{"id":113430,"date":"2018-06-25T15:27:34","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T14:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=113430"},"modified":"2018-06-25T15:27:34","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T14:27:34","slug":"slow-suicide-and-the-abandonment-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/06\/slow-suicide-and-the-abandonment-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Slow Suicide and the Abandonment of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one\u2019s mind, is the condition of the normal man.\u00a0 Society highly values its normal man.\u00a0 It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.\u00a0 Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.\u00a0 Our behavior is a function of our experience.\u00a0 We act the way we see things. \u00a0If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive.\u00a0 <\/em>If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.\u201d
\n\u2013 R.D. Laing, The Politics of<\/em> Experience, <\/em>1967<\/p>\n

\u201cThe artist is the man who refuses initiation through education into the existing order, remains faithful to his own childhood being, and thus becomes \u2018a human being in the spirit of all times, an artist.\u2019\u201d
\n\u2013 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

21 Jun 2018 – <\/em>Most suicides die of natural causes, slowly and in silence.<\/p>\n

But we hear a lot about the small number of suicides, by comparison, who kill themselves quickly by their own hands.\u00a0 Of course their sudden deaths elicit shock and sadness since their deaths, usually so unexpected even when not a surprise, allow for no return.\u00a0 Such sudden once-and-for-all endings are even more jarring in a high-tech world where people are subconsciously habituated to thinking that everything can be played back, repeated, and rewound, even lives.<\/p>\n

If the suicides are celebrities, the mass media can obsess over why they did it.\u00a0 How shocking!\u00a0 Wasn\u2019t she at the peak of her career?\u00a0 Didn\u2019t he finally seem happy?\u00a0 And then the speculative stories will appear about the reasons for the rise or fall of suicide rates, only to disappear as quickly as the celebrities are dropped by the media and forgotten by the public.<\/p>\n

The suicides of ordinary people will be mourned privately by their loved ones in their individual ways and in the silent recesses of their hearts.\u00a0 A hush will fall over their departures that will often be viewed as accidental.<\/p>\n

And the world will roll on as the earth absorbs the bodies and the blood.\u00a0 \u201cWhere\u2019s it all going all this spilled blood,\u201d writes the poet Jacques Pr\u00e9vert.\u00a0 \u201cMurder\u2019s blood\u2026war\u2019s blood\u2026 blood of suicides\u2026the earth that turns and turns with its great streams of blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of such suicides Albert Camus said, \u201cDying voluntarily implies you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit [of living], the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.\u201d\u00a0 He called this feeling the absurd, and said it was widespread and involved the feeling of being an alien or stranger in a world that couldn\u2019t be explained and didn\u2019t make sense.\u00a0 Assuming this experience of the absurd, Camus wished to explore whether suicide was a solution to it.\u00a0 He concluded that it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Like Camus, I am interested in asking what is the meaning of life.\u00a0 \u201cHow to answer it?\u201d he asked in The Myth of<\/em> Sisyphus<\/em>.\u00a0 He added that \u201cthe meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.\u201d\u00a0 But I don\u2019t want to explore his line of reasoning to his conclusions, whether to agree or disagree.\u00a0 I wish, rather, to explore the reasons why so many people choose to commit slow suicide by immersing themselves in the herd mentality and following a way of life that leads to inauthenticity and despair; why so many people so easily and early give up their dreams of a life of freedom for a proverbial mess of pottage, which these days can be translated to mean a consumer\u2019s life, one focused on staying safe by embracing conventional bromides and making sure to never openly question a system based on systemic violence in all its forms; why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many people embrace getting and spending and the accumulation of wealth in the pursuit of a chimerical \u201chappiness\u201d that leaves them depressed and conscience dead.\u00a0 Why so many people do not rebel but wish to take their places on this ship of fools.<\/p>\n

So what can we say about the vast numbers of people who commit slow suicide by a series of acts and inactions that last a long lifetime and render them the living dead, those whom Thoreau so famously said were the mass of people who \u201clead lives of quiet desperation\u201d?\u00a0 Is the meaning of life for them simply the habit of living they fell into at the start of life before they thought or wondered what\u2019s it all about?\u00a0 Or is it the habit they embraced after shrinking back in fear from the disturbing revelations thinking once brought them?\u00a0 Or did they ever seriously question their place in the lethal fraud that is organized society, what Tolstoy called the Social Lie?\u00a0 Why do so many people kill their authentic selves and their consciences that could awaken them to break through the social habits of thought, speech, and action that lead them to live \u201cjiffy lube\u201d lives, periodically oiled and greased to smoothly roll down the conventional highway of getting and spending and refusing to resist the murderous actions of their government?<\/p>\n

An unconscious despair rumbles beneath the frenetic surface of American society today.\u00a0 An unspoken nothingness.\u00a0 I think the Italian writer Robert Calasso says it well: \u201cThe new society is an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s as though we are floating on nothing, sustained by nothing, in love with nothing \u2013 all the while embracing any thing<\/strong> that a materialistic, capitalist consumer culture can throw at us. \u00a0We are living in an empire of illusions, propagandized and self-deluded.\u00a0 Most people will tell you they are stressed and depressed, but will often add \u2013 \u201cwho wouldn\u2019t be with the state of the world\u201d \u2013 ignoring their complicity through the way they have chosen compromised, conventional lives devoid of the spirit of rebellion.<\/p>\n

I keep meeting people who, when I ask them how they are, will respond by saying, \u201cI\u2019m hanging in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t common sayings intimate unconscious truths? \u00a0Hang \u2013 among its possible derivatives is the word \u201chabit\u201d and the meaning of \u201ccoming to a standstill.\u201d\u00a0 Stuck in one\u2019s habits, dangling over nothing, up in the air, going nowhere, hanging by a string. Slow suicides. The Beatles\u2019 sang it melodically: \u201cHe\u2019s a real nowhere man\/Sitting in his nowhere land\/Making all his nowhere plans for nobody\/Doesn\u2019t have a point of view\/Knows not where he\u2019s going to\/Isn\u2019t he a bit like you and me.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a far cry from having \u201cthe world on a string,\u201d as Harold Arlen wrote many years before.<\/p>\n

Maybe if we listen to how people talk or what popular culture throws up, we will learn more through creative associations than through all the theories the experts have to offer.<\/p>\n

There have been many learned tomes over the years trying to explain the act<\/strong> of suicide, an early and very famous one being Emile Durkheim\u2019s groundbreaking sociological analysis Suicide<\/em> (1897).\u00a0 In thousands of books and articles other thinkers have approached the subject from various perspectives \u2013 psychological, philosophical, biological, etc.\u00a0 They contain much truth and a vast amount of data that appeal to the rational mind seeking general explanations.\u00a0 But in the end, general explanations are exactly that \u2013 general \u2013 while a mystery usually haunts the living whose loved ones have killed themselves.<\/p>\n

But what about the slow suicides, those D. H. Lawrence called the living dead (don\u2019t let \u201cthe living dead eat you up\u201d), those who have departed the real world for a conscienceless complacency from which they can cast aspersions on those whose rebellious spirits give them little rest.\u00a0 Where are the expert disquisitions about them?<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve had more than a century of pseudo-scientific studies of suicide and the world has gotten much worse.\u00a0 More than a century of psychotherapy and people have grown progressively more depressed.\u00a0 Large and increasing numbers are drugged to the teeth with pharmaceutical drugs and television and the internet and cell phones and shopping and endless talk about food and diets and sports and nothing. Talk to talk, surface to surface. Pundits pontificate daily in streams of endless bullshit for which they are paid enormous sums as they smile with their fake whiter-than-white teeth flashing from their makeup masks.\u00a0 People actually listen to these fools to \u201cinform\u201d themselves. They even watch television news and think they know what is happening in the world.\u00a0 We are drowning in a \u201cuniverse of disembodied data,\u201d as playwright John Steppling has so aptly phrased it.\u00a0 People obsessively hover over their cell phones, searching for the key that will unlock the cells they have locked themselves in. Postliteracy, mediated reality, and digital dementia have become the norm.\u00a0 Minds are packaged and commodified.\u00a0 Perhaps you think I exaggerate, but I feel that madness is much more the norm today than when Laing penned his epigraphic comment.<\/p>\n

Not stark raving screaming madness, just a slow, whimpering acceptance of an insane society whose very fabric is toxic and which continues its God-ordained mission of spreading death and destruction around the world in the name of freedom and democracy, while so many of its walking dead citizens measure out their lives with coffee spoons.\u00a0 A nice madness, you could say, a pleasant, depressed and repressed madness.\u00a0 A madness in which people might say with T. S. Eliot\u2019s J. Alfred Prufrock (if they still read or could remember):\u00a0 \u201cI have measured out my life with coffee spoons\u2026And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, \/ and snicker, \/ And in short, I was afraid.\u201d<\/p>\n

But why are so many so afraid?\u00a0 Everyone has fears, but so many normal people seem extremely fearful, so fearful they choose to blend into the social woodwork so they don\u2019t stand out as dissenters or oddballs.\u00a0 They kill their authentic selves; become conscience-less.\u00a0 And they do this in a society where their leaders are hell-bent on destroying the world and who justify their nuclear madness at every turn. I think Laing was right that this goes back to our experience.\u00a0 When genuine experience is denied or mystified (it\u2019s now disappeared into digital reality), real people disappear.\u00a0 Laing wrote:<\/p>\n

In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses.\u00a0 Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our sanity.\u00a0 We begin with the children.\u00a0 It is imperative to catch them in time.\u00a0 Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks.\u00a0 Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I. Q.\u2019s if possible.\u00a0 \u00a0From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, as their parents and their \u00a0 parents before them, have been.\u00a0 These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of it potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.\u00a0 By the time the new human is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world.\u00a0 This is normality in our present age. Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites.\u00a0 Love lets the other be, but \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 with affection and concern.\u00a0 Violence attempts to constrain the other\u2019s freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other\u2019s own existence or destiny.\u00a0 We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love\u2026We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So yes, I do think most people are victims.\u00a0 No one chooses their parents, or to be born into poverty, or to be discriminated against for one\u2019s race, etc.\u00a0 No one chooses to have their genuine experience poisoned from childhood.\u00a0 No one chooses to be born into a mad society.\u00a0 This is all true.\u00a0 Some are luckier than others.\u00a0 Suicides, fast and slow, are victims.\u00a0 But not just victims.\u00a0 This is not about blame, but understanding.\u00a0 For those who commit to lives of slow suicide, to the squelching of their true selves and their consciences in the face of a rapacious and murderous society, there is always the chance they can break with the norm and go sane.\u00a0 Redemption is always possible.\u00a0 But it primarily involves overcoming the fear of death, a fear that manifests itself in the extreme need to preserve one\u2019s life, so-called social identity, and sense of self by embracing social conventions, no matter how insane they may be or whether or not they bring satisfaction or fulfillment.\u00a0 Whether or not they give life a meaning that goes deep.<\/p>\n

But for those who have taken their lives and are no longer among us, hope is gone.\u00a0 But we can learn from their tragedies if we are truthful.\u00a0\u00a0 For them the fear of life was primary, and death seemed like an escape from that fear. Life was too much for them.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 We must ask.\u00a0 So they chose a life-in-death approach through fast suicide.\u00a0 Everyone is joined to them in that fear, just as everyone is joined by the fear of death.\u00a0 It is a question of which dominates, and when, and how much courage we can muster to live daringly.\u00a0 The fear of death leads one to constrict one\u2019s life in the safe surround of conventional society in the illusion that such false security will save one in the end.\u00a0 Death is too much for them.\u00a0 So they accept a death-in-life approach that I call slow suicide.<\/p>\n

But in the end as in the beginning and throughout our lives, there is really no escape.\u00a0 The more alive we are, the closer death feels because really living involves risks and living outside the cocoon of the social lie. Mr. Pumpkin Head might seize you, whether he is conceived as your boss, an accident, disease, social ostracism, or some government assassin.\u00a0 But the deader we feel, the further away death seems because we feel safe. \u00a0Pick your poison.<\/p>\n

But better yet, perhaps there is no need to choose if we can regain our genuine experience that parents and society, for different reasons, conspire to deny us.\u00a0 Could the meaning of our lives be found, not in statements or beliefs, but in true experience? \u00a0Most people think of experience as inner or outer.\u00a0 This is not true.\u00a0 It is a form of conventional brainwashing that makes us schizoid. It is the essence of the neuro-biological materialism that reduces humans to unfree automatons. Proffered as the wisdom of the super intelligent, it is sheer stupidity.<\/p>\n

All experience is in-between, not the most eloquent of phrasing, I admit, but accurate.\u00a0 Laing, a psychiatrist, puts it in the same way as do the mystics and those who embrace the Tao.\u00a0 He says, \u201cThe relation of my experience to behavior is not that of inner to outer.\u00a0 My experience is not inside my head.\u00a0 My experience of this room is outside in this room.\u00a0 To say that my experience is intrapsychic is to presuppose that there is a psyche that my experience is in.\u00a0 My psyche is my experience, my experience is my psyche.\u201d\u00a0 Reverie, imagination, prayer, dream, etc. are as much outer as inner, they are modalities of experience that exist in-between.\u00a0 We live in-between, and if we could experience that, we would realize the meaning of life and our connection to all living beings, including those our government massacres daily, and we would awaken our consciences to our complicity in the killing.\u00a0 We would realize that the victims of the American killing machine are human beings like us; are us, and we, them.\u00a0 We would rebel.<\/p>\n

Thoreau said a life without principle was not worth living.\u00a0 Yet for so many of the slow suicides the only principals they ever had were those they had in high school.\u00a0 Such word confusion is understandable when illiteracy is the order of the day and spelling pass\u00e9. Has anyone when in high school ever had Thoreau\u2019s admonition drummed into his head: \u201cThe ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely<\/em> is to have been truly idle or worse.\u201d\u00a0 Of course not, since getting a \u201cgood\u201d living is never thought to involve living in an honest, inviting, and honorable way.\u00a0 It is considered a means to an end, the end being a consumer\u2019s paradise.\u00a0 \u201cAs for the means of living,\u201d Thoreau added, \u201cit is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it, even reformers, so called \u2013 whether they inherit, or earn, or steal it.\u201d\u00a0 Is it any wonder so many people end up committing slow suicide?\u00a0 \u201cIs it that men are too much disgusted with their own experience to speak of it?\u201d<\/p>\n

What the hell \u2013TGIH!<\/em><\/p>\n

I believe the story has it that when he was in jail for refusing the poll tax that supported slavery and the Mexican-American war, Thoreau was visited by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who asked him, \u201cHenry, what are you doing in there?\u201d\u00a0 To which Thoreau responded, \u201cRalph, what are you doing out there?\u201d\u00a0 Today, however, most folks don\u2019t realize that being outside their cells is being in them, and such imprisonment is far from principled.\u00a0 That\u2019s not a text message they\u2019re likely to receive.<\/p>\n

I recently met a woman, where or when I can\u2019t recall.\u00a0 It might have been when walking on the open road or falling in a dreaming hole.\u00a0 She told me \u201cif you look through a window, you can see the world outside.\u00a0 If you look in a mirror, you can see yourself outside.\u00a0 If you look into the outside world, you can see everyone inside out.\u00a0 When the inside is seen outside and the outside is seen inside, you will know what you face.\u00a0 Everything becomes simple then,\u201d as she looked straight through me and my face fell off.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Jun 2018 – I believe the story has it that when he was in jail for refusing the poll tax that supported slavery and the Mexican-American war, Thoreau was visited by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who asked him, \u201cHenry, what are you doing in there?\u201d To which Thoreau responded, \u201cRalph, what are you doing out there?\u201d Today, however, most folks don\u2019t realize that being outside their cells is being in them, and such imprisonment is far from principled. That\u2019s not a text message they\u2019re likely to receive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}