Calling out the For-Profit Normalization of Suicide
‘13 Reasons Why’
In my home country of The Netherlands, 81 teenagers committed suicide in 2017. That’s nearly twice as many as in the previous year, according to the national statistics agency. Researchers are unsure, though, what the cause of the increase might have been, but some point to a new Netflix series, 13 Reasons Why, which began airing in March 2017.
Critics have said the series portrays suicide in an all too romantic light. Dutch psychiatrist Jan Mokkenstorm agrees and thinks the series may “hint at young children that suicide is a solution to their problems”.
In right-wing circles, it is spoken of taking the ‘red pill’, as in the movie The Matrix starring Keanu Reeves, when people stop believing the mainstream worldview and, instead, embrace traditionalist, nationalist or even racialist beliefs. I’d have to say I was born with the red pill melting on my tongue, but I didn’t swallow it whole until recently. Here’s the reason why:
Something happened in my home country of The Netherlands. A young woman, Ximena Knol, nineteen years old, had ordered her poison online, paid around $10.50 for the package including shipping, had it delivered to her door, consumed it and died. As a child, Ximena had been sexually abused by a family member. She has been struggling with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.
The do-it-yourself suicide poison she ordered was sold to her by a Dutch not-for-profit foundation, “Last Will”, that believes all people, including teenagers, should have the right to commit suicide. The foundation also believes suicidal people have the right to purchase their deadly poison online.
The progressive reasoning justifying this dystopian nightmare that promotes teen suicides goes as follows. In a liberal, social-democratic society such as The Netherlands, no authority has the right to tell people what they can’t do. Liberals consider suicide a personal choice no more acute than getting a new haircut, changing one’s wardrobe or having a sex-change operation. Therefore, if kids want to commit suicide, society shouldn’t act so ‘fascist’ to try to talk them out of it, let alone heal their depression. Adult liberal society has thus convinced itself that it is doing suicidal children a favor by making it easier for them to commit suicide.
For now, in response to public outrage, the Dutch state has outlawed selling the suicide poison and reprimanded its producer. But those of us familiar with progressive tactics know how this ‘backlashing’ tactic is part of a grander strategy. The leftist rabble will first orchestrate public backlash over some incident, wait for the storm to blow over, then turn the incident into policy behind people’s backs while they preoccupy the public with the next engineered shock.
This is, for example, what leftist billionaire George Soros and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker have once called the “piecemeal approach” to social engineering. There is, however, a massive problem with the liberal reasoning to justify teenage suicide. It’s blatantly obvious to anyone who has still managed to keep his sanity: What if teenage suicides have nothing to do with personal choice?
Ximena’s father doesn’t believe his daughter wanted to die. He believes she wanted to escape her fears and mistakenly thought the poison could help her.
Unfortunately, I, too, have first-hand experience with the subject of teenage suicide attempts. On a cold winter morning in late 1994, just weeks after my fourteenth birthday, I skipped class in the early morning. I put on my coat, snuck out of the school building, walked past rows of willow trees, and then along a channel. It had begun to snow and everything became quiet.
When I got to the bridge, I walked up and just stood there with my hands on the cold railing, staring into the dark, silent waters flowing away from me. The stream carried broken sheets of ice with it. My intent had been to jump in, hoping the shock of the icy water would freeze my muscles, sink me to the bottom of the channel, and drown me.
Like Ximena, I didn’t want to die. I was only looking for a way out of a very troubled life. I felt I had run out of options. Suicide was the last solution I was willing to try. I had had trouble finding any meaning in life, I was living in severe psychological pain and could not find anybody to talk to about it. But that had nothing to do with personal choice. It had everything to do with surrender.
Then and there, I decided to confront the pain. A conflict demanded to be resolved, one way or another, resulting in either a jump or a retreat. I imagined my future me arriving from the future to pay me a visit. What would my future me tell me to do?
I told myself that if I would choose life, I would find friends, love, support, something meaningful to work on, perhaps even have a family of my own someday. I decided these things were worth living for, no matter the pain I was suffering today. I was going to fight the mist of my existence and emerge as a victor.
In the end, life did turn out for the better. But what absolutely infuriates me today, is that children who are like me are now being seduced to commit suicide by a society that pretends to love them in order to profit from selling them poison.
And that’s when I finally swallowed the ‘red pill’. If I had not been born in the year 1980, but in the year 2004, I would have been dead today. I would have watched series like 13 Reasons Why. Combined with the apparently readily available online poison, our present-day culture would have pushed me over the ledge. Liberal society would have murdered me, by proxy, and have me believe it was my own personal choice.
I believe normalizing suicide as a personal choice is a crime against humanity. Yet, adult liberal society fools itself into thinking it is still moral, when in reality, it is morally bankrupt. A society that abandons its children has no future.