It's paradoxical but true that although suicide might be contagious, it will never contagious enough to even be considered by most psychologically healthy people. Insofar as this is true, the rejoinder of "that's a crazy person, clearly" will never fail to be effective against this form of political protest.
This seems like a 'noble lie' argument. You don't want to praise something courageous, noble and self-sacrificial because it might encourage others to follow suit?
Do you seriously think there's a danger of any significant number of people self-immolating, such that recognising the selflessness of the sacrifice is some sort of infohazard?
Even as I'm typing this it feels uncharitable, but otherwise I can't really make sense of your logic from a consequentialist perspective.
On one hand, I think this post is correct that speaking positively about this sort of thing will probably increase the amount of times it happens.
On the other hand, I think this sort of protest genuinely affects the discourse on certain issues. Most other dramatic protests hurt unrelated members of the public (blocking traffic, dirtying the Mona Lisa, suicide bombing). This type hurts only the person choosing to protest (okay, this probably isn’t literally true, but could be true in theory). It therefore communicates a striking devotion to cause-over-self that I think actually results in people to stop and think about the cause the person was protesting. Given an important enough cause, then, this form of protest could be a net good for the world.
It’s difficult for me to balance these things against each other. As another comment points out, setting yourself on fire is such an awful experience that valorizing it seems unlikely to increase it by much. This is a point of dissimilarity from 13 Reasons Why-style suicides. But it is also difficult to know how much these sort of acts actually cause good things to happen via their effect on public discourse.
I guess at the very least, I’m not as strongly opposed to the valorization as this post is
Good piece. Either way, politically-motivated suicide is bad. Either it doesn’t work and you and your cause are seen as too extreme, or it does work and catches on and then we’re living in a world where political decisions are made due to moral extortion via threat of suicide (which seems less than perfectly rational to me). Glorifying suicide is such a colossally stupid idea. Jeez.
I see this as a case where the media is displaying bias with an "end justifies the means" approach. If the same person did the same act to advocate the opposite position, would the report be of a noble sacrifice or of a mental breakdown?
Thanks for this. I think your intuitions are precisely correct. Interestingly, I think Plato was onto this aspect of suicide entering "consciousness" as an infecting thing much earlier than our contemporary contagion studies: in the Laws, the punishment proposed for suicide is to efface the memory of the suicide (bury him outside the city, refuse him funerary honors etc), lest the miasmatic pollution of the act pollute others. It's anachronistic to suggest it's a 1 to 1 to our contemporary concept of contagion, but it's in the neighborhood.
This is good work, and I agree with what you say here. But might two things be true: an act could be courageous and inherently good, but bad to draw attention to? I don't think that's true here, but we could imagine cases. Do you think that there are any good examples of protests of this kind?
Better to just burn one kidney, I say.
It's paradoxical but true that although suicide might be contagious, it will never contagious enough to even be considered by most psychologically healthy people. Insofar as this is true, the rejoinder of "that's a crazy person, clearly" will never fail to be effective against this form of political protest.
This seems like a 'noble lie' argument. You don't want to praise something courageous, noble and self-sacrificial because it might encourage others to follow suit?
Do you seriously think there's a danger of any significant number of people self-immolating, such that recognising the selflessness of the sacrifice is some sort of infohazard?
Even as I'm typing this it feels uncharitable, but otherwise I can't really make sense of your logic from a consequentialist perspective.
I’m torn on this.
On one hand, I think this post is correct that speaking positively about this sort of thing will probably increase the amount of times it happens.
On the other hand, I think this sort of protest genuinely affects the discourse on certain issues. Most other dramatic protests hurt unrelated members of the public (blocking traffic, dirtying the Mona Lisa, suicide bombing). This type hurts only the person choosing to protest (okay, this probably isn’t literally true, but could be true in theory). It therefore communicates a striking devotion to cause-over-self that I think actually results in people to stop and think about the cause the person was protesting. Given an important enough cause, then, this form of protest could be a net good for the world.
It’s difficult for me to balance these things against each other. As another comment points out, setting yourself on fire is such an awful experience that valorizing it seems unlikely to increase it by much. This is a point of dissimilarity from 13 Reasons Why-style suicides. But it is also difficult to know how much these sort of acts actually cause good things to happen via their effect on public discourse.
I guess at the very least, I’m not as strongly opposed to the valorization as this post is
Good piece. Either way, politically-motivated suicide is bad. Either it doesn’t work and you and your cause are seen as too extreme, or it does work and catches on and then we’re living in a world where political decisions are made due to moral extortion via threat of suicide (which seems less than perfectly rational to me). Glorifying suicide is such a colossally stupid idea. Jeez.
I see this as a case where the media is displaying bias with an "end justifies the means" approach. If the same person did the same act to advocate the opposite position, would the report be of a noble sacrifice or of a mental breakdown?
Thanks for this. I think your intuitions are precisely correct. Interestingly, I think Plato was onto this aspect of suicide entering "consciousness" as an infecting thing much earlier than our contemporary contagion studies: in the Laws, the punishment proposed for suicide is to efface the memory of the suicide (bury him outside the city, refuse him funerary honors etc), lest the miasmatic pollution of the act pollute others. It's anachronistic to suggest it's a 1 to 1 to our contemporary concept of contagion, but it's in the neighborhood.
This is good work, and I agree with what you say here. But might two things be true: an act could be courageous and inherently good, but bad to draw attention to? I don't think that's true here, but we could imagine cases. Do you think that there are any good examples of protests of this kind?
I had similar thoughts. It seems that ruthlessly mocking him might have the opposite effect as praising him.