90 - Thinking accurately

Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Chevenga Mental State Assessment Committee of the Assembly of Yeola-e, etesora 38, Y. 1556

Chanae Salhanil, Servant of Kaholil: Now I want to ask you about the general nature of suicide, and so I guess I’ll start by throwing your own question back to you: why do people do it?

Tamenat of Haiuroru: Well, it always comes down to this: they have come to believe that death is preferable over life for some reason. They feel it will either be less painful for them than life, or more just, or more beneficial in some larger sense, or better in some other way.

The reasons can be many. Most often it is expecting that death will be less painful than life, due to their suffering some sort of severe pain, a pain to which they see no other or better cure, either because it is so extreme they can only imagine the most extreme measure will work, or they’ve tried other methods, or they’ve succumbed to despair in general. It can be physical pain, but much more frequently it is emotional, and can come from anything that causes emotional pain: bereavement, loss of love, loss of anything valued, betrayal, being abused, enslavement, torture, severe shaming, and so forth. Sometimes a person will commit suicide in anticipation—correct or not—of pain, so as to avert it. In these cases, suicide is seen as the ultimate and thus perhaps the only escape from a trap, the ultimate and thus only means of choice in the face of otherwise complete helplessness.

Sometimes also a person will commit suicide not out of pain but out of a sense that death is the right and just thing, though oftentimes there is also the pain of guilt or shame they feel is unbearable. Whether a person is inclined to this sort of suicide has a great deal to do with the ethics to which he adheres, most likely those in which he was raised, and so it varies greatly from culture to culture.

For instance, it is considered honourable for Arkan soldiers to kill themselves if they have committed certain acts considered disgraceful for an Arkan soldier. In some parts of Laka it is considered honourable for a wife to kill herself if her husband dies. A person committing suicide in such a situation need not be suffering from pain and despair, and in fact can sometimes be quite calm about it.

Now there is a third reason, which is that the person sees some larger benefit arising out of his death. For instance, the A-niah people, before the secret of the wing came out, had a custom of killing themselves if captured by Arkans. No one knew why then; the theory was that they had a particular aversion or objection to the sorts of things Arkans do to captives. But once the secret came out, they revealed that it was because at that time the Arkans alone had truth-drug, and they didn’t want to risk a Niah captive being truth-drugged and revealing the secret. Again, someone committing suicide for this reason can be quite calm and rational about it.

Less common, but it does happen, is suicide that is intended to hurt others, in reproach or in revenge. A person has to want to hurt another a great deal to give up life for it, so often one or more of the other reasons come into play as well. But it does happen.

Cha: Are most suicides insane?

Ta: If by that you mean, are they not thinking accurately, yes, in many cases—though I should note, we all can think inaccurately, or be fleetingly insane, in the grip of intense emotion. It’s hard to know the exact number, as it’s not something for which there are reliable records. Extreme despair in particular can distort thought; a person can think his situation is much more hopeless than it truly is, that suicide is his only hope of relief even though in truth there are many others. Extreme pain can simply bias the mind towards wanting such immediate relief that death seems the only measure fast enough. This is why many people considering suicide can be convinced against, by reminding them of possibilities they are, in despair, forgetting, and by bringing relief for their pain by any number of measures.

Cha: Let me ask the question this way—or perhaps it’s a different question—do you consider anyone insane who seriously considers suicide, just by definition?

Ta: No. It depends on the motive and the situation.

Cha: How so?

Ta: Well, if you have on the one hand a man who has just lost his wife, and in grief wants to kill himself. If he did not, then in time his grief would ease, he would finish mourning her, and find happiness again, either in the pleasure of the company of those of his family who remain, or by remarrying, or both. But in the peak of grief he does not see this, and so for that time he is not thinking accurately and so we may consider him insane.

But on the other hand, if you can go back to the time before the secret of the wing came out, a Niah man is captured by Arkans, and they somehow let him know they plan to truth-drug-scrape him. When he anticipates that they will find out the secret of the wing that way, which he can prevent if he commits suicide, he is actually thinking perfectly accurately. He is correct in what he is predicting. So we cannot say he is insane.

…

Cha: Thank you, sib President, and thank you, Tamenat, for taking the effort to aid us in our work. Before I get to specific questions, I’m interested to know your general thoughts, from what you’ve read, as well as anything that strikes you.

Ta: Well, there are many things that strike me, but what does the most is how young this began with him… considering suicide at seven, and the foreknowledge starting at seven also. It is extremely rare in a child that young. And my first advice to you in understanding his mental state is to look at his life before that.

The seed of it that is obvious on first glance is the assassination of his father, which caused great shock and grief to him, as it would any child. But I think there is more to it. Plenty of children lose parents at that age, and with virtually all of them, the thought of suicide doesn’t even cross their minds. Also, at no time did he say here, “I missed him so much, I wished to die,” or “I felt I couldn’t bear life without him,” which is what you hear when people are driven suicidal by a loss. The way he talks about it, the effect is indirect. It’s as if the loss awakened or exacerbated something that was already there in him.

His urge to leap off the cliff, the way he describes it, had nothing to do with his father’s death at all; it was about thinking he might be a coward. In other words, it wasn’t from pain; it was justice, in his mind. If he proved a coward it would be something unforgiveable, something for which he deserved to die, so he felt. Now as I said before with that sort of suicidal inclination, it’s to do with the ethics he was being raised with, and those as we know were warrior ethics, and this is an example. If he was a coward he could not be a warrior, and it was his obligation to be a warrior. But also, notice he says, “Not everyone should die for cowardice, just me.” He sets himself apart from everyone else in his degree of obligation. Why, I don’t know; to me the most obvious theory for a reason is that which set him apart from others in general, the position he was being raised to take, as semanakraseye. But I am only theorizing, I do not know.

His death-conviction, foreknowledge as he saw it, started with a view of his father’s corpse, but it was not about his father; else you might expect it to fade off in the next year or so, as that is the usual course of grief from bereavement. As we know, he’s been in the grip of it ever since. Now it could be an extreme version of following in his father’s footsteps, ‘as he does I should do,’ but again, you don’t see a lot of children of parents who are murdered doing that. I think there are convergent factors but I am not seeing all of them, there is information missing. Now of course I know there’s a delusion here, a belief that he deserves to die young, because that has become common knowledge, too. And that fits very well with what I have read here. But I’m not seeing all of the reasons.

Now if you go down the incidences, they are something of a mix, but mostly the suicidal urgings of perceived justice. With most of them, he feels he has committed, or might otherwise commit, an unforgiveable crime.

…

Ta: Now in terms of the death-conviction, it matches also what I know of what Surya observed in him, that he did not have foreknowledge but a conviction that he ought to die before thirty, that it was just. He says not, ‘I don’t want to live past thirty,’ ‘I couldn’t stand to live past thirty,’ or anything like that; as he explained here, he could not say, when Surya put him in the [Haian word], in the truth-hold, ‘I deserve to live.’ Why he would think so, I don’t know; I don’t know enough about him. But because it started when he was seven, you have to look, as I said before, for reasons before that. To entirely understand his mental state, now and for his whole life, it’s absolutely necessary to look at seven and under. The answers are there.

Cha: Do you think he is insane, and if so, acutely or chronically?

Ta: Well, if the answer to that question were easy enough for me to give based on the minute amount of knowledge I have of him, I think you would not have a Committee investigating it, because you would not need one (laughter). I do not know. If you ask me, was he thinking accurately each time, some are straightforwardly no, some not so clear.

Cha: Can we go through each one?

Ta: Certainly.

Cha: Starting at age seven.

Ta: No, he was not thinking accurately, neither when he considered leaping off the cliff if he was a coward, nor when he saw his own corpse. If he had turned out to be too cowardly to be a warrior, there were other choices possible for him, I would think. And when he saw his own corpse he interpreted that as meaning foreknowledge, and certainty, but it has turned out to be a delusion. The essence of a delusion is that it seems like reality. But before we declare him insane this time, we do need to allow for his age. The minds of children, especially so young, have simply not developed sufficiently to think fully accurately about complex issues. Of course they have also not usually developed sufficiently to even consider such extreme actions as a result of a moral code, and that’s very striking in him too. There is something very significant here.

†

Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Assembly of Yeola-e, etesora 42, 1556:

Acting Semanakraseye: Next item, we have a request from the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee to assign a Servant to it due to its shortfall in members as the Servant of Ossotyeya recused herself for personal reasons, and obviously I must recuse myself as I am his sister.

Angaseye dagra krisa [taking the Crystal]: Before we consider nominations, is there any Servant willing to volunteer to serve on the Committee? Omonae Shae-Lemana, Servant of Thara-e-Tinanga-e, has stood. Anyone else? (No answer.) As the Servant of Thara-e-Tinanga-e has stood, I recognize him.

O: Thank you, adakri. I would like to volunteer to serve on the Committee, but I’d like it to be subject to a vote of approval by Assembly rather than just a procedural vote, in case there is cause for concern on the part of Assembly for the same reasons I did not volunteer for the Committee at its striking. The reasons are these: I fought under Chevenga from when he returned to Yeola-e, all the way to the city of Arko. I have a great admiration for him as a warrior and a general, and still feel in my heart the bond that each of his warriors had with him. As well, on two occasions during the war, I had sex with him, and I still feel sexually attracted to him, though I would never act on it now as my husband and I are sworn purely to each other. I have stood to volunteer now because I have two things the Committee has expressed it would prefer in its eighth member: I am in the fourth year of a four-year training in psyche-healing, and I am asa kraiya. But I am concerned that the nature of my past relationship with Chevenga makes me unsuitable for the Committee for reasons of bias.

Adakri: Thank you for explaining so openly, Omonae. I concur with you that this calls for a vote of approval as well as a procedural vote, just to be certain we are doing our full duty. That, we approve Omonae Shae-Lemana, Servant of county Thara-e-Tinanga-e as suitable to serve on the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee: discussion. Servant of Michalere.

Li: Sib Servants, I question the wisdom of having two people on the committee who are sexually attracted to Chevenga. We already have one, whose name I will not mention because it was revealed in confidence, at the outset when we agreed to share with each other all that we felt with respect to the semanakraseye. I think we’d be making a mockery of the sacredness of detachment.

Adakri: Servant of Thara-e-Kalanera.

Da: I would contend that a sufficient number of Servants of Assembly are or have been sexually attracted to Chevenga that we might overly limit our choices for the Committee if we eliminated them all from eligibility. Already we would be eliminating the one person who has volunteered and who has the qualifications the Committee prefers. I would like to request a show of hands to test my point.

Adakri: Please raise your hand, each Servant who is or has ever been to any degree sexually attracted to Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e.

[Certified count: 49 of 236]

Da: I don’t think we want to categorically bar more than a fifth of ourselves from taking a role on any committee for any reason. The man is attractive, and we are all human, subject to human feelings, and that doesn’t make it impossible for us to be thorough, dedicated and incisive doing committee work. For the record, as I am on the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee also, I have never seen Chevenga, in his dealings with the Committee, ever do anything even resembling an attempt to play on any member’s sexual attraction to him, or any sort of admiration for him, so as to influence our findings.

Li: That doesn’t mean that the influence doesn’t happen.

Adakri: Servant of Selina North.

Lekora-e Shae-China: My feeling on this is that you young people have far too much time on your hands. (Laughter)