The Black Knight (Suicide)

Cause of death: suicide.
Who: 1-2% of modern nations
Why: factors are related to "something is wrong with your head" - depression, manic-depressive, drug/alcohol, schizo, agitation, etc. Walk into an emergency room: most people are there because something is wrong with their heads (low IQ, alcohol induced stupidity, mental illness, etc.), you will see the high risk. Now look at the doctors - they are also at high risk: under stress, lack of sleep, mood swings. Their knowledge does not protect them.

Put the whom into perspective: 1-2 % of everyone is huge. Everyone will die of "old age", baring accident or intent. Live long enough and you will die of cancer, heart failure, or other degenerate proximate cause. The ultimate cause is the same: you are old and worn out. If you treat your body poorly you will wear out faster - smoke, drink, eat garbage, don't exercise. We all know this. The fact that 1/100 to 1/50 will die by their own intent is therefore a huge number - and a number that is likely an underestimate (taking large risks, joining the army in time of war, and generally placing oneself in harms way can be an effective means of killing oneself). Look at it another way - suicide is the second leading cause of death for college students.

Suicide is a systematic and sizable problem with our society. Doctors have a fairly high level of knowledge about suicide, know the factors involved, and know how to access further information. This does not help them very much - as a group they commit suicide fairly frequently. Knowledge alone does not prevent suicide.

How can we address suicide? We must start from knowledge and move to action. Suicide is not "rare". It is prevalent, it will impact your life at some point. We all should know a little bit about suicide, as it is one of the primary causes of death - and one of the largest ones (intent: suicide or murder, accident, and decay are the possible causes). The key factors relate to mental health, a truism if there was ever was one.

We know that medication can help - lithium, anti-depressants, and cognitive therapy are known to reduce the incident of suicide, and thus early treatment is important [note: the availability and efficiency of these drugs has changed the population in universities - at one point in time those most likely to kill themselves would not be in university, as the factors contributing to suicide risk would overwhelm their lives and they would not "make the grade". This population can now better manage their problems, and can now make it into university, yet their risk remains high. Universities have not yet dealt with this "new" issue (for them).] Medication gives crutches, allowing people to hobble forward. This is not a "cure", or sufficient. But can keep people hobbling until things improve.

But in general the issue seems to be environmental - social and emotional environments are important. Stress, depression, sadness, bitterness, pain, exclusion, negativity. These are simply labels for, and symptoms of, sparse, poisoned, and broken social and emotional environments. Once you find yourself in a sparse and ugly environment you are in trouble - your "network" is diminutive, and so is your life. Joy is dead, you do not see beauty, you do not see how to solve things. You are literally unconnected. Choices, possibilities, beauty - not there. You cannot imagine a better life, you cannot image how to change things. The black knight is on the table.

It is a simple truth that the networks that define our lives are nonlinear - having 3 close friends is not 3X better than having 1, but much much more than that. Our lives become rich in more than proportion to what we have, and our lives become painful in extreme ways when we do without social connections and positive emotional experiences. One simply cannot imagine life with no meaningful connections and meaning (e.g. good social and emotional lives). We cannot understand what it will be like (and thus cannot prepare well to get through rough times) and we cannot bare it for long if we find ourselves in such a state.

Due to the requirement for social and emotional life, and the highly nonlinear nature of networks, we are at risk. We cannot plan well for loss and we cannot easily build capacity to sustain ourselves through hard time. What can we do?

The black knight is always in play, and if you lose capacity you will be cornered. We know empirically that the black knight is part of the board of our society, the black knight is ready to engage every and any of us. We have only a handful of tools open to us in pushing the black knight to the perfillary of the board - (1) recognize that suicide is common and a systematic problem in our lives, (2) take care to build up our emotional and social networks and lives, and (3) reach out to our friends and others who find themselves in sparse environments. A series of negative emotional situations can quickly make one perceive things as negative in a systematic manner, a social vacuum quickly leaves one without perspectives and help, a belief that suicide is rare leaves one feeling inadequate and ashamed of such thoughts - I'm so fucking weak and pathetic. No you are human, a human that has found yourself in an ugly situation, one that is overwhelming as we do not teach each other that emotional and social reality make up 2 out of the 3 key aspects of being human and instead we all focus on the more easily (yet not easy) measurable and taught third factor - objective truth. It is somewhat ironic that the depressed are often more capable in the objective plane, with more realistic assessment of their skill level, etc., but this is not helpful to them as they lack the fruits of the other two aspects of human reality (emotional & social). They are 2/3rds dead already, and "logically" they see suicide as the only realistic solution.

If you see your friends or children cut off, you must try to reach them. It will be hard, for they will likely not admit to having suicidal thoughts (shame), and they will not be able to see a way beyond and through the pain. The gap between their emotional and social reality and the emotional and social reality required for a bearable, let along thriving, life is too large for them to transition without help. "You don't understand", and it is true - talk to someone who made it through, and they cannot even put themselves back into the past to fully describe the lack that defined life. Before you kill yourself you are not human, you cannot imagine becoming human, you considering killing yourself as you are already dead in the ways that matter. How to we bring people back to life? We can only try to help them do it themselves, we can only hope that we catch the downward spiral before it is too late. If you do get yourself or another on medication this is just the beginning.

Primitive societies had serious issues with decay, accidents, and violence as causes of death, problems that our society has vastly reduced. If you chose to lead a physically healthy life medicine can help you immensely by getting you though emergencies, allowing you to live much longer. Basic hygiene and vaccinations has dramatically increased life span. The state has monopolized violence, reducing intragroup conflict, and the consequences of state-state warfare among competent states has become so large as to reduce intergroup conflict to an astonishing extent. So to a large extent, we have pushed off decay and accident in order to lead longer and healthier lives, and we have diminished the likelihood of someone intending to kill us. But that leaves self-intent as a large factor contributing to death, one that we have not addressed anywhere near sufficiently. It is somewhat surprising that we have largely ignored suicide - fundamentally there are not that many ways to die, so just on conceptual grounds alone one would think we would confront this more. Empirically suicide is a huge issue, an issue that points to a vastly impoverished emotional and social life.

Suicide suggests that we continue to be poor in our society - by focusing on suicide we can learn more about what it means to be human and we can improve our own and others lives. We can create wealth and beauty.

Lowdown:

Suicide is one of the key characteristics of our society, one that is not discussed and thus one that will remain prevalent. Empirically we know that 1-2% of people will kill themselves, a huge number - suicide will effect your life. A society that largely ignores 2/3rds of what it means to be a human is bound to have problems with allowing people to create fulfilling and beautiful lives. Positive social and emotional state is key in preventing suicide. "Emergency treatment" with drugs enables one to hobble onward, allowing social and emotional networks to be created, but the drugs alone are insufficient and "treatment" begins there. The good news is that the process is actually enjoyable and enriching once underway.




Reference:

Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide : Suicide enlightens the human condition, every educated person should be versed in basics of suicide. This book is the best I have seen on suicide - essentially everything in this posting is directly from the author (e.g. "black knight" metaphor), was an earlier observation of mine that the author also notes (e.g. the emergency room example - which is filtered in terms of suicide here, but in general is a good example of how "brain problems" causes much pain and expense to society, ironically I was in the emergency room with someone who suffered an intense migraine attack when I first became aware of this), or was written in reaction to author (e.g. emotional + social aspects being largely ignored in our society, with the objective element of the human condition being focused on to the exclusion of these other factors). You should read this book, you should have your friends read this book, if you are a teacher you should discuss this book with your students (one tidbit you will learn: in the time it takes for one class, which you could devote to the book, 3 Americans will kill themselves - why are we not talking about this more?), if you are a parent you must read this book. If you are in a book club, read this book.

Deconstructing the Enneagram

The enneagram is a diagram which embodies a personality theory. The diagram is a 9-pointed figure, and the origins are wrapped in vague and mysterious beginnings - discussion of Eastern European mystics, the Sufis, number theories, etc., is common.

The basic idea is that there are 9 types of people, who are related to each other by the position on the diagram. The two types beside your type, your "wings", are similar and you can tend towards one of them. There are also two other types which you relate to when under stress, or in security, which are across the figure from you. In other words, your main type + the two wings + plus the two "stress/security" points describe you - or 5/9th of the diagram potentially describes you, and the types that "describe you" cover all aspects of the personality space. As you can see the enneagram is not a sharp tool.

The 9 types can be chunked into 3 groups of three - and your wings and stress/security points ensure that your personality spans then entire space of personality as you are related to each of these groups, e.g. the enneagram does not actually seem to discriminate you into a type that is distinct and informative. These three goups describe how information/emotions are processed by your type - head/fear, heart/grief, body/anger. A generous reading is that the enneagram captures your stance towards objective, social, and objective reality - but reading books/webpages about the enneagram does not have this insight leaping out. In terms of labeling and understanding people, the enneagram seems too complex for what it does - 9 types? But you can be close to the wing? Or under stress and thus across the diagram, or perhaps you are secure and thus across in a different direction? Oh yeah - in some of the literature they point out that stress doesn't mean what we normally mean by stress, so maybe you are at your stress point when you are not stressed. Huh? Where are the clear and sharp distinctions that one would look for in order to justify the number of labels?

At best it seems that the 3 groups of three - head/fear, heart/grief, body/anger - offers some insight, and a reduced version of the enneagram (e.g. 3 main types of personality) could be useful. But at this point why even attempt to salvage the enneagram? The big 5 is an emprical description of personality that is on solid, if limited, footing. Why not simply find your big 5 properties, and then think about subjective, social, and objective reality as the environment that you are embedded in and which you must learn to live in in order to thrive? For that matter, if the 9 types actually were clear distinct types they should correspond to clusters of big 5 properties - if we looked at the 5-d space with points for each person who took the test we should see clusters of the points: to be precise, we should see 9 distinct clusters, one for each type. To my knowlege this has not been observed, pretty strong evidence that the "enneagram theory" is false.

You can take an enneagram test for fun - after first hearing of this theory I googled and took 3 different ones, from 3 different web pages which sold enneagram related products, and had three different results - not surprising since the theory does not seem to make sharply distinct categories. Even worse, some of the test show the "points" you have on each personality type and my score was fairly evenly spread over a huge subset (~3/4) of the personally types. Basically I could pick any personality type that sounded nice to me and claim it as "capturing me". To me it seems clear: the enneagram is pseudo-science that offers no insight or constructive means to understand yourself and others. Disturbing, as apparently this model is used by some counsellors and therapists, as a google and amazon search reveals, and since it appears to have no sharp and incisive properties that would justify such use it would be better to say the model is misused by some counsellors and therapists.

Pseudo-science is not inert, and can cause a lot of pain and damage. Any placebo value of the enneagram should exist with any other treatment plan, so I cannot see any value brought to the table. Folk psychology and traditions have the potential have capture interesting truths, but as far as I can tell the enneagram contains no such interesting aspects. In fact, it does not even seem to be a legitamate folk theory - with the "mysterious roots", with vague references to Sufis or other groups, likely being made up in order to give the false sense that the method is an ancient tradition (no evidence is given, and inconsistent stories exist, both of which suggest the "ancient system" claim is false). The story seems to be thus: the enneagram theory was made up in the 20th century, with false historical pedigree, and its claims to sort people into meaningful categories which help you understand yourself and others and grow falls apart under even the weakest examination.

Lowdown
- The enneagram lives up to its name (pronounced "any-a-gram": yes, you too can pick any of the grams/personality types you want to pick to describe yourself), but does not appear to live up to any of its claims.

3 key planes - objective, subjective, social

There are 3 key planes that humans exist on - the objective, the subjective, and the social. Each is a "type of reality", and to have full, rich, and successful lives we must learn how to live in each of these planes.

Objective Reality. External reality appears to exist, seems to be persistent, and seems to be consistent. Few people dispute this - some philosophers, or the immature, may bicker at the edges and claim not to believe this, but their actions suggest otherwise [1]. Learning how to gain information, experiment, judge truth, use logic, and manipulate objective reality is an important set of skills. The scientific method is thus: ask questions of reality, and honestly listen to the answer. This is simple, yet not easy. Asking the right questions, actually paying attention to an answer, realizing when you meant to ask one thing but in fact asked another, and honestly listening (you often do not like the answer) are all not easy. What we typically learn as "the scientific method" in school is more often actually just some tactics used by scientists, and thus does not always make sense or even get used consistently, but the overall stragety is simple and the same - ask questions, honestly listen to the answer. Learning the basic scientific approach is powerful, has created vast material wealth in our society, and will improve your life to the extent you live the scientific method. It is mind boggling what we can do and create when we ask good quesitons, and take the time to listen to the answer. Learning the scientific method and creating the social conditions that allowed for the honest listening is no easy task. We have succeeded in doing so - anyone with the dedication and willingness can learn the scientific method, and learn how to live in alignment with objective reality. Many do not, including many scientists, but you can.

Subjective Reality. You are conscious. Amazing. It would be mind blowing, if it were not mind defining. This is one of the few things you actually truely know. Subjective truth is everything that feels important - emotions, love, meaning, consciousness, the moment. Many limiting beliefs exist, many unskilled ways of experiencing ones subjective reality exist. Learning how to handle your emotions, to build your character, is one of the most powerful and immediate ways of improving your life. Some scientists seem so taken by the power of objective truth that they seem to discount this factor of life [2], but you can "prove" the sheer insanity of doing so by just experiencing right now. Listen. Look. Feel. Amazing. We often forget just how awesome the universe is, right now, if we simple open our minds to the sheer crazy beautiful fact of consciousness and emotions. Learning to meditate and taking an experiential approach to life are good ways to hone your "subjective skills". Much that limits us are self imposed beliefs, not truth, or neglect of what is important on the subjective level - it doesn't matter if you do well on empty efforts, you are still wasting your time and life.

Social Reality. We are social animals, we need others, are limited by our group, and find meaning with others. Power is essentially our ability to conduct ourselves as we wish in a social environment. The misuse of power can seriously limit others, and preventing such misuse remains a key factor in maintaining a good society. It was a long and hard struggle to get to the point were power of the few was restrained to the point where a "commoner" could speak honestly and communicate what they have found about objective reality to others. If we create healthy and strong connections with others we create a vibrant social network that gives meaning, creates wealth, and gives capacity to our lives. Improving your social network brings value to others and to you, and allows you to both create and store value. Reaching out to others, picking and perking them up, open and honest communication - e.g. sharing yourself - are how you start to build these muscles.

As far as I can tell, these 3 aspects of human reality are "all there is". If we learn to handle ourselves in these 3 domains we will have happy and successful lives, if we don't we most likely will not.

Our society has focused mainly on objective reality and the creation of material wealth. The value and beauty the comes out of this focus is astounding. We live longer and better, to such an extent that even our trash is amazing - a powerful measure of just how wealthy we are (go back in time and you could sell much that we throw out for a pretty penny). We have choice and resources. But why do we focus on this aspect? The positive reason is that it makes for a comfortable and long life, one that is largely easy and pleasant, and it allows people to focus on what is important to and for them. The negative reason is that this is easier to do - we can "train" people to be a cog in a big machine, without much effort or consideration, and have reasonably amazing outcomes, we can do the easy (versus simple) and walk through life without engaging it and others. We don't have to think about how we are doing things, since we are guarenteed a "decent" result without effort.

The important implication is this: we both have vast resources - material wealth - and plenty of room for improvement. On an individual level, our society allows us to do almost anything we want to improve ourselves - and even if we are "poor" we are richer than most of the people currently in the world, and most of people who exisited in history. We are materially secure, even if we don't feel this way, it is true. We can take life choice "risks" without risking much - the worse case is that you are materially richer than "99%" of the people who have ever lived. On a collective level we can vastly improve others lives, both in simple (smile at a stranger) and profound (build up meaning in peoples lives) ways. The simple fact is this: we are materially rich, and yet we live in a society that is poor in social and emotional ways due to largely ignoring these factors (and due to the ease of our wealth we are not so hot at objective reality either - we are rich enough to be able to afford to be wrong and hold incorrect ideas without significant, or at least obvious, pain). Our focus on the material has given us security, and the means to engage either of the other two factors with almost no risk. We simply have to confront our fears, wake up, and engage reality. It is not easy, but it is simple, and it is rewarding.




Notes:
[1] If they truely believed otherwise, then offer them a bet: 1 to 1000 odds for money that objective reality does/does not exist. Put up $100 bucks, so they must put up $100, 000, and have the test as this: cut off your hand. If they truely believe there is no objective truth, then it does not matter if they cut their own hand off or not, if they loose the bet or not, etc. In fact, why are they wearing clothes and holding down a job and submitting to gravity and social norms? If one truely believed in no objective reality, would you live a normal and tedious life? One would have to be completely boring, unimaginative, and unintelligence to live a normal life - the only reason most people live normal lives is due to neccessity, they have strong objective constraints. If you are not constrained by objective reality, why are you limiting yourself? There is only one reason - you actually know, or believe, you are in fact so constrained. This footnote is painfully obvious, and should go without saying, but to a large extent our society has elevated criticism as an ideal - children are rewarded for pointing out faults, even if they are not significant, realistic, or important. Yes, sure, maybe objective reality does not exist - or is not as highly constraining as we think - but this is (1) obvious, and (2) not so productive or important. We train children to have a largly empty and impotent frame - stylistic criticism - and get adults who are diminuate, bitter, and immature. Criticism as a system is corrosive, limiting, and sad - and to a large extent is the focus of our educational system.
[2] This amazes me, but it is true. This may simply be a matter of strength - we tend to focus on what we are strong at, and discount other things. The sheer amazing wealth we have generated from focusing on the objective may also convince some, who are somewhat noncritical thinkers, that it is the only important factor - yes, it is amazing, but so are the other factors.

Poverty - a social view

What is poverty? In western societies we often define poverty as lack of financial resources - if you make < $X a year you are, defacto, poor.

Is this an accurate definition? On the face of things, yes, but dig deeper and things look a bit differently. Consider some poor person who wins the lotto. We all expect them to go back to being poor fairly soon. Or look at many NFL players, they go broke shortly after retiring, despite having an almost sick amount of money. Poverty obviously relates to skills, an ability to manage ones life.

Consider this definition: poverty is a lack of healthy social networks. "The Rich" help each other, give each other advice, train their children. Some ethnic groups help each other, give each other advice, train their children. The groups we see as rich, the ones that persist, that consistently create wealth and value, that are happy and have plenty are ones that are rich in connections, bonds, duty. They have healthy social networks.

Now look to the poor - they do not help each other, they espouse victimhood, they are critical of "The Rich" (including, say, Jews who are one of the ethnic groups with meaningful social networks), they do not give meaningful advice to each other, they do not work hard to create value but instead consume value. If one is from this "group" (defined mainly as a lack of group cohesion) and hones ones skills and creates value and wealth, well, one is in trouble: without finding a cohesive group to join the value and wealth created may soon disappear.

The poor are those who are poor in relationships. A given poor person has parents, friends, siblings, and spouses who have overall negative and unconnected personalities. Whining, victimology, passivity, complaint, justification, selfishness: we reconize this in "the poor". The social environment the poor live in is sparse, unhealthy, negative. How could anyone thrive in such a corrosive environment?

Under this view we can see how better to become rich - not only must we hone particular skills that allow us to create wealth, but we must hone social networks that are positive and productive. We must become gardeners of our social environment - watering, fertilializing, finding "plants" that work together, creating beauty. We must also do something that is difficult: pulling weeds. This can be painful, but if we wish a bountiful garden we must till, pull weeds, and protect against invasion. If you are starting to change your life, you may find that you have to cut ties with your parents and some former friends. Invite them with you, but do not tie yourself to them. Our relationships are a choice, and a most important one.

Learning how to make money at some task is not sufficient (though it is necessary) to become wealthy; learning how to be a valuable friend, someone people want to know and be with, and finding others to join with in the struggle of life is needed. And here lies true wealth - the financial aspect is but one part.

University students may eat noodles, live in run down and sparsly furnished apartments, make very little money (and actually usually have significant negative money (debt)), and have a lack of financial resources - but they are not poor. They are forming deep connections with others, they are learning skills to create wealth, they are engaging ideas and life and people, and they most often come from caring families. Our great grandparents were not poor either (at least not all of them), despite lacking almost everything we take as granted in terms of material wealth.

Poverty is not measured by how much money you make per year. Poverty is measured by a lack of meaningful social networks . A social pauper necessarily finds he is a financial pauper, if not now, then soon. If you want to be "rich" forget the money, and consider people: how to connect, how to bring value to others? Even if you do not find the finances you want, you will find what we wish to buy with the finances - a happier and more meaningful life.

First things first - people. Find others who care about life, themselves, and others. Create value with them. Actually live. That is wealth.