But I’m so weak now. What kind of job could I do? I should go back to bed and stay there until I starve to death.
I want to die. Or do I?
No, of course I don’t. But they do.
More and more people are waking up to what they are and what they’ve done. They can’t forgive themselves, and try as they might they no longer believe in a god who could forgive them, so they’ve decided to die.
Durkheim said our ancestors saw suicide as an act of defiance directed against some master, king or god whom they regarded as unjust and therefore refused to serve. There's no one, just or unjust, whom I regard as my master. I'm answerable only to my own conscience. But in living for others, I took responsibility for them. And I failed them.
Freud said suicide is the way we punish ourselves for having done something we consider unforgiveable. But only in our dreams do we commit such crimes, because only in our dreams do such crimes exist.
Jocasta, a Freudian avant Freud, tells her son that every man dreams of killing his father and sharing his mother’s bed. Sometimes those of us with troubled consciences tell ourselves the same thing. We pretend not to know what we know, and tell ourselves it’s only a dream, so that we can go on living. But just as Œdipus knew his crimes were not committed in a dream, so are we all waking to an awareness of the crimes we all commit.
Life feeds on life. Others die so that we may live. The church said we’re all sinners, but no matter how terrible the crimes we commit, god will forgive us if we repent. But try as we might, we can no longer believe in gods. We know we are responsible only to ourselves and our own consciences for what we do. And now that we're finally admitting that we know what we do is wrong, but still we cannot or will not do what we know is right, we must punish ourselves.
Some of us try to do better, be better. Perhaps most of us try at some time, but never all of us at the same time. And now most of us have given up.
I wanted to live and help others, but the society of which I’m a part wants to die, so my life has been meaningless. I stay alive only because my death would be equally meaningless. Arranging my death—the kind of death I want: a painless death, because I’ve done nothing to deserve punishment—would take more effort than I can muster now that I’ve become so weak. But staying alive would also take effort, and I’m not sure I have the strength for that, either. I may die simply because I no longer have the strength to live. Perhaps I never did.
I’ve always lived for others, and now there's no one I want to live for. They all disgust me.
Things that are crimes in our dreams are common in our waking lives. This world we've made, in which crime is the norm, disgusts me. I'm disgusted to be part of it, disgusted by anyone who wants to part of it and deforms his or her self in order to fit into it, and disgusted with myself for fitting into it all too well. I’m disgusted by the person I’ve become.
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