Comment by jdietrich

4 days ago

Fisher died by suicide in 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fisher

Be careful here.

There's a pattern to suicide: people don't commit suicide merely because they're miserable, or because they think their situation is hopeless. It is also necessary to believe that you have lots of options, but all of them are unacceptably bad.

Indian sustenance farmers didn't have high rates of suicide, until they got access to microcredit.

Schizophrenics, who often have distorted feelings of agency (e.g. seeing something on the TV, they may feel with deep certainty that they somehow caused that thing to happen), have sky-high suicide rates.

Men, for whatever reasons, have higher feelings of agency than women. And men of course have much, much higher rates of suicide than women - even though in terms of pain, misery etc. it's not clear women have it that much better.

Black Americans and Native Americans in the US both have a history of being subject to racism and oppression. But the former, stereotyped by racism as being basically good for nothing, have low suicide rates. Native Americans, whose racist oppression was historically accompanied by painting them as great noble spirits etc. have sky-high suicide rates. Economic conditions don't explain the disparity well, difference in sense of agency does.

So, blaming things outside yourself, whether correctly or not, may be a defensive psychological reaction to misery. Fisher thought something could be done; if he had had a weak sense of agency, he wouldn't have done all that writing for one thing.

  • The bog reason for male suicides being higher is having higher gun ownership. It makes effective suicide easier.

    • I remember "hearing" recently that it's because our society conditions (most certain types) men to feel entitled to access and success; tie their self-worth and value as a human to their level of success; and to deem it a personal failure when they don't.

      These things together end up making for a personal despair that more often results in suicide.

      That's why the white make suicide rate I'm the US is so proportionately high.

But not before encouraging everyone to blame things on "capitalism" which even Marx would have said would be solved by more capitalism.

(Namely cost of living in Anglo countries, which is largely caused by their practically feudalist land usage policies.)

  • I mean, late stage capitalism hasn't been working out so great; so he kind of has a point.

    • There is no such thing as late stage capitalism. Or I should say, it's a misnomer. When people refer to late stage capitalism, they are usually complaining about market failures due to globalism, governmental issues, difficulties adapting to automation, or extreme envy of those who have gotten rich. Free markets generally work well for everyone, except for rare circumstances like monopolies or unfair competition.

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