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Title: Suicide and Despair Author: CrimethInc. Date: December 17, 2012 Language: en Topics: suicide, Mental Health, death Source: Retrieved on 29th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2012/12/17/suicide-and-despair-how-do-you-want-to-die
Hanging from a rafter with the stool kicked to the floor beneath you?
From an overdose of sleeping pills, like an actress or a fed up
housewife? Opening your arteries with a razor, in a hot bath so you
wonât shake so much when the warmth leaves your body?
All at once, in a spatter of brains and bone on the concrete at the foot
of the high-rise where you work? Or in increments, installment by
installment with cigarettes and saturated fat and air pollution, high
blood pressure, radiation, toxins in the water, carcinogenic sugar
substitutes and cell phones?
Do you want certainty, a gun to your temple? Or do you play the
lottery-driving on the freeway, having unprotected sex, paying taxes to
a government that might send you to war or the police to your door with
guns in their hands?
Perhaps youâre getting paid for itâhow much are you worth per hour? Do
you wash dishes for minimum wage, give and receive orders for a
managerâs salary, fight your way to the top to get a fair price for your
life?
Or are you buying it? Do you purchase it in single servings, buying
yourself a taste whenever you can with alcohol, cocaine, heroine,
prostitutes, action movies, video games, television, whatever it takes
to go blank for an instant? Do you sometimes long to cut right to the
inevitable, flinging yourself into the abyss of some addiction,
religion, absolute negation of everything youâve ever wanted, everything
that has disappointed you?
Do you savor every drop, stretching it out as far as you can? A moderate
dose every day for the rest of your life, with health insurance to make
sure you donât miss out on a single hour? Or are you ready to get it all
over with, consummate the affair with one defiant gesture, flaunting
your disdain for the absurd tragedies of this world as you go down in a
hail of bullets?
Or maybe itâs not death youâre after, after all.
But what else is there?
âI wish all the people whoâve killed themselves were still aliveâand all
the people who are alive would kill themselves!â
If there is a social stratum below the exploited underclass, a demo
graphic that suffers most from the absurdities of our society, it is the
suicides. The suicidal classâevery minute, more hit the pavement. Who is
more dispossessed than them? They are only recognized when they absent
themselves; only their blood speaks on their behalf. They know better
than anyone else what must change about this world, and yet in despair
of ever changing it they avenge themselves upon the only victims in easy
reachâgiving a new meaning to the saying that those who make half a
revolution dig their own graves.
Imagine a person feeling that his life is out of his control to such an
extent that he can only regain possession of it by murdering himself!
Can a society really be free and healthy if people will go to such
lengths to escape?
So like theft and adultery, suicide is forbidden, an unspeakable
abomination. Self-satisfied den mothers who have never grappled with
depression feel entitled to sneer at the cowardice of those who make the
difficult decision to end their lives. Even the terminally ill are not
to choose for themselves when and how they pass awayâthere are laws
against it, as if the living could legislate for those crossing over
into death! What does it say of a civilization that it not only forbids
its denizens to kill themselves but does not even permit the question of
whether life is worth living?
Yet we commit a little suicide every moment we deny ourselves the lives
we wish to live. Wholesale suicide is off-limits, but most settle
willingly enough for death on the installment plan, whittling their
lives away hour by hour. No matter how unfulfilling life is, they dare
not back out for God is on the other side to punish them for shirking
their earthly dutiesâGod, that is, or else Public Opinion, which He has
deputized in His absence.
Meanwhile, if a young man joins the military and mindlessly obeys orders
that lead to his senseless death, his conduct is courageous and
praise-worthy. Suicide, like Disaster, is perfectly acceptable so long
as it occurs on the terms of the powers that be; you can die in their
hands, but not of your own. The ones who shoot or hang themselves are
daring heretics, like the upstart mystics who claim to receive divine
guidance that bypasses the Pope: if self-destruction is the order of the
day, theyâre determined to have a firsthand relationship with it,
whatever anyone else says. In rejecting both living death and the
sovereignty of the authorities over their lives, they are only one step
away from rejecting death and domination altogether: Neither death nor
taxes!
But again, like theft, adultery, and other pressure valves, suicide is
isolatingâindeed, it is the most isolating act bar none. While it
returns an instant of autonomy to an individual, it can only prevent
people from establishing collective ownership of their lives. âThose who
dig their own graves make only half a revolution. If no âone could
steal, if no one could cheat, if no one could end his life, âyet all the
tensions that run through our society today remained picture the massive
upheavals that would ensue!
If all who have killed themselves could compare notes at some grand
convention center in the hereafter, what would they be able to tell us?
Perhaps they would be capable of succoring one another; where no one
else could; perhaps they would regret that, rather than destroying
themselves, they didnât launch a revolutionary organization comprised of
those who have nothing to lose; perhaps it would, seem strange to them
that it had felt so much easier to do violence to themselves than to
respond to the violence done to them.
Itâs too late of courseâtheir lives are fixed in eternity, set apart
like flies trapped in amber. But there is still time to find those who
are currently contemplating suicide, to encourage them to speak freely
about their feelings and do our best to make a world no one will wish to
leave.
Life is not simply a trap, a sentence. This occurs to everyone at least
once. We have an option that makes us freer than the gods, just as every
employee is freer than every boss: we can quit. One can savor this idea
in every extremity; it provides consolation when nothing else can.
Nothing obligates us to liveâtherefore, if we have the courage for it,
at every moment life can become a tabula rasa, a space in which anything
is possible and everything can be risked.
With such freedom, we can only be slaves if we choose to be. Slavery is
for those who still believe that their masters control the domain of
death as well as lifeânot for us. For us, there is only the unknown. It
may be awful, it may be salvation, it may be nothingness, but it is
unknowable, in life as well as death. Frontiers to be crossed, new
worlds to explore, abysses to be riskedâyes, the possibility of joy, of
the realization of your most cherished desires, and risk, risk too. The
risk of finally confronting fear, daring the unknown, looking the
ugliness of life in the face-off, one way or another, quitting the job
of existing.
For most of our contemporaries, life itself is a job, a desperate
struggle to juggle a thousand obligationsâincluding the saddest
imperative of all, enjoying oneself. These unfortunates forget the
lightness of life, the weightlessness of every moment, every situation,
in the face of nonexistence. We can choose not to live. So there is no
reason not to open oneself to, to risk everything for, a life of joy.
There is always the option of putting an end to thingsâone may as well
play for high stakes if one chooses to exist. After all, the worst that
could happen is already assured.
There is no reason to get up in the morning, then, but to live. No boss,
no law, no god can take from you the possibility of saying No.
All this is useless, and not news, to the suicide, who has already
disconnected from life and wills death simply to finalize the
arrangement, to put an end to the inconvenience of feeling one thing and
living another. Once youâre that exhausted and demoralized, no mere
mental exercise can change your mind; suicide bombers, contrary to idle
speculation, must act from a tremendous investment in this world to be
capable of going to such lengths to die at othersâ expense. Your average
suicidal person can barely vacuum his apartment, let alone carry out an
elaborate mission.
But imagine if people lived as though they might die at any moment, so
every day it was as if they were born again! Imagine if no one let life
become a job for himself or anyone else in the first place! Then how
many people would kill themselves? People commit suicide when it is
harder for them to picture breaking off their commitments than ceasing
to existâhere again are our customs and investments, become cancerous
and inorganic, riding us to early graves.
If we were brave or reckless enough for it, our despair could afford us
supernatural powers. Imagine being able to act without fear of the
repercussions, to choose the unknown over the intolerably familiar, to
withdraw from unhealthy obligations and relationships the moment you
recognize them for what they are. It takes a ruthless mercy to discard
sentimentality and remember all the things that never happened and still
might never happen, all the dreams that never came trueâto acknowledge
that we canât wait forever, thereâs not enough time for that.
Let the past go. All the old battles youâre still fighting, all your
denial and defense mechanisms, all the addictions and inertia youâve
accumulated and all the fears that bind you to them. This is going to be
the hardest thing you ever live throughâbut let them go, let them die,
have courage through the silent moments in the void as you wait,
trembling, for your new life to be born. It will be.