Suicide is low class.

Suicide is a peasant’s death, lowly and base. As Minois observes, noblemen exhausted and enraged with life had duels and quests and wars to achieve a glorious death. Peasants only had “a rope or a river to end their woes.”

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Minois, History, 16.

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The I on your Suicide BINGO card, curiously, is not about the I as in the me but the we as in the us meaning the them with what suicide is now meaning society against the individual, the them against the I, society against the individual since the me in suicide turned on they the them as in society.

Recall the philosopher’s philosopher who branded suicide as leaving your post. The image speaks of standing the wall only to desert when the polis comes under siege. The image is too narrow, however, and somewhat misleading with the philosopher’s philosopher’s principal concern being what lies within the walls as authorities and values and roles, individual and polis, and not so much on how soldiers should fortify for an invasion from without. This philosopher of the philosopher is concerned with enemies within that are all around.

What the philosopher’s philosopher means is that in all societies each individual plays roles amid aims and values and authorities mapped across the web of societies within what society is as family, tribe, party, religion, class, corporation, institution, nation and onward. Some call this the bargain that is human society. Stand your posts, give society its due, and get fed accordingly.

What then is suicide if not simply saying, No, to human hunger, and so saying, No, to being possessed and posted from within and all around by cravings and feedings and the roles and bargains that they entail? Recall the hairy ape who revealed consciousness and will and intentionality and freedom with the word, No. The, No, can be angry and forceful and theatrical. The No can also be in the manner of our man Bartleby. I prefer not to, says scrivener, politely and firmly.

And does the No in whatever form and manner not explain the outrage at its meaning? Does the study of etiology, Why did you leave us?, not conceal the real question, How could you leave us? How dare you desert us? Not wonder the branding. The criminalness. No wonder the punishment. The pound of flesh. Blood and bones too. The last laugh. The final word.

But wait! Just then suicide throws down a Reverse UNO™ Card as if to sayj’accuse!, and now suicide is an indictment of the moral state of society, to borrow a phrase. Did the individual let down society or did society fail in truly nourishing the individual? Was suicide desertion or dereliction in the manner of a goldfish who dies in the bowl through now fault of his own? And now society frets and wrings its hands about itself. What if suicide within society is all around, not as weeds among the wheat but as sprouts of the same seed cultivated from the very same soil? One suicide within any society is virtually nothing at all. The sun also rises, does it not? But what if suicide is reaping in harvest what we have sown? Now suicide passes from individual to blight. And BAM! Society plays Reverse UNO to declare that if suicide is a social disease, then you, my friend, are the symptom of what must be cured. And what do we do with diseases that spread? We spray them down. We nip them in the bud. We pull them up by the roots. Your kind shall be eradicated, says society to the suicide. You shall no longer exist. It’s called Prevention. And this is how we fill in a space for the I.