Essay:Anarchism and suicide

Suicide is the act of ending one's own life through a self-inflicted wound of a life-threatening or life-ending nature, hence causing a self-inflicted death. Untold numbers of suicides have occurred throughout human history through various means, and for varying reasons and under various circumstances.

Most religions which have existed in human society have mostly considered suicide as a highly-desperate action, either positively sanctioned as an unpreferable last-ditch effort to save other people from death or some other non-preferable fate, or negatively sanctioned as an ultimate act of selfishness and emotional self-centricity (the latter often arising out of unfortunate circumstances into which the deceased had been born or lived for some ultimately-intolerable period of time); depending upon the circumstances in which the deceased had committed the final act, religions may regard the deceased as having gone to either a pleasurable afterlife (if the deceased was considered a hero/ine through the suicide) or to an insufferable eternity of torment in the underworld (if the deceased was considered a coward or weakling due to the suicide). The state (be it in the form of empire or mob rule), which is instituted as an instrument of force and coercion that enjoys some independence from the predominant religious institution, has similarly varied in its perception of suicide.

Perhaps the reason why religion and state both share similar views on suicide is because they both have a strong perception of death, the cessation of life, as a goal or landmark of various sorts.

Thus, since one is inflicting wounds upon oneself, it is just as easy to say that suicide is an act of violence as it is to say that it is individualistic and non-coercive to others (although others who may have closely known the suicidee in life may be hurt emotionally by the attempt). As most religions maintain a sanction against willful suicide, many states have also followed in lockstep, with most states prohibiting assisted suicide as an act of murder or conspiracy to commit murder. In other states, suicide may be extolled as a religious virtue of martyrdom, and states which are closer in relations to the predominant religion may also follow in the encouragement of suicide as a weapon of war, notably in the act of deliberate mass murder-suicide through suicide bombing.