I feel this is a core issue of suicide. Believing in it
causes more suffering to your daily life. All of the stories that each one of you shared is seriously real and gingerly touching.
There is this notion that we "have" to, that what you all wish for and what you want "doesn't matter" in the face of this, that your human will
must be crushed in favor of death—but the reality is that there
is no obligation—there
is no "requirement" or mandate for an action so dependent on volition.
I fear that one of you may end up against a wall one dark evening, and feel tremendous guilt alongside pains of bodily death. I do not wish such a fate upon anybody. For this reason, I don't want anybody to partake in actions they feel deeply guilty and uncomfortable with: because, that can easily become a means for one violating one's self, and
no one deserves to feel that.
I think that suicide comes out
very, very short, on it's utilitarian promise: to reduce suffering. There is so much guilt and pain involved in the mere conception of the idea of acting on it, so much pain and remorse and suffocation caused by the very accepting of the proposition—that it almost becomes a mercy to remind yourself that you
do have a choice, that nothing can overturn your absolute will, in the end.
You don't have to do anything you don't have to. If you feel you are forced against your will—even by your own self—know you ever hold the inalienable right, to decline: to dissent.
It's for this reason that I am quite sure of two things. The first is that even uneducated people, whether sunk in the theocratic despotisms of yore, or the more modernised totalitarianisms of today (or the other way about, if you prefer) have an innate capacity to resist and, if not even to think for themselves, to have thoughts occur to them. We know this empirically, because such people always appear as if from nowhere when despotisms fall. But I also believe that we can know it by induction.
I was most heartened to have your reply. It is true that the odds in favor of stupidity or superstition or unchecked authority seem intimidating and that vast stretches of human time have seemingly elapsed with no successful challenge to these things. But it is no less true that there is an ineradicable instinct to see beyond, or through, these tyrannical conditions. One way of phrasing it might be to say that injustice and irrationality are inevitable parts of the human condition, but that challenges to them are inevitable also.
On Sigmund Freud's memorial in Vienna appear the words: "The voice of reason is small, but very persistent."
Philosophers and theologians have cogitated or defined this in differing ways, postulating that we respond to a divinely implanted "conscience" or that—as Adam Smith had it—we carry around an unseen witness to our thoughts and doings and seek to make a good impression on this worthy bystander. Neither assumption need be valid; it's enough that we know that this innate spirit exists. We have to add the qualification, however, that even if it is presumptively latent in all of us, it very often remains just that—latent. Its existence guarantees nothing in itself, and the catalytic or Promethean moment only occurs when one individual is prepared to cease being the passive listener to such a voice and to become instead its spokesman, or representative.
You ask me for some encouraging examples. I don't wish to furnish the sort of slogan that might appear on some cheery poster or be used as some uplifting motto. Again, it is a matter of how one thinks and not of what one thinks. However, there are some flashes of human intelligence that rise above the merely contrary and that can show us how some of our predecessors dealt with fiercer opposition than we face at present.
The second, which is only a corollary of the first, is that we do not naturally aspire to any hazy, narcotic Nirvana, where our critical and ironic faculties would be of no use to us. Imagine a state of endless praise and gratitude and adoration, as the Testaments ceaselessly enjoin us to do, and you have conjured a world of hellish nullity and conformism. Imagine a state of bliss and perpetual happiness and harmony, and you have summoned a vision of tedium and pointlessness and predictability, such as Huxley with all his gifts was only able to sketch. Only one other sacred text mentions "happiness" without embarrassment. But even in 1776, this concept was thought to be mentionable only as the consequence of a bitter struggle, just then being embarked upon. The beautiful word "pursuit," however we construe it, would be vacuous in any other context.
I close by saying, as I may well have occasion to say again: Always look to the language.
[all 3 of these quotes from:]
—Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (ch. III)
