Why is suicide illegal? Because it’s a crime to destroy government property (har har)?. I’ve heard that the truth is that it gives first respondents a pretext to enact drastic measures to save your life. Under normal circumstances, people have the right to refuse medical care.

From the perspective of third parties, suicide is clearly a bad thing – a get out of jail free card when other people want you to keep playing. But how do you block the dam at the source? How do you stop people from doing it?

You’ve got to persuade them that death is no escape. Here are some methods that have been tried:

1. In the West Indies under Spanish occupation (as recorded by Girolamo Benzoni), vast numbers of men committed suicide by jumping from cliffs or by killing each other. He adds that, out of the two million original inhabitants of Haiti, fewer than 150 survived as a result of the suicides and slaughter (a number that’s hard to believe). In the end the Spaniards, seeing their labor pool dwindle, put a stop to the epidemic of suicides by persuading the Indians that they, too, would kill themselves, and would follow them into the afterlife to inflict fresh tortures. “Kill yourselves, and we’ll be there holding open the gate.”

2. In the Spanish American War, the Moros would strip naked, bind their penises and testicles with green strips of cow hide, and soak the cow hide in salt water, causing it to shrink around their genitals, causing tremendous pain. They were in such agony that they’d attack the enemy in a blind fury and feel nothing, not even a shot to the heart (apparently this is the reason the Americans switched from .38s to .45s, which is not the only time small penises and big guns have gone together, but I go off-piste). The eventual solution to these suicide attacks was to capture the Moros alive, wrap them in a pig skin, bury them up to the neck, and leave them to die. From their perspective, pork meant eternal damnation. When the Americans starting doing this, the situation rapidly returned to normal.

Is there a secular method to deter suicide? Maybe. You’d have to start out with kids, and school them the right way.

“Killing yourself? No. Doesn’t work. The universe always knows. Here’s what happens: you black out from the pills, the bloodied knife falls from your hands, you feel the galvanic surge of the train passing over and through you…and then you wake up, alive and unhurt. The kettle’s boiling. It’s time to go to school, or go to work, or go to nowhere at all. You haven’t escaped. The bottomless abyss just drops you back in other the top. I’ve tried doing it over and over. So have we all. There’s no getting out of here, and we just have to live through it.”

Wouldn’t they have heard of successful suicide victims on the news? People who apparently did what a guy on PUAHate once described to me as “manually stop breathing”?

Maybe you can explain to your kids about how time has a subjective element. For some, it’s a tumbling waterfall. For others, it’s a trickling brook. Maybe for suicide victims, it has the consistency of pitch at room temperature – apparently solid, yet flowing over the course of millions of years. As you kill yourself, your brain captures a moment, and holds it in Zeno’s paradox of increasingly smaller intervals, stretching out eternally.

People who get run over by a train? They’re still under the train.

There’s ways to make suicide seem far less attractive. It involves lying, but maybe suicide victims themselves are already deceiving themselves by imagining an escape route anywhere.

From theoretical genetics comes the idea of a “green beard” gene, which a) gives you some clear physical sign of its presence (canonically, a green beard), and b) modifies your behavior so that you’re nice to people with that physical trait. And by “nice”, we’re talking about altruism: you do things to benefit them even when there’s no benefit to yourself.

The trouble is that such a gene would have an Achilles heel: genetic freeloaders. Suppose a mutation appeared that gave you a green beard but DIDN’T affect your behavior. You’d gain the benefits of the green beard gene (green bearders would be nice to you), but wouldn’t have to pay any costs. Such a mutation would theoretically outcompete the legitimate green beard gene until the value of green beards was destroyed.

Or would it? Did cubic zirconia destroy the value of diamonds? The presence of fakers doesn’t seem to render authentic items worthless – or if it does, it does so in an arbitrary and unclear way. Certain moths have evolved the yellow and black banding of wasps (freeloading off the wasps’ “I am poisonous” heraldry)…but flying insects with yellow and black banding are still scary. It seems that there’s a delicate equilibrium between reals and fakes that can exist without tipping one way or another. After all, it benefits the fake green beard gene for there still to be some social cachet to a green beard.

None of these genes are known to exist. But there are cultural, information-based green beards.

Gang tattoos, for one. Items of religious faith (such as a cross, or a hijab), for another. These are props that signal to other gang members or believers “I am part of the in-group. Favour me.” According to the fake green beard principle, you’d expect to see lots of “fake green memes” – people who wear a cross and reap the benefits, but don’t bother going to church or paying any other price for their faith. And sure, you could put guys like Tim Lambesis in that category.

But at the same time, fake Christians aren’t wildly outcompeting true Christians. Generally people who wear crosses do go to church, and do believe. Obviously, there are limits to how far this sort of memetic fakery can reach.

Maybe this is why so many religions insist on public, costly shows of faith – to help keep the flock pure of non-altruistic green beard fakes. And maybe this explains why so many religious rites seem bizarre and strange to outsiders – they’re that way by design. Why would you insist someone do something sensible to show his faith? It’d be like a college fraternity where joining requires that you change your car’s oil, brush your teeth, and call your mom every week.

This could explain things like the Grishneshwar Temple Baby Toss, where newborns are flung from a tower to a canopy 50 feet below. No way would a fake green beard do that. Rituals like this are sieves, meant to separate the sheep from the goats, and the costlier and more dangerous, the better. Remember, fake believers water down the purity of the religion. You cannot allow freeloaders to benefit from the in-group’s altruism. And it’s ironic that this green beard memetic behavior is actually damaging its subjects at the genetic level.

This is probably Dickie Dawkins’ big contribution to the philosophy of biology: recognising that humans aren’t just a canvas for recombinant DNA, but also a canvas for information-based replicators of all kinds. DNA isn’t the only way to play this game, we have other things trying to spread themselves via our bodies – and sometimes they can even override the power of genes.

Catholic priests are celibate – a drastic act of faith that takes your reproductive fitness down to a number closely resembling “zero”. Why? To prove the seriousness of their beliefs. That seems odd to outsiders: killing off your genetic strain for the sake of making a point. But I wonder what sorts of green beard memes are currently infesting your mind.

Gregory Cochran is what you’d call a “hyphen man.” Formerly a physicist, now an anthropologist, with ancillary interests in various other topics, it is said that if you speak a falsehood to a mirror three times, Greg will appear in the reflection and yell at you.

I’ve collected some of his quippage.

[Innumerable uses] “You’re wrong.”

“When you think about it, falsehoods, stupid crap, make the best group identifiers, because anyone might agree with you when you’re obviously right. Signing up to clear nonsense is a better test of group loyalty. A true friend is with you when you’re wrong. Ideally, not just wrong, but barking mad, rolling around in your own vomit wrong. Movement conservatives have learned this lesson well.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/megafaunal-extinctions/

“Ron Unz explains that his model took no more than five minutes to produce. I believe him.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/hamilton-rules-ok/

[On the origin of homosexuality] “The Emmdees say that when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. When explaining homosexuality, people think of pterodactyls and unicorns.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/homosexuality-epigenetics-and-zebras/

[On the existence of the Kinsey Scale] That would make exactly as much sense as a bell curve of food preferences ranging from steak at the left to granite at the right, in which people in the middle liked steak and rocks equally well. Is an even split between a behavior that works and one that never does what you expect from biology? Do you expect half the geese to fly north for the winter?
http://www.unz.com/pfrost/origins-of-male-homosexuality-germ/

“Homosexual men are nature’s Petri dishes”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/recantation/

[On Iraq] “There are now a number of talkative idiots saying that Bush has made a mess of Iraq…I compare this to someone who has had a bad sexual experience with a porcupine and is now trying to decide just where he went wrong. Should he have used Brylcreem on the quills? Should he have sent flowers? Did he ‘come on too strong’?”
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail309.html

“There is no threat out there that can be usefully addressed by a larger ground army. In fact, there’s not much of a short-term threat out there at all. Except the threat from within: crazy people. That one is serious, as always.”

[Later] Many of you seem to think that invading a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 was a reasonable response, just as we always attacked the Navaho or the Cheyenne in response to Comanche attacks. Ah, but we didn’t, because that would have been pointless and incredibly stupid. Nor did we talk as if the redskins were the coming threat to Western Civilization, even though jihadists are actually relatively weaker than Sitting Bull was. […] If accuracy or making sense mattered, I can think of a a few hundred pundits who would be cleaning septic tanks right now.”
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/08/wheres_snow_whi.html

“…if Iraq had been about 50 times cheaper, in terms of money and casualties and reputation, I could maybe see someone reasonable arguing that it wasn’t a mistake, or at least wasn’t the stupidest thing this country has ever done. But it wasn’t 50 times cheaper.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/a-god-damned-hippie/

[On the Chelyabinsk meteoroid] “If this meteor had exploded at a lower altitude, it would have smashed that city flat and killed hundreds of thousands of people. How likely that was depends on the details—most meteors are not strong enough to hold together during that kind of re-entry, although some nickel-iron meteors may be. The Tunguska explosion would have utterly destroyed any city it hit. It’s not quite as bad as a nuclear weapon: It would only kill you with fire and blast, rather than fire, blast, and radiation. You’d only die twice—Sean Connery might survive.”
http://takimag.com/article/paranoid_about_asteroids_gregory_cochran

“What’s Arcturus really like? The real Arcturus, not the touristy parts?”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/charade/