Should I Kill Myself? (answering reader questions)
Should Euthanasia Be Permitted?
Paid subscriber asks:
By the way, Iâve basically stopped reading the comments of people who arenât paid subscribers. Just in case youâre wondering why Iâm ignoring you and writing an entire article for this guy. Hint hint. Iâm putting out hundreds of articles a year, so, you know, a few dozen dollars or whatever seems fair.
Anyway.
As far as I am aware, the prohibition on suicide is a relatively recent thing in human history, starting with the Jews.1 Christians kept this prohibition, but they were also obsessed with getting themselves killed to emulate the example of Jesus.
Aside on Christianity
As an aside, hereâs what I would do if I was a Christian:
Lobbying the government to launch a crusade to retake the Holy Land and make it into a Christian theocracy;
Form a shadowy international organization to overthrow governments and replace them with Christian theocracies.
Itâs very strange to me that these goals were accepted for 1,700 years as theologically uncontroversial, and now itâs very difficult to find a Christian who is comfortable with these things. Christian Groypers who openly advocate for such actions are fringe, marginal, and condemned by their fellow Christians.
I donât have a lot of respect for Groyperous Chuds, not because I think they are âfake Christians,â but because I think their psychological motivation in becoming a Groyper is to fulfill a scapegoating narrative.
Those in a dead end situation, who have nothing to lose, who hate the country and the smart people and the Jews and all the other successful beautiful people, and who arenât excellent at anything⌠For such people, becoming a Groyper doesnât really hurt, and it helps to justify their current situation.
Scapegoating is an expression of impotent rage. It just so happens that the most Groyperous forms of Christianity are the most historically consistent. Groypers might be personally ignoble on average, they also have some facts and logic on their side.
It is probably also true that the first Christians had nothing to lose, hated their country, and the Romans, and all the successful people in Judea and Greece⌠It was a movement of dissidents and discontents - - Bolsheviks. This isnât respectable, but it is internally consistent.
Even if we are to accept the divinity of Jesus, I donât see any reason to accept the councils which selectively decided what to include and what not to include in Biblical canon. It is proven that all the gospels are really old and therefore âauthentic,â meaning that early Christians really believed all those things, but also, a huge amount of Gnosticism, like that of the Gospel of Thomas, was excluded for political, sectarian, and factional reasons.
I donât think Christians have a good account for how or why these texts were excluded -- itâs just blind faith that some Greek dudes in the 4th century had the absolute authority to condemn writings which had already been in circulation for hundreds of years.
Ok weâre back
So yeah, if youâre trying to decide whether suicide is a good idea or not, appealing to Judaism or Christianity is problematic, because unless you are Orthodox or a Groyper, your religion is a fake cherry-picked grab-bag of ecumenical therapeutic deism, and I donât see that as an authority worth anything.
The Campbell-Chesterton Rule
If there are a series of cultural norms shared by many different world empires, maybe we should give some kind of Chestertonâs Fence consideration to these cultures. If suicide was prohibited by the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese, etc, it would probably be a bad idea.
This approach combines the study of comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell with Chestertonâs Fence. I call it the Campbell-Chesterton Rule.
The burden of proof is on the anti-suicide side to discover this universal prohibition against suicide among all advanced peoples⌠There are plenty of examples contradicting this, as in the case of the Roman Lucrezia, the Japanese Seppuku, the Jewish Masada.
According to these cultures, suicide isnât morally neutral, but morally required under certain circumstances.
Socratic Logic
If I was a traditionalist, Iâd end the essay here. But the Socratic approach is to attempt to dissect the issue in pursuit of the Good. In a Platonic state, is suicide permitted?
(for all you free cucks, this a 4,694 word essay and weâre just getting started)
