The author of this paper makes it clear from the very beginning that they do not know any philosophical truth about life beyond the essential realizations that a) humans come to life with no choice, and b) humans cannot prevent their ultimate destiny of death. Writing a whole essay to answer the question ‘why humans kill themselves?’ and finding reasons for that in the individual or in the society without having experienced death or being any close to comprehend an objective truth about it must entitle a great amount of false certainty which the author admits but yet cannot escape. This mask of certainty that one finds in any philosophical or theoretical writing is a reflection of the human condition that sparks from the same two realizations about life and death. This human’s tireless search for certainty is acknowledged not as a linear journey towards the truth but a subjective defense to the state of being “thrown into the world”, as philosopher Martin Heidegger calls it, and the consequent chronologic inevitability of leaving it. The human is born into a world and a time not of their choice, into a condition, into rules and boundaries, and is confronted by unanswered questions of this being, like the question of meaning, of purpose, and of death, and the human is at a certain point in time leaving life with no choice and with no clear conclusion. Suicide challenges the concept of death and is seen by existential philosophers as a philosophical problem, because it tricks the human consciousness that one is free to choose death anytime, but can the human prevent death altogether? Can the human use the same freedom they use to choose death and choose eternity? The author is putting the question of freedom at the center of this treatment. With the individual life being a line between two major points in which one was not the actor of decision, assuming complete freedom in the in-between occasion would be arbitrary. Whenever the question of freedom arises, the problem of human consciousness emerges, marking the peak of the human’s paradox and point of intellectual perplexity. Thinkers have tried for ages to solve the puzzle, and yet the little we have come long to know. And all further attempts like this one is another expression of human’s limitations of knowledge and awareness. Realizing this might be a key point in perceiving social complicated subjects like suicide.
Introduction
The human condition is a social problem. Does a life of a sole human separated from all social context make existential sense? If a hypothetical planet has only one human inhabiting it, a human with the same developed mind of a social one, and assuming the availability of life’s essential circumstances that guarantees that one human’s survival. Would such a living person have no condition? Since struggles and conflicts would be absent and unnecessary, and seeking them would be impossible. The one human will have no peers of their kind, as the human cannot compare themselves to a cloud or a rock, to things they cannot see a reflection of their own life in, they cannot have goals, urges, desires or demands. If such a life was destined to eventually end in death, waiting for the occurrence of death would make no sense, as well as the passage of time, since there are no motivators to keep that temporary existence going.
The mind of the human, as a social creature, must find it challenging to imagine such a life where there is no other. The human who was born into a life with no clear explanation of that existence must have a purpose to endure the truth that the time he is spending is nothing but a slow distraction from his ultimate known fate. Even if that distraction is denying his death and living as if he will live forever. In order to do that he needs someone with the same condition, to share that condition on one hand, and to deny it on the other. By seeing his weakness and vulnerability in someone outside of himself, and to stand out of it and seek power over it to defend himself against it. By that, the human is to embrace his duality and to overcome his own dilemma, his paradox of having an immortal mind trapped in a dying animal. He commits to nature, he seeks food and shelter to survive, but he will only do it within a context in which he can see himself as a hero of survival, or seeing a hero in someone who he wants to become. That is the human motivator, relation.
Existential Realism
The human relation puts the individual in a context where he can weigh his value and set his expectations. The human on his daily life journey of surviving death is to measure himself in relation to others. The animal part of the human is programmed to help him in this survival, it is supported with organism made just for that and the human cannot set free if he wishes, he cannot rebel against nature’s laws, he has to depend on resources to ensure his supply of food and protect himself from danger that will stop him from doing so. The wheel of evolution does not stop at each individual, it has a clear goal and does not put into account any human reservations, morals, sorrows or judgements. Nature wants the species to resume its evolutionary journey as long as it benefits the overall organic life and it will do whatever it takes to fulfill its purpose.
What freedom does the human have in the face of a greater force that involves him as a trivial part of countless numbers of organisms? The human’s will comes indeed second to nature’s will. With that the human’s will itself becomes part of nature’s. As the human has no choice but to meet nature’s expectations from him. He can think he is free, he can think he is powerful, but in the end he is only allowed to move freely within nature’s survival terms. To look at human relations in the survival context, a lot could be explained about human activity. If one’s awareness of his own death will prevent him from functioning naturally, it will be part of his nature to repress his own realization. And if that repression requires the human to adopt mechanisms to overcome his fear he will embrace any solution possible to do so. Society emerges from this survival race, first as a group of animals sharing resources and second as minds with a deep paradoxical condition fearing evanescence. Human’s defenses against truth and search for meaning cannot be detached from his natural behavior of survival and death. Understanding a human’s life is essential to understanding his death. And in order to answer how can one choose death by suicide despite all nature’s compulsions over him to survive, we have to ask how does the human maintain a life first. By understanding survival mechanisms we might understand the destructive ones.
The normal
The solution for the human dilemma starts from deep inside of him, and it results in another social dilemma. In psychoanalytic terms, the human’s narcissism and heroism are his ways to adapt to his unbearable fate. He uses his consciousness to create different realities in which he is an immortal hero and a God. He creates values that transcend his animality. And yet he wants to be part of something bigger, as he cannot bear his individuality, he cannot stand complete isolation, he will be confronted with his smallness, and he will be reminded of his fate. But with others he can have a purpose, now his wish to overcome his animality becomes a wish to overcome too much consciousness, to return to his animality. He wants to feel belonging, he sees himself part of community, of a society and he conforms to collective norms and rules to maintain his belongingness. Once he feels comfortable, his consciousness of the meaninglessness of his distraction strikes him again, he will want to stand out of it, commonality is no longer enough of a solution, he wants to save himself, and he does that by believing he can save others, he sees himself as the hero, he engages himself in arbitrary activities that only he sees the value of, he creates a value for it, and he believes in it so much it becomes his religion, and it is not enough that he finds it valuable, others have to reassure him and believe in him, because if they do not, he will be isolated again, so he keeps moving back and forth in this paradox, of wanting to be a hero and wanting to follow a hero, since both options are not solving his dilemma, no hero guarantees ultimate survival, all heroes he follows are imperfect, he seeks God but he doesn’t find it, so he becomes one, only till he discovers he is too small to be one, his consciousness keeps believing in a lie and the opposite of it, and with that he passes time, finds distractions that serve his survival, at the end he meets his ultimate fate and his story ends.
The human’s sense of belongingness is fundamental to his survival. To draw the human’s existential realism on his role in community and society is essential to understanding his problematic behavior like the one about suicide. The human finds meaning in community, society, family, in collective meaning-making, in religious community, in the common organization of basic life needs, in resource distribution, power structure, hierarchies, political life and in culture.
The role of family is important to the newly-”thrown into the world” creature, they are thrown into a family that reflects a small part of all collectivity, it’s the human’s first portal into the social world, it’s where he gets to read the first pages of the book of normality, he learns norms and constructs and he is asked to conform and attach, and when he does he is happy to survive, as he feels accepted and connected, he accepts the rules, and he is glad to play the game of death denial and heroism, as the basis needed for existential security has been established, he is permitted to feel small knowing he is part of something bigger, and when he is secure he is ready to attempt to stand out and impose his narcissism into the outer world and society.
He moves to a bigger scale where he can see himself in contrast with the others, being part of something means acknowledging outsiderness. Here he can devote his life to survival games where he sees his peers in teams, he enjoys and embraces dualism because it gives him a sense of self, when he sees the other being less he sees himself as more and he feels superior, and when he feels inferior to someone he sees as a hero he wants to follow and transcend, he wants to move forward and overcome his inferiority, he needs a religion because it gives him a bigger meaning than he alone cannot afford, when he has it, is not enough, he never transcend wholly, he is still an organ that requires survival, so he takes his religiousness to his mechanicality, he uses his meaning to create conflict, he adopts arbitrary ideologies to define himself clearly in his fight, he dissolves himself in his nation, in his cult, in his group, in his team and he only wants to survive if he is superior, so he declares war on the other group, he makes up a race where he can be an animal who has to fight for food and he takes the result on an intellectual level and believes he is saving himself from his fate, he wants to win, he prefers winning or losing over neutrality, neutrality is his realism, and he cannot stand it.
The Outsider
Here we can take a step closer to understanding the act of suicide from an existential and survival perspective. First, by looking at the normal we ought to understand the outsider. To exist out of common norms and needs, to fail to commit to society’s rules and games where survival is for the conformist, being a nonconformist means being one step closer to death.
The outsider is the most prone to fail survival, as he is more confronted, less prone to distraction, his existential realism is exposed, his defenses are coming short, and his mind is not helping achieve denial. It is not an evolutionary mistake and his organism is not functioning wrongly. He has the same machine and the same animal’s body everybody has, and he has the same mind that is willing to help if there is a chance. The problem is the chance. The circumstances that create it. As certain life realities can exceed the human’s limitation of mind and body to keep that duality in harmony, to keep the fights, urges and defenses in the normal domain. The normal gets to indulge in these realisms, exhausting life’s possibilities, acting as an animal when the animal can save him and acting like a prophet when religion can overreach the animal’s boundaries. The outsider is breaking out of this dance, he can not put his mind at ease so the animal can enjoy life and his mind alone is not going to save him because it is too limited to answer his wary questions.
The outsider lacks essential requirements of social survival. He is not part of family and community, he does not belong to something bigger than him, he did not freely choose to break out of it, neither did a community reject him, it happened because it is possible to happen, social laws do not work actively to embrace an individual’s realism, it does the exact opposite, it works because it denies it as explained, and the mind reacting to social detachment and errors will not hold at projecting them over the individuals’s novel realism, the outsider’s one, so he is left with too much consciousness of his individuality and smallness, and his attempts to reconnect with the collective who are already deep into their normality tend to fail, as the common ground is out of balance, the outsider starts where the normal ends, his consciousness reaches to cover normal realism, he sees it for what it is, he recognizes the denial and defense, and his mind refuses to participate, as it will not serve its purpose at making him endure his realism, he needs new defenses for his new realism, so to face his alienation he develops shame. Shame is a survival mechanism that operates on all humans to keep them part of their societal commonality. For the normal that means the urge to conform and belong. But for the outsider, for whom conformity and belongingness is out of possible, that means keeping his consciousness of life’s errors out of the way of normality so it can survive, and instead projecting in on himself, creating for him a new domain of distraction, where he alone is the center of life’s paradox. The fight between normal social realms transfers to him, he has to find solutions for his own, and the failure of whole life means his failure. From the normal’s point of view that appears as a disorder, directly targeted at his mentality, calling it mental disorder, the outsider’s nonconformity makes him alienated, criticized and judged, for him being an obstacle in the way of the normal path, to keep him isolated he has to be defined in normal terms, not acknowledging his realism but simplifying it and categorizing it, and certainly not treating it but correcting it, attempting to reinforce normality on him, thinking that the problem lies in disbelief, but the outsider knows that it is an existential problem, for which there is no treatment. Shame grows bigger and the humanity of the outsider becomes his curse, his vulnerability becomes his center of self-hate, his imperfections become his mistakes, ultimately his distraction takes the shape of his obsessions. An obsession about life and death. Looking back at my example of the planet with the sole human who would not find sense in waiting for his death, extreme shame is an emotion that is connected to such isolation, under which the human will struggle to find his life bearable, taking active steps accelerating towards his death.
Existential materialism
Now taking a brief break from existential analysis of humans and drawing a wider picture to include an analysis of the broad history of humans and their accumulative ways of dealing with survival on this planet. How did humans organize their life in a way that kept their existence going? By giving humanity’s main purpose of survival as an organism its deserved attention, we might extract some conclusions that will help better understand individuals’ conflicts with society. The history of humankind should not be separated from that great evolutionary force. Overlooking one of life’s essential powers in defining the progress of societies throughout history will result in an incomplete comprehension and accordingly an evasive theorization of subjects like ethics and psychoanalysis. Human’s compulsive instinct towards self-preservation can tell a lot about societal organization and people’s relations to each other. Real world conditions that Dialectical Materialistic theories try to take into consideration when studying the history of humankind include human’s psychological condition as part of this real world implications that affect people’s lives and society’s progress. History of humankind is most definite in the history of class struggle and economic competition. As all humans striving for survival on shared resources, their relations in organizing the consumption of these resources determines the direction of progress each society and community will develop towards. The outcome of labor organization and the rules and constructs that society adopts based on their material needs is the base for social conformity. Culture, politics and social norms and roles are the mere outcome of the material development of people. By dividing labor among them, class emerges, and each class organizes their relations based on their role of labor. If society is surviving on the accumulation of capital and the reproductivity of this capital to create new labor, their relations will be capitalistic, their society will be divided into capitalists and workers. The polarization of class will be the norm. Within capitalism, each individual will have to commit to their role to ensure material survival. The human’s acceptance of life and of survival is an acceptance of its means. When the means of survival are capitalistic, life becomes capitalistic.
The normal vs Capitalism
In a capitalistic society, it is capitalism that sets the norms to which the individual has to conform. The normal or the healthy mind is the one that fits the best with society’s expectations of what the individual can contribute to fulfill the overall material needs. In a world where profit is prioritized, values such as productivity and efficiency will be seen as virtues. Crossing the line between materialism and existential realism, an individual is accepted by a society if they are profitable and beneficial. In their search for meaning, the normal will conform to these rules in order to gain this acceptance and self-esteem. By doing so, the individual can secure their existence. When the normal applies his existential defenses in his capitalistic reality, it is his materialistic success that becomes the distraction, and he creates values that support his way. His uses the rules of capitalism to indulge in his animality, he devotes his time and effort into learning his society’s virtues, he believes in his labor, his profession, his meaningless purpose, even if it invests him and burns him out, he does it and keeps doing it because it gives him security, he does not questions his methods because he is too focused on the ultimate meaning, he seeks heroism, he fights for survival.
Reaching material goals is yet not enough for the normal, as his consciousness will persist on searching for answers beyond his animality, but when the health-minded wants to transcend, he does so without breaking out of his normality, he adds a spiritual cover to his reality, he engages in religion, culture, art, higher means that are not materialistic from the outside, but in its core it is nothing but an expression of his conformity, he passes his feelings about the meaninglessness of his actions and prevaricates his cry for deliverance into heroic statement of his condition. He insists on seeing himself as a survivor and resists admitting the absurdity of his rules and its fake promises of salvation.
Capitalist realism is a political game, in which everyone has to play a certain role, while in the core humans are only fighting over survival, on the surface everyone claims to know the truth and everyone believes they are entitled to power and superiority. Political media such as religion, nation, culture, gender, ideology and affiliation are all rooms for the normal to engage his lost mind in mutations of reality where existential truth is kept on the margin, where he can deny the absurdity of his meaning in the face of his ultimate fate that defies every meaning altogether.
The Outsider vs Capitalism
If realism is capitalism, existence becomes hell for the outsider. Refusing to conform to capitalist rules is rejecting the world’s material methods. The outsider’s dilemma comes from him being unable to reject his animality, as he has to follow nature’s laws to keep himself alive, his body will move him to it whenever it is possible. But his inner refusal of life’s rules stands in the way. Survival necessitates conformity and acceptance and he is unable to do so. His shame becomes a threat to his life. He needs to get rid of it in order to accept life’s terms and conditions. In the capitalist world where virtues connoting survival are efficiency and productivity, consistency is a key. The outsider’s mind is not allowing him to be consistent. Capitalist promises do not convince the consciousness of the ill. The disorders of his mind are anti-capitalistic by nature. His shame, guilt and depression will stop him from dedicating himself to absurd activities only for the sake of survival when he is completely aware that he is not saving himself from his fate. Mental disorders are seen by the healthy as mechanisms against happiness, while happiness is seen by the ill as a denial mechanism against the truth.
In capitalist normality, disorders of the mind are stigmatized and rejected, and should be treated as such, because they expose its banality, they challenge its functionality and continuity, and the nonconformist becomes a burden the healthy has to carry. There is no place for existential crisis, questions of identity, depression in a society that feeds on constant production and non-stopping consumption of material to survive. The outsider, unhealthy or ill, however they are diagnosed in normal terms, does not see the sense of material survival if his condition will not be solved. What should he live for? If his dilemma is purely existential, then what is life altogether for? The capitalist answer is, for survival. Which the normal accepts because his mind makes its own way through it and figures out ways to make him stand out of it. But for the outsider, political equals elusive, he does not want to prove something, he is not looking for winning, he is looking for emancipation, he does not want to be a hero of survival, he wants to be a hero of existence, he does not looking for a material distraction, he is looking for an existential truth, but he can’t find it.
Death
What can he do? The outsider is not more free than any other human. His survival is not a choice. His problem with life is not about rejection to live and his will to die, but the incompatibility of the means of survival with his mind. Each one rejects the other. The mind refuses what it takes for a human to survive, and survival rules require an accepting mind so they could happen. How does he survive? As long as a human is alive that means there are means of survival possible for him. For the existentially-ill outsider, his shame can be his savior. He will reject norms, but he will live challenging it, he will leave to prove himself right, he will be tricked into the same heroism, he will still conform even if minimally and will consume the same means he criticizes.
Is life possible without any acceptance? Can a mind develop in a way that it completely rejects adapting to all social norms? If the act of suicide is the solution for such a condition, it has to come from the mind that no survival adaptations can work out this dilemma. An absolute failure of all defense mechanisms, A transformation of denial into confrontation. The philosophical trick by the mind that death is not a solution for life as a problem and one faces absurdity by embracing life is in itself a survival trick. Embracing life to run away from death is the outsider’s last attempt to create meaning The human exhausting all means and being left with no other option but death is not free to choose so, as, first, death was his inevitable fate from the start and if anything he only wanted to prevent it, and second, human does not choose his mental mechanisms in dealing with circumstances of life and existence. A human failing in serving capitalist means is a human failing at fulfilling life’s needs. In this case, suicide cannot be seen as a free form of death, it can only be seen as a natural cause of death.
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