[2627] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: suicidal thoughts
mingliu@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (mingliu@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu Dec 12 21:49:19 1991
>>Helping a suicidal person is always preferable to watching them kill
>>themselves.
>
>Why?
>
>Our society has the notion that everybody should live, whether or not they
>want to, whether or not there are sufficient resources available to them,
>whether or not they are good or socially useful or responsible or anything
>else. Why is this the case?
Hmm....from an evolutionary point of view, it's probably because a
society that allows suicide to occur without very active intervention is
inherently unstable. To make an anology, if a person will sit and see
its limb (sorry for the rather gruesome imagery) rot and does nothing
about it, he/she is not likely survive. Along a similar ling of
argument, a society might very well have existed that carried the ideal
of respecting one's decision to the ultimate extent, but it would
probably have perished a long time ago. (I think a recent study showed
that about 1/3 of teenagers had at least "contemplated" about killing
themselves. Imagine, how long can a society perpetuate itself if no
efforts were made to prevent such things.) The survival of a society as a
whole will favor maintaining such a system of intervention. It either
persists or perish...sadly, there isn't much cheers or tears associated
with all these.
On the note of rationality of suicidal thoughts, I have to admit that I
am heavily biased in that I have much contempt toward trying to
establish life within a framework of "raionality" and/or irrationality
(sorry, I am after all, a biologist), I personally have come to the
conclusion that if reasoned throughly, suicide is a perfectly
justifiable "rational" conclusion. However, again going back to
evolution, such human beings might have very well existed or still
exist, for all I know, but they could not have survived through the
process to contribute to next generation's gene pool.
The individuals who have survived will have to develop some
kind of mechanism, most likely imprinted genetically in an "anti-suicide"
gene, to deal with it.
I know this all sounds very "dehumanizing" but....
All these reminded me of an image from a short film I saw a while ago: a
monkey-like animal, holding a torch, marches forward through time, on a
road where many other different animals have fallen and died by the
roadside.
Cheers, to the resilience of life on this planet...
