I often see quotes from people like Fred Hampton about how they’d willingly die for the people. Or engage with Huey Netwon’s concept of reactionary and revolutionary suicide, or see how people like Daisuke Namba looked death in the eye and readily accepted it. And I really just…don’t get how they did it
I…I’m a coward. I know it. I don’t say it to myself enough and I don’t work on it like I should. But still, I can’t conceive not fearing death.
To start I dont want to fear. I don’t like the paralyzing sensation, the absolute inability for me to do something. When I was…more depressed than I am now, I often contemplated (i guess if im being honest, reactionary suicide). And what stopped me was not only my connection to society, but also just being afraid, afraid of what might come next. Is it nothing? Is it reincarnation? Am i eternally damned to some hell? What would even be the good option? I feel like a coward every time I sit down and contemplate that I didnt do it. And then I feel like more of a coward for wanting to take the easy way out. Nowadays it’s not that I want to die…its just that I wish I was never born in the first place.
But moving on. It’s not just fear of the unknown. I don’t want to hurt people. Not just people. Everytime I think about it, I imagine my cats wondering where I’ve gone, why they can’t see me anymore. Why I abandoned them. I wonder about my mom, about my family, what they’d think. Especially if I ended things myself. Would they hate me? Would they hate themselves? I don’t think they even know the extent of how I feel.
It’s basically every night now that I think about it. I think “what if this was it. What if I died now? What if I went to sleep and never woke up?” And I feel immensely scared. There’s so much I wish to do, wish to learn, places I wish to go. I feel like a failure for being so insulated, that if I died now that I wouldn’t have changed the world in my years of existence.
I’ve been watching 人民的名义 recently, and in one episode a charecter went over the details of his life in the sino-japanese war, about how he joined the CPC to carry explosives and use them against the Japanese. And I sat there watching and asking if I would do it. Would I have carried explosives under fire to destroy Japanese pill boxes or joined the Guomindang’s Dare to Die corps against the Qing? And honestly I couldn’t definitively say yes. I understand the inevitability of death, I understand that one day I will die. But I don’t understand how I accept it.
If you’ve read this, thanks for letting be honest. I know there’s more to the world than just me. But I don’t know how to tell my brain that…
I live and breath the revolutionary catechism, which might be a good read to understand your own feelings through something of a complete opposite of how you feel.
But it’s also important that there exist ordinary, self-preserving people. Those are the ones the revolutionaries seek to protect and draw their passion from. The same way you think of your mother in case you die, she might feel similar to you. To each person who is still socially connected there are other people who matter. And those, either in concrete relations (like somebody’s child) or abstract social understanding (the set of all children in a community) are what usually leads people to be willing to die.
Another important point is to consider how dire the situations are for the revolutionaries you mentioned. Imagine a genocidal imperialist country is invading your homeland, knowing full well that survival would mean slavery, exploitation, torture and all that happened in, for example, the Japanese invasion of China. In those conditions choosing death may not only seem preferable, but also just accelerating the same outcome in case of defeat.
CW: suicide
Don’t be ashamed of fearing death, nor of “failing” at suicide. Most people with healthy connections with society fear their own deaths or that of their loved ones, and the number of people who actually die by suicide is orders of magnitude lower than those of people with ideation.
Wishing not to live is quite normal in this broken world, and choosing to live anyway is going against the current. Industrial scale suicide is part of current day capitalism. You don’t need to be one of Nechayev’s “doomed men” revolutionaries to be a good marxist.