Losing My Best Friend in College to Suicide
And My Best Advice to the Young
by
Eric Paul Nolte
While the title of this essay is about losing my best college friend to suicide, this is also a meditation on the suicidal behavior of so many young people I have known and lost to horrible and pointless deaths, especially in recent years, and to others for whom I fear they are in danger today.
It is also my heartfelt, mindful, and best advice to all the young people I know. This is a paean to a rational love of life, and the better world such a love may engender.
I particularly fear for those young people on college campuses today, especially those in the humanities, where a dense and toxic fog rolled in long ago and reduced the intellectual conversation to a vertigo-inspiring babble of postmodern epistemology and ethics.
I believe that young minds and hearts are put in mortal danger when their professors assure them that all normative values are entirely the arbitrary conventions of the tribe they were born into, and that nobody can confidently say that any ideas are necessarily right or wrong, or true or false, and yet also proclaim that all cultures are equally good (except for the West, which is absolutely condemned as the essence of evil... except for socialists ... except for Stalin and Mao...)
Yet there is still the vestigial whiff of common sense, which, from my having spent years abroad, I know is not so common after all, but instead amounts to the faint scent of Aristotle and the late European Enlightenment. And anybody who displays the faintest whiff of this common sense and sanity has to know that when you take a dose of heroin, this is not entirely unlike walking on a tightrope from rim to rim across the diameter of a live volcano.
We recently lost yet another golden boy to such an inadvertent heroin overdose. In the weeks since then, I have often burst into tears at the thought of this absurd and avoidable tragedy. I knew the boy for many years. I don't think one would be mistaken to attribute this boy's death to something suicidal.
What the hell is wrong with the sorrows of these young Werthers, as Goethe framed the matter?
After my first trial at college was so rudely interrupted by my Army draft notice, I lost my best college friend to suicide. What was most shattering about this loss was that my friend, Chris Lambert, was an Objectivist! I had never known a more articulate, clear, strong advocate of rational self-interest, and of life as a process of creating one's own meaning, purpose, and joy. And yet he took his own life. It was completely shattering to me. Chris was also an astonishingly gifted actor. Among other things, at 18, Chris had recreated Hal Holbrook's "Mark Twain Tonight," a one man show in which he convincingly portrayed the 70 year old Mark Twain's traveling theater shows.
* * *
Now, it's hard enough to come to understand Ayn Rand through the thicket of cultural hostility... but ... I was a red diaper baby, veteran of an urban socialist commune, reared to be an heir to Trotsky's world view.
So, here we are many decades since Chris' death. I could go on at some length about the horror of losing Chris and the overwhelming slap in the face to my then nascent grasp of Objectivism-- to have the most articulate spokesman for the philosophy of loving life on earth... take his own life for no reason that anybody could understand. No suicide note. No evident foul play. Nothing. He hanged himself in his off-campus apartment. I have struggled to make sense of it ever since. Chris and I were 19 at the time. I am now 63. It still makes me dizzy and sad.
So let us move on to yet another horrible suicide:
The son of close friends took his own life many years ago. He was a golden boy of 20, gifted at music and everything else he ever touched, but he was impatient, idealistic in a way that was deeply skewed towards the misanthropic, earth-worshipping wing of the most militant environmentalists. At the grave site, I was talking with one of the boy's closest friends, a young man who shared the dead boy's ideals. We were talking about environmentalism and the stakes for humanity. I mentioned that I had recently read that the ban on DDT had just then been determined to have been a politically hasty and scientifically unwarranted decision, and, more importantly, that the subsequent global ban on DDT had resulted in a worldwide catastrophe. Where malaria had been virtually eliminated in the world before then, the global ban on DDT caused a resurgence of malaria that over a period of just a few years had killed hundreds of millions of people, particularly in Africa.
The dead boy's friend, speaking as a radical environmentalist, coldly snapped at me, "We don't need those people anyway!"
An epiphany came to me at that moment: if your deepest ideals cherish the earth and despise humanity, what does this make of you, as a human being? It makes you an instance, an example, of the thing you despise.
How are you supposed to live? Wouldn't it be a good example of idealism to cheer the deaths of hundreds of millions, to pray for the appearance of a new virus to wipe out humanity, or even to believe it would be a virtuous and laudable action ... to take your own life?
I couldn't help but wonder if my friends' son had taken his own life, motivated, at least in part, by such a horrible idea.
* * *
Now, here we are, still many years later. More recently, two friends of ours were over for dinner and spoke intimately, in voices drained of heat or hope, of their high school son (well, a step-son to one of them) who has driven into a ditch, metaphorically speaking, that makes me fear for his life and moves me to meditate on his predicament while trying to figure out some strategy to help him.
This boy's entrenched lethargy makes me worry that he might want to take his own life. Now I remember him in earlier years as sweet little boy with a charming wit and an endearing warmth and affection. It's a horrible and wrenching thought to see this precious kid as snagged on a branch in a river where he is arranging things so that he might just let go and drown! How did we get here?
My wife is a public school teacher, so I hear from her an ear-searing stream of wounded, indignant, frustrated pleas, complaints, sympathies, outrages, and other observations on the schools, the unions, and the government regulators in far-flung cities from where central planning bureaucrats and politicians fire at the teachers fusillades of edicts and absurd, but faddish, ever-changing educational policy. With our experience of seeing (between my wife and me) three kids into college, and with my reading of many shelves of books on education, psychology, happiness, flourishing, and philosophy, I must say that I no longer believe in the sanctity of a conventional education, at least as it is practiced on the government controlled campuses.
Nevertheless, I believe that knowledge is a key value of life-serving consequence. The knowledge that counts most deeply, of course, is of those matters that give us the intellectual powers to put together a life of our own, by our own lights, for the purpose of our own, long-term, rational happiness and flourishing-- something like what Aristotle called Eudaimonia.
But there is no way to help anybody who will not be helped, who does not want to be helped. The boy has long resisted both school and therapy of different orientations.
Help without self-motivation does not work. This kind of help does not work with psychotherapy, or education, or in any other important field. And mandatory "help" is least effective of all. Any doubt about this claim can be resolved by a look at Stanton Samenow's study on giving psychotherapy to prisoners (Inside the Criminal Mind), and another of his books which covers his life's work with children, Before It's Too Late: Why Some Kids Get Into Trouble--and What Parents Can Do About It.)
So the question is, how is this hapless laddie going to pull himself out of this graveyard spiral before he hits the ground and bursts into flames?
* * *
I've heard it said that if there were some activity that troubled kids can find, something they love and enjoy, then there can be some basis for hope, some traction available between enjoyment and the ability to set a course. But this is a treacly half-truth. What if the kid loved nothing but playing violent video games all day? Drinking beer all day? These activities may be loved, but they are clearly bad for the kid, and profoundly self-destructive!
Well, then the statement must be refined: love, as usual, is never enough. Feelings are never enough!
Ah, but nothing is more common in the world than the idea that Antoine de Saint-Exupery captured in his book, The Little Prince, when his character of a wise little fox advises his eponymous little prince: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, for what is essential is invisible to the eye."
I remember when I read this passage of Saint Ex for the first time as a twelve year old boy, my eyes welled up and my forearms turned to gooseflesh. I felt flooded by a cosmic insight of enormous power. "Yes!" I thought, and went on to think, "Of course this is a deep and profound truth and I should hold on to this forever!"
This cloying claim to wisdom, that it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, is so woven into the ethos of our culture in general and into my childhood in particular that it took me decades to learn how to square off to this received wisdom, figure out what was wrong with this claim, and learn how to refute this notion.
Now, passion for some activity may be the basis for beginning to formulate a goal, but passion by itself does not come equipped with a rudder by which one can steer it on a course of one's own choice. A goal is nothing without developing a plan and taking action to achieve it. Developing a plan cannot be guided merely by feelings because emotions can teach us nothing new, these effusions of the heart merely display what we already believe.
Passion spawns dreams, but dreams and goals must be judged for their life-serving power. Without such judgment, we're back at the same treacly half-truth as when we said that the boy needs something to love if he is to get any traction between the dream and setting a course to reach it, or of developing a plan of action to achieve a goal.
The goal has to be judged as rational.
If you're steering your life by the dictum, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly," you are saying, "You should steer by your feelings."
These days, who on earth would dare to object to this idea that you just have to go with your heart!
Indeed. Who would object? The way out of the woods lies in a rational epistemology.
* * *
One of the deepest troubles here is that we live in a world that is still so backwards with respect to matters of epistemology, that it remains largely unquestioned, and even unchallengeable, that faith is a legitimate alternative to reason as a means of knowledge.
I should interject that by faith I mean the dictionary denotation of belief in the truth of a proposition without evidence. By knowledge I mean a correspondence between reality and the claims a proposition makes about reality. By reason I mean logic applied to the evidence of experience; rationality; or "the faculty that grasps and integrates the material provided by the senses," as Ayn Rand defined it.
So here we are again at the sticking point of the world, the death grip of what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world," the pre-modern ethos of superstition, versus the reactionary, but equally senseless ravings of their postmodern skeptic opponents who deny that knowledge is anything but a tribal, arbitrary convention.
The premodern mystics say, "I know what's absolutely true because God said it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it ... except that if you don't agree with me, you're going to hell."
The postmoderns, by contrast, say, "There is no absolute truth (except for the absolute that there is no absolute truth) and so Truth is entirely a matter of which tribe you were born into. This is multiculturalism; cultural relativism; or the idea that no tribe's ideas can be any better or more true than those of any others. That all these tribes purvey radically contradictory ideas troubles me not at all because we postmoderns are beyond any old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy questions of enlightenment now, and this fact of contradiction between the ideas of one tribe and another could only trouble those poor, benighted sods who insist on clinging to this obsolete belief in absolutes."
It remains true today that the only foundational opposition to this stunningly false alternative between premodern mysticism and postmodern skepticism is found in the stream of thinkers that began with Aristotle and who trace themselves through Ayn Rand and her like-minded kinfolk; in short, the advocates of reason, as defined above. Rand called her philosophy Objectivism, and evaluated her own significance as arriving at a time that allowed her to take up and significantly advance the Aristotelian stream. Similarly, she saw that she had been able to take up and advance many of the key ideas of the European Enlightenment which flowed from Aristotelianism. The American founders had mined their ideological origins from the Aristotelian and Enlightenment thinkers, and Rand was aware that she had significantly advanced these ideas. For example, Rand showed how the normative values of America, such as that the idea of individual rights is secular, not divine. As she framed the matter, individual rights are not granted by divine law, nor by congressional law, but by the law of identity, which sees these rights as bedrock conditions of survival, rooted in human nature as such.
In any contest between which fundamental outlook is the most life-serving, the premodern mystic, the postmodern skeptic, or the Aristotelian/ Objectivist/ European Enlightenment, I ask you who, given the facts, could reject reason, observation and logic, and instead uphold either a) the verification of truth by means of mystical faith, meaning the stark belief in the truth of an idea without evidence; or b) the skeptic's denial of the possibility of confidence in any knowledge?
But we're not given the facts. And the person in question here was a sweet little boy, affectionate with his family and friends, who had a charming sense of humor, and is now a depressed, obese teenager, snagged on a branch in the river, who appears to be wholly innocent of owning any life-serving values, and probably believes the reigning dogma purveyed at school these days, that self-esteem is what other people think of you ... which is why I fear this poor soul is in danger for his life.
Geez! Where do you even begin here?
Maybe with self-esteem, because without it, nobody can find the energy even to get his feet out of bed in the morning.
But, self-esteem is already a complicated concept, derived from a foundation of many prerequisite concepts, and a full grasp of it can not be achieved without a prior grasp of these earlier ideas.
So be it. So are many of the important concepts in philosophy and science woven into a complicated web that requires, ultimately a grasp of the whole web. We enter the fray where we can, and then circle back later, in order to be systematic and rigorously fill in the blanks as prior personal and accumulated human knowledge allow.
* * *
Philosophy is a whirling merry-go-round that will never stop whirling merely to allow us to board without danger or grueling effort. How to jump aboard without faltering, getting whacked and losing teeth, is the first challenge. But it can be done if you just start running abeam the outer arc, find something to grab ahold of, and pull yourself aboard. From there we can begin to contemplate the whole machine around us, as if the machine were stopped, because now we're aboard and moving at the same relative speed as the machine itself.
So we tell the boy in question here, "Son, you're in trouble.
"Do you hear me? I fear for your life. Did you get that? It matters! You matter!"
And here is my best advice to the young:
* * *
Your life matters! Without you, without your being alive, there is no possibility that anything else can ever matter. Your being alive is, as the old philosophers put it, a necessary but not sufficient condition for anything else to matter in your life.
So you need to hold your life as important before you're going to be able to hold anything else as important.
You get this? Another term for this matter is to say you need self-esteem.
Oh, God, I bet you've heard endless fluff about self-esteem in school, but what they're telling you is nonsense! Self-esteem is crucial, but it is not what you have been told it is. Self-esteem is not the result of what other people think of you.
Self-esteem is an accomplishment that you have to earn, and it lies at the intersection of several important things: you must come to feel worthy of achieving happiness. You must learn that this happiness is something that you must achieve by intelligent work. You must achieve a certain confidence in your ability to live your life, which you can expect to happen when you have acquired enough skills to know you are capable of making your way in the world. While you might not feel all these good things at this very moment, maybe you can see some evidence from your experience of having already learned many things. From this inductive evidence, you can know that you are capable of learning how to make your way in the world.
Let me expand on this idea that you need to acquire the conviction that you are worthy of happiness:
Knowing that you are worthy of happiness is an accomplishment too, because, for one thing, this whole idea is awash in confusion and craziness coming from all your moral leaders who will tell you that any big concern with your own happiness is selfish and bad! But they're wrong! You need to learn that you are indeed worthy of happiness, but you'll never achieve it by going through life with hedonistic, self-indulgent thrills, or by just any old path of willy-nilly mindless bouncing off the walls.
Your life is your most sacred possession! Your life is yours to live! You are on this earth to live your life and be happy, and you can put your life together by your own lights, and do damn near anything you want to do, so long as it is rational, peaceful, and respectful of the same right in everybody else.
Your life is the very source of the possibility of valuing anything at all. You should want to live because, barring any bad luck like being captured as somebody's slave, or experiencing the curse of an incurable illness with intractable pain, joy is the reward of a life well-lived.
You can create a life of meaning, purpose, and, yes, joy! Why not? This is the possibility that life offers all of us, and it's not that hard! It's just not so difficult, if you'll just get your head screwed on right, and realize that the world is infected by all these crazy ideas, and that you do not have to be a victim of these ideas!
You can get the right perspective to dismantle the crazy ideas and their power over you if you demand that the ideas you accept must make sense!
How do you know if an idea makes sense? For one thing, you can know that no idea makes sense if it contradicts itself. For example, it is a contradiction when somebody tells you that to be happy you must live a life of self-sacrifice for the lives of others. This is crazy because it is telling you that to be happy you must renounce your own happiness.
Ayn Rand got most of these matters absolutely right. She is not a deity, and you cannot trust anybody's ideas without wrestling with them for yourself and making them your own by a process of bringing everything you believe to the final court of logic, evidence, and observation. Rand, combined with your own observation and reasoning, is a good starting point for trying to unpack the wide range of puzzlements, conundrums, and imponderables that have bedeviled Homo saps since we first appeared on the planet about 100,000 years ago.
Another foundational truth here: reality exists outside you, but includes you. Your mind does not invent reality, you grasp reality by sense perception, and you judge any puzzling aspects of your perception of it by logic. Logic is the process of identifying things without contradiction in the full context of everything else you know. There are no contradictions in reality, so for one to draw the conclusion that the underlying nature of reality entails a contradiction, is evidence that one is making a mistake. This is not to be confused with the important admission of saying, when appropriate, 'I don't know.'" To say we don't know something leaves open the possibility of a better explanation as it comes down the road, and makes it a reasonable ambition actively to search for these better answers.
Logic, which is the process of non-contradictory identification, works because reality is what it is, and not just anything we wish it were, in defiance of the facts. The law of identity states that things are what they are. A is A. A thing, A, cannot be both A and another thing, B, at the same time and in the same respect. A thing can't be a table and yet also be a fish tank at the same time. Nothing can be entirely burning in flames, and yet be frozen solid at the same time. You can't harvest a crop in the future if you eat your stock seed today, contrary to the ravings of our mainstream economists, preaching the madness of John Maynard Keynes.
As Rand put the matter, loosely paraphrased, life, your life, is the very source of your possibility of valuing anything, and if you choose to live, you must hold three cardinal values as the compass by which you steer your life: reason, purpose, self-esteem. Reason, as your basic means of survival. Purpose, as your choice of the happiness that you want your life to be about, and which your mind must then develop a plan to achieve. Self-esteem, as the fuel that alone can power your efforts to make your way in the world.
Now, another crucial point here: A value is something we want so much that we are willing to take the actions needed to acquire it. A virtue is the means by which we pursue a value. Value is a goal, virtue is a corresponding action taken in order to gain that value. So there is very long list of virtues corresponding to all the values a person might ever hold. All our virtues pertain to the relation between consciousness and reality. The primary virtues required to achieve the cardinal values of reason, purpose, and self-esteem are: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride. There are many other virtues too, at the top of which one might include benevolence towards others, and steadfast persistence at a task in the face of obstacles. Rand fleshes out these primary relationships in Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged. One could also add a myriad of other virtues of life-serving importance, such as optimism, humor, friendliness, nurturing love and friendship, good hygiene, cleanliness, punctuality, tidiness, a healthful diet, the good habits of cultivating beauty, good health, of running one's life ship shape and squared away, and regular physical exercise. Given the sad state of the world, I would also add the virtue of lending a helping hand to the hapless, when we can do so without harming ourselves or encouraging something else that is bad.
For now, I will end with the advice that, in any contest between your feelings and your reason, trust your reason. Why trust the mind over the heart? Because feelings are automatic evaluations made on the basis of what you already know. Feelings are not a window through which to view or acquire new knowledge. Feelings cannot offer you the means of verifying the truth of a proposition. The verification and testing of an idea depend on objective facts and logic, which are precisely what emotions cannot provide.
Morality is a code of values chosen by you as a guide to how to steer a course in the world.
As Rand put it, "The purpose of morality is not to teach you how to suffer and die, but how to enjoy yourself and live."
So go and figure out how to enjoy yourself and live! It's the right thing to do! And nobody can effectively do it for you, but you!
If nothing inspires you to want to get up and out, then you have proof positive that an elephant of crazy ideas is sitting on your head. All small children know what they want and they cry out to get it! What the hell happened to you? If you don't know what you want, you will need to figure out which cockamamie intellectual virus you have swallowed that has made you vulnerable to allowing an elephant to sit on your head.
Taking your own life is not a good way out. Taking your own life will make it impossible to find a good way out.
So get going! Excelsior!
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