Allow me to first acknowledge that not all cases of suicide are directly resultant of social misconduct. There are some among us who suffer certain psychological dispositions toward negativity, depressions, and hallucinations. We, as a social species are in process, hopefully a process of moving toward greater inclusiveness and care, understanding and empathy, knowledge and ability, but being in process, having not all the solutions to every possible ill. That intellectual burden of unknowing, that psychic burden of un-openness to the other, is the paucity of our everyday life together, a primitive manifestation of our sinfulness or lacking of soul in our being-with one another. Mental issues may well rest behind a number of suicides, but behind those stand a species, a society not equipped, be it by biology, history, or merely will, to deal with the triggering issues. We are tortured by such suicides precisely because in the depths of our souls we know they ought not to happen, that we are in some fashion lacking the knowledge, the tools, the hearts to prevent them. In ancient times such an awareness of lacking would be termed “sin”, but Western modernity has muchly banished that term and found no other with which to fashion our focus.
We are a social species. We are inherently oriented toward living together. The bourne of that togetherness is in continuous evolution. The primitive pack has incressently given way to some greater grouping: clan, tribe, ethnos, nation. Yet every pulse toward greater inclusivity has been met with a negative, a xenophobic reaction. This has played out on the vast stage of our histories, and it continues to play out—daily—in lives everywhere. Our fragile, our lacking-centre little selves, our teetering egos, and grasping ids, constantly toss out a tether to another, and just as fervently recede in fear, insecurity, hostility, aggressiveness. We are a constant battleground between the forces of compartmentalization and integration; in religious terminology that is spoken of as the war between sin and the holy, for sin likes to divide things up, hide them, horde them into little unconnected boxes, and the holy is the thrust to total openness and giving.
Such may constitute the constitution of our anility to be-with others, but we are not creatures without reason, without will, without conscience. All too often do we recede into our own little wants and desires, our own little puffed-up notions of self, and do all that is possible to eliminate from our orbit, from our world them that are different, them that seemingly, by disposition, costume, or custom somehow to us give “evidence” of a challenge, a threat, an alternative, an-other-ness. The sovereignty of our self-defintion is imperilled and we act to denigrate, to eliminate without acknowledging the other in whom this seems to reside. It is an act of fear, an act of hate, an act self-retreat, an act of negating the fundamental thrust of the sociality of our being. It is selfishness raised to its full panoply and pomp: lies, deceptions, accusations, aspersions, contumacious contumely, subversive shunning, abuse—subtle and overt–to body and to soul. It is sinfulness by another name. And its effects are deadly. It kills the soul that harbours it, and it kills the other at whom it is directed. It isolates the other, it bombards the other with notions of unworthiness, it does that which it intends—it hollows out the other in order that the other appear no more, and so appear no more as contrary, as challenge, as invitation to horizons otherly, to openness, to dia-logue, to being-with. Willing oneself sovereign allows only for subservience or annihilation, the usefulness of those options dependant solely upon the parameters of one’s sense of insecurity and concomitant hostility, despite the fact that such very insecurity and hostility are healed only by the openness to being-with, dialogue, the mutual exploration of horizons, otherliness.
This is the crime, the sin, the brutality played out over and over in homes, in schools, in work places, in cities and in nations. I want Me and only Me, my way, always, and I want no contrariety to contradict it. We want Us, only Us, our way, always, and we want no contrariety to contradict it. The individuals, the groups, the peoples, the nations so boxed-up and battered, so concentrated, cramped, and cast away from the greater flow of humanity are shrived of vision, of value, of hope, of life, and sooner or later, will act out that which the oppressor so cowardly will not condescend to do, which the oppressor secretly wishes to happen. Suicide happens rarely without the guiding, the supporting hand of another. Suicide is too often the outcome of hating someone to death. Such is the potency of fear, of hate, of hell set out of its bounds and given berth in the human heart.