Do not kill yourself as a form of political protest

Nb: Ironically, if you are depressed or suicidal, you may wish to pursue other reading material today. Dialing 988 will connect you to the National Suicide Hotline.

Pictured: not you

When you think of a “cool brave suicide that really makes a point, man”, you are almost certainly thinking of a cultural tradition to which you do not belong, or a circumstance that does not remotely hold.

You are not Mishima, using a culturally contextual form of ritual suicide, linked to a semi-extinct warrior culture that he was trying to resurrect. He was, okay, maybe larping, but at least larping as a specific kind of thing that involved suicide to make a final point that would be understood as such by his target audience. Are you going to resurrect the samurai tradition? Not so much.

You are definitely, absolutely not Thích Quảng Đức. Everyone saw the famous photograph of the monk calmly on fire, and thought “damn, bro - metal”. People made it into album covers (some of those that work FORCES, indeed).

What was notable about Quảng Đức’s suicide? There is a whole complicated Buddhist philosophy around death, suffering, fire, and self-immolation specifically. It’s so complicated, in fact, that I’m not really qualified to summarize the Buddhist position per se, to the extent it exists - but presumably his immediate audience was. And to the extent part of the audience was Western journalists and their audiences in turn - do you know how much meaning was conveyed by the sheer Orientalism of the endeavor? Did you know there is a cult in India of monks who stretch their ears to immense length so they may be ritually strangled with them? Of course not, I made it up, but it seems plausible, no? Monks doing weird self-abnegation, for inscrutable reasons, very profound, and best observed from a distance. Are you a Buddhist sage qualified to invoke this memeplex on your behalf?

And not to put too fine a point on it, are you going to scream like an idiot until your vocal chords ash, starting with a couple slogans and concluding with “Ahhh! ahh”? Here, let me quote about Quảng Đức: “As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.” Do you possess the physical control of a senior Buddhist monk to maintain composure in these circumstances, so as to put on a good show? Not so much.

What does your cultural tradition - ie, the people who will be interpreting whatever message you wished to send - say about suicide? Most of the “approved” Western suicides aren’t even properly understood as suicides. Throwing oneself on a grenade or similar acts of bravery would be even better if you could survive the experience, but, tradeoffs. Ditto for standing in front of a tank or a bulldozer - the point is to make them do it, as opposed to letting them make you get out of the way. You impose a cost upon them and their pretense of voluntariness, or even better - maybe they’re bluffing and aren’t willing to back up their threats (cf the Tank Man), which at least in the moment are now impotent. Walking up to an embassy and doing an auto-auto-de-fe forces them to do… nothing.

The “understandable”, if not “approved”, Western suicides seem to be about avoidance of suffering - “would rather kill self than live in agony or shame, they have left me no way out, I refuse to participate in their spectacle of punishing me” etc. Often this dovetails with the idea of being “driven to suicide”, either as a semi-intentional outcome of policy, or as an attempt to draw attention to the fact of what is being done to them - specifically the idea that what is being done to them is so terrible that they would rather die. Here is where we start to approach the bright idea of suicide-as-protest.

The idea that “what is being done to me is so terrible I would rather die, and I would like everyone to know this”, is fundamentally different than “what is being done to this other guy is so terrible I would rather die”. You’ll notice the second statement is incoherent, because the only thing that has changed is that you no longer, I suppose, vicariously experience their suffering? But they are in fact still suffering! Cool “raising awareness”, but a dozen other mechanisms would have accomplished as much or more.

The linkage between public suicide and mental illness is the most salient, both because it is true in the specific case that inspired this post (cf his Reddit account, which although purged as a primary source, lives on in cringe screenshots) as well as in the vast majority of other such cases. The narcissistic cry for attention via the impulse to raw self-destruction in a conspicuous way, particularly self-destructive because of the lack of impact - we rightly regard this as a shameful display in other contexts, even when the self-destruction actually is tremendous or the cause is theoretically just. Consider contemporary cases of politically favored self-mutilation, or desecration of public art, and consider whether this is the vibe you wish to associate with your cause.