He was the last person I expected do that. On the other hand what were those expectations based on, not evidence anyway, assumptions, presumptions, impressions, abstract and theory with no substance, expectations which were based on other expectations, a trembling tower miraculously suspended with no base at all to rest on.
To describe him, we’ll pretend we’re at a party. He didn’t speak to many people. They encouraged him first and then felt frustrated. They gave up. Rather than simply give up, they talked, they bitched. They made assumptions he did not like them. They decided to dislike him based on the false assumption that he did not like them.
As if a reason to hate someone is because they do not love you. Something reasoned by its opposites absence. Reasoning something is beautiful just because it is not ugly. On the other hand, emotion, it’s a whole different ball game. If we had discovered a way to defeat it with reason, I would make the reasoned estimate that we would have done it already.
So why didn’t he speak to many people? He had too many expectations and he feared disappointing himself. They bubbled up inside, the urgencies in every moment and intention with every word. Conflict surged inside, the drive for action competed with the desire to avoid, to avoid what he saw as the inevitable result; failure and all of that inner turmoil led to an external paralysis. All of that paralysis led to social isolation to everyone until he met me, yet feelings linger, they remain and cling even when their causes are eliminated and they influence the very way we think, the way we interpret all occurrence. All of this, was something he himself could not even express so how is it that I know this?
We discovered a way. I met him in college in medical school. We used to perform autopsies to figure out causes of death but there were so few bodies to examine, physical ailments and illness were all but absent and all who died, died naturally and painlessly (due to technology to predict death and the consequent administration of drugs to alleviate associated pain). Yet suicide rates were rising so much. Suicide was prevented in no case as the individual was deemed to have full body autonomy and was even helped to achieve death painlessly on expression of the intention. We did not examine those bodies. The cause of suicide traditionally were an area for genetic predisposition but also one for social or societal circumstance, context, conversation and memory. Interpretations essentially. We had no authority to determine cause in those situations.
Your forgetting, we live in Utopia. Genetic predispositions are predicted now, they’re isolated and examined, even spontaneous emergence of a brain chemical can be determined with the regular and compulsory school health checks and either are offset with the excellent and effective medication provided free by the state. The context was perfection, it was no longer considered to have any cause in suicide, the same for societal or social circumstance. All that was left was conversation and memory of the person which are things held by others but in that regard these were then subject to their interpretation. The only factor we deduced that could give us a clue therefore was interpretation itself.
We needed to find out how an individual interprets occurrence, any occurrence. After years of painstaking research, in Utopia not only did we trust the state but the state trusted us and funding was given without application to all who pursued it and after this research we found a way. The problem was our way required access to the bodies. The rates were rising and we still had no authority to access the bodies. It was deemed illegal for medical students to discover the functions of thought itself by way of physically examining the mind and that is just what we thought we had discovered, the reasons for this illegality was that such a discovery upon the processes of thought itself would allow alteration of these processes, anyone with yearning for power could then alter the thought processes of others to make them lose their trust in Utopia, everyone trusted this declaration by the state and we saw some suicides as a necessary sacrifice to maintain the trust we both received and invested. It was the only illegality that existed. As I said those rates were rising, on a personal level, I lost my brother for no determinable cause, I tried to defeat the consequent emotion with reason, reason that to find a cause would prove eventually dangerous to the state which we all loved, but as mentioned before there is no way to defeat emotion with reason (Possibly this could also be discovered after the defeating the one illegality that existed) and I was helpless in grief We examined an option to steal them but it seemed impossible, all dead bodies were nearly immediately disposed of by incineration. There was almost no interim, we had advanced to a point where families and friends were able to grieve and accept without the tangible confrontation of a dead body. The state was so trust worthy in Utopia that everyone naturally trusted it and thus death was recorded and accepted automatically. Then he suggested something I had never expected him to suggest.
That evening in the laboratory, I was near breaking point, surrounded by the bodies that we did have the authority to examine the minds of, the natural deaths, in there we saw no conclusive end to our research unless we had access to a mind which genuinely wanted to commit suicide. Research on the other minds prove futile, the thought processes of their interpretation of any occurrence were expected and already known without any of our research at all. What he said made something occur to me which had never occurred before during the years of our research and indeed the realization struck me as obvious as well as the definitive end. I knew why I was doing the research, I wanted to help, merely help not solve, alleviate, merely alleviate, not eradicate, some, merely some not all of my own grief by the discovery of why my brother killed himself and in doing so help others in the same position and yet I never knew his position and I never thought to ask and then I became all too aware of his reason.
“I want to die, I have no idea why, but it is a genuine intention, an intention which provoked me to carry out all this research in the first place and once I commit suicide you will have full access to my mind, in some way my mind won’t be ideal because although I had intent to die prior to the research, the motivation that my mind could then be used will somehow have influenced my interpretation of occurrence but I urge you to pursue our end regardless” He said.
Those were his words, the exact formality of his speech of the man I never expected to want to die and in that way the man I never really knew but the man I now know more intimately than I know anyone, even myself.
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