- from Nonviolent Communication
Start looking for the needs driving actions and you will gain an x-Ray vision that will give you effortless compassion.
Edit: Here’s a list of basic human needs: https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs-inventory
This depends on who's doing the analysis. For example, self-immolation is often seen as an extreme form of desperate but rational protest. The only way to understand and prevent these types of events is to understand and address the underlying needs.
History can be quite ugly. In a way that makes suicide the better option.
> thousands of happily brainwashed and well-fed kamikaze pilots
The source is needed for "happily".
> The living need to keep living. Who knows why people kill themselves. Lots of incoherent reasons, basically. Your self-immolating monk might be the clearest version
This is incoherent.
>> This is incoherent.
The living cannot - and don't - live for the dead, or the causes that the dead chose to die for. Dying for a cause doesn't make the cause nobler. It just takes you out of the conversation. That's why suicide is, by definition, incoherent.
Second, many living in fact do value self sacrifice.
Third, the "for cause" suicides are fairly often organized by living in the hope the living will get what they want. The one killing himself is agreeing to do it on behalf of other living. You may or may not disagree with cause, it does not really matter.
In short, your view doesn't just prioritize the group over the individual - it prioritizes the worst possible groups.
And so, Frankl bored holes in the skulls of his Jewish patients, who had taken overdoses of pills in the hope of escaping their Nazi tormentors, and jolted their brains with Pervitin, an amphetamine popular in the Third Reich.
The suicidal patients revived, but only for 24 hours. One wonders what agonies they went through in their last day of life, with Frankl’s amphetamines coursing through their trepanned heads.
[...] Frankl wrote, “When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. … His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.” The suicidal Jews had not borne their burden properly. If they lived they could still stake a claim to their suffering as a “unique opportunity,” Frankl believed.
What Frankl failed to see was that Austrian Jews were making a political statement by killing themselves, sometimes at the Gestapo’s deportation office. As Frankl’s biographer Timothy Pytell points out, their “Masada tactic” was an act of protest.
The Nazis in fact shared Frankl’s goal of preventing Jews from killing themselves, since they had decreed Jewish suicide to be “illegal.” Jews belonged to the Reich, to be disposed of as the Germans saw fit."
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/vik...
Just want to say here, Frankl was trying to keep people alive to keep them alive. Inept as that may have been. There's a huge difference between that and getting your jollies by wanting to torture people... and only people who want to torture people would want to draw a similarity between those two things.
No. There's a vast difference between cutting someone's head open to save their life because they'll be dead otherwise, and doing it to a totally okay, healthy living person with the intention of killing them.
I don't think you are taking into account the outcome when one persistently fails (or cannot) cover its human needs.
Give me an excruciatingly painful, slow-killing terminal illness, and tell me how do you not see suicide as a rational option.
More security, more laws, more healthcare, more attention to issues from the average people, and also more hate.
Maybe it doesn't change the way the suiciders wanted, but it does change.
But that gets to the central point. The actor with the suicide vest no longer has a voice. He can't verify the outcome. He can't modify his course. He can't run for president, or parliament. He can't start a movement. He is finished; how the world responds is not his concern. It's not that nothing happens, it's that whatever happens, the protest itself was incoherent.
Suicide is not an effective way of making the world better for yourself, no. But it turns out that people care about more than that. People do commit suicide for political aims, all the time - including soldiers who sacrifice themselves in the service of some larger cause. This fact seems to confuse you - you call them "irrational" and "incoherent". Since you are the one who is confused, perhaps you are the one whose worldview lacks explanatory power.
You do care about things outside yourself, don't you?
I don't believe in an afterlife. I also don't believe that the most effective way to accomplish something is to take yourself out if the equation. And I also don't place all my money on bets that I'll never know the results of. So remaining in the world is, among other things, the only rational way an individual can know whether their efforts bore any fruit.
>> which is not an appropriate framework
According to whom? From an individual's perspective, it's actually the only rational framework.
>> You do care about things outside yourself, don't you?
People or movements? I don't consider jumping on a grenade to protect your friends to be suicidal. I don't consider pushing someone you love out of the way of a train to be suicidal. But to set yourself on fire or blow yourself up to make a statement on behalf of an ideological group? Whose leaders are too cowardly to blow themselves up? Yeah, I have more respect for my own individuality, and more respect for life than that.
Just wondering, are you defending suicide bombings?
Suicide in normal life is just people escaping unbearable pain. Of course, someone with a properly functioning brain could probably never understand what it feels like.
That's a huge impact!
That's a very bizarre interpretation. Sorry in advance for my long dissection of this comment.
First, saying that 9/11 created mass migration. Migrations have always occurred throughout human history, whether to flee political persecution, bad economic conditions, environmental disasters (both natural and human-made). There are more migrants and refugees now than in the past decades, but that could (partially) be attributed to factors which have nothing to do with 9/11: harsher climate, neocolonial military (or economic) "interventions" in the global south (venezuela, mali, etc), automation of work without wealth redistribution, development of larger transnational chains favoring outsource exploitation in poorer countries (eg. Bangladesh labor is cheaper to exploit than Tunisian/Mexican), and many others.
Second, implying that global north ("democratic") countries are the ones welcoming the migrants and refugees. I don't have recent stats on the topic, but a few years back it appeared a vast majority of people sought refuge in neighboring countries, not in Europe/USA. Moreover, the Global North has a serious history of exploiting undocumented/refugee labor in slave-like conditions (minus the shackles) and broad Internet access has made such information available/verifiable to many people, who no longer look up to France (for example) as a haven of peace and prosperity, but (rightfully) as a place of despair and endless abuse in the hands of the powerful elites. European countries are very good at pretending they can't host more asylum seekers and other immigrants, but are among the richest countries on Earth with incredible levels of food/housing waste... and they sure find resources to pay for their walls, prisons and ~thugs~ cops.
Third, considering that authoritarianism is a new development in "democratic countries". I don't know of a single country who has a well-earned reputation as a democracy. To my knowledge, all pretend-democracies (such as France where i reside) have a strong history of political repression, secret services plots, neo-nazi (or otherwise fascist-inclined) infiltration and cooperation with law enforcement and the military, non-monetary forms of corruption on every level (and less obvious forms of monetary corruption, see "Outrage" for a french example of police filling their pockets from ordinary citizens). Authoritarianism and racism has been on the rise for a few decades now: our parents' teachings from WWII are long gone. In France specifically, there were quite a few authoritarian setbacks throughout the 80s-90s (see for example the Pasqua-Debré racist laws), but it's really with Sarkozy as Ministry of Interior (2005) that the nomenklatura's discourse started shifting towards outright fascism. It started with the threat within, the dangerous young people from popular districts and the engineering of an "insecurity feeling" via state/industry-controlled media. Then when Sarkozy became president (2007), he made a famous stigmatization campaign against Rroma people.
Sarkozy may have been presented as a right-wing president, but a more apt description is a fascist candidate. Because, as Mussolini suggested back in the day, fascism is the merging of Corporate and State powers, and Sarkozy represented just that: he was a close friend of Bolloré and many other neo-colonial fortunes, and made sure the State intervened in favor of big business at every turn. At that time, a new far-right international was forming around the ideas of a "clash of civilizations" and immigration as "reverse colonization"... and you could see Marine Le Pen dancing at balls in Vienna with neo-nazis from all across Europe. Over the next decade, their vocabulary/concepts were imposed on all publications by private-owned media, while public media contributed to the same climate of fear without spelling the concepts out. And here we are now fast forward almost 15y, with Macron elected as a shield against Le Pen's racism, who himself took very racist measures as soon as he was elected (such as doubling from 45 to 90 days maximum time in retention centers for undocumented people who are not accused of any crime), and insisted a refugee boat (the Aquarius) should just be left to rot and sink in the Mediterranean sea, despite some local governments offering them asylum.
How did we arrive to this strange place in history? I'm not sure, but i'm very sure immigrants doesn't have the mystical powers you attributed them. What happened is the product of our oligarchy and political police, not ordinary folk who just want to live a "normal" life. How do we leave this strange place in history and aim for democracy? We need to understand the failures and inadequacies of past and present systems: elections have proved time and time again they're nothing more than a scam, and as long as we delegate power unconditionally to power-hungry psychopaths, all we'll get is dictatorship with a pretty and colorful sugar coating (don't even get me started on actual political repression in Europe, the topic is long and scary). We need power to, by and from the people now. That means abolish every election and everything that resembles a Nation-State: let the people orgnaize in their communities and let no community ever dictate their way of life to others. Anarchism and self-organization are the only path that can divert us from that future we're headed towards that consists of ever-increasing inequality, political repression, climate catastrophes and refugees, and civil war over basic abundant-yet-not-shared resources.
This is 100% untrue. It is not normal to have suicide ideation. It is not normal to have to deal with those thoughts every day.
My whole point in this thread is that suicide is always, fundamentally irrational. I keep getting downvoted for it, but I think it's an important point - especially for people who consider themselves rational beings but also include suicide in the list of things they'd consider as options.
If is completely normal and usual for properly functioning adults to not see suicide as a possible choice all the time. Suicide ideation is not normal state of being.
I mean it totally can be:
1. Assume materialism/naturalism.
2. Experience pain or some other unpleasantness and dislike it.
3. Suicide solves the pain problem completely, and creates no further problems from the perspective of the person commuting suicide.
Everyone automatically has empathy for people they feel aligned or connected with. You don't even have to try.
"only"? What if that's their main goal? You're still judging them for having values that are different from yours, which is something that comes naturally to anyone. The whole point of learning to have empathy is so you can empathize with people whose values are incompatible with your own. You probably don't even understand their values and take their superficial statements literally because you're too keen to judge them as bad instead of understand their underlying feelings that they may not even be able to articulate themselves.
Just to be clear - we are still talking about "nonviolent communication", right? Because a careless reading would interpret this as a call to hit people with sticks solely because we hold their actions to be motivated by incorrect beliefs.
In any case, it's still not true. Unless you have resigned yourself to hitting them with sticks, you're still in the realm of communication and persuasion. You'll always get further with that if you try to understand where they are coming from, which is what "nonviolent communication" is all about.
For the record NVC does not insist on never using force. Force is necessary for protection or for stopping clearly harmful actions.
Examples: Anti-Vaxxers’ protest - need for autonomy, for being heard.
“I'll make you all shut up and listen to me.” - is the strategy to meet the needs to matter, to feel heard, need for competency.
Explosives to the chest - need for autonomy (from occupation/apartheid/oppression), for understanding (“see how it feels for your people to die?!”), control (powerless to do anything except this),
breaking into the senate chamber - need for autonomy (“freedom”), to matter (“stolen elections”), agency (being able to change things)
In some cases the beliefs which caused these particular needs to arise can be manipulated (and were), and the strategies for meeting the needs are flawed (insurrection, boom best etc. ) but the needs are simple, universal and deeply human.
I can never condone terrorism but can understand the powerlessness and pain behind it, the lack of agency, and the need to matter and have a voice that drive some of its acts.
So stopping terrorism has to do with addressing oppression etc.
>> So stopping terrorism has to do with addressing oppression etc.
This sounds so much like my former teacher and mentor - who was also an erstwhile member of the weathermen in the 60s. I do think that addressing oppression is half of the problem. But if you consider the problem to be humans killing other humans while taking their own lives in service of a belief ("right" or not), then it really can't be addressed without also giving individual humans the sense that their own individuality is wonderful and unique and worth preserving, even in the face of oppression or injustice. It goes deeper than whether the belief is wrong or right. It requires a form of self-respect and respect for life that can't come from a group identity. That overrides group identity and comes to its own conclusions. That is the basis of morality - the decision to refuse a wrongful order. It requires an internal moral compass and a desire for self-preservation and a sense of one's own life being valuable. And that's something that no organization or ideology will ever try to inculcate in its disciples, and which can't be achieved by e.g. America addressing oppression.
And yes, I understand the needs for agency, for autonomy, and the feelings of powerlessness and frustration behind such outrageous, inhumane and fruitless acts. I am also informed about the extensive preparation and brainwashing that go into it which also meet the person’s need for belonging and to matter (announced as martyr in their community). (See Syriana for a depiction in film?)
But solving oppression and murder by state terrorism will likely reduce suicide bombings, too.
Most humans feel better when they can see that they are better off than someone else (and worse when they can see that they are worse off.)
The desire to dominate and control others also seems very common.
etc.