- To be, or not to be: that is the question:
- Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
- The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
- Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
- And by opposing end them?
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- --William Shakespeare
"Suicide is man's way of telling God 'you can't fire me - I quit.'"
Bill Maher
"Then is it sin to rush into the secret house of death, ere death
dare come to us? " - William Shakespeare
A report on MSNBC news says
that "a suicide takes place somewhere around the world every 40 seconds,
or nearly one million a year, and the rate looks set to surge over the
next two decades."
The report adds that suicide is a major world health problem, that it's
largely preventable. The highest suicide rates (in percentages of population)
have been in former communist states - Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Latvia
and Hungary, followed by Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Slovenia and Finland.
Judging from numbers alone in 2000, the greatest incidents of suicide have
occurred in China (195,000) - where there are more women suicides than
men - India (87,000), Russia (52,000) and the USA (31,000). While there
have been suicides in Arab countries, they certainly haven't figured among
the major sufferers either in numbers or rates per 1000.
My interest in the topic has been fuelled by a wish to discover authoritative
studies about what leads a person to self-destruct. According to <(http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996373>New
Scientist Digital (September 8,2004) "Suicide kills more people each
year than road traffic accidents in most European countries, the World
Health Organization is warning. And globally, suicide takes more lives
than murder and war put together, says the agency in a call for action."
The death toll from suicide - at almost one million people per year
- accounts for half of all violent deaths worldwide said the WHO report.
It also noted, "people in Latin America, Muslim countries and a few
Asian nations are least likely to die by their own hand."
"It's important to realise that suicide is preventable," points
out Lars Mehlum, president of the International Association for Suicide
Prevention. "And that having access to the means of suicide is both
an important risk factor and determinant of suicide."
Since high self-esteem and social "connectedness " can protect
against suicide, it's logical to conclude that the absence of these factors
can play an important role leading to suicide. The problem not only affects
those who die at their own hands. It's been estimated by health officials
that 20 times that number have failed in their attempts to commit suicide.
The yearly costs associated with self- afflicted injuries have been estimated
in the billions of dollars. As pointed out by the International Association
for Suicide Prevention (IASP) "For every suicide death there are many
survivors; their lives are profoundly affected emotionally, socially, and
economically."
Professor Mehlum, the president of IASP, said, "Suicidal behaviour
has a large number of underlying causes which are complex and interact
with one another. Factors such as living in poverty, unemployment, loss
of loved ones, arguments with family or friends, legal or work-related
problems are all acknowledged as risk factors when affecting those who
are predisposed or otherwise especially vulnerable to self-harm.
In a scholarly paper on "Suicide (1897) " Robert Alun Jones
reports on studies by the great French sociologist and philosopher Emile
Durkheim that dealt with a whole range of topics including:
1. What is Suicide?
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- 2. Extra-social Causes
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- 3. Social Causes and Social Types
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- a. Egoistic Suicide
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- b. Altruistic Suicide
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- c. Anomic Suicide
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- 4. Suicide as a Social Phenomenon
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- 5. Critical Remarks
"Suicide thus varies inversely with the degree of integration of the
religious, domestic, and political groups of which the individual forms
a part; in short, as a society weakens or "disintegrates," the
individual depends less on the group, depends more upon himself, and recognizes
no rules of conduct beyond those based upon private interests. Durkheim
called this state of "excessive individualism" egoism, and the
special type of self-inflicted death it produces egoistic suicide."
If suicides are low in Arab societies, what accounts for the increasing
rates of suicide in Bahrain, especially among Indians? With the expat's
society weak and the individual independent of the group, he becomes the
egoistic suicide defined by Durkheim. That certainly wouldn't explain
the suicides of the Palestinians. For this, Durkheim had another explanation:
"But if excessive individuation thus leads to suicide, so does insufficient
individuation: ...men on the threshold of old age, women upon the deaths
of their husbands, followers and servants upon the deaths of their chiefs
- in which the person kills himself because it is his duty. "Such
a sacrifice, Durkheim argued, is imposed by society for social purposes;
and for society to be able to do this, the individual personality must
have little value, a state Durkheim called altruism."
Durkheim notes that "the altruist commits himself to a goal beyond
this world, and henceforth this world is an obstacle and burden to him...the
unhappiness of the altruist... springs from hope, faith even enthusiasm,
and affirms itself in acts of extraordinary energy."
Those responsible for the suicide of the Palestinian bomber may know full
well what their treatment of the Palestinians does to their psyches, in
which case they remain entirely responsible for the deaths incurred.
To quote Durkheim again, "No living being can be happy unless its
needs are sufficiently proportioned to its means; for if its needs surpass
its capacity to satisfy them, the result can only be friction, pain, lack
of productivity, and a general weakening of the impulse to live."
Whether they knew the outcome or not, this means that the Israeli occupation
forces have themselves been responsible for the deaths made of their own
sacrificial lambs that they have attributed to terrorists.
Palestinian suicide bombers have a kinship with the Romans at the time
of Cato. Romans viewed suicide as a rational act, calmly undertaken, carefully
planned in advance, and intended for public consumption (almost entirely
at odds with our modern conception of suicide).
Whereas most modern societies tend to view nearly all suicides as irrational,
hastily planned and executed in a fit of passion, and usually undertaken
alone, this type of suicide was the sort most deplored by the Romans, the
type of suicide they sought to avoid when choosing their own deaths.
Thus Tacitus criticizes a man who leapt to his end from a building for
his "sudden and undignified death" and reports that his mother
was blamed and banished from Rome for ten years. The Romans never condoned
hasty, messy, irrational suicides. They haven't been by Arabs either.
The suicide bomber, unable to develop and express his individuality under
occupation and unable to serve his society in constructive ways, turns
to a goal beyond this world.
Fouad Ajmi US News (9/20/04) reports, "We love death," said that
quintessential merchant of death Osama bin Laden, "as much as the
infidels love life." Ajmi adds "The young homicide bomber walking
into a Tel Aviv discotheque has come to serve a warrant of death on people
his age whose ways he yearns for yet cannot have."
Ajmi concludes his article by saying "...the 9/11 commission recently
recommended the launching of a campaign of public diplomacy in the Muslim
world. But this is illusion. For at heart, this war for Islam is one
for Muslims to fight. It is for them to recover their faith from the purveyors
of terror."
Both conclusions are illusion. "Diplomacy in the Muslim World"
will do nothing to change the circumstances - the sense of hopelessness
imposed on the Palestinians and the oppression and humiliation of occupation
felt by the Iraqis - under which the victims feel compelled to commit suicide.
The Muslim clerics that Ajmi refers to as "purveyors of terror"
are no more responsible for the conditions experienced by their congregations
than their followers themselves are.
Neither the clerics nor their followers are fooled by the propaganda that
calls the suicide bombers terrorists while ignoring the gross terrorism
of occupation forces that murder, maim, destroy homes and livelihoods and
instil constant fear with fighter jets, bombers, tanks, helicopter gunships
and a well-armed military machine.
The propagandists may deceive their willing audiences in the West, but
they don't delude either the hopeless who have been impelled to suicide
or those who feel empathy for the abject victims of oppression.
Something needs to be done about the disgusting tendency in the West to
feel sorry for the victims of the victims. As Cesare Pavese has written,
"No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide. " It,s time to
stop bluffing and bullying and to start corrective work on the reasons.
-
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- Paul Balles is a retired American university professor
and a freelance writer.
-
- For more information, see <http://www.pballes.com/>
- http://www.pballes.com
- and
- <http://www.writerfreelance.com/>http://www.writerfreelance.com
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