Darkover
Angelic
- Jul 29, 2021
- 4,209
Let's imagine that you are throwing a big party for your family and friends. You've put in a lot of work, and you're confident that everyone in attendance is going to have a great time. The very last thing that you'd think to do would be to hire a firm of big, burly bouncers to guard the doors of your house to keep people in and make sure that nobody can leave before you had decided that the party had ended. If the party was any good, you would expect the guests to choose to stay of their own volition, without any threats of coercion, and without their exit being blocked.
Imagine that you had attended such a party, you decided after about an hour that you weren't having a good time and decided that you wanted to leave; and you found that your path was blocked by a large, beefy security guard. When you explained that you would like to leave, he told you that the party was objectively wonderful and that your decision to leave was evidence that you were of unsound judgement. Therefore, by continuing to detain you at the party, he was actually protecting your own best interests against your faulty judgement. Would you humbly accept that you were, in fact, wrong in your assessment of the party and that your decision to leave is symptomatic of a profound impairment in your capacity to make decisions that reflect your rational best interests? Or would you be more likely to conclude that the fact that strongarm tactics had to be employed to stop you from leaving was, in fact, evidence of deep insecurity on the part of the host?
Blasphemy laws in Islamic countries work on a similar principle to this. These laws don't exist because a Muslim's faith in his religion is so strong that there is nothing that could ever possibly be said to cause his belief to waver in the slightest. They exist for the opposite reason - because faith in Islam, or any other empirically unproven belief system is dependent on mutual confirmation from the people around oneself. If everyone around you, and all the people that you admire and respect, share the same belief system and the same strong faith, then you will most likely retain your own strong faith as well. However, if all around you, people that you generally hold in high esteem for their intelligence and level-headedness start to express deep-seated doubts about what they (and you) have been taught to believe, then there is a strong chance that, over time, your own faith will start to weaken.
If you depend on your faith to provide you with your sense of meaning and purpose in life; then this process of finding your faith start to falter can be extremely distressing, and this is why you might be driven to develop defence mechanisms to try and prevent you from being exposed to any evidence or alternative viewpoint which contradicts your own worldview.
I believe that the same process is in play when we talk about suicide. It can't have gone unnoticed by many that we are currently in the grips of a moral panic concerning the subject of suicide, which is being portrayed as an ongoing public health emergency. From the amount of suicide prevention campaigns that we get in the UK, and from the urgency that governments are being called upon to act to reduce suicide rates in the UK, you would fully expect that people were positively queuing up all day, every day, to jump from Tower Bridge into the Thames. When in fact, we have not seen a recent upsurge in the suicide rates in the UK, and suicide rates in the UK remain low by European and worldwide standards.
All suicide prevention schemes, without exception, draw upon the same tired old stereotypes and tropes about suicidal people being emotionally unstable and are in urgent need of treatment for a presumed mental health issue. They have constructed a rhetorical fortress whereby any person asking for the right to be suicide can be summarily discredited as "mentally ill" (i.e. they are unreliable witnesses to their own thoughts, and cannot be taken seriously) and in urgent need of mental healthcare. Conveniently for proponents of suicide prevention, these presumptions of mental illness are completely unfalsifiable, and in merely making the insinuation that someone is mentally ill, you open up a credibility gap between the suicidal person who is deemed unsound of mind, and the rest of society who has a paternalistic duty of care to make sure that the suicidal person does not have the opportunity to make plans to act based on their allegedly compromised mental state.
As a general principle, I think that if you feel confident that your opinion is well informed, then you don't mind allowing people on the opposite side of the debate to put across their ideas, and to have an open exchange of ideas. I don't think that you would need to try and portray your interlocutor as being mentally deranged, or assert that they've been possessed by the devil in order to shut down their viewpoint before they've even had the chance to express it. You'd let them speak, and then you would calmly go through their argument, point by point, and show them the errors in their reasoning. For example, it doesn't seem that atheists are quite as defensive about their ideas as devoutly religious folk; as firstly, atheists are simply advancing the null hypothesis with relation to God's existence, and usually don't seem to be as strongly emotionally invested in their perspective as theists are. But as we see from blasphemy laws, devout theists are often very defensive about their beliefs, even to the point where they are prepared to use extreme violence to shut down any opposing perspective
Although suicide prevention advocates aren't typically resorting to stoning people to death for expressing heterodox views about bodily sovereignty (which would, of course, defeat the purpose of suicide prevention); people on that side of the debate do seem to get very "triggered" by any suggestion that there is more moral complexity to the issue of suicide prevention than they are willing to allow. After years of debating the issue of the right to suicide on Reddit and Twitter/X; one trend that I've noticed is that many of the people who are most passionately opposed to the right to die are people who themselves report having had suicidal thoughts in the past, or even being suicidal in the present. This puts me in mind of anecdotes about homophobic Christian preachers who later go on to be exposed to be soliciting the services of male prostitutes. It seems, from the outsider's perspective, that denouncing homosexuality as sinful and perverse is how they go about resolving their own private internal conflicts. One wonders whether the same might be true about many of the people who are among the most vociferous opponents of the right to suicide.
It is my personal psychoanalytical theory that the aggressiveness of the suicide prevention lobby often stems from the same form of dissonance between the person's innate biological drive to resist death at all costs, and their nagging suspicions (suspicions that they wish to suppress) that people advocating for the right to die might actually be on to something about the ultimate futility of humanity's plight. As this is merely my armchair psychoanaylsis and I am unable to see into the minds of the people who are passionate supporters of suicide prevention, I am open minded to any evidence that might change my view on this.
To avoid any misinterpretations of my argument; one thing that I'm NOT arguing is that everyone secretly hates life and wants to die. I'm not arguing that most people see life as being bad for themselves. However, I think that many people do realise that life is essentially a zero sum game, and that in order for them to be winning, someone else has to be losing. For example, in order for me to be able to affordably clothe and entertain myself living in a developed nation, this requires sweatshop workers to be toiling in sweatshop conditions to produce the clothes for pennies an hour. In order for me to indulge my love of travel, I have to contribute to global warming. And in order for each person to enjoy their lives as individuals, they kind of depend on other people sticking around (whether by choice, or by force) so that they don't have to live their life mired in loneliness and grief. If people were freely allowed to commit suicide, then I think that a lot of people know that there's a risk that the whole enterprise of human life would be exposed as a house of cards that was prone to collapse if people couldn't be forced to stick around to be exploited for the benefit of those who are more fortunate.
Imagine that you had attended such a party, you decided after about an hour that you weren't having a good time and decided that you wanted to leave; and you found that your path was blocked by a large, beefy security guard. When you explained that you would like to leave, he told you that the party was objectively wonderful and that your decision to leave was evidence that you were of unsound judgement. Therefore, by continuing to detain you at the party, he was actually protecting your own best interests against your faulty judgement. Would you humbly accept that you were, in fact, wrong in your assessment of the party and that your decision to leave is symptomatic of a profound impairment in your capacity to make decisions that reflect your rational best interests? Or would you be more likely to conclude that the fact that strongarm tactics had to be employed to stop you from leaving was, in fact, evidence of deep insecurity on the part of the host?
Blasphemy laws in Islamic countries work on a similar principle to this. These laws don't exist because a Muslim's faith in his religion is so strong that there is nothing that could ever possibly be said to cause his belief to waver in the slightest. They exist for the opposite reason - because faith in Islam, or any other empirically unproven belief system is dependent on mutual confirmation from the people around oneself. If everyone around you, and all the people that you admire and respect, share the same belief system and the same strong faith, then you will most likely retain your own strong faith as well. However, if all around you, people that you generally hold in high esteem for their intelligence and level-headedness start to express deep-seated doubts about what they (and you) have been taught to believe, then there is a strong chance that, over time, your own faith will start to weaken.
If you depend on your faith to provide you with your sense of meaning and purpose in life; then this process of finding your faith start to falter can be extremely distressing, and this is why you might be driven to develop defence mechanisms to try and prevent you from being exposed to any evidence or alternative viewpoint which contradicts your own worldview.
I believe that the same process is in play when we talk about suicide. It can't have gone unnoticed by many that we are currently in the grips of a moral panic concerning the subject of suicide, which is being portrayed as an ongoing public health emergency. From the amount of suicide prevention campaigns that we get in the UK, and from the urgency that governments are being called upon to act to reduce suicide rates in the UK, you would fully expect that people were positively queuing up all day, every day, to jump from Tower Bridge into the Thames. When in fact, we have not seen a recent upsurge in the suicide rates in the UK, and suicide rates in the UK remain low by European and worldwide standards.
All suicide prevention schemes, without exception, draw upon the same tired old stereotypes and tropes about suicidal people being emotionally unstable and are in urgent need of treatment for a presumed mental health issue. They have constructed a rhetorical fortress whereby any person asking for the right to be suicide can be summarily discredited as "mentally ill" (i.e. they are unreliable witnesses to their own thoughts, and cannot be taken seriously) and in urgent need of mental healthcare. Conveniently for proponents of suicide prevention, these presumptions of mental illness are completely unfalsifiable, and in merely making the insinuation that someone is mentally ill, you open up a credibility gap between the suicidal person who is deemed unsound of mind, and the rest of society who has a paternalistic duty of care to make sure that the suicidal person does not have the opportunity to make plans to act based on their allegedly compromised mental state.
As a general principle, I think that if you feel confident that your opinion is well informed, then you don't mind allowing people on the opposite side of the debate to put across their ideas, and to have an open exchange of ideas. I don't think that you would need to try and portray your interlocutor as being mentally deranged, or assert that they've been possessed by the devil in order to shut down their viewpoint before they've even had the chance to express it. You'd let them speak, and then you would calmly go through their argument, point by point, and show them the errors in their reasoning. For example, it doesn't seem that atheists are quite as defensive about their ideas as devoutly religious folk; as firstly, atheists are simply advancing the null hypothesis with relation to God's existence, and usually don't seem to be as strongly emotionally invested in their perspective as theists are. But as we see from blasphemy laws, devout theists are often very defensive about their beliefs, even to the point where they are prepared to use extreme violence to shut down any opposing perspective
Although suicide prevention advocates aren't typically resorting to stoning people to death for expressing heterodox views about bodily sovereignty (which would, of course, defeat the purpose of suicide prevention); people on that side of the debate do seem to get very "triggered" by any suggestion that there is more moral complexity to the issue of suicide prevention than they are willing to allow. After years of debating the issue of the right to suicide on Reddit and Twitter/X; one trend that I've noticed is that many of the people who are most passionately opposed to the right to die are people who themselves report having had suicidal thoughts in the past, or even being suicidal in the present. This puts me in mind of anecdotes about homophobic Christian preachers who later go on to be exposed to be soliciting the services of male prostitutes. It seems, from the outsider's perspective, that denouncing homosexuality as sinful and perverse is how they go about resolving their own private internal conflicts. One wonders whether the same might be true about many of the people who are among the most vociferous opponents of the right to suicide.
It is my personal psychoanalytical theory that the aggressiveness of the suicide prevention lobby often stems from the same form of dissonance between the person's innate biological drive to resist death at all costs, and their nagging suspicions (suspicions that they wish to suppress) that people advocating for the right to die might actually be on to something about the ultimate futility of humanity's plight. As this is merely my armchair psychoanaylsis and I am unable to see into the minds of the people who are passionate supporters of suicide prevention, I am open minded to any evidence that might change my view on this.
To avoid any misinterpretations of my argument; one thing that I'm NOT arguing is that everyone secretly hates life and wants to die. I'm not arguing that most people see life as being bad for themselves. However, I think that many people do realise that life is essentially a zero sum game, and that in order for them to be winning, someone else has to be losing. For example, in order for me to be able to affordably clothe and entertain myself living in a developed nation, this requires sweatshop workers to be toiling in sweatshop conditions to produce the clothes for pennies an hour. In order for me to indulge my love of travel, I have to contribute to global warming. And in order for each person to enjoy their lives as individuals, they kind of depend on other people sticking around (whether by choice, or by force) so that they don't have to live their life mired in loneliness and grief. If people were freely allowed to commit suicide, then I think that a lot of people know that there's a risk that the whole enterprise of human life would be exposed as a house of cards that was prone to collapse if people couldn't be forced to stick around to be exploited for the benefit of those who are more fortunate.
