Topic Warning: Suicide

Let us go back a semester, to the fall of 2025. Anyone who has visited—or worse, lived—in Martin Ruter Hall knows just how atrocious that dorm was when the class of 2029 moved in. Constant fire alarms in the middle of the night, condoms hanging from the main entrance doorknob, and do not even get me started on the nightmares you would encounter in those communal bathrooms Eww! However, none of this compares to the greatest monster lurking in its hallways. Over the floor, an incorporeal and very silent beast swam through the breeze on every floor. A colorless cloud made its presence known with a stench that hit you every time you entered the building. The most unsuspecting would have thought a skunk had gotten into the building. But in reality, everyone who smelled it agreed on the same thing: it was the smell of the devil’s lettuce, Mary Jane, marijuana burning morning and night without missing a single day. There is no mistake in these events, for this co-author remembers them very well, having lived in this place during that time.

In fact, one of my most vivid memories of this place is that time I (Alan) was writing my final paper for an English class at the last minute when the fire alarm went off for the umpteenth time that week. Once again, everyone had to go outside and wait for the Southwestern University Police Department (SUPD) to arrive to turn the alarm off—and for us to get scolded yet again for setting it off. Needless to say, I ended up turning in my paper late because I waited until the last minute, but that was not the reason that night stuck with me so much. Rather, for the first time that semester, they had caught someone with weed—and not the kind growing on the ground. As expected, the SUPD scolded us even more harshly that evening. Not because that student possessed the plant, but because of the casual disregard with which that student—and all of us—treated the damage we were causing to our own lives by not only consuming it but also covering up such acts.

As a curious aside, every time someone came to turn off the alarm, we were reminded that we were forbidden to open—or even lift slightly—the windows in our bedrooms, because doing so would immediately set off the alarm. Why this rule? you might ask. It was to catch smokers in the act if they tried to evade the hypersensitive fire detectors installed in every room.

But then again, you will ask yourself: so, if they already knew this problem existed, why did not they take immediate action against the perpetrators at the slightest sign of trouble? The answer: the residence assistants and the SUPD already knew who were responsible. It was really obvious who they were (just following the stench to the door where it smelled the strongest was enough). However, they did not take any action because the vast majority of the smokers were college athletes—valuable students who represented Southwestern’s name every season and could not be easily replaced. Furthermore, beneath this reason the most significant factor of all was hidden: getting expelled for simply smoking marijuana is too severe—because what is the point if one or two get kicked out? Everyone does it anyway.

Down to the Rabbit Hole, Where No Ray of Hope Gets

Cannabis, or marijuana, has been illegal in Texas since 1931, when the state banned possession of any amount and classified it as a felony. This also includes any psychoactive substance used for recreational purposes. However, it remains the most common and easily accessible psychoactive drug, as well as being widely socially accepted throughout the state. I mean, who has not known a friend who is abnormally relaxed every day and has bloodshot eyes for some dubious reason? It is as if no one cares that these people are actually using drugs, is it? Because that is how it is. But first, we need to understand the idiosyncrasies of all this to grasp why it happens in the state and on our campus.

As with all drugs, they feel good to use. But marijuana, in particular, has this perception of safety surrounding it, since it does not destroy your body as quickly or hook you as strongly as “real” drugs do. So, much like a morning cup of coffee, the social stigma is just as mild as drinking beer or smoking cigarettes—it is just another adult pastime, albeit one that is talked about a little less. But we must remember that just because a leech does not kill you with a single bite does not make it any safer than a lion, since both kill, albeit at different speeds.

The main reason marijuana is so popular is that it makes everyday life more “bearable.” In addition to being a stimulant, marijuana’s primary effect is that it acts as a depressant on the nervous system. This means it reduces brain activity and affects your central nervous system. As a result, it makes you feel drowsy, relaxed, and sluggish, at the cost of poor concentration and memory problems. But people interpret these effects as an excellent and inexpensive stress reliever for a reality that seems designed not only for its continued use but also for its permanence. 

Young people—our young people—feel powerless. As they approach adulthood with each passing year, they do not feel fully grown-up, because they have the sense that they lost control of their lives long before they could even live. Any hope of prosperity is thwarted by the inability to achieve real assets, stability, or autonomy in adulthood. Therefore, to cope with the situation, they turn to small luxuries, fleeting pleasures, and ephemeral improvements that “fill” this existential void for a second, but ultimately leave you with the same hunger as before. They say the emptiness we feel is because we must seek meaning in life. History, novels, movies, and songs all tell us that the meaning of life should center on the relentless pursuit of happiness, but this generation disagrees. 

Marijuana today in Texas and on our campus is not primarily popular just to look cool in front of others, but to cope with the fact that we feel we are sinking deeper and deeper into a hole we never dug but were put there. Like those born into the Lost Generation, we live in a war where no bullets are fired, only prices and the cost of living in this society where, just to endure the simple act of breathing once more, we do not seek happiness—only relief. 

We are hopeless and we know it.

Should we Revolt Against Humanity?

I (Will) confess here that I am not the most optimistic person at the moment. While I retain a certain dose of optimism regarding personal growth, when it comes to global political issues, I am quite lacking in it. The planet has been damaged irreparably at this point, with it being hotter right now than at any point in the last 125,000 years. Moreover, sea levels are inevitably going to rise 6 to 12 more inches in the next 2 decades, leaving 2 billion of the earth’s population on land which will either be underwater or too hot to be inhabitable. On top of all of that, there is the frightening fact that concentrated carbon emissions—which have skyrocketed in recent decades—reduce human cognition, preventing our ability to think and plan well (Continued CO2 emissions will impair cognition | Paul M. Rady Mechanical Engineering). As cultural theorist Anna Kornbluh bluntly puts it, “In the near future, we will be hot and imperilled and stupid. It is too late” (Immediacy or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism). Our generation has inherited a doomed earth.

 This startling fact—among others—has instilled a form of doomerism among academics that is more philosophically robust than their reddit doomerist counterparts. Adam Kirsch, a literary theorist, gives an overview of this pessimistic movement in academia in his 2022 book, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us. In the book, Kirsch draws our attention to two major strands of contemporary academic thought which take as their starting point the failure of humanity as a project: transhumanism and anthropocene antihumanism. Transhumanism is the belief that humanity must transform itself—using advanced biotechnology and/or AI—in order to proceed, while anthropocene antihumanism is the belief that, given the extreme degree to which human beings have ruined the planet and doomed themselves, they should stop fighting, but instead welcome, their extinction. 

I will begin with some brief comments on transhumanism. While this movement shares with anthropocene antihumanism the intuition that humanity should be abandoned, it differs from the latter in having an incredibly strong technological optimism. It envisions a future of “posthumans” with AI minds who are finally free of hatred, greed, and violence. As Kirsch says, “AI minds might be more appreciative than we are of the wonder of creation. They might know nothing of the violence and hatred that often makes humanity loathsome to humans themselves.” Furthermore, in a posthuman age, art will no longer be necessary. The world will be clear again, with human relationships reduced to calibrated mechanisms requiring no mediation from novels or film to understand. 

Frankly, I find this whole “utopia” rather dystopian. For one, it merely revives the fantasy of finally being able to create a perfect, fully realized race of beings free of lack, a fantasy which has always accompanied the worst atrocities of human history (think of Nazism and its philosophical debt to social darwinism). Kirsch often warns against “humanist egoism” in his book, the over-inflated sense among humanists that human beings bring more value to the universe than we actually do. But how is the belief that human beings can play god and create a race of posthumans not profoundly egoistic in its own way? Every time humanity has attempted to play god in history, it has failed. Why think transhumanism will pan out differently?

For another, I just fail to see how AI minds could actually be in a state of wonder at the world. What is wonder if not a finite, passionate mind grappling with that which transcends it? AI minds would be devoid of passion and would reduce all knowledge to simple, quantifiable data. It would have no self-consciousness, no awareness of its struggle to understand something greater than itself. It would not see itself as lacking or finite; it would not see itself as anything. It’s true that a world of AI minds would no longer need novels, but why celebrate such a world? To me, a world without stories is a dreadful one.

While I don’t want to paint all transhumanists with too broad a brush, the highly speculative utopian dreams they have more reflect their distance from real-world struggles than they do robust philosophical argumentation. After all, some of the biggest proponents of transhumanism—both materially and idealistically—are the incredibly affluent “tech bros” of our time: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeffrey Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on. These men are incredibly privileged and lucky individuals who don’t struggle against the world as those who are less well-off do. They are thus able to have a strangely detached perspective on the world and the lives of the people who inhabit it.

Even more detached, though, is the anthropocene antihumanist movement, and it is this movement which I want to spend more time discussing. The term “anthropocene” refers to an era—said to have started around the mid 20th century—where the actions of human beings have had the most profound impact on the environment, to the point where humans have completely subjugated nature. Spurned by movements like the Green Revolution and more recently by the rise of Big Tech, the anthropocene has been an era marked by the spread of industrial capitalism across the globe, to the detriment of the environment. Widespread industrial farming practices, for example, have sucked the vitality out of much of the earth’s soil for the sake of higher yields on crops and increased profits. 

For anthropocene antihumanists, the severe global environmental crisis exacerbated by the anthropocene is a clear sign of just how awful our continued presence on the planet is. This is where their antihumanism comes from: they oppose the humanist claim that human life adds value to the universe. To them, we add nothing of any value to the universe; all we do is bring more suffering and destruction into the world than would have existed previously. The movement often presents itself as “chastening human egotism” or embodying true selflessness. Patricia McCormack, a frontrunner for this movement argues in her book, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene, that we must bring about an “end to the human both conceptually as exceptionalized and actually as a species.” Her argument rests on the anti-humanist intuition that human beings are a “parasitic, detrimental species” that is only able to thrive by making other species suffer and wreaking havoc on the earth. Thus, to will our own extinction is the ultimate altruistic act we can make as a species. If you’re wondering what her call to action is, well… it is the “deceleration of human life through cessation of reproduction” and “advocating for suicide [and] euthanasia.”

Now, before I proceed further, I want to make it clear that I am not a champion of human egotism. I think human exceptionalism is true in the trivial sense that there are certain capabilities we have as humans that non-human animals lack. But overall, I tend to view human beings as incredibly finite, and at times quite impotent. This contributes to my slight pessimism about global politics; there is no guarantee that we humans will actually achieve a utopian society. So I’m certainly not in disagreement with antihumanists that human egotism and blithe optimism are problematic. But I find that anthropocene antihumanism has swung wildly and problematically to the other extreme: species hatred and political resignation.

In his famous work, The Rebel, philosopher and novelist Albert Camus condemned what he called “philosophical murder”, which is the killing of human beings in the name of some abstract, revolutionary ideology. Targeting Marxism in particular, he took issue with the way it distances itself from the concrete human condition in its zeal for revolution, embodying a more detached perspective which allows the murder of human beings because of its supposed logical necessity in bringing about a better world. When I think of anthropocene antihumanism, I see a similar phenomenon, but inverted. Rather than allow murder for the sake of political revolution, we should welcome collective suicide in acting out extreme political resignation. Either way, it comes off as incredibly cold, detached, and (unsurprisingly) inhuman.

It’s not exactly selfless either. What is altruistic about abandoning the struggle for a better world? What is selfless about leaving others to suffer the absurdity of human existence alone? What is compassionate about turning one’s back on the oppression of others? And moreover, what is courageous about this retreat to the world of pessimistic abstractions? Sure, it is definitely bold to advocate for collective suicide, but it’s also a sign of privilege to advocate such a stark conclusion with detached ease. I find those who actually face up to the ambiguities of human existence, and who collaborate to imagine and build a better world for all, to be much braver by comparison.

At this point—and as our more philosophically-minded readers may have already thought—I risk circling around a taboo topic: suicide. For Albert Camus, this topic was “the only truly serious philosophical problem.” Is life worth living? For Kirsch, McCormack, and others like them, the answer seems to be no. In fact, for them, to assume it is worth living is the gravest error of our species. What value have we possibly added to the universe by our existence? For these academics, all we have gotten from the idea that human life is worth it is environmental destruction and widespread oppression. All we have gotten from the assumption that life is valuable is the prolongation of suffering.

I profoundly disagree.

I don’t deny that life is difficult, nor do I believe in any final consolations for our species, be they the various heavens postulated by various religions, or the visions of an inevitable construction of heaven on earth from various political philosophies. However, what I do know is that there is something beautiful deep within the world and ourselves, which we often forget about in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, which often gets covered over with various philosophical abstractions. It’s difficult to describe, but it can be glimpsed whenever one is walking among nature with friends, sharing stories and laughs. It can be glimpsed whenever one is awed by a beautiful piece of music, feeling as though the world and the self have lost their heaviness, now free to float among the various melodies and chords accompanying a liberated being. It can be glimpsed in the psychic rupture of one who has fallen in love, who finds themselves unable to quell the swarms of butterflies in their stomach whenever their beloved so much as smiles as them, and who is willing to change their life for their sake. It is this beauty which, above all, keeps people from resignation. In fact, it is this beauty which acts as the driving force for rebellion against the oppressive world we have made for ourselves.

So, to fight against doomerism, I propose we adopt what philosopher Ernst Bloch calls “militant optimism”. This optimism is not caught in delusions of an inevitable utopia, nor does it succumb to cynicism. In recognizing that the world is still incomplete, that the darkness of the present moment will soon pass, and that there is beauty deep within which needs cultivation, it stubbornly seeks to imagine and create something new. It will persist through all failures, taking what needs to be learned from them, and will embrace the unknown future. As it begins to feel crushed by the weight of the world’s absurdity, it will suddenly remember in a burst of energy, that it can push back. 

After two world wars and a widespread economic depression, the generations coming of age in the early 1900s certainly seemed lost. Mass disillusionment with not only the growing capitalist world order but also the revolutionary movements meant to overturn said order, coupled with large-scale human atrocities such as the Holocaust, left many adrift and hopeless. In our time, we see new lost generations; it seems that more people are depressed today than at any point in human history. But we must not let the stark facts of this era, and the pessimistic ideologies borne of these facts, cloud our horizons. If we clear away the clouds, and pay close enough attention, we may see new life emerging. We may hear the earth sing the song of hope once again, no matter how brittle her voice has become.