Suicide: Taking Control

NB1: This entry has spoilers for the movie Bent. You have been warned.
NB2: I’m in quite good mental health; this entry purely theorizing.

I’ve been ruminating about people who make very logical, very defensible decisions to commit suicide. Categorically placing suicide as something immoral is as stupid as categorically placing eating meat as immoral. I’d gander most vegans and vegetarians would eat meat if faced with starvation; the percentage who would eat meat if the animal was already dead would probably be even higher.

So I have a few examples that I’m playing with at the moment.

The most recent one is at the end of Bent. Max is a German queer who is caught by the Nazis and sent to a Dachau, in a bid to survive he kills his lover on the way to the camp. Later at the camp he befriends another German queer who helped him survive initially, and since they’re not allowed to touch one another they become lovers by inventing an early antecedent of phone sex. A Nazi Captain engineers the death of his lover. Max is forced to watch then bury his lover. In an act of defiance and pride he switches his shirt bearing the Jewish star, which he falsely obtained, for the shirt of his now dead lover, then kills himself on the electric fence where his lover’s hat is hanging.

So another example, this one from real life. Esquire ruminated on The Falling Man. If you’re faced with certain death isn’t taking control admirable? Assuming that those who jumped from The Twin Towers knew they were potentially the victims of terrorism, isn’t denying the terrorists the satisfaction of killing you by killing yourself honorable? It’s giving the terrorists the finger. Another way to look at is that those who jumped chose not to be a direct victim.

What I’m driving at is it makes more sense to commit suicide than to be the victim of someone else’s slow resulting actions.

One final idea to ruminate on is if you’re:

• Elderly
• An environmentalist
• Perhaps bored and miserable
• Not contributing to society
• Have no living relatives
• In okay, but not great health

It is rational, and even perhaps defensible from an environmental standpoint to commit suicide. If you’re near the end of life and not happy about it why continue to take up limited resources. This of course is an extreme case of the Tragedy of the Commons, and it was covered by Star Trek seventeen years ago.

I’m not sure exactly what I think about this case… Perhaps like a good Television series it is preferable to decide when to exit, than to jump the shark.