Man's Fate and God's Choice, Bhimeswara Challa [best free ereader .TXT] 📗

phenomena.”275 While killing is routine in the animal kingdom, opinions differ if animals actually commit suicide. It is reported that altruism leading to death is fairly common and that some animals like dolphins and octopuses do take their own lives. But most experts say that animal suicides are instinctive, not reasoned; though they may go through the processes and do things that might cause death, they cannot conceive of their own death.

The twin killings — suicide and homicide — although distinct, are almost interchangeable. And although they have been a part of human history from the earliest man, they have never been so virulent and widespread as they are today. Traditionally, it has long been thought that these two are antagonistic expressions of human violence, either of which removes the motivating cause and makes the other unnecessary and even impossible. But that is changing, and a particularly alarming ‘deathly’ development is that of homicide followed by suicide of the perpetrator, which is occurring mainly in partnerships and families. It has now spread to ethnic and religious revenge and zealotry in the form of what are described as ‘suicide bombers’. These people are blurring the boundary between suicide as ‘auto- homicide’, or murder of self, and homicide as murder of another. Both are acts of anger, frustration, alienation, and affirmation of one’s identity, dignity, faith. Both are a defiance of the dictum of the sanctity of life, results of the breakdown of natural defenses that let us live and let others live. The equation or equivalence between the two forms of murder has long been debated by sociologists and psychologists, and if any, it has become more tangled and complex. No one is clear what portends, but clearly one’s own life or another’s life no longer means the same as before. Such an elemental change in the human mindset could not have occurred all on its own; raising the unnerving question if the growing human propensity for self-destruction serves a still mysterious cosmic purpose. Death and destruction play a central role in natural selection and in the equilibrium of Nature. But that is usually not by one’s own hand or that of a fellow-species. If a person decides to kill and die at the same time then there is very little to preempt it. That is a new phenomenon in Nature and the killer becomes the

274 Cited in: Hara Estroff Marano. Not Always a Cry for Help: Suicide May be an Attempt to Exercise Power and Control. Psychology Today. 6 May 2003. Accessed at: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200305/not-always-cry-help

275 Cited in: Nicole Jackman. The Brains of Violent Males: the Homicidal & Suicidal Brain. Biology Paper 202. 2003. Serendip. Accessed at: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro03/web2/njackman.html

most powerful person on earth, and he also becomes the arbiter of what we call ‘collateral damage’, which means he decides who else gets murdered. The murderer or the martyr (that is, in his mind) becomes the master, whose choice of time and place could mean life or death for others. Unless that mindset changes through consciousness change, this form of violence

— homicidal suicide — could well become the apocalyptic pandemic of the future.

In whatever form, death has always been at the epicenter of human creativity and consciousness. Arthur Koestler, who was also the founder of the ‘voluntary euthanasia society’ Exit, wrote before his own suicide: “If the word death were absent from our vocabulary, our great works of literature would have remained unwritten, pyramids and cathedrals would not exist, nor works of religious art, and all art is of religious or magic origin”. While death has been a creative inspiration, overcoming death has also been an enduring human passion. And death by violence has been as integral as death by disease and decay. The epidemics of suicide and murder could well be the bitter harvest of our flouting the laws of Nature and of our relentless quest for earthly eternity. Franz Kafka wrote that without the continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself, man cannot live. The scriptures envision spiritual immortality, and science promises physical immortality. Science says now or never, each life is the only chance we have to savor life; the scriptures, on the other hand, assert that now and never are the same. To transcend from ‘death to immortality’ is part of a prayer at the beginning of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. And in the Katha Upanishad, it is said that those in whose hearts desire is dead and the knots of delusion are untied, become immortal. Nature has provided a sort of biological escape from death through intergenerational or genetic continuity, but what man seeks is individual immortality. We are not content any more with spiritual or symbolic immortality; we want actualized and instant immortality, which makes redundant the ‘after-life immortality’. Since the body is made of organic matter which must decay and dissolve, and since life is designed, as Bernard Shaw puts it, ‘like a flame that is always burning itself out’, human attempt at bodily eternity, through such technologies as cryonics and stem cells, puts man on a collision course with Nature. It is no longer science fiction or fantasies of the rich to perpetuate themselves. People say that it is not only possible but inevitable, that death — the ‘ultimate disability or disease’ — will be surmounted technologically. Some researchers are talking about the possibility that a person who is identical to you in every way might be brought to life, a sort of technological reincarnation. The enticing, if scary scenario being sketched is eternal youth, indefinite life span and god-like power to create living beings from a single cell. The anomaly is that we might have a situation in which millions of people feel that whatever awaits after death is better than being alive in this world today, and the disturbing prospect of thousands of people paying large sums of money to come ‘back from the dead’.

Future ‘man’, if science has its way, might well be like the images of the movie The Matrix (1999), in which the human has already become the raw material for the self-perpetuation of nano-tech machinery.

As a species, we think we are the best there is on the earth, but as individuals most people think they are the underdogs, fighting unequal battles on unfair terms. Freud maintained that suicides and homicides are not opposites. Both are killings, the only difference being that homicide is directed against the external world, while suicide is aggression turned inwards. Karl Menninger posits that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder. Similarly, murder is often committed to avert suicide. No species can carry so much ‘deadly weight’ and toxic load for too long. The human species is ripe for an epochal transition, a revolutionary change, an evolutionary pole-vault; either it will evolve into a better, more moral being, or it will fade away into the black hole of time, one more species that once lived on the earth and had its day under the Sun. Perhaps we are too proximate to notice, but something truly profound, truly awesome, truly horrific, truly

benumbing is happening to the human character and personality. Man’s threshold of tolerance is fast narrowing; his stoicism in the face of pain and hardship, inconvenience and irritation, annoyance and humiliation, reprimands and insults is lowering day by day dramatically, making man increasingly suicidal and homicidal. It would almost seem as if the human mind is constantly on the lookout, not for reasons to live, but for excuses to cease.

And it has increasingly shed its inhibitions about taking another’s life. The World Health Organization estimates that every year, more than a million people kill themselves, an increase of 60 percent worldwide in the past 45 years, which means that the cases of suicide far outnumber those of homicides that increased by 50 percent between 1985 and 1994. The truly troubling aspect is not the numbers or the percentage of increases, but that most of the victims quit when they were at their productive best, for reasons mostly trivial. The distinction between suicide and homicide, from a species point of view is immaterial: homicide is a form of suicide and vice versa. Nothing is too trivial or casual, flippant or funny for suicide; murder is holy revenge and suicide-murder is ‘preparing to meet God.’ Many people today increasingly feel cornered, and the only escape route seems to be to kill. In settling scores, men inflict suffering not only on the ‘enemy’, but on themselves too.

Mohammad Atta, who flew the airplane into the WTC Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, is supposed to have said: “if we do not fight we will suffer. If we do fight we will suffer, but so will they.” The old rule of life that ‘you don’t take what you cannot give’ is no longer a barrier to killing. Alarmingly, the individual, society and State increasingly consider killing as a hassle-free and less expensive option to sort out interpersonal and intra-societal discord, disputes and disaffection.

Alarmingly, ever-increasing numbers of people, finding no help among the living, want to join the dead. At their wit’s end while facing life’s intractable problems, they are telling themselves — and the world — ‘enough is enough’, there is a limit to every endurance; they just want to end it all, whatever it leads to. Success — which means the desire to get everything we want, when we want and how we want — has become the ‘mantra’ of self-worth. In human culture, for someone to succeed, another must lose or more importantly, should seem to lose, and when that person happens to be you, you feel you are at a dead end staring into the abyss of death. An eighteen-year-old poor boy in India, not ‘faring well’ in his studies, hanged himself in the classroom and left a note that said, “I am not a

success. God has not helped me.”276 Another relatively new breed of suicides is precipitated by the feeling of insufficiency, a feeling that ‘this world is not for me’; for living is an exercise in futility. Despite strict religious strictures, suicide is rapidly spreading and has become the preferred exit route. Way back in August 1975, Time magazine carried a cover story that identified suicide as the third major claimant of the lives of young adults in North America, after car wrecks and homicides. In the quarter of a century since, it has become far worse having become as infectious as the common cold. Suicide is said to be steeply rising in Japan, and a recent report noted the dramatic increase in suicide in ‘God’s own country’, the state of Kerala in India, much admired by economists for its high literacy rate and social safety net, and by sociologists because of its communal harmony.

The human mind, whether it is centered in the brain or elsewhere, has enabled and empowered man to become the virtual viceroy of the earth; the viceroy has become the monarch; the representative has dethroned the royalty. But the mind’s power is still finite; and it has created a conundrum. Man has become a paradoxical being to whom everything is

276 The Deccan Chronicle. Hyderabad, India, 3 November 2004. p.3.

relative, selective and culture-sensitive, and situation-specific and steeped in self- gratification. Values are now tentative, not absolute and everything is possible and permissible under one or an other circumstance. Thus, we could have an honest thief and a tender murderer, a superstitious atheist, a kind tyrant, and a patriotic traitor. Then there are necessary evils, and just wars; even divine sanction is cited for the slaughter of millions. The human mind is the home of those negative passions which, when they manifest externally, become the primary sources of evil in the world. That evil often takes on the guise of separateness and self-righteousness, both of which come, as Vedanta tells us, from body- identification. Mortal life