"Intellectuals" are always eager to offer advice, and to deny responsibility for the harm it causes.
British physician Theodore Dalrymple reports that attempted suicide is "the most common cause of emergency admission to the hospital in England among women and the second most common among men. There are more than 120,000 cases a year," he continues, "and England boasts one of the highest rates of such behavior in the world. Its completed suicide rate, on the other hand, is rather low by international standards," which, he concludes, simply means that "many of those who attempt suicide don't intend to die."
Writing in the Winter issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, Dalrymple recalls that attempted suicide experienced "an explosive growth at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties. Until then," he points out, "to attempt suicide had remained a crime in England, and it had also remained a comparatively rare event. But something more than the liberalization of the laws was involved in the opening of the floodgates of self-poisoning, for the floodgates were opened throughout the rest of the Western world also."
Dalrymple notes that the writings of suicidologists "overflow with dense statistical tables correlating one factor (the unemployment rate, social class, even the phases of the moon) with the act of suicide or attempted suicide." He argues that "the overall impact of this work is to suggest that, if only enough variables were examined, if only enough data were collected and analyzed with sufficient sophistication, the 'cause' of suicide and attempted suicide would be found. The importance of what goes on in the minds of the individual human beings is thus implicitly denied, in favor of vast impersonal forces."
Dalrymple insists that "patterns and statistical regularities by themselves tell us little unless we are prepared to search for their meaning, and that meaning is always to be found in the minds of men and women." In almost all cases, he contends, the distress that provokes an attempted suicide "is self-inflicted, or at least the consequence of not knowing how to live. The emotions that surround most overdoses," he asserts, "are simultaneously intense and shallow."
Theodore Dalrymple reflects on the infrequency of suicide in African countries and other undeveloped nations, where the poor "engage in a cruelly demanding battle to obtain water, food, firewood, and shelter for the day, even in the cities. This battle," he concludes, "automatically gives meaning to their existence." In London and other large Western cities, however, "subsistence is more or less assured, irrespective of conduct. On the other hand, there are large numbers of people who are devoid of either ambition or interests. They thus have nothing to fear and nothing to hope." Dalrymple concedes that such wretches have brought their misery on themselves, but he insists that they are victims too, victims of an idea &emdash; "the idea, peddled by generations of 'intellectuals,' that material security and human relationships unconstrained by any kind of necessity would set mankind free."
