On life and how it ends [tw discussion of suicide]

Submitted by nomorepie in yourpersonalblog

(i posted this long musing in a friend's discord after she said "its weird that the way your life ends could potentially become what you’re most known for when you’re gone. and it might happen by chance or you can make it happen that way... do you ever think about what you would do with yours")

There were those people who set themselves on fire to protest the genocide in gaza

I can't understand it but it sure makes me feel some kind of way. A while ago I saw the suicide letter of a transgender woman posted on bluesky. People who knew her were sharing it because media refused to cover it, despite her being found dead at a Veterans Affairs building, her body covered in a trans flag. She also wanted to draw attention to something by dying there I think

And at the same time, suicide is a huge cognitive hazard. It's well known in media circles that publicizing it will always lead to an increase of suicides. Idk what the ethical thing to do here is

Maybe if we did not treat the entire subject as a taboo it would be easier to talk about. That's kind of a catch 22 though. Maybe if people knew how many before them had suicidal thoughts and then went on, it would be easier to live despite those thoughts. But people who are "normal" and "healthy" now don't want to think or speak of those times when they weren't. Everyone would prefer to put unpleasant stuff behind them and that's their right. And I'm not sure a peer group of depressed and suicidal individuals wouldn't just fuel each others' worst tendencies. We know that helplines do mostly nothing, if they don't call the cops on you. Professional help is hard to access, if it isn't actively harmful. Things are very fucking dire out there and we can only count on each other. I don't want to lose friends. I don't want to die.

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rain wrote

Maybe if we did not treat the entire subject as a taboo it would be easier to talk about.

Then we need to stop imprisoning (“hospitalizing”) everyone who comes forward admitting they are suicidal.

Suicide and suicidal ideation is a legitimate response to a lot of traumas, and criminalizing this response just stops people from even talking about it until it has gone into a full blown crisis. There should be voluntary help to anyone who needs it, but if someone really wants to die that is their choice. Taking away someone’s autonomy, taking away their fundamental right to decide what to do with their own body - that’s not helping. It’s an abomination - and most people instinctively avoid it.

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twovests wrote

I feel for that. I think "copycat suicides" really are a serious problem. I think suicides to prove a point are usually just a waste. They're a cheap an quick way to amplify your voice a little bit, at the cost of ever being able to speak again.

That said, suicide is also a pretty good solution to almost every personal problem. So much of the dialogue around suicide refuses to acknowledge this, because "We concede that suicide is a reprieve from all pain forever" probably isn't good messaging." Trying to reduce suicides is probably a good thing.

And I'm not sure a peer group of depressed and suicidal individuals wouldn't just fuel each others' worst tendencies.

This is a difficult point for me. There used to be such a group on Reddit that did go into the "Suicide will end your pain but also put it onto others, and most suicidal people really shouldn't do it, etc." It was legitimately good and useful dialogue with decent moderation.

When Reddit banned the community, it found another form, and it lead to many many premature deaths. I know people who have died after discovering methods on the offshoot community. I think these communities are possible to exist as something healthy, but that's very difficult to do and is also a huge liability.

I don't have any answers here, I'm sitting here with you on this. It's a subject I love to talk about but it feels like such a danger. It's very unique as a taboo.

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oolong wrote

i've only read one paper (of the many existing ones) on self-immolation in tibet but simplifying them as "cheap an quick" really glosses over the oppression happening on multiple levels where a voice in actual tibetan can't even be heard

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twovests wrote

Sorry; I should clarify what I mean. By "cheap and quick", I really do just mean that the amplification is real and short-lived. And I only have my American political context here.

The self-immolation protest suicides in Tibet are something I really didn't know much about at all. (Other than searching up their wiki articles after having had read your comment.) I'm only speaking in my context as someone in the USA who's mostly aware of these suicides in how they interact with politics in America.

I can only readily recall two examples (other than suicide attacks), even though I know there were many more. The most salient being "Aaron Bushnell"* self-immolating last year. The anniversary is tomorrow and I doubt it'll be remembered at all.

And by "cheap", I'm trying not to fedpost here, but far-right terrorists in America have conducted suicide attacks that have proven to have real political gains. Trump might not be in the office today if his supporters didn't show ten years of evidence that they're willing to throw away their lives and drive and shoot and kill for him. I think suicides amplify a message, but don't have the same chilling effect that suicides attached to terror attacks do.

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oolong wrote (edited )

yeah, i'm only the normal level of mad about the americentrism rn (more peeved). necessarily as someone outside the us and in asian spaces, the majority of suicides in protest i know have been related to tibet.

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twovests wrote

Yeah, that's entirely fair. I'm sorry about being Americentric but I also don't know how I would be less so from my positionality. I can only post from the sum of what I know, which has been poured into my brain inside America.

I don't mean to ask for an essay but I'm also not firm in my stance and want to know more? I think suicides to send a message are still probably usually a waste of the rest of a life. But I want to know more about your viewpoint in general (or at least the paper you mentioned? I know only a tiny bit about Tibet and the general history of Chinese imperialism, and even less about Tibetan self-immolation.) (And it's not unthinkable to me that censorship and repression could be so strong that self-immolation is the only way at all to spread a message, especially when so many people are doing it. But I don't know enough to go the rest of the way and imagine anything specific about the impact it would have.)

(I also am eager to discuss suicide in general and I appreciate this thread a lot so I hope my first comment doesn't monopolize this whole thread lol)

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oolong wrote

i don't have a recommendation beyond having connections outside america that would then spur you to decenter the usa then doing the whole we are human and connected and have a shared struggle thingy. like there's no point in joking about learning about american politics against my will, i have loved ones there and my local politicians get inspired by their us counterparts all the time.

god ok. so. the paper i read isn't even focused on the act of self-immolation itself but rather how language oppression is linked to death. in the context of necropolitics, the ways in which a government controls how people die (extreme simplification)(the 'killing' of a language and its deleterious effect on the speakers being above's thesis), ccp state surveillance removes typical avenues for protest such that people find themselves disappeared, jailed and/or extrajudically killed and their message erased, which is where self-immolation comes in as an act arresting enough to defy that. see here also. there's more to be explored in whether you see the act as violent or non-violent re buddhism and the ethics of its reproduction in how we (whether inside or outside of tibet/china) report on it and talk about its effectiveness.

not to crying emoji now but i'm not prepared to write an essay on this because i definitely haven't done all the reading and always feel lacking when asked to write. i hope i am making sense

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nomorepie OP wrote

Super interesting comment to me, thank you for sharing, oolong

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twovests wrote

(sorry for being late to reply, i'm still reading the first paper, i just wanted to send you an acknowledgement at the ~50h mark lol. i'll be back here)

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twovests wrote

Yeah ;( All of my connections outside the USA have some degree of stakes in here (beyond the usual influence the US has worldwide). I'm already in on the "humanity is one organism on the earth, individuals are illusions and borders are lies" thing, but the only non (us) americans I know who talk about local politics are Canadians, which is already pretty heavily intertwined with US politics. I liked to think of myself as a global thinking person, but I've been looking increasingly local, and thinking more and more exclusively about US politics (and the politics of other nuclear-armed nations).

Regarding the first article:

tldr: I read the first article and took away about as much as a non-anthropologist might take away from an anthropology academia paper. I end this section asking how you found this article / how this article ended up on your reading docket?

I do very much appreciate the articles. I've been hungry for Brainy Readings after leaving academia, but there are few forums on the internet where such things are discussed that aren't also LessWrong-likes. I have to admit that I've only read the first one through so far

I started to write something of a book report for the first article that I've had to pare down a lot. Tbh, at first I didn't think I was the target the audience for the first article. The abstract felt like an impenetrable wall (and, at least in my field, that was supposed to be the easy part), but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the rest of the article was the simple thesis, elaborated thoroughly, with a hefty contextualization in an academia I am not part of.

I had some prior background which helped contextualized the sections pertaining to language oppression in the US, Canada and China. I internalized some of those facts but otherwise it felt like too much for me to chew.

But most of what I cut out from the first and second drafts of this reply is "I can't appreciate this entirley". (I know this comment is already so comically long that I had to cut it into sections, but it was way longer!) The field is a bit too distant for me, some terms or ideas are a bit too abstract for me (is it really appropriate to label this academic article 'militant'? Is racism really inherent to any state? These are the ideas which need more elaboration for me to agree with.). It feels like liters of information flowing into my brain which only has room for a pint.

I'm curious, what got this article on your reading docket? When I was in undergrad and grad school, I usually read articles as part of an assignment, or research, or for a presentation for student organizations. Without a question to answer, or deliverable to produce, I felt my reading was directionless.

Regarding the second article, and more of a reply to you:

So I haven't read the second article through yet, and I have a separate 300 words on that already. But I really regret not reading this one first. I feel like I've internalized a lot more from this article (which I've read for only ~10 minutes so far, compared to the ~90 on the first article).

But it's been about 100 hours (I'm sorry it took so long, and I'm sorry I didn't even finish the second article yet!) But yes you did indeed make sense! I'm sorry it took me so long to reply.

Anyways, I am going to read that second paper eventually (probably in the next 50 hours)

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oolong wrote

i had previously read roche's other papers because i was interested in the link between language and nationalism. i speak hakka so originally i was reading work on hakka ethnonationalism. i haven't done any tertiary schooling but i've been interested in national identity formation since high school so this is just a thing i read for leisure. i often find that because i haven't done the foundational readings in an academic context that things go over my head and i have to read slowly but i find the challenge fun?

i didn't expect a reply or for you to read either article closely!! so it's fine!! thank you for your consideration!!!!

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twovests wrote

Oops, I edited out my asterisk; so * there is good reason to speculate Aaron Bushnell might have been trans, people who knew Bushnell said otherwise. It's touchy, so I'll just quote Bushnell's name and use proper nouns.

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