WHAT'S WRONG WITH WHITE MEN?

by Hewitt E. Moore

@hewittemoore

In 2016, White males accounted for 7 of 10 suicides in the United States (roughly 32,000 of the 44,965 reported suicides). To put that number in perspective, 17,250 people died from homicide, and about 37,000 people died in car accidents. Whites are statistically 3x more likely to commit suicide than Blacks or Hispanics. And men are 3.5x more likely to commit suicide than women (although women attempt suicide 2x more often than men).

TOXIC ANTI-MASCULINITY

Something ominous is happening to men

by Basil Benton
@benton_basil127

Just in time for International Women’s Day (March 8th), the increasingly red-pilled Tucker Carlson began a month long special inquiring into why men are failing, “[in] mind, body and spirit.”  The “war on women” seems to have back-fired, resulting in large casualties among men. According to Mr. Carlson, “it's men in America who are failing,” in general, not women.

RECONSIDERING SUICIDE

This mook says not to kill yourself...

by Andy Nowicki

Reflecting on Dominique Venner’s recent suicide has caused me to consider the entire subject of self-slaughter anew. There are many different angles from which one might analyze and comment upon the matter of dying by one’s own hand—and I have weighed many of them before—but one which has gone largely unremarked is the concept of suicide as a pop-cultural phenomenon. At the risk of sounding insufferably po-mo, what is needed is a “meta”-analysis of the practice of quietus-making and bodkin-baring.

To begin a discussion of the macro, one starts with the micro, working one’s way outward, from the mysterious fibers of one’s own soul into the complex interweavings of the collective soul of the culture at large. As a nihilistic, agnostic, chronically morose Gen-X teenager marooned in the mid-80s, consumed with all-too-typical alienation and tiresomely frequent spasms of unsightly anomie from the onset of puberty’s bitter bloom and forever afterward, I can vividly recall the suicide hysteria that broke out in America just as I found myself stumbling, mumbling, and lumbering through adolescence.

MICHELLE CARTER: THE CASE OF THE SUICIDE SEDUCER

This article, first published in September 2015, is here republished in light of news of Michelle Carter, the "suicide seducer" in question, being recently convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the case described below.

Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy

by Andy Nowicki

There is a very odd scene in the celebrated Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma, in which the play's hero, the jolly, upbeat Curly, attempts to talk his antagonist, the surly, sullen Jud, into committing suicide.

Jud is a creep, to be sure: a menacing stalker, who is later revealed to be a murderer. Still, the song's humor – and it is funny – brings great discomfort when the viewer considers the inherent cruelty of the circumstance. It is even a little heartbreaking how Jud comes around so readily to Curly's point of view on how his death would really be the happiest outcome for everyone, including himself:

Curly is clearly playing dirty here, and not just because the act of attempting to manipulate another man into ending his life is rather unseemly and appalling in itself. Curly is additionally culpable because he is a much more astute and mentally nimble man than Jud, so his effort to woo the other man into self-slaughter has something of the character of a grown man corrupting a child. (To head a certain type of ubiquitously anti-intellectual reader off at the pass; yes, I know it's "just a play," but my point is that it's a darker scene – and given the scene's significance in the story, a more disturbing play – than is commonly acknowledged.)

I cannot help but be reminded of the macabre comic exchange between crafty Curly and deadheaded Jud when I consider the tragic case of Conrad Roy, a sweet but dull-witted lad from Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, who was apparently talked into offing himself by his malevolently sadistic, Iago-esque online girlfriend Michelle Carter last summer.

Of course, when 18-year old Roy took himself out by ingesting a lethal amount of carbon monoxide in his pickup truck on July 12, 2014, Miss Carter first publicly behaved in what seemed an appropriate manner befitting a deeply bereaved girlfriend. The pleasant-countenanced, pixie-faced teen took to social media (but of course) to mourn the passing of "a beautiful soul gone too soon." Later she tweeted, "I'll always remember your bright light and smile. You'll forever be in my heart. I love you Conrad." She even organized a suicide prevention fundraiser in the name of her fallen virtual beau, cementing her seeming "cred" as a grieving loved one of the departed.

Yet when police investigated the boy's death, they came across his cellphone, and soon discovered the cache of texts that he had exchanged with Michelle in the days and hours leading up to his suicide. These text threads revealed, shockingly enough, that Carter had repeatedly insisted that Conrad get over his fearful reluctance and kill himself already. In fact, she had nagged him relentlessly about it, until he finally capitulated and – in the grand tradition of henpecked boyfriends – gave her exactly what she wanted.

In one representative sample (see the entire recorded exchange here), Michelle advises Conrad to obey the Nike and Shia Labeouf-endorsed injunction to "just do it":

CARTER: You can't think about it. You just have to do it. You said you were gonna do it. Like I don't get why you aren't.
CONRAD: I don't get it either. I don't know.
CARTER: So I guess you aren't gonna do it then. All that for nothing. I'm just confused. Like you were so ready and determined.
CONRAD: I am gonna eventually. I really don't know what I'm waiting for but I have everything lined up.
CARTER: No, you're not, Conrad. Last night was it. You kept pushing it off and you say you'll do it, but you never do. It's always gonna be that way if you don't take action. You're just making it harder on yourself by pushing it off. You just have to do it. Do you want to do it now?
CONRAD: Is it too late? I don't know. It's already light outside. I'm gonna go back too sleep. Love you. I'll text you tomorrow.
CARTER: No. It's probably the best time now because everyone is sleeping. Just go somewhere in your truck and no one is really out there right now because it's an awkward time. If you don't do it now you're never gonna do it, and you can say you'll do it tomorrow, but you probably won't. Tonight? Love you.  

Later, Michelle admonishes Conrad that he needs to stop "overthinking." Like a certain eternally conflicted Danish prince, this hapless lad must simply learn to stop dithering and take proper action:

CARTER: Okay. So you gonna do it?
CONRAD: I guess.
CARTER: Well, I want you to be ready and sure. What does that mean?
CONRAD: I don't know. I'm freaking out again. I'm over thinking.
CARTER: I thought you wanted to do this. This time is right and you're ready. You just need to do it. You can't keep living this way. You just need to do it like you did the last time and not think about it and just do it, babe. You can't keep doing this every day.
CONRAD: I do want to but I'm like freaking for my family I guess. I don't know.
CARTER: Conrad, I told you I'll take care of them. Everyone will take care of them to make sure they won't be alone and people will help them get through it. We talked about this and they will be okay and accept it. People who commit suicide don't think this much. They just could do it.
CONRAD: I know. I know. LOL. Thinking just drives me more crazy.

According to court documents, Carter even instructed Conrad to get back in his truck and finish the job when it seemed he was tempted to chicken out at the decisive moment. Later, she confessed as much in a text to a friend: "I was the one on the phone with him (Carter wrote) and he got out of the car because... he got scared and I fucken told him to get back in because I knew he would do it all over again the next day and I couldn't have him living the way he was living anymore. I couldn't do it. I wouldn't let him."

           

*************

That Michelle Carter mentally manipulated Conrad Roy into killing himself is a proposition beyond dispute; it is, in fact, supported by all of the available evidence. But though authorities have duly charged Carter with involuntary manslaughter, it isn't clear that she broke the law in any way. In fact, it seems unlikely that she will serve any significant jail time.

Still, her wretched and unconscionable behavior has infuriated people beyond measure. They are enraged, it would seem on a patently primal level, "triggered" by the fact that this seemingly innocent, well-meaning, cheerful smiley-faced girl in fact proved to be a spectacularly squalid specimen of pathologically narcissistic duplicity.

But their response isn't just about sociopathy-shaming. In fact, the widely-shared anger has deeper, patently premodern roots. Though feminism and unisex gender-neutrality are now officially-sanctioned mainstream ideologies, it has proven more difficult to rewire the built-in human tendency to expect nurturance from females, and to see the absence of such a proclivity as a uniquely horrifying, even monstrous betrayal of nature. Particularly galling, it seems, are women who appear to be sweetly sympathetic "earth mother" types, but in fact prove to be bloodthirsty Kali-like demonesses in disguise. (Take a look at the message board at the end of this article to get a good indication of the rage occasioned by the Carter-Roy case, and ask yourself if the extent of the collectively expressed disgust doesn't stem from a shared gut-level conviction of gross, viscerally inhuman perfidy, akin to how we feel when we run across egregious cases of cannibalism, incest, and the like.)

As with Shakespeare's consummate villain Iago, Michelle Carter's motive for her depredations remains murky. One can reasonably speculate, however, that she simply got off on the thrill of causing the destruction of another person, and afterwards reveled in the attention of being widely seen as a grief-stricken "widow" of a poor lost soul. Nor, in her thirst for "drama," is she particularly unique among her sex, though admittedly she took things to an unusual extreme to achieve the narcotic-like buzz that accompanies the attainment of acclaim.

Andy Nowicki, assistant editor of Alternative Right, is the author of eight books, including Under the Nihil, The Columbine Pilgrim, Considering Suicide, and Beauty and the Least. He occasionally updates his blog when the spirit moves him to do so. Visit his Soundcloud page.

"YOU JUST HAVE TO DO IT!": THE CASE OF THE SUICIDE SEDUCER

Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy

by Andy Nowicki

There is a very odd scene in the celebrated Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma, in which the play's hero, the jolly, upbeat Curly, attempts to talk his antagonist, the surly, sullen Jud, into committing suicide.

Jud is a creep, to be sure: a menacing stalker, who is later revealed to be a murderer. Still, the song's humor – and it is funny – brings great discomfort when the viewer considers the inherent cruelty of the circumstance. It is even a little heartbreaking how Jud comes around so readily to Curly's point of view on how his death would really be the happiest outcome for everyone, including himself:

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SELF-HARM

Robin Williams in Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" (1996)

by Andy Nowicki

The materialist conception of reality posits as self-evident the non-existence of the human soul. To materialists, a living being is a meat puppet controlled by no hidden hand; it merely flops about pitifully on its arbitrarily-constructed stage, until such time when events conspire to cause its demise.

In the materialistic conception, a creature like man simply has no enduring imperative beyond a desperate—and ultimately futile- drive for self-preservation. Notions of an afterlife and an eternal destiny are simply delusions he has sold himself to give his paltry existence the illusion of meaning. The very complexity of his consciousness has, in fact, become his curse. The reality of death, meanwhile, can only strike terror into his heart, and he strains miserably to avoid it. Pain, too, is something he cannot abide, for pain is a reminder of his mortality. Pleasure, conversely, is the main distraction that he craves, but it is an ever-fleeting one, which brings increasingly diminishing returns, given the constantly obtruding reminders of his approaching extinction.

DOMINIQUE VENNER: HERO OR "COWARD"?

by Andy Nowicki

My faith teaches, or rather holds it as self-evident, as an outgrowth of natural law, that suicide is a sin. I understand and fully accept this tenet, and wouldn’t dream of dissenting from it, or from any other legitimate, duly-held Church doctrine.

VENNER'S BARE BODKIN

by Andy Nowicki

As a gesture, French ex-paratrooper, veteran right-wing activist, and all around macho badass Dominique Venner’s gunshot-through-the-head self-snuff in the cathedral of Notre Dame sends a powerful message, though I’m not entirely sure what that message is.

One reads Venner’s final words summarizing the rationale for his act, and he truly sounds like a man of sound mind, with a clear-headed notion of aesthetic intent regarding the ramifications of his messy, bloody, brain-splattering final exit at the altar of the historic Paris church. Still, it isn’t easy to discern just how news of an elderly comrade’s suicide is meant to rally the European New Right to fight mass immigration and demographic displacement with any greater determination or ferocity than before. News of a mentor’s auto-annihilation, after all, does not typically have the effect of firing up his pupils or inspiring them to risk their own lives for the cause. Suicide is not martyrdom; whatever we may think of self-slaughter, it cannot be conflated with self-sacrifice. One doesn’t give one’s life for a greater cause, at least not in any obvious way, by directly and deliberately ending it.

SUICIDE OF THE WEST

by Andy Nowicki

Dennis Mangan recently discussed a new study which claims that Middle Eastern suicide bombers are more sad sacks than wild-eyed fanatics, driven towards their explosive final act not by Allah-ardor but simple world-weariness and clinical depression.