Suicide and Community

 

Unfortunately, the suicide rate has notably increased. Individuals' mental breakdown has been perpetuated by the fear of the isolation from and the meaninglessness of living in the current society.  This downfall has inspired to re-think about some sociological studies which may derive the answer for why a suicidal ideation tends to strike us so often.

This reason seems to be caused by not only the temporary effect of the pandemic but also the permanent effect of the world social environment transition. The current post-industrial modern society of the technologically advanced globalised world has already created the root cause of the rising suicide rate; the ongoing socio-economic depression caused by the pandemic has just perpetuated the social illness demonstrated by the rising suicide rate. 

 

Emile Durkheim explained about the four types of suicide caused by the two elements of society, the integration level and the regulation level.  When either of two becomes either excess or lacking, individuals living in their society are more likely to be prone to their social illness inducing their suicide attempt.  The excess social integration among individuals may encourage to the altruistic suicide while lacking their integration may lead an individual to the (irrational) egoistic suicide.  The excess societal regulation based on social norms may result in the fatalistic suicide whereas the excessively deregulated society with little shared norms and values among individuals may induce the anomic suicide. 

The typical examples of the altruistic suicide is a suicide attack committed by the former imperial Japanese soldiers in the World War II and the extremist Islamic suicide bombers.  This suicide occurs when individuals are excessively loyal to their belief and/or their figurehead leader and attached to the whole member individuals living in their community.  In such a situation, their love of community tends to be too strong to sustain their life as an individual. 

The industrial revolution has caused a strong transition of individuals' society.  Since the industrial revolution, individuals have started moving to a place employing them away from their homeland. Their mobility of changing their living place has become far more frequent than the pre-industrial counterpart.  It has become rare for individuals living in a community with little or no new comers so that their communities and their neighbours living there are no longer permanent. Their feeling of belonging to one community with familiar neighbours has been depreciated since then. 

In such an industrialised society, individuals are often less caring about their neighbours because they are often complete strangers for their own life and their too busy for their own life to care about the others.  By losing their integration among individuals, they often suffer from loneliness and meaninglessness as their neighbours no longer care about each individuals. When their feeling of loneliness and meaninglessness exceeds their patience, they are prone to commit the suicide due to their loss of interests in living any longer which Durkheim called the egoistic suicide.

Apart from the aforementioned suicide caused by either of the two different extreme societal integration issues, the most notable factor to analyse the current rising suicide rate is the regulation issues.  The regulation mentioned here is neither economic nor political, it is purely a regulations on social factors such as norms and values individuals follow.  

In the past, both the pre-industrial communitarian society and the early modern industrialised society, various fatalities were burdened on individuals.  They were fated to sacrifice their energy and time to work to gain their means of living.  They were often prone to various fatal diseases in either a technologically little advanced pastoral community or a high polluted industrial zone. 

Furthermore, individuals were more highly bounded by rigid norms and values in their belonging institutes in the past than nowadays.  Their traditional communities and their working environments used to exist in a longer term than nowadays.  So, in order to conduct them to fulfil the interests of their belonging group, the unified codes of conduct were essential to produce their desiring outcomes together.

By contrast, because the businesses and the public managements are shifting toward more capital intensive and of their institutes' structure are frequently modified in order to adjust them to their rapidly changing socio-economic fashions and trends. Therefore, individuals are more prone to losing a job and in a frequent need of relocating themselves to another working environment even in a global scale. 

In such an environment, the permanent norms and values seldom remain existing to conduct individuals to live.  There is no longer a form of social conduct telling individuals what to do.  In another word, these individuals now have to self-regulate themselves without being relying on either the others or their belonging institutes such as companies, governments, and religious organizations.  Durkheim predicted that more individuals would suffer from normlessness and lacking values encouraging them to live because of this rapid transition of the societies in the whole world in the future from his time.  

Karl Marx predicted that majority individuals, the proletariat, would unify them together to establish a socially minded economic and political system. However, unlike Marx predicted, individuals nowadays are far less likely to unite together to cooperate to reform their society.  Instead, the majority individuals nowadays hardly cling to any unified value to believe in to achieve their unified goal such as Marxist social revolution. 

Durkheim called social illness individuals suffer due to lacking regulations by a code of conduct and unified values "Anomie".  Anomie caused by the aforementioned normlessness and valueless is represented on one extreme side of the regulation axis.   When individuals lose their guidances of life such as social norms and their meanings of life such as social values, the syndrome of Anomie often create various social and psychological problems and even induces them to commit suicide.

Ferdinand Tönnies was also one of the remarkable sociologists pointing out the change in social characteristics.  He claimed that human individuals' society was gradually shifting from Gemeinschaft (The traditional community based society) to Gesellschaft (The modern individualistic society). He referred to these two types of society for explaining how the form of the social contract among individuals vary depending on their social structure. 

The former society puts priority on preserving the existence and the interests of a community, the group of individuals sustaining their common living environment, over each individual's existence and interests.  Over there, individuals form their social contracts by means of their emotional whim and the spontaneously established order such as a customary law.  These individuals help each other quite often in order to keep their kinship with each other like forming a big family and believe in and strictly unified norms and values.  

These members of the communities are afraid of changes in their living environment so they are often deeply suspicious about new ideas or new comers threatening the permanence of the characteristics of their familiar living environment.  Individuals are not so free to act and think with their own will although the strong sense of belonging prevents them from the negative phycological illness caused by loneliness and meaninglessness.

The latter society put priority on individual responsibility for their self-preservation as a condition for providing them with their unique individuality and each individual's merit stimulating the development of the whole society.  Over there, social contracts among individuals are formal and often clearly defined in order to keep their mutual agreement rational and transparent.  This society provides with the equal treatments of individuals under the law so that their agreements must be formal and clearly defined.  

The existence of communities is considered to be transient to allow flexible mobilities of individuals and resources to encourage innovations with a robust development pace.  Individuals are seldom emotionally attached to the others so they are less likely to voluntarily help their neighbours because their neighbours are often complete strangers for them.  It provides individuals with freedom in a wide range of their life without being restrained by solid norms and values.  Nevertheless, it also means that they have to find their own meaning of existence even by struggling with it.  

 

In the current globalised world, the characteristics of many regions of the world are becoming more identical to each other under a unified objective of increasing the material productivity level with flexible foreign trades across their borders.  Because of the massive material benefits brought by adapting to the global capitalism, more and more countries adapt themselves to the formal and individualistic social contracts.  This trend has induced them to transform their traditional communitarian society, so-called Gemeinschaft , to the world-standard business-like modern society, so-called Gesellschaft .

The recent world wide information technological development has also accelerated the trend shifting their society from the traditional communitarian society to the post-industrial modern society.  The post-industrial modern society has provided people living in any part of the world with their access to the abundance of technologies and creating wealth which includes their access to medical treatments curing them from fatal diseases and the most advanced intellectual knowledge. Therefore, this trend certainly has beneficial advantages.

However, the non-negligible problem is a rise of phycological illnesses including suicide which are seemingly caused by lack of integration with the others as well as loneliness and meaninglessness in their life.  Only the material productivity growth and the convenience derived from it are seemingly emphasised far more than each individual's psychological and social problem.  

Some individuals feel being left alone when these individuals cannot meet with what the current market demands even after making their best efforts.  Because the pace of societal changes is so fast that the socioeconomic gap between different individuals can be widened furthermore.  Then, these left away from the trend, because of being detected as the useless, may face losing opportunity to work for enough income sustaining their cultural living standard.  At this stage, even in order to provide all individuals with the equality of opportunity, a certain level of the positive intervention in their outcome to diversify the resources will be a necessary condition.

In addition to their economic needs, their social needs are also crucially important.  Some politicians just claims to provide these left alone individuals marginalised as the useless with the state benefits such as providing all individual citizens with the universal basic income.  Nonetheless, this does not solve the problem of providing them with the meaning of life as well as saving them from loneliness.  When the progress of the current societal change moves forward without taking this psychological social aspect into consideration, there is a high risk of the emerging negative reactions to the current socioeconomic structure.  

 

All in all, regardless of a plain freedom of actions and thoughts and the prevention of bad living conditions causing a fatal death, the newly arising suicide rate and the other social disorder are derived from a newly arising social problem of the post-industrial modern society.  Even with an abundance of material resources, it is neither easy nor simple to solve this psychological and social illnesses.  Unless this is solved, various forms of negative reactional insurgences threatening the peace and the stability of the world may arise.  Furthermore, it is simply regrettable to see many people committing suicide despite the progress of the world as a while.  None should be left alone from gaining the benefit of the world development.