A Man Who Kills a Man

[Mangetout]

@Frylock

OP’s quote makes me wonder if Chesterton may have been a practicing solipsist. Would explain some things.

It sort of looks that way if you read him as straightforwardly stating facts, but I think he’s really written a bit of poetic prose there - not intended to bring people to a factual understanding of what suicide is, but intended to inspire people to think differently about what it means to be alive.

IMO, anyway.

[Frylock]

Well, I mean, yes.

I was just taking a swipe.

[Velocity]

Question for people who think the world is overpopulated: If so, why should voluntary suicide be prevented?

[Trinopus]

I think the world is overpopulated…and I want to reserve voluntary suicide for people who are not mentally ill.

Mental illness, the usual cause of suicide, undermines the validity of the decision. It’s a bad decision, just as decisions often are when made while one is angry, or has just broken up with a former lover, or is drunk.

If someone who is rational and sane and competent to make a decision, a legal adult, and not under any form of coercion, chooses suicide, what basis do we have to stop him? We don’t stop people from taking risks with their lives; why should we stop them from throwing their lives away entirely?

Why don’t we compel people to stop smoking? That’s only slow-motion suicide.

[ITR_champion]

@jroth7

Interesting insight but that isn’t where I was going. Chesterton’s assessment of suicide reflected a concern that humanity’s future on Earth would be threatened if mankind refused to take an interest in his existence. Chesterton was expanding on the writings of Maimonides (which I can’t find at the moment) when Maimonides was concerned about the Jewish people committing suicide to escape the Roman cruelty in those times. He like Chesterton was worried that if enough people committed suicide it would threaten mankind’s existence.

Note that Chesterton died in 1936, when the world population was about 2 billion.

That would be 61 years before the United Nations released a massive report, the GEO4, that finds the planet in “dire environmental straits because humanity’s footprint [its environmental demand] is 21.9 hectares per person while the Earth’s biological capacity is, on average, only 15.7 ha/person.” The report gives details on past trends and future prospects on the atmosphere, pollution, food, biodiversity,
water and inequality in the world, and the picture is grim.

Had he known Earth, in 1997, would be at the “unknown points of no return,” and at serious risk due to “the dangers of climate change, water scarcity, dwindling fish stocks, and the pressures on the land and the extinction of species,” Chesterton might have written, The man who kills himself, as far as he is concerned, saves the planet.

I think that if Chesterton had lived to see it, he would have made fun of that failed doomsday prophecy, and many others as well.

“Every so often, a new sect appears, enthusiastically spreading the news that the world will soon end. By a slight error of calculation, it is usually the sect that soon ends.” - G. K. Chesterton

[Trinopus]

No, alas, the sect called Christianity has not ended, and continues to predict the end of the world.