agreed completely, really pretty much everything the collective has to say about suicide pisses me off. there are these "your pain is real, but so is HOPE" posters plastered all around the subway systems where i live, and i pretty much scowl every single time i see them. when i encounter stuff like that, i often think about its relation to morale management in the blood pyramid (my pet name for class systems more or less). it's a topic i sort of love to hate or hate to love you know, so it sucks to have it triggered by the obnoxious campaigns.
to begin with, as a mentally ill and often suicidal person, the mere existence of these anti-suicide campaigns harms me, because they serve to remind me of situations i'm actively trying to forget about when i'm navigating the physical infrastructure of the blood pyramid. the pyramid is structured in a way that requires many individuals in urban centers to ride metal ships through an intricate system of underground tunnels so that they can be efficiently delivered to their assigned labor chambers. usually when i'm riding on the slave ships i'm just trying to dissociate because i hate the whole system, particularly the fact that we are actually expected to pay to use it haha, and also that it is in such disrepair (we just had a derailment here in nyc last week), and obviously, idk, just the whole fact of what it's designed to do and why it exists is a big part of why i want to die so much of the time
in any case i have to take the ship so that i can perform the tasks that the masters dictate in order to "earn" the tokens they require to keep my body alive and at their disposal for future labor. overall i think this is quite a hellish situation so i just try to distract myself with music / videos / books. these stupid ads just instantly snap me back into my suffering slave body, put the pain and problem of my life back into laser focus, even if they aren't attached to platitudes and call lines, which they always fucking are haha
pleassseee i'm just trying to get to my designated slave chamber, stop assaulting me with unwanted information bombs ??? it's truly infuriating to realize that these ads and signs exist in large part to comfort everyone EXCEPT suicidal people. they exist so that the collective can claim it's doing its best to help and thus relieve itself of a burden. suicidal people hate platitudes, and most don't think call lines are going to help them, especially those who have actually had to rely on those systems and have seen how pathetically dysfunctional they are.
what's worse than being surrounded by the deafening silence of the collective as you suffer? the deafening roar of "you are not alone. help is a phone call away." imo the whole pyramid works together in an often emergent but nevertheless relentless way to isolate you, since that ultimately maximizes its ability to exploit and abuse you. and once it's succeeded in isolating you, or if you accidentally or deliberately isolate yourself, it conspires with your worst natures to trap you there. but don't worry, because it's prepared a very special message just for people like you, and here it is, right here conveniently placed in the locations we think "citizens" might be despairing, the slave ships! WOW i don't even have to go out of my way, and my thoughtful collective has not only prepared special help for me but anticipated my need for it and baked it right into the geometry of this absolutely dismal loading screen i have to wait through to get to work, not to put too fine of a point on it
and in any case, the statement simply isn't true anyway lol, because in my suicidal experience at least there are absolutely obvious and rationally defensible ways in which i AM alone, and there is NO help. no meaningful help i mean, because many of my problems result at least partially from prolonged interaction with the pyramid that i'm forced to live inside of. when i cross paths with these info weapons i want to scream, "i feel like an animal in a zoo and i hate it!" being surrounded by signs "reminding" me that help is just three digits away, if only i CHOSE™ to accept it, it's actually so grotesque my friends, because these campaigns are more about perpetuating dominant ideological content than they are about helping people like you or me. and they are built to deflect all responsibility, which is why they often paradoxically emphasize personal choice (but only if you chose to live haha), personal circumstances, and, like in the ad targeting suicidal men you saw, personal responsibility to loved ones or to the collective ("think of what you could offer the world!" etc)
i want to scream about being in a zoo because the situation is actually deeply analogous to a zoo. suicidal people are often trapped by conditions they can't control, so we are like caged animals. non-suicidal people are therefore spectators by default as they are not in this particular cage as we experience it, but can only observe it externally. of course we are all in various cages, even those of us who desire to live, so there is significant natural empathy on the part of the non suicidal, but that empathy collides with the need to believe that certain higher order structures are good objects (life is good, civilization is good, people are good, etc etc). this is why they often don't really want to hear about our experiences. our experiences often contain shadow content that threatens to shatter the myth of the good collective, the goodness of humanity, or at very archetypal depths the goodness of life itself. succinctly, they don't clearly see their own cage (perhaps as a condition of retaining a positive outlook) and so they can't understand how our cage is intertwined with theirs; they would often rather deny the whole thing. due to this there remains a separation, and so we are in our little zoo, and they are in their big zoo, and we observe one another from across the abyss of despair.
in actual zoos i've observed that the cage walls are painted with little depictions of the animal's natural habitats. supposedly this is in place to make the animals feel comfortable i think? i have no idea if it actually helps the animals or not, but this practice also clearly functions to relieve the audience of guilt. the average zoo visitor would like to believe that the animals are healthy and happy, but it is often hard to imagine that a wild creature could truly be happy in a prison. the prison is therefore dressed to resemble a vision of the animal's former freedom. the zoo visitor may now imagine that the animal doesn't know the difference, that it is thoroughly convinced by the illusion of freedom and is therefore not truly suffering. ironically, perhaps the only agent convinced of an illusion in this system is the zoo visitor, who is buying into a fantasy contrived and suggested by the wardens to ensure the flow of capital is not disrupted (!)
it's just the same way with these suicide outreach ads, they aren't for us, they're part of the necessary fantasy of the collective. and so they just reflect the cultures own attitudes, which include little in the way of understanding or real empathy. respectfully, i'm just so goddamn sick of hearing about how i'm not alone, when being alone is really the central problem of my awful existence in this terrible hell-machine human beings accidentally built to suffer inside of lol
for a thing that's so obsessed with hierarchical suffering the blood pyramid has no fucking idea how to utilize its own information system to its benefit. there are various levels of suffering happening in the social body, and many dimensions of suffering, but in each instance one would like to determine the balance of the scales: how much of the given suffering is a result of the individual, and how much a result of the collective(s)? this is so that the social repair can unfold in a dual-pronged way, to maximize the rate and effectivity of total healing. instead it just fucking ignores this more or less, it never observes the scales with the necessary honesty, because it's always attempting to deflect blame. unfortunately, this is often true of the individual as well. somewhere between the individual and the world, there's the mental illness. and both levels of the system need to integrate shadow content and transform their own structure to achieve their full potential. sadly, our civilizations manage the truly dire cases with denial more or less, the blood pyramid doesn't want to catch any negative reflections of itself so instead it makes these bullshit propaganda campaigns to control the narrative
somewhere around here is usually when my ship docks into the next underground labor shuttle nexus and i realize i spent the whole ride spiraling about not only my own horrors but also these entwined giant collective problems i have no control over, so thanks for that MTA, keep plastering 'em up so i can keep being triggered by them, i'm happy to know that at least the people around me are feeling comforted in the knowledge that the benevolent social order is out here trying to find all the suicidal people who didn't realize they were a phone call away from being saved lol
