SUICIDE, HUMAN NATURE, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Any intervention requires an accurate diagnosis of the problem, and there are many problems and signs of social/psychological pathology:

·       According to the CDC, suicide claimed the lives of 45,000 Americans in 2016. In the last twenty years, suicide rates have increased by 30 percent in half of U.S. states.

What can possibly account for this tsunami? In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom lamented that the family is now unable to inculcate their children with objective moral ideals which convey a vision and pursue for their lives:

·       The moral education that is today supposed to be the great responsibility of the family cannot exist if it cannot present to the imagination of the young a vision of a moral cosmos and of the rewards and punishments for good and evil, sublime speeches that accompany and interpret deeds, protagonists and antagonists in the drama of moral choice, a sense of the stakes involved in such choice, and the despair that results when the world is “disenchanted.”

In this absence of the ideals of good and evil, the pursuit of pleasure, immediate gratification, has filled the vacuum with a be-here-now mentality. And why not? Isn’t the present all we have? This thinking has taken the West captive. Baba Ram Dass ( formerly Richard Alpert) has popularized it:

·       “The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it's in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I'm caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.”

“Being” is about going-with-the-flow of one’s own feelings to the exclusion of goals, responsibilities, or any moral obligations. Simply “being” constitutes a narrowing of our lives.  The exclusive preoccupation on just “being” is a form of self-obsession and represents a cosmic shift away from our former role models who had exemplified courage and self-sacrifice to the “being” of a soaring eagle or a patient egret tip-toeing through the marshes in search of their next meal.

While it might be true that the eagle and egret have no thoughts of suicide, they aren’t humans, and they lack human needs. Well, what does it mean to be human? Have we lost an important understanding of humanity which has contributed to the suicide crisis?

Behavioral scientist, Clay Routledge, doesn’t believe that the answer is to be found in psychotherapy. Instead, he has observed that, at this time of the greatest availability of therapy, suicide continues on its deadly march. He then identifies a key factor in understanding the phenomenon of suicide:

·       As a behavioral scientist who studies basic psychological needs, including the need for meaning, I am convinced that our nation’s suicide crisis is in part a crisis of meaninglessness.

Routledge insists that empirical studies have borne this out:

·       A felt lack of meaning in one’s life has been linked to alcohol and drug abuse, depression, anxiety and — yes — suicide. And when people experience loss, stress or trauma, it is those who believe that their lives have a purpose who are best able to cope with and recover from distress.

These kinds of findings shouldn’t surprise us. If our total preoccupation is “being” and experience, we have nothing to fall back upon when our experiences fail to pay their anticipated dividends. It is at these junctures that we require answers to the persistent human probings: “Who am I am why am I here? What am I to do with my life when I can get no satisfaction?”

How are we to answer these questions? Where does meaning come from? Some insist that we can simply create our own meaning out of a meaningless world, but can we? Isn’t this like playing make-believe, and will make-believe give us what we need? We become like the lonely man who talks to himself as imagines that he has a friend who compassionately listens.

Of course, this is pathological. However, is it substantially different from imagining that we have a meaningful meaning and a purpose in a meaningless world?

Atheists have often admitted that we just have to get used to the idea that the universe does not care a bit about us, but this is the very thing that our nature will not allow. Instead, we crave to be part of a universe or even a community of love where we can play a very special role.

Only when we are convinced that our meaning is reality-based will we be standing on solid ground. M. Scot Peck, the late psychiatrist and author of the “Road Less Traveled,” had consistently observed that those patients who believed that God was taking care of them would improve. These observations finally led him to find his own meaning and purpose as a follower of Jesus.

If this universe is the creation of an loving Being has guaranteed to eternally take care of us.