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Sociocultural Views on Suicide
An analysis of society's logic concerning the act of suicide
Suicide - The Murder of Oneself
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
Those who believe in the finality of death (i.e., that there is no
after-life) - they are the ones who advocate suicide and regard it
as a matter of personal choice. On the other hand, those who firmly
believe in some form of existence after corporeal death - they
condemn suicide and judge it to be a major sin. Yet, rationally, the
situation should have been reversed: it should have been easier for
someone who believed in continuity after death to terminate this
phase of existence on the way to the next. Those who faced void,
finality, non-existence, vanishing - should have been greatly
deterred by it and should have refrained even from entertaining the
idea. Either the latter do not really believe what they profess to
believe - or something is wrong with rationality. One would tend to
suspect the former.
Suicide is very different from self sacrifice, avoidable martyrdom,
engaging in life risking activities, refusal to prolong one's life
through medical treatment, euthanasia, overdosing and self inflicted
death that is the result of coercion. What is common to all these is
the operational mode: a death caused by one's own actions. In all
these behaviours, a foreknowledge of the risk of death is present
coupled with its acceptance. But all else is so different that they
cannot be regarded as belonging to the same class. Suicide is
chiefly intended to terminate a life - the other acts are aimed at
perpetuating, strengthening and defending values.
Those who commit suicide do so because they firmly believe in the
finiteness of life and in the finality of death. They prefer
termination to continuation. Yet, all the others, the observers of
this phenomenon, are horrified by this preference. They abhor it.
This has to do with our understanding of the meaning of life.
Ultimately, life has only meanings that we attribute and ascribe to
it. Such a meaning can be external (God's plan) or internal (meaning
generated through arbitrary selection of a frame of reference). But,
in any case, it must be actively selected, adopted and espoused. The
difference is that, in the case of external meanings, we have no way
to judge their validity and quality (is God's plan for us a good one
or not?). We just "take them on" because they are big, all
encompassing and of a good "source". A hyper-goal generated by a
superstructural plan tends to lend meaning to our transient goals
and structures by endowing them with the gift of eternity. Something
eternal is always judged more meaningful than something temporal. If
a thing of less or no value acquires value by becoming part of a
thing eternal - than the meaning and value reside with the quality
of being eternal - not with the thing thus endowed. It is not a
question of success. Plans temporal are as successfully implemented
as designs eternal. Actually, there is no meaning to the question:
is this eternal plan / process / design successful because success
is a temporal thing, linked to endeavours that have clear beginnings
and ends.
This, therefore, is the first requirement: our life can become
meaningful only by integrating into a thing, a process, a being
eternal. In other words, continuity (the temporal image of eternity,
to paraphrase a great philosopher) is of the essence. Terminating
our life at will renders them meaningless. A natural termination of
our life is naturally preordained. A natural death is part and
parcel of the very eternal process, thing or being which lends
meaning to life. To die naturally is to become part of an eternity,
a cycle, which goes on forever of life, death and renewal. This
cyclic view of life and the creation is inevitable within any
thought system, which incorporates a notion of eternity. Because
everything is possible given an eternal amount of time - so are
resurrection and reincarnation, the afterlife, hell and other
beliefs adhered to by the eternal lot.
Sidgwick raised the second requirement and with certain
modifications by other philosophers, it reads: to begin to
appreciate values and meanings, a consciousness (intelligence) must
exist. True, the value or meaning must reside in or pertain to a
thing outside the consciousness / intelligence. But, even then, only
conscious, intelligent people will be able to appreciate it.
We can fuse the two views: the meaning of life is the consequence of
their being part of some eternal goal, plan, process, thing, or
being. Whether this holds true or does not - a consciousness is
called for in order to appreciate life's meaning. Life is
meaningless in the absence of consciousness or intelligence. Suicide
flies in the face of both requirements: it is a clear and present
demonstration of the transience of life (the negation of the NATURAL
eternal cycles or processes). It also eliminates the consciousness
and intelligence that could have judged life to have been meaningful
had it survived. Actually, this very consciousness / intelligence
decides, in the case of suicide, that life has no meaning
whatsoever. To a very large extent, the meaning of life is perceived
to be a collective matter of conformity. Suicide is a statement,
writ in blood, that the community is wrong, that life is meaningless
and final (otherwise, the suicide would not have been committed).
This is where life ends and social judgement commences. Society
cannot admit that it is against freedom of expression (suicide is,
after all, a statement). It never could. It always preferred to cast
the suicides in the role of criminals (and, therefore, bereft of any
or many civil rights). According to still prevailing views, the
suicide violates unwritten contracts with himself, with others
(society) and, many might add, with God (or with Nature with a
capital N). Thomas Aquinas said that suicide was not only unnatural
(organisms strive to survive, not to self annihilate) - but it also
adversely affects the community and violates God's property rights.
The latter argument is interesting: God is supposed to own the soul
and it is a gift (in Jewish writings, a deposit) to the individual.
A suicide, therefore, has to do with the abuse or misuse of God's
possessions, temporarily lodged in a corporeal mansion. This implies
that suicide affects the eternal, immutable soul. Aquinas refrains
from elaborating exactly how a distinctly physical and material act
alters the structure and / or the properties of something as
ethereal as the soul. Hundreds of years later, Blackstone, the
codifier of British Law, concurred. The state, according to this
juridical mind, has a right to prevent and to punish for suicide and
for attempted suicide. Suicide is self-murder, he wrote, and,
therefore, a grave felony. In certain countries, this still is the
case. In Israel, for instance, a soldier is considered to be "army
property" and any attempted suicide is severely punished as
being "attempt at corrupting army possessions". Indeed, this is
paternalism at its worst, the kind that objectifies its subjects.
People are treated as possessions in this malignant mutation of
benevolence. Such paternalism acts against adults expressing fully
informed consent. It is an explicit threat to autonomy, freedom and
privacy. Rational, fully competent adults should be spared this form
of state intervention. It served as a magnificent tool for the
suppression of dissidence in places like Soviet Russia and Nazi
Germany. Mostly, it tends to breed "victimless crimes". Gamblers,
homosexuals, communists, suicides - the list is long. All have
been "protected from themselves" by Big Brothers in disguise.
Wherever humans possess a right - there is a correlative obligation
not to act in a way that will prevent the exercise of such right,
whether actively (preventing it), or passively (reporting it). In
many cases, not only is suicide consented to by a competent adult
(in full possession of his faculties) - it also increases utility
both for the individual involved and for society. The only exception
is, of course, where minors or incompetent adults (the mentally
retarded, the mentally insane, etc.) are involved. Then a
paternalistic obligation seems to exist. I use the cautious
term "seems" because life is such a basic and deep set phenomenon
that even the incompetents can fully gauge its significance and
make "informed" decisions, in my view. In any case, no one is better
able to evaluate the quality of life (and the ensuing justifications
of a suicide) of a mentally incompetent person - than that person
himself.
The paternalists claim that no competent adult will ever decide to
commit suicide. No one in "his right mind" will elect this option.
This contention is, of course, obliterated both by history and by
psychology. But a derivative argument seems to be more forceful.
Some people whose suicides were prevented felt very happy that they
were. They felt elated to have the gift of life back. Isn't this
sufficient a reason to intervene? Absolutely, not. All of us are
engaged in making irreversible decisions. For some of these
decisions, we are likely to pay very dearly. Is this a reason to
stop us from making them? Should the state be allowed to prevent a
couple from marrying because of genetic incompatibility? Should an
overpopulated country institute forced abortions? Should smoking be
banned for the higher risk groups? The answers seem to be clear and
negative. There is a double moral standard when it comes to suicide.
People are permitted to destroy their lives only in certain
prescribed ways.
And if the very notion of suicide is immoral, even criminal - why
stop at individuals? Why not apply the same prohibition to political
organizations (such as the Yugoslav Federation or the USSR or East
Germany or Czechoslovakia, to mention four recent examples)? To
groups of people? To institutions, corporations, funds, not for
profit organizations, international organizations and so on? This
fast deteriorates to the land of absurdities, long inhabited by the
opponents of suicide.
---------------------------------------------------
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism
Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101. Until recently, he
served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia. Visit Sam's Web site at
http://samvak.tripod.com
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