To die for

Suicide as altruism

Lemmings are a species of rodents about whom people believe to commit mass suicide. They migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. Sporadically, large migrating groups will reach a cliff overlooking the ocean then jump off the cliff and start swimming, sometimes to death. Frequently, lemmings are also often pushed into the sea as more lemmings arrive at the shore. Due to their association with this odd behavior, lemming suicide is a frequently-used metaphor in reference to suicidal people.

Scorpions, the prairie deer, elephants, whales, and dogs are other animals known for terminating their own lives. However, the motives behind an animal’s choice of terminating its own life are not doubled by an aware reasoning, as in human’s case. In the animal regna it can only be instinctual suicide, most of the time due to the survival of the tribe. Without giving too much credit to this behavior, we can nevertheless claim that this particular case of self sacrificing for the benefit of a larger group can be defined as altruism. Consequently, altruism stops being monopolized as an exclusively human trait. For the time being, irrationality seems to remain the only feature reserved to human beings.

Suicide as freedom

Yet, it is noticed a higher conscience in animals like the scorpion or the prairie deer which commit suicide if they are imprisoned. Can we extrapolate and speculate that the prairie deer longs for freedom? For humans, freedom is, from a psychological point of view, just a matter of perception. Biologically, we are not free but slaves of your impulses and instincts. Sociologically, freedom it is just an impression -in terms of norms and rules constraint. What is freedom for a deer that was born in captivity?

I hate name dropping, but Voltaire once said the human species is the only one that is aware about the imminence of death and knows this based on experience not instinct, as opposed to the animals who “feel” death by instinct.

Consequently, animals can only have instinctual presentiments (I know it sounds a bit redundant, but I have a point, so stick around).

Humans, on the other hand, know that death is an immanent and imminent future of life.

Ironically enough, while animals seem to commit suicide due to lack of freedom, humans kill themselves out of excess freedom, and to exacerbate this prerequisite.

Dostoevsky's character Kirilov committed suicide to prove the absolute freedom of the man and paradoxically emphasize his own divinity.

Suicide as double standard

The ancient Greeks, Epicureans and Stoics thought that suicide is to exit stage when the play is too boring. For them it was that simple. Some Asian societies still do it. Why do we give so much moral charge to suicide nowadays? When but especially why did suicide attempts start being labeled as mental unbalance? The desire to live equals a mentally healthy individual. Yet, humans are driven by “death tempting” highly irrational acts (just think of extreme sports). Is it OK to have a death wish by jumping off a cliff with a parasail but not OK to chase a bottle of vodka with a fistful of aspirins?

Suicide as control

Paul Ludwig Landsberg tackled this issue in a whole book unsurprisingly titled “Essai sur l’experience de la mort, suivi de la probleme moral du suicide”.

He said that people fear death as the fear of death is fear of the unknown. Death is immanent and imminent but its arrival is uncertain. Some of the suicidal people chose to commit suicide and do so to eliminate the fear factor of the unknown, as they cannot take the pressure of the death’s imminence. These are usually people who are in control of their lives so the idea “of the unknown” scares them into pulling the trigger. For them, to die is to eventually fulfill their human mission controllably.

Suicide as temptation

From a religious stand, all three major Abrahamic religions blame suicide equally and unequivocally.

Church rejects suicide and finds no moral justification for it. However, my most stringent question is: doesn’t the concept of free-will contradict the religious precept that requires blind submission? Stuart Mill argues in his essay “On liberty” that “the sine qua non of liberty is the power of the individual to make choices”. Isn’t suicide just one of these particular choices to end one’s life when one considers timely?

From a Christian point of view, we can also contemplate suicide as temptation because the nature of human sufferance imminently brings the temptation of death.

A. Bayet said that condemning suicide isn’t a Christian attitude but a human aspect introduced by church to it, as Christianity means first of all unconditional tolerance. But there is a very fine line here, and Christianity thinks that if you justify suicide you justify crime, theft, sin. Christianity’s bottom line is that to commit suicide is to kill a human, and to kill a human is murder. However in certain societies, suicide can also be perceived as a moral duty- Japanese do the seppuku, ancient Greeks used to drink poison, Dacians (the ancestors of Romanians) threw themselves off the cliffs if they lost wars.

Judaism as well views suicide as the most serious of sins, although suicide is not specifically recorded in the Talmud.

Starting with 533 AD, those who committed suicide were denied a Christian burial, which was a requirement for going to heaven. While suicide is strongly condemned by the church there is however no specific text that explicitly states that suicide leads to hell.

Some authors say that, because Jesus took the punishment for the sins of mankind, and suicide is seen as a sin, the result would be that the person that commits suicide would not be more culpable than an ordinary criminal, and that all his sins (suicide included) would be absolved and covered by Christ.

Suicide as validation of ideas

Emil Cioran (the master of “The Summits of Despair”) said that “Jesus allowed to be crucified because he knew that only through sacrifice his ideas can triumph”.

Suicide is forbidden in Islam and is listed among the “enormities” in "Reliance of the traveler" (a manual of Sharia in the tradition of Imam Shafi’i), yet some think it is the highway to Heaven.

However, the question of suicide as a path to martyrdom is neither new nor original. At a certain point there was a specific Christian group called the Donatists who believed that by killing themselves they could attain martyrdom and go to Heaven. There were eventually declared heretics by the church. Apparently, only self sacrifice and death offers authenticity to your ideas and doctrine.

Christ’s suicide

Why the self-murderers are not being given the last mass and are ostracized and proscribed post mortem to the outskirts of the cemetery? Christ's guidelines preach unequivocally love, tolerance, and forgiveness.

Weren’t the Christian martyrs, who willingly allowed to be killed, suicides?

Didn’t Christ himself commit suicide since he knew what was expecting him and still accepted it? St Peter said “Don’t run away from sufferance as Christ himself willingly gave his life for us”.

Isn’t suicide the act by which a human voluntarily decides to cause his own death?

If a murderer can be forgiven why can’t be a suicidal?

Doesn’t free will mean to be able to make free choices, and doesn’t free choice mean to be able to commit suicide as well?

It is said that a useless life is an early death. For some, life is a journey, for others a burden, and for most of us, a gift. Enjoy it while you have it, and remember “those who are in the obituaries today, thought yesterday that tomorrow is just another day”.