Subject: Re: suicide
From: Robbie (shok@netcom.com)
Date: Sat Feb 26 2000 - 20:39:18 EST
Jim said:
<< I just don't respect the act.<b> He was a coward </b>in pretty well
all religious and philosophical traditions. >>
I've heard that statement so many times from so many people and it
always strikes me as such a ridiculous notion. It seems that a lot of
people, not having thought very long or hard about suicide, proclaim
those that have chosen it "cowards," (it's always that word, even)
apparently just to reinforce that Suicide Is Bad. (because there isn't a
commercial jingle to that effect yet)
As the son of a man who killed himself, I have spent a great deal of
time thinking about such acts. I have come to an understanding of
suicide far removed from the ever-so-prevalent "act of cowardice" jibe.
First of all, one must take into consideration man's instinct for
self-preservation. If I offered you a million dollars to break your own
leg, I very strongly doubt you would be capable of doing it (even if you
wanted to). Hell, try poking yourself in the eye. Can't do it, can
you? In order for the suvive-at-all-costs center of your brain to allow
you to absolutely and irrevocably destroy yourself, there has to be
something very serious going on up there. An inclination toward
self-destruction doesn't make a lot of sense from an evolutionary stand
point (which may, in itself, explain common affirmations of Suicide Is
Bad; people are, to some extent, programmed to feel that way).
People (and everything else, for that matter) always take the path of
least resistance. It's called rational behavior. Simple economics: you
put the cost on one side, benefit on the other, and see which way the
scale tips. If you act outside of this framework, I'm sure you would
fit most definitions of insanity. Some people obsessively work out; for
them, the pain and effort of attaining their ideal physique is less
expensive than a life with a non-ideal one. Some people spend years and
fortunes on school; for them, the money and time and effort that go into
being educated is less expensive than a life as an uneducated yokel.
You get the idea. People place different values on different things,
but they always go the cheapest (ie, easiest) route.
And I think it's pretty safe to say that there are only two general
types of suicide:
1) Suicide as an act of an individual in such a hopeless mental state
that they become absolutely robotic:
Suicide is usually not as emotional as people tend to think;
coroners don't generally discover dried tears on the cheeks of those
who have killed themselves. The normal, emotional mechanisms of the
mind that generally prevent people from destroying themselves have to
completely shut off for suicide to be possible. Suicide notes are
never as profound as mourners want them to be; they are usually quite
simple, non-emotional, and blunt ("Dear mom, I'm sorry. Give my
stereo to suzy; I think she likes it."). I once skimmed a book that
was a large compilation of suicide notes (grim, isn't it?) and it
was remarkable how non-emotional they all were. One of them in
particular was written in lipstick on a bathroom mirror and went
something like: "Honey, I hate you. This is your fault. Love, Your
Husband"
2) Suicide as an act of infathomably strong sense of will:
Most suicides, one would imagine, fall into the other category.
This is a much rarer type; these are the monks who set themselves on
fire to protest an injust war and the suicide bombers and kamakazi
pilots and so on. These are the people who kill themselves out of
some sense of duty, obligation, or honor. You might actually consider
this a subgroup of the other, because I imagine the robotic state of
mind has to exist here as well.
But no matter how you slice, there is no room for cowardice in the minds
of people about to kill themselves. Calling people who kill themselves
cowards, is, methinks, a rather silly and simple-minded thing to do.
Suicide is much more complex than that, and there is nothing in the
typical definition of cowardice that even roughly encompasses the act of
ending your own life; quite the opposite. It's a rather ballsy thing to
do.
-robbie
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