becomes addicted to the thrill of a near-death experience and the resultant, usually feigned, compassion. The faker uses it as a mark of character when, of course it is exactly a mark of defective temperament and denotes a weak character. To boast of such faking (and they can go on about it) is contemptible and disgusting.
Faking is also the bread and butter of the counselling racket. Counsellors typically mirror their clientele: losers. Losers who choose to justify themselves by fooling themselves into thinking they are playing God with people (whose mere act of ringing up or talking indicates they are a faker in the first place). They see their pointless jobs as a calling, but they ingratiate themselves to fellow losers in gossip sessions and drama scenes because they get a perverse voyeuristic kick out of it, not only for a feeling of self importance. Fakers helping fakers - how very convenient it all is, the real suicide rate after a call to a crisis line must be incredibly low, and (a corollary of that) what a wonderful success rate they must enjoy. More money for them. Come on callers join the party.
In this sickening collusion add the coroners to the list. Those lippy mavericks, who literally are judge and jury (and act like they are the executioners) have their act of parliament to gag the press on all suicides and are only too willing to join in the rounds of finger pointing, pontificating and engaging in activist blather with the usual lack of intelligence that marks this phoney debate. As far as answers go they contribute nothing from within the safety of their lofty and unelected office. The level of the coroners' arguments seems to be hovering around that of talk-back radio after the pubs have just closed. And as for the brain-dead media, we have long stopped expecting anything less than reactionary fumblings as far as critiques of the status quo go.
The final segment of resistance to home truths is, naturally, the people close to the suicide. Every family somewhere along the line will have suicides in the closet. And every time it is the same: "we had no idea? Why didn't we know? Why didn't they tell us something was wrong?" and "if they did we would have helped." And there is always the other questions: how could a person we thought was good do something so bad to themselves? We feel let down, excluded, even humiliated, by their secretive actions, as if it were a personal betrayal. And at the same time we may feel partly guilty that it was our fault, our negligence, our failure that contributed to it. And since we have all been in that situation we may even project this guilt and blame on to society at large. Suicides being individual-specific and circumstance-specific, some scenarios may well be aggravated because of some individuals' actions, such as persecution or abuse. But our feelings towards the tragic act is all so futile.
Although tragedy would imply inevitability, the act of suicide must be premeditated to some degree, and still require a decision at the ultimate point. Our seeming irrelevance to their lives (and their death) may leave us bitter, and even lead us to a healthy questioning of the value of our own lives. What we must not lose sight of in these situations is that they had their reasons. No matter how foolish, old fashioned, bizarre, or misinformed their decision it was their decision and we ought to respect it. If they really thought they had to die then they deserved to die. The ultimate privilege was theirs alone to enact, and is neither good nor bad, it just is. We can't do a damn thing about it, and it's time we stopped acting as if we could.
