the basic need they're trying to address is not one that reflects a deeper meaning or bears a great deal of weighty analysis as to its merits
This depends on who's doing the analysis. For example, self-immolation is often seen as an extreme form of desperate but rational protest. The only way to understand and prevent these types of events is to understand and address the underlying needs.
Suicide is never a rational response, and can't be taken into account on the spectrum of human needs, since it's an abnegation of all human need. It doesn't need to be considered within the spectrum of rational economic responses. Viktor Frankl made it through without committing suicide, while thousands of happily brainwashed and well-fed kamikaze pilots went to their deaths. We are then in the philosophical realm of whether this is a world you simply choose not to live in. The living need to keep living. Who knows why people kill themselves. Lots of incoherent reasons, basically.
Your self-immolating monk might be the clearest version, but still falls short of doing anything for this world. We don't and shouldn't take suicidal people's thoughts seriously. They failed to make a point, and gave up. Even if they think they're going to 72 virgins (which is even more cowardly). We are discussing the people who go on living and how to arrange the living world.
It's rational for an individual in the face of terminal illness; all I'm saying is that it's not a rational form of protest to change the world, e.g., in the form of suicide vests or death-by-cop.
> Maybe it doesn't change the way the suiciders wanted, but it does change.
But that gets to the central point. The actor with the suicide vest no longer has a voice. He can't verify the outcome. He can't modify his course. He can't run for president, or parliament. He can't start a movement. He is finished; how the world responds is not his concern. It's not that nothing happens, it's that whatever happens, the protest itself was incoherent.
You seem to be taking a highly individualistic view here, which is not an appropriate framework.
Suicide is not an effective way of making the world better for yourself, no. But it turns out that people care about more than that. People do commit suicide for political aims, all the time - including soldiers who sacrifice themselves in the service of some larger cause. This fact seems to confuse you - you call them "irrational" and "incoherent". Since you are the one who is confused, perhaps you are the one whose worldview lacks explanatory power.
You do care about things outside yourself, don't you?
>> You seem to be taking a highly individualistic view here
I don't believe in an afterlife. I also don't believe that the most effective way to accomplish something is to take yourself out if the equation. And I also don't place all my money on bets that I'll never know the results of. So remaining in the world is, among other things, the only rational way an individual can know whether their efforts bore any fruit.
>> which is not an appropriate framework
According to whom? From an individual's perspective, it's actually the only rational framework.
>> You do care about things outside yourself, don't you?
People or movements? I don't consider jumping on a grenade to protect your friends to be suicidal. I don't consider pushing someone you love out of the way of a train to be suicidal. But to set yourself on fire or blow yourself up to make a statement on behalf of an ideological group? Whose leaders are too cowardly to blow themselves up? Yeah, I have more respect for my own individuality, and more respect for life than that.
One guy to takes it upon himself to kill 50 people. Or a million people take it upon themselves to kill one guy and his family. From the perspective of someone who doesn't care about life, the first case is brave and the second case is cowardice. Sure. From the perspective of someone who does care about life, and doesn't want innocent people blown up by random assholes, the drone strike is justified... if done with 100% accuracy. This is in no way a justification of what happened last week, which was a war crime. But society has an obligation to defend itself against individuals who want to mass-murder and don't care about their own lives or others'.
Just wondering, are you defending suicide bombings?
There are plenty of meaningful suicides in history, where agents killed themselves before they give up secrets that can hurt their countries, or went on to fight hopeless missions for some essential tactical goal. Assisted suicide for terminal patients is one way people can retain meaning and freedom in their last days.
People who want to die with dignity are not trying to make a point about how the world should be run. People who strap bombs to themselves or take down planes, are, but their point should not be taken seriously; they don't intend to live here. You can make a point with your death, suicide or otherwise. You can't expect it to matter to people who are still alive.
> Suicide is never a rational response, and can't be taken into account on the spectrum of human needs, since it's an abnegation of all human need. It doesn't need to be considered within the spectrum of rational economic responses
I mean it totally can be:
1. Assume materialism/naturalism.
2. Experience pain or some other unpleasantness and dislike it.
3. Suicide solves the pain problem completely, and creates no further problems from the perspective of the person commuting suicide.
"In 1941 [...] Jews were killing themselves at the rate of about 10 a day, and Frankl was determined to save them. Frankl tried to bring the suicidal patients back by injecting them with amphetamines, but it didn’t work.
And so, Frankl bored holes in the skulls of his Jewish patients, who had taken overdoses of pills in the hope of escaping their Nazi tormentors, and jolted their brains with Pervitin, an amphetamine popular in the Third Reich.
The suicidal patients revived, but only for 24 hours. One wonders what agonies they went through in their last day of life, with Frankl’s amphetamines coursing through their trepanned heads.
[...] Frankl wrote, “When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. … His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.” The suicidal Jews had not borne their burden properly. If they lived they could still stake a claim to their suffering as a “unique opportunity,” Frankl believed.
What Frankl failed to see was that Austrian Jews were making a political statement by killing themselves, sometimes at the Gestapo’s deportation office. As Frankl’s biographer Timothy Pytell points out, their “Masada tactic” was an act of protest.
The Nazis in fact shared Frankl’s goal of preventing Jews from killing themselves, since they had decreed Jewish suicide to be “illegal.” Jews belonged to the Reich, to be disposed of as the Germans saw fit."
Sadism. That's what nazism was/is. It's no fun on the eastern front if there's no one left to torture. Hitler allegedly said "if Jews didn't exist we would have to invent them." The quote has been disputed, but it's telling that neo-nazi websites repeat it frequently, then follow it up with, "who would want to invent Jews?" The reality is: A lot of people who suffered severe physical, sexual and psychological abuse as children in places like rural Germany, modern Russia and Plano, Texas, are pathologically incapable of stopping themselves from taking their abuse out on others. That implies their ability to justify being monstrous sadists, on top of lying and gaslighting people into believing flat-earth theory or conspiracies about stolen elections. This is the kind of generational psycho-sexual abuse that leads to people applauding policies like "keep 'em [**racist terms**] alive so we can torture them to death."
Just want to say here, Frankl was trying to keep people alive to keep them alive. Inept as that may have been. There's a huge difference between that and getting your jollies by wanting to torture people... and only people who want to torture people would want to draw a similarity between those two things.
The problem is not ineptitude. He rejected their self evident wishes for a death they chose, revived them and subjected them to torture and experimentation that Mengele might approve of. I wouldn't wish the experience of having your head drilled open for cranial drug injections on my worst enemy. He's a torture porn peddler glorifying suffering instead of alleviating it, like Teresa of Calcutta.
No. There's a vast difference between cutting someone's head open to save their life because they'll be dead otherwise, and doing it to a totally okay, healthy living person with the intention of killing them.
Afaik, by all I read, Hitler was completely genuine in his anti-semitism. And also, the explanation of nazism as being caused by unique levels of child abuse in rural Germany would be novel one.
If you take the idea that suicide is a rational, meaningful form of protest, then like the nazis you would want to prohibit the people you're murdering from killing themselves first. The nazis were sadists who wanted the act of murder all to themselves, so they overlooked the existential aspect: The dead can't talk either way. Frankl at least wanted to keep them alive, to prove that existence did have meaning, even in the worst suffering. So? He was a humanist and they were nihilists, and you think that amounts to the same thing?
History can be quite ugly. In a way that makes suicide the better option.
> thousands of happily brainwashed and well-fed kamikaze pilots
The source is needed for "happily".
> The living need to keep living. Who knows why people kill themselves. Lots of incoherent reasons, basically. Your self-immolating monk might be the clearest version
> The living need to keep living. Who knows why people kill themselves. Lots of incoherent reasons, basically. Your self-immolating monk might be the clearest version
>> This is incoherent.
The living cannot - and don't - live for the dead, or the causes that the dead chose to die for. Dying for a cause doesn't make the cause nobler. It just takes you out of the conversation. That's why suicide is, by definition, incoherent.
First, not every suicide is "for cause". Minority of them are.
Second, many living in fact do value self sacrifice.
Third, the "for cause" suicides are fairly often organized by living in the hope the living will get what they want. The one killing himself is agreeing to do it on behalf of other living. You may or may not disagree with cause, it does not really matter.
This is a view that reduces humanity to ants, or bots, or Borg. Especially divorced from any particular ideology or necessity, what you are advocating is the treatment of individuals as disposable units, directed to die by a faceless and unaccountable power structure. That was the case with the Kamikaze, and it's the case with jihadis now. Interestingly, it only seems to happen in the service of totalitarian ideologies. Revolutionaries who advocate for human rights or democracy don't tend to obliterate themselves. They want to be around to take care of their families.
In short, your view doesn't just prioritize the group over the individual - it prioritizes the worst possible groups.
Since you're talking about kamikazes, those attacks were rational - the goal was to destroy enemy ships, at the expense of their own lives. Commendable, even, it takes a lot of courage.
Suicide in normal life is just people escaping unbearable pain. Of course, someone with a properly functioning brain could probably never understand what it feels like.
Someone with a properly functioning brain may think about suicide anytime, but can do the math that an emperor or a mullah asking you to blow yourself up for him is a phony, and that the feeling that everything is ruined is belied by the fact that there's always tomorrow. A properly functioning brain takes suicide into account as a possible choice all the time. It's just not a meaningful choice as pertains to the daily life and economy of the rest of people who keep living. That's really all I was trying to get across.
9/11 started a trillion dollar war that ended in massive failure, destabilized several countries, created mass migration that resulted in many democratic countries becoming more authoritarian, and more.
> 9/11 (...) created mass migration that resulted in many democratic countries becoming more authoritarian
That's a very bizarre interpretation. Sorry in advance for my long dissection of this comment.
First, saying that 9/11 created mass migration. Migrations have always occurred throughout human history, whether to flee political persecution, bad economic conditions, environmental disasters (both natural and human-made). There are more migrants and refugees now than in the past decades, but that could (partially) be attributed to factors which have nothing to do with 9/11: harsher climate, neocolonial military (or economic) "interventions" in the global south (venezuela, mali, etc), automation of work without wealth redistribution, development of larger transnational chains favoring outsource exploitation in poorer countries (eg. Bangladesh labor is cheaper to exploit than Tunisian/Mexican), and many others.
Second, implying that global north ("democratic") countries are the ones welcoming the migrants and refugees. I don't have recent stats on the topic, but a few years back it appeared a vast majority of people sought refuge in neighboring countries, not in Europe/USA. Moreover, the Global North has a serious history of exploiting undocumented/refugee labor in slave-like conditions (minus the shackles) and broad Internet access has made such information available/verifiable to many people, who no longer look up to France (for example) as a haven of peace and prosperity, but (rightfully) as a place of despair and endless abuse in the hands of the powerful elites. European countries are very good at pretending they can't host more asylum seekers and other immigrants, but are among the richest countries on Earth with incredible levels of food/housing waste... and they sure find resources to pay for their walls, prisons and ~thugs~ cops.
Third, considering that authoritarianism is a new development in "democratic countries". I don't know of a single country who has a well-earned reputation as a democracy. To my knowledge, all pretend-democracies (such as France where i reside) have a strong history of political repression, secret services plots, neo-nazi (or otherwise fascist-inclined) infiltration and cooperation with law enforcement and the military, non-monetary forms of corruption on every level (and less obvious forms of monetary corruption, see "Outrage" for a french example of police filling their pockets from ordinary citizens). Authoritarianism and racism has been on the rise for a few decades now: our parents' teachings from WWII are long gone. In France specifically, there were quite a few authoritarian setbacks throughout the 80s-90s (see for example the Pasqua-Debré racist laws), but it's really with Sarkozy as Ministry of Interior (2005) that the nomenklatura's discourse started shifting towards outright fascism. It started with the threat within, the dangerous young people from popular districts and the engineering of an "insecurity feeling" via state/industry-controlled media. Then when Sarkozy became president (2007), he made a famous stigmatization campaign against Rroma people.
Sarkozy may have been presented as a right-wing president, but a more apt description is a fascist candidate. Because, as Mussolini suggested back in the day, fascism is the merging of Corporate and State powers, and Sarkozy represented just that: he was a close friend of Bolloré and many other neo-colonial fortunes, and made sure the State intervened in favor of big business at every turn. At that time, a new far-right international was forming around the ideas of a "clash of civilizations" and immigration as "reverse colonization"... and you could see Marine Le Pen dancing at balls in Vienna with neo-nazis from all across Europe. Over the next decade, their vocabulary/concepts were imposed on all publications by private-owned media, while public media contributed to the same climate of fear without spelling the concepts out. And here we are now fast forward almost 15y, with Macron elected as a shield against Le Pen's racism, who himself took very racist measures as soon as he was elected (such as doubling from 45 to 90 days maximum time in retention centers for undocumented people who are not accused of any crime), and insisted a refugee boat (the Aquarius) should just be left to rot and sink in the Mediterranean sea, despite some local governments offering them asylum.
How did we arrive to this strange place in history? I'm not sure, but i'm very sure immigrants doesn't have the mystical powers you attributed them. What happened is the product of our oligarchy and political police, not ordinary folk who just want to live a "normal" life. How do we leave this strange place in history and aim for democracy? We need to understand the failures and inadequacies of past and present systems: elections have proved time and time again they're nothing more than a scam, and as long as we delegate power unconditionally to power-hungry psychopaths, all we'll get is dictatorship with a pretty and colorful sugar coating (don't even get me started on actual political repression in Europe, the topic is long and scary). We need power to, by and from the people now. That means abolish every election and everything that resembles a Nation-State: let the people orgnaize in their communities and let no community ever dictate their way of life to others. Anarchism and self-organization are the only path that can divert us from that future we're headed towards that consists of ever-increasing inequality, political repression, climate catastrophes and refugees, and civil war over basic abundant-yet-not-shared resources.
I'm not so sure. I went to existential therapy for some years. My therapist was fairly certain I wouldn't kill myself, and my ideation was just an open examination of the various options. I used to talk about being embarrassed after a social situation and wanting to walk into a plane propeller and be turned into red mist. She'd casually ask if I was going to do it and I was like, of course not. She said she wasn't worried about me.
My whole point in this thread is that suicide is always, fundamentally irrational. I keep getting downvoted for it, but I think it's an important point - especially for people who consider themselves rational beings but also include suicide in the list of things they'd consider as options.
But the therapist did not said that "properly functioning brain takes suicide into account as a possible choice all the time". That is much stronger statement then "you are not at risk of suicide".
If is completely normal and usual for properly functioning adults to not see suicide as a possible choice all the time. Suicide ideation is not normal state of being.
I have to disagree. This is like saying that most people never consider sleeping with their neighbor's wife. Bullshit. I think people who claim that they never have such "bad thoughts" are lying - either to the world or to themselves. If you refuse to admit to yourself that you've considered it, you can never have an honest conversation with yourself and work out the rational reasons why you shouldn't do it. This is how "normal" people end up suddenly doing things totally seemingly out of character; they failed to be honest with themselves.
This depends on who's doing the analysis. For example, self-immolation is often seen as an extreme form of desperate but rational protest. The only way to understand and prevent these types of events is to understand and address the underlying needs.