“Then both ourselves and seed at once to free
From what we fear for both, let us make short,
Let us seek Death, or he not found, supply
With our own hands his office on ourselves;
Why stand we longer shivering under fears
That show no end but death, and have the power,
Of many ways to die, the shortest choosing,
Destruction with destruction to destroy.”
– Milton, Paradise Lost[1]
There are many ways to approach the topic of suicide. From the micro level of neurology, genetics, and psychology, to the macro level of anthropology and sociology, hard questions concerning the phenomenon of suicide receive no easy answers. The literature is vast, the analyses and prognoses varied, and the subject saturated with statistics, emotion, and intense debate. There is an entire field of study devoted to suicide – suicidology. An entire essay could be written just explaining suicide statistics, which is not the purpose of this essay. Apart from boring the reader and writer to death (pardon the pun) with discussions of statistics ad nauseam, reducing suicide to the numerical dehumanizes the subject of suicide, a subject that is all too real for many of us. Here, the focus will be on sociocultural factors in suicide, specifically in the west, but noting that suicide is a transcultural phenomenon dating back to antiquity. For the purpose of this essay, these sociocultural factors will be discussed in general terms as capitalism and patriarchy. Far from treating suicide as socially determined, however, it will be argued that suicide is a performative act, one that requires intense internal debate and reasoning. Suicide is an expression of agency, however limited that agency may be by external factors. Suicide then is not a free choice, nor is it inevitable. It is at once preventable and desirable, fascinating and repulsive.
Any discussion of suicide and society inevitably turns to or brings up Emile Durkheim’s Suicide. As contentious a study as it is (I wish not to dwell on or critique Durkheim here except to say that Durkheim’s study is more a contribution to methodology in sociology than it is to the subject of suicide) his definition of suicide is extremely useful and important: “Suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive [e.g. shooting oneself] or negative [e.g. refusing to eat] act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.”[2] This definition is important for two reasons: 1) it excludes deaths that arise from a person’s act in moments of delirium, intoxication, or accident, and 2) in order to commit suicide proper, one must be cognizant and lucid enough to make the decision to end their life. Durkheim conceded that suicide could be studied and understood at the psychological level (As Camus approached it: “The worm is in man’s heart”[3]), yet it was social factors that were the dominating force regarding the suicide rate.[4]
Of these dominating social factors, capitalism and patriarchy are the hegemonic ideologies (read: social pathologies) that dictate most forcefully individual choices. In Karl Marx’s only discussion of suicide, “Peuchet on Suicide,” in which Peuchet is quoted extensively, it is asserted: “Although penury is the greatest source of suicide, we find it in all classes, among the idle rich, as well as among artists and politicians. The varieties of reasons motivating suicide make a mockery of the moralists’ single-minded and uncharitable blaming.”[5] Marx/Peuchet goes on to list a number of other possible motivations for committing suicide, from jealousy to terminal disease. The notions of suicide as unnatural, selfish, or cowardly are scoffed at as, “Philisophical tirades have little value in [suicidal people’s] eyes and are a poor refuge from suffering.”[6] Likewise, Marx/Peuchet admonish such ideas as punishment, or threats thereof, to stave off suicide. The reasoning for this should need no articulation. Suicide is seen as just “one of the thousand and one symptoms of the general social struggle ever fought on new ground.”[7] Important to note here is Marx’s critique of the family as reflecting the same issues as society, implying that patriarchal domination as a social force seeps into the home, creating the same problems at the micro level, some of which lead to suicide.[8] Durkheim also highlighted the gendered nature of suicide, which sees men achieve suicide more often and more effectively, which is to be expected given “toxic masculinity” and the denial of emotions and fostered egotism that it demands. (“Only real men use guns, pills are for pussies.”)
At the time Marx published his essay in 1846, industrial capitalism was just beginning to flourish. Marx saw the way capitalism and its division of labour turned people into machine-like producers, seeing the factory as a prime example. A process that Adam Smith claimed would lead to an ignorant and stupid population.[9] This furthermore creates a separation from a person and their labour, they also become disconnected from themselves, and they become alienated. For Durkheim, in his theory anomie, a person in the same situation, being a former peasant turned urban wage-slave, becomes aloof from society, isolated, and wracked with normlessness and uncertainty. Following Freud and his work Civilization and Its Discontents, an embracing of both perspectives is crucial in an attempt to understand suicide, as it befalls upon or is taken up by a vast variety of human beings.
Both Marx and Durkheim could see society taking an evermore rigid, structural, bureaucratic form. Central to this industrialization of society was the homogenization of time. Here is not the place to recount the history of the clock, however important and however it may be interpreted, but the imposition of a social schedule is a major factor regarding the alienating effects of capitalism. Or, as E.P. Thompson poetically describes it: “When the watch is worn about the neck it lies in proximity to the less regular beating of the heart.”[10] Thompson’s work would highlight the importance of time in industrial society, arguing that without standardized time the modern state and capitalism could not have arisen. Arguably, this standardization of time has severe and deadly consequences. It also has a patriarchal aspect to it in regards to “working-hours,” being “on the clock,” and “women’s work.”
Recent developments in evolutionary psychology and biology attest to the alienating and disturbing effect of the modern state, of which the necessity of punctuality is but one part.[11] As Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, puts it:
This is the basic lesson of evolutionary biology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction. The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals [including humans], while neglecting their subjective needs.[12]
While Harari’s statement can be argued, seeing as many animals’ objective needs are not met (or explicitly denied), the main point – that we are biologically evolved to live as hunter-gatherers, not domesticated serfs – holds sway. What this means, to extrapolate and infer, in the context of social factors regarding suicide, is that, simply put, humans are maladapted to our infrastructure, our mode of social organization, and the dictatorial commands of the capitalist state; hence, the presence of “diseases of civilization,” such as obesity and anxiety and, most important to our discussion, depression.
In light of all this, it becomes easy to see at least some suicides as a form of rebellion or liberation, as the outcome of a rational decision, as an expression of agency. Take, for example, the self-immolation of Norman Morrison or Thích Quảng Đức. I hope I will be forgiven here for not expounding on these examples and simply deferring to the work of David Lester, in his chapter “Self-immolation as a Protest” in the anthology he also co-edited, Suicide as a Dramatic Performance. The suicides of Morrison and Đức, as Lester says, are heavily analyzed and discussed and so anything I produce will simply be a reiteration of such analyses and a recounting of a repeatedly told story. For the sake of brevity the details and specifics of their deaths will not be reproduced here, as the main plot is well known. Their stories and subsequent analyses are well aligned with the purpose of this essay; they are vivid and clear cut examples to show suicide as performative and an expression of agency amid structural violence.
However, it is one thing to see agency in the politically motivated suicides of Morrison and Đức, but what about the depressive? Is suicide in the midst of a depressive episode an expression of agency, or the outcome of atypical neurochemistry? To be quite honest, I do not believe anyone, experts or laypeople, can answer this question. Only those who have killed themselves know, and they cannot speak. That said, we look at the various opinions offered on the subject.
Voltaire and Zapffe provide the clearest examples of opposite opinions on the matter of depression and suicide. For Voltaire, “The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself to-day, would have wished to live had he waited a week.”[13] This assumption implies that depression is a fog or a lens that skews reality and those who commit suicide in depressive episodes are not thinking clearly. Voltaire counsels, as many do today, “a little exercise, music, hunting, the play, or an agreeable woman.”[14] The naïvety of such a “remedy” befoggles the mind, it also negates social forces and pins depression on the individual. In contrast, Peter Wessel Zapffe, in “The Last Messiah,” asserts, “When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hairraising misapprehension of the nature of existence.”[15] This seems grotesque from certain standpoints, and perfectly logical from others. Just as within the field of suicidology, which encapsulates in its definition suicide prevention, there are those who dissent and posit that suicide prevention does not logically follow from the study of suicide.[16] The ubiquitous, transcultural reality of suicide means accepting that in some cases there is no remedy. No amount of fresh air and vegetables will ameliorate the existential despair of the body that wants to die. Furthermore, there is the theory of depressive realism,[17] that those who are depressed are seeing things clearer than most. Emil Cioran, nihilist pessimist philosopher, whose musings on suicide are highly valuable (at least to me), once asserted that, “A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity…”[18] These speculations on the part of Voltaire, Zapffe, and Cioran highlight the nature of studying suicide and its etiology and prevention. The study of suicide is an examination of subjectivity and the tensions between self and system.
Returning to Marx, considering the arguments above and from the perspective of one who may wish to prevent suicide, Marx’s assessment, or rather Peuchet’s assessment, that “short of total reform of the organization of our current society, all other attempts [to prevent suicide] will be in vain”[19] seems fair. The problem with this assessment, however, is that there is no way to prove it. And, even if one could prove, without a doubt, that capitalism and patriarchy are central motivations for suicide, and that abolishing both and finding alternatives to these structures is paramount to prevention, the rich and the powerful are capitalist patriarchs. (I also have not broached the subject of suicide in stateless societies in any way, which is an important counter-argument to my thesis.) The whole problem with power of any sort is nobody ever wants to let it go. That was Marx’s main mistake in his purported “scientific” plan for revolt. The notion that anyone will seize power via the state and then relinquish it is more naïve than Voltaire’s good-hearted advice of music to alleviate depression. The attraction to power is a trait of the narcissist and the psychopath. Nobody in power cares if you kill yourself, unless, as Lester said regarding Norman Morrison, your suicide is obvious, public, motivated, and political in nature.[20] Would Marx prevent the suicide of Norman Morrison?
To describe suicide as a form of agency then, as an assertion of personal, even political, power, is to modify Durkheim’s definition of suicide. This has already been done by others and repeated by Ludek Broz and Daniel Münster in the recent anthology Suicide and Agency: Anthropological Perspectives on Self-Destruction, Personhood, and Power. Quoting De Leo et al. the modified definition of suicide is thus: “an act with fatal outcome, which the deceased, knowing or expecting a potentially fatal outcome, has initiated and carried out with the purpose of bringing about wanted changes.”[21] The ability, or at least the potential to effect change, any change, is the bread and butter of what we call agency. As Broz and Münster inform, “The World Health Organization has even replaced the terms ‘suicide’ and ‘suicide attempt’ with ‘intentional self-harm’ in its lexicon, which clearly highlights the centrality of intentional agency.”[22]
To bring all of this home, so to speak, let us turn to what the state of Canada, in its callous hypocrisy and denial has called, in various ways, an “epidemic of suicide” afflicting several First Nations reserves, keeping in mind the above discussion. To combat this “epidemic” Canada has called for a “state of emergency” regarding the crises (see Agamben and “State of exception). Again, here, for the sake of brevity the details and specifics will be omitted, as they can easily be found elsewhere. Here, I want to inquire and speculate about the motivations behind those who succeeded in their achievement, their “nirvana by violence.”[23]
If the contention concerning the etiology of suicide is correct, or partially correct, the effects of capitalism and patriarchy (both contained under the umbrella of colonialism), have wrought miserable circumstances upon First Nations people, leading to suicide rates that are astonishingly egregious. This seems obvious. What remains enigmatic is the act of suicide itself. If colonialism has created such a hostile environment, from a social deterministic point of view, all First Nations people who experience the psychosocial dislocation and anger wrought through the tragedy of the Canadian state would commit suicide. However, if we understand suicide as a form of agency, albeit limited, as a means to effect change at a macro level, the “epidemic of suicide” makes much more sense. And it is effective, just as Norman Morrison’s protest was effective – to a certain extent, anyway.
The Canadian state cannot be decolonized. To paraphrase Ward Churchill, it is not possible to enter the court of the conqueror, argue a case against their conquest, and then see the conquest relinquished.[24] It is, however, possible to kill yourself. In doing so, one brings attention to the social problems endemic to First Nations reserves in Canada (or whatever the context happens to be) and at the same time ends the misery of subjugation and despair brought about by those conditions. Was this multi-faceted understanding of the complexity of the problem at the forefront of the minds of those who killed themselves? Do the suicides of adolescents on reserves in Canada count among the ranks of Morrison or Đức? We can only speculate, and I choose to refrain from speaking for the dead with any kind of certainty.
There are a few popular clichés, pithy retorts, about suicide that become obviously false in the conscious investigation of suicide. We have all heard them before. “Suicide is selfish”; “Only cowards kill themselves”; “A permanent solution to a temporary problem.” These vacuous platitudes are insulting to me, as a person who has struggled, and continues to struggle, with addiction, depression, and suicidal ideation. I am inclined to agree with Cioran, that:
You kill yourself, we are forever being told, out of weakness, in order not to have to face suffering or shame. Only no one sees that it is precisely the weak who, far from trying to escape suffering or shame, accommodate themselves to such feelings – and that it requires vigour in order to win free of them decisively. In truth, it is easier to kill yourself than to vanquish a prejudice as old as man, or at least as his religions, so sadly impermeable to the supreme gesture [suicide].[25]
It is not until you are holding a knife to your wrists that you understand the courage it takes to refuse biology and society, to negate the contingency of mortality and free yourself from the bondage of flesh. Academic inquiry and debate have their place in regards to suicide, but the subjective knowledge that informs the truly suicidal is beyond metric or measure. Understanding the social forces that combine and collude to create circumstances that encourage, promote, or pressure human beings to kill themselves, is paramount to suicide prevention, insofar as suicide is to be prevented. I am of the opinion that some suicides should, on the contrary, be supported and cooperative, just as Đức’s fellow monks helped him prepare for his final assertion of will and power.
Bibliography
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Alloy, Lauren B. Cognitive Processes in Depression. New York: Guilford Press, 1988.
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Personhood and Power. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Penguin Books, 2013.
Carrera-Bastos, Pedro, Maelan Fontes-Villalba, James H. O’Keefe, Staffan Lindeberg, and Loren Cordain.
“The Western Diet and Lifestyle and Diseases of Civilization | RRCC.” Research Reports in Clinical Cardiology. March 09, 2011. Accessed April 09, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2147/RRCC.S16919.
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North America. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017.
Cioran, E. M., and Richard Howard. The New Gods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Durkheim, Emile. Suicide. Place of Publication Not Identified: Www Snowballpublishing, 2013.
Enright, D. J. The Oxford Book of Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Harari, Yuval N., John Purcell, and Haim Watzman. Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind. London: Vintage
Books, 2015.
Lester, David, and Steven Stack. Suicide as a Dramatic Performance. London: Routledge, 2017.
Maris, Ronald W., Alan L. Berman, Morton M. Silverman, and Bruce Michael. Bongar. Comprehensive
Textbook of Suicidology. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.
Marx, Karl, Eric A. Plaut, and Kevin Anderson. Marx on Suicide. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1999.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: Encyclopædia
Britannica, 1955.
Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, no. 38
(1967): 56-97. http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/stable/649749.
“VOLTAIRE(1694-1778)from Philosophical Dictionary.” The Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive. August
21, 2015. Accessed April 09, 2018. https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/voltaire/.
Zapffe, Peter Wessell. “The Last Messiah.” Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas. Accessed April 09,
- https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah.
[1] Eve is speaking, as quoted in The Oxford Book of Death
[2] As quoted by: Jones, Robert Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. Beverly Hills,
CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1986. Pp. 82-114 <http://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/suicide.html>
[3] The Myth of Sisyphus, 2
[4] Suicide, 193
[5] Marx, Karl, Eric A. Plaut, and Kevin Anderson. Marx on Suicide. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999.
[6] Ibid 47
[7] Ibid 51
[8] “The revolution did not topple all tyrannies. The evil which one blames on arbitrary forces exists in families…” Ibid. 51. “What kind of society is it wherein one finds the most profound loneliness in the midst of many millions of people, a society where one can be overwhelmed by an uncontrollable urge to kill oneself without anyone suspecting it? This society is no society, but, as Rousseau said, a desert populated by wild animals.” Ibid. 50.
[9] “In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible to become for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging…” An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1955.
Book Five, 340
[10] Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56-97. http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/stable/649749.
[11] “It is increasingly recognized that certain fundamental changes in diet and lifestyle that occurred after the Neolithic Revolution, and especially after the Industrial Revolution and the Modern Age, are too recent, on an evolutionary time scale, for the human genome to have completely adapted. This mismatch between our ancient physiology and the western diet and lifestyle underlies many so-called diseases of civilization, including coronary heart disease, obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, epithelial cell cancers, autoimmune disease, and osteoporosis, which are rare or virtually absent in hunter–gatherers and other non-westernized populations.”
Carrera-Bastos, Pedro, Maelan Fontes-Villalba, James H. O’Keefe, Staffan Lindeberg, and Loren Cordain. “The Western Diet and Lifestyle and Diseases of Civilization | RRCC.” Research Reports in Clinical Cardiology. March 09, 2011. Accessed April 09, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2147/RRCC.S16919.
[12] Harari, Yuval N., John Purcell, and Haim Watzman. Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind. London: Vintage Books, 2015. 344
[13] Philosophical Dictionary, “Cato: On Suicide, and the Abbe St. Cyran’s Book Legitimating Suicide” https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/voltaire/. Accessed April 09, 2018
[14] Ibid.
[15] “Philosophy Now” Issue 45 https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah (emphasis in original_
[16] Maris, Ronald W., Alan L. Berman, Morton M. Silverman, and Bruce Michael. Bongar. Comprehensive Textbook of Suicidology. New York: Guilford Press, 2000. 4
[17] Alloy, Lauren B. Cognitive Processes in Depression. New York: Guilford Press, 1988.
[18] The New Gods 55
[19] Marx on Suicide 50
[20] Lester, David, and Steven Stack. Suicide as a Dramatic Performance. London: Routledge, 2017.
Lester cites Hendrickson, who claims that Morrison’s death helped changed Robert McNamara’s opinion on the war: “And yet what I fervently believe, and cannot prove, is that the fire [Morrison’s flaming body] in the garden became the deep sensitizing agent for a revelation that began seeping into the secretary of defense a fortnight later.” (1996:198-199) 275
[21] Broz, Ludek, and Daniel Münster. Suicide and Agency: Anthropological Perspectives on Self-destruction, Personhood and Power. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015. 12
[22] Ibid 12
[23] Cioran, The New Gods 50
[24] Churchill, Ward, and Mike Ryan. Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017. 15
[25] The New Gods 54