Suicide in America

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According to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the overall suicide rate has increased by 25% in the US and by more than half in some states. It means that around 16 out of every 100,000 Americans will take their own life. Nearly 45,000 Americans of all ages, genders, races and and ethnic groups took their own life in 2016 alone. There were 25 states that had increases of more than 30%. Nearly all of those states are in the western and Midwestern regions of the US.

Relationship issues, financial troubles and rural origin (isolation, lack of healthcare) tend to be top factors contributing to suicide across the country. Mental health systems are struggling, there is a stigma associated with mental health, and training for mental health professionals is poor.

Then there are the guns. A vast majority of deaths from firearms are suicides. In fact, two-thirds of gun-related deaths in America are suicides. While there is a relationship between serious mental illness and suicidal behaviour, the suicide rate cannot solely be put down it. Economic conditions or livelihood opportunities in decline are also factors, along with substance abuse, poor physical health, job and legal problems.

Encouraging people to go to therapy and using mental health professionals to help “change dysfunctional thinking” seems a sensible goal, and – heaven knows how you do it – helping people to feel connected and belonging to a caring community is another important objective. (based on a BBC item, 9 June 2018)

Strange. Back in the 1960s America was known for its community spirit, which came across to me forcibly, traveling around the country on two extended occasions, hitch-hiking and meeting people of all ages and conditions. The feeling of togetherness was very strong and a startling change from the reserved nature of middle class life in England. What on Earth happened to turn an all-jolly-together country into a mass of isolated individuals living in a more crude and more harsh environment (I exaggerate a bit)? The decline of religion, maybe? The loss of jobs, where you work with others? Increased crime? In the old days homelessness was rare. Now it is everywhere in the cities. American military power encompasses most of the world, while society falls apart at home.

The urge to bring the whole system crashing down (e.g elect a President that will do just that) is a symptom of rural desperation and the suicide phenomenon? But what to do about it?

Suggestions?

The more excessive salaries are publicized, the higher they go

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Many of us dread the monthly credit card statement and plan, maybe, for a leaner month. But for CEOs such as Persimmon’s Jeff Fairburn, who was recently awarded a bonus of almost £110m, “it will still feel like Christmas”. The same goes for lavishly rewarded university vice-chancellors and the handful of GPs identified as earning more than £400,000 a year. You might have thought greater transparency over high pay awards would foster moderation, but quite the contrary: for the big beasts of the corporate “jungle”, knowing what other people get simply fuels demand for ever-higher pay. It’s about status, not about need.

Yet excessive pay awards are dangerously corrosive: they destroy staff morale and fray the ties that bind societies together. As inflation eats into wages, the issue will become a political “flashpoint”. If businesses won’t take action, the Government should legislate to make shareholder votes on pay binding. “The rest of us should start buying shares and voting.” (Camilla Cavendish, The Sunday Times)

I remember, at business school, being told that “talent was multi-national”, and that to compete European businesses had to at least match American remuneration. Thus the rot spreads. British businessmen gleefully point to the salaries of similar companies in America and, presumably, threaten to move elsewhere if they don’t get the same or similar pay, without reference to cost of living or the widening gap with the workers. This bogus stuff was being touted by business schools in the 1980s! Reform them or close them down, the business schools I mean. They can be useful introduction to finance for a small minority, but otherwise they are of little use to society. In my opinion.

Evidence and religion

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“If God answers prayers, we should see miraculous effects of prayer. With millions of prayers having been said every day for thousands of years, we would expect some to have been answered by now in a verifiable way. They have not.

“If God has revealed truths to humanity, then these truths should be testable. Over the millennia many people have reported religious or mystical experiences in which they have communicated with one god or another. By now, we should have seen some confirming evidence for this, such as a verifiable fact that could not have been in the person’s head unless it was revealed to them. We have not.

“If God is the creator of the universe, then we should find evidence for that in astronomy and physics. We do not. The origin of our universe required no miracles. Furthermore, modern cosmology suggests an eternal “multiverse” in which many other universes come and go.
If humans are a special creation of God, then the universe should be congenial to human life. It is not.

“Theists claim that the parameters of the universe are fine-tuned for human life. They are not. The universe is not fine-tuned for us. We are fine-tuned to the universe. After evaluating all the evidence, we can conclude that the universe and life look exactly as they would be expected to look if there were no God.

“Finally, I would like to comment on the folly of faith. When faith rules over facts, magical thinking becomes deeply ingrained and warps all areas of life. It produces a frame of mind in which concepts are formulated with deep passion, but without the slightest attention paid to the evidence. Nowhere is this more evident than in the US, where Christians who want to convert the nation into a theocracy have tried to dominate the Republican party. Blind faith is no way to run a world”. (part of an article on religion by Victor J. Stenger)

To me this sounds eminently sensible, except for the condideration that mankind needs to believe in something, aside from money and survival. This being the case it behooves us to treat this matter with kindness, understanding and consideration. Religion fills a role for some people, even as their number drops. The problem comes when they get involved in party politics.

Aristotle and self-interest

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Aristotle believed that happiness was central purpose of human life and a goal in itself. That is, happiness depends on the cultivation of individual virtues, including physical as well as mental well-being. He argued that virtue is achieved by maintaining the Mean, which is the balance between two excesses.

Aristotle is a main advocate of egoism. He believed that for humans to be happy and to flourish, human beings ought to cultivate their self-interest. For Aristotle, every man is an end in himself and not a means to an end for others. Going against the belief of altruism (that morality consists in living for others or society), Aristotle believes that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself (going back to man being an end in himself, not a means). Man must work for his rational self.

I think Arostotle was proposing a more self-centered approach to life than Epicurus. The latter put much more emphasis upon toleration and friendship. To him society had to hang together, or its constituent parts would hang separately. The influence here was the roiling wars that touched the lives of so many Greeks of his era. Be moderate, he said, seek happiness, yes, but self-interest had to be tempered with coperation, compromise and an understanding of other people’s motivations and interests. We need a message like this to go out, particularly to the divided American people or, yes, we’ll all hang together.