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	May 14, 2003

DANGEROUS MEME #3: ADVICE FOR ADVANCING RADICAL IDEAS From Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization : People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren't ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new. When presenting a new idea, you don't have to have all the answers. It's better to say 'I don't know' than to fake it. Make people formulate their own questions. Don't take on the responsibility of figuring out what their difficulty is. We each internalize information differently. If you don't understand a question, keep insisting they explain it until it's clear. Nine times out of ten they'll supply the answer themselves. Above all, listen. Your close attention is sometimes more important than your articulateness in winning converts. And learning is always a good thing. 3:58:27 PM  trackback []  comment []

WHEN IS SUICIDE 'JUSTIFIED': A RANT I'm really annoyed. I just finished reading a review by Salon's Laura Miller of Lisa Lieberman's book Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide. And I'm really pissed. I mean, where do these people get off moralizing about when suicide is or is not 'justified' , judging the motives of individuals' personal actions, and claiming that "it is a universal human duty to try to prevent any healthy person from self-destruction, regardless of how good that person's reasons might be"? What bullshit. Obviously neither of these two rank amateur psychologists have had any personal (I mean personal, not something your step-mother or grandfather might have thought about) experience with wanting to end their own life. They obviously also haven't had any experience with the debilitating effects of anti-depressant drugs. Christ, if they'd even read some first-person accounts on the subject like The Noonday Demon they might at least have a clue about the subject they pontificate on. I read this review because it got off to a decent start. Lieberman says that when they are institutionalized and forced to take anti-depressive drugs "individuals at risk of destroying themselves [are] deprived of the right to determine their own behavior." But it's all down-hill from there. Judgements fly left and right: suicide is "petulent", "an act of aggression", "a variation on 'fuck you!'", involves "dishonesty, self-pity and sheer malice", a "glorified tantrum", "self-loathing masquerading as concern for others", "competitively morbid". These hackneyed guilt-ridden labels are an insult to both the intelligence and the valour of the ferocious, life-long emotional struggle of those that commit, or seriously contemplate, suicide. Regular readers of How to Save the World have read both essays and fiction from me on the subject of depression. For those that want to know more about suicide, please disregard Miller's sanctimonious review and pass on Lieberman's flimsy and uninformed pseudo-intellectual tract, and read The Noonday Demon or any of the other well-researched, first-hand accounts of the subject, or just talk to someone who has been suicidal. The sufferers and the survivors we all know deserve that much. 9:22:14 AM  trackback []  comment []

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