Suicide and the Meaning of Life
On 21 May 1991, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam detonated an RDX explosive-laden belt tucked below her dress. Rajiv Gandh, the former prime minister of India, his assassin and 14 others were killed in the explosion. Thenmozhi was not motivated by religious belief or the promise of 72 virgins in the after-life. Presumably she believed in a cause higher than her own existence. Why are people willing to die for a cause when they know they are going to be forgotten in the years to come?
Suicide is an enigma that for most of us is hard to explain. Far many more people aged 15–24 commit suicide than there are people dying of domestic violence in Australia and presumably in the rest of the world. Should we concerned about it? Should we give people the right to commit suicide? After all it’s their own life. The state does not tell me how I must spend my money. Why should the state intervene if I want to take my life? I digress.We would like to think that people who are depressed have a wrong view of life. But there is no reason to think that way. The rest of us may be hallucinating and life with all its disappointments may indeed not be worth living. Let’s hope otherwise.
“For most of us life is a disappointment. Some can’t cope with it” (Bob Carr). Almost anybody who gives serious thought to the question “What is the purpose of life?” comes to the conclusion that life has no purpose and invents ways of giving meaning to life. Existentialism as a philosophy gained prominence in the 19th century and acquired its name in the 20th century. How do people cope with the existentialist angst? Following Tolstoy I would suggest that there are four mechanisms commonly used to deal with it:Ignorance, Epicureanism, Hope and Religion
Even when you are fully convinced of the absurdity of life, few actually take their own lives. One reason is fear which is the flip side of hope. Death is a one-way street and even people who claim to talk to people in the other world are not too happy to join them. Cowardice thus helps reduce the incidence of suicide. Attempting suicide and failing is a terrible experience especially if people come to know about it. Here I am not interested in suicide per se but in how it is a response to cope with the absurdity of life.
Consider Ignorance. Some people live in such poor economic situations that they spend all their time making a living. This is true not just in under developed countries but in developed countries as well. The capitalist system forces so called better-off people to put in seventy hours a week and few people have the time to ponder over such issues, to smell the roses so to say. In fact people brag about how hard they work even at the cost of seeing their family or participating in the community. Much like the businessman in Saint-Exupery’s novel The Little Prince, who is too busy counting his money that he no time to say Good-bye.
The weekend ritual of the football game or some other sport gives us some respite from the emptiness of life. A win by our favourite team or player gives us a vicarious thrill as though we have won the match ourselves. Of course like everything else in life there is more disappointment than joy. But the occasional wins make it worth following the team to the point of spending more than a few days wages, in many cases, to watch your favourite team or player play and hopefully win. It also helps in bonding with like minded people. “WE lost” or “WE won”, referring to “our” team, is a common phrase that seems strange only to a few people like me. Gambling is yet another activity that is usually disappointing but gives occasional joy. The thrill of success makes all the failure worth it. Of course that is true of life in general. Sundays at one time used to be day of worship. Even if most church-goers pay little attention to the readings or the sermon there are a few minutes allocated for introspection.
The other option is Epicureanism. Books like War and Peace and Pride and Prejudice indicate that back then, as now, rich people flutter from party to party. The rest of the time they talk about what happened at the party. Nowadays, due to much better economic conditions, a much higher proportion of the society live for their weekend at the pub or disco. Another favourite pastime is go on a holiday. You spend every free minute researching or planning your next holiday and bore the hell of everybody around recounting the holiday adventures. They are happy to have fun but they are happier to be seen having fun as Sartre might say.
Hopes and dreams are another way to cope with the absurdity of life. People who have some time but not the economic wherewithal to make merry, live with the hope that their life situation will change, “God wants you to be rich. If you are not rich you are not putting enough effort.” That notion is very popular in the USA and the cause for so much disparity between the rich and poor in that country. The less fortunate see the well off having fun (do they really?) and look through a virtual barbed wire hoping that they will one day be on the other side.
And Religion. When hope in this life fails people take to hope in a better after-life. Even religions that do not subscribe to an omnipotent god, promise some version of the law of karma. This notion of everlasting life in heaven seems irrational. There is no purpose to life on earth as we know it and everlasting life only makes matters worse. There would be no urgency to do anything. Nothing to look forward to. No desire to leave the world a better place than we found it.
If we had but world enough and time
Thy coyness dear lady would be no crime
Well Andrew (Marvel), in heaven the coyness of your mistress would indeed be no crime.
This is not to say that religion is false. It just means that a lot of people are using religion as a substitute for opium as Karl Marx put it. Religion comes in handy in other ways as well. It helps in a bonding that crosses national and racial boundaries. There is a sense of sense of shared values and beliefs.
Thenmozhi as discussed above may not have been motivated by a formal religion but still believed that sacrificing her life for Tamil Eelam was a worthy cause no matter how many innocent bystanders had to pay with their own lives. Again, when people register to defend their country they are willing to risk their lives in the hope that should they be killed, their sacrifice will help others leave a better life. It is that attitude that gives meaning to life. Without somebody to believe in you and share the joy of your successes, and split the pain of your failures, life it is true, is without purpose.
