Society Dies

It's true. I've seen it happen. To be more precise, I've seen society commit suicide. Like a suicide bomber, killing everything and everyone in the immediate vicinity as well.

I had this friend, Alex. We were like best buddies, especially when he moved into a house not even a quarter mile removed from my own. Alex was a man who could do anything with his hands, so he helped me redecorate my attic, the one I'm sitting in right now. We transformed my attic into the proverbial man-cave with two high-end PC's on either side of the room making possible many a night of deathmatch, RPG and racing multiplay gaming. On the wall in between the PC we hung a dartboard and in the corner we placed a small refrigerator to hold the necessary amounts of beer. Every weekend Alex was at my house, and we played, drunk beer and smoked joints, usually until he passed out on the comfy chair or the couch at around 4 or 5 A.M. When my other friends came over as well, we played darts, got drunk and high to the point we couldn't even hit the board anymore, let alone score 100+ points.

The thing about Alex was that he didn't have any restraints; he literally kept drinking and smoking until he fell asleep. Me and my friends often joked about how his car was always full of empty beer-cans, but we also warned him that this wasn't right, that he would certainly have a fatal accident if he wouldn't stop drinking while driving. Or that he would have his license revoked the next time he got caught while driving under influence. We actually were hoping at one point that his license would be revoked, so he would be forced to take taxi's or the bus. It never came that far, unfortunately.

A couple of years, 4 or 5, before he died, Alex had to leave the house near mine, because he fell behind on the mortgage payments, and he moved to a flat in the part of the city where I grew up. No more drunken weekends in my attic. The second PC became my girlfriend's PC, and the dartboard was mainly used by myself alone, save the occasional visit from my other friends. And the day I got my own drivers license, admittedly very late in life, I stopped drinking alcohol, so the refrigerator ended up in the garbage pile at some point. Alex and me still kept in contact, but the intensity was gone. Alex did however hold on to his lifestyle, this attitude that there's no tomorrow and of not caring for himself. Me and my other friends didn't notice this enough at the time, we even praised him for being the "ultimate party animal," and that he was. He also had this great sense of humor and would always make us, and whatever company we were in, laugh.

Even with this lifestyle, Alex never skipped a day of working. He was one of the friends I've written about before, who went from The Netherlands to Denmark on Monday to work at a meat factory, and returned home on Friday; I've used this as an example of how completely inefficient and irrational our economy is. Pigs from Dutch farms get cut in half in The Netherlands, the meat and the workers then get transported to Denmark to cut the meat in smaller pieces, which then get transported to Poland to be packaged, and finally get distributed to the supermarkets, some of which are in The Netherlands; super inefficient, but super good for the economies and labor-markets of all countries involved, but super bad for the environment. But Alex was always present, almost never called in sick and he fortunately didn't drive the van to Denmark...

Then one day we got informed that Alex had passed away. Not in a car accident like we'd always feared. No, Alex had committed suicide. He jumped to his death from the flat-apartment he rented in my childhood neighborhood. His funeral was grand, with hundreds of people attending and strangely, that was the first time ever that I met his parents. Well, his mother at least, because she had remarried. I knew none of this. You see, Alex was the latest addition to a core group of friends, the rest of whom had grown up together, came from the same neighborhood. I learned on that day that Alex's father had also committed suicide, and the Alex had a difficult relationship with his father. His mother lamented that maybe Alex had this lifestyle not caring about himself, living like there's no tomorrow, because he never had the chance to set things straight with his father, and that he was robbed to ever have that chance the moment his father took his own life.

As his best friends, we often talked about Alex, and how it was possible to be so close to someone but still be blind to the inner problems he obviously had carried with him all this time. I personally felt a sense of guilt, and I sometimes still do, for not recognizing that Alex's lifestyle was intentionally suicidal, that he lived the way he did because he just didn't care about what could happen to him. I got angry at one of my other friends when she suggested that "at least he lived the life he wanted to live and ended it on his own conditions," or words to that affect. As if it was a choice he had freely made. Damn it. Damn that blind belief in the freedom of choice.

I've seen Alex, one of my best friends, live like there's no tomorrow. I've seen how he just didn't care about much, not even his own life, while partying as if it was his last day every weekend. And in Alex I see society as a whole. We're Alex, and Alex was us. We live in a society that just doesn't care. Like I was ignorant about Alex's troubled past, society tries to cover up its troubled past. We like to see our own history as the series of parties and trouble-free weekends with Alex. Like Alex, we look away from the truth of the dangers of our collective lifestyle. There's no tomorrow, which is apparent in climate change denial and equating Covid-19 with a mere flew. There's no past, apparent in the movement against Critical Race Theory, the whitewashing of black heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. and the refusal of confronting students with the true history of genocides and slavery on which we've built much of our current wealth.

We don't care about truth, aren't even willing to discuss what truth is, as our political and intellectual leaders get away with spreading untruths without repercussion. Jordan Peterson is allowed to garner a following of millions while denying the truth of climate change and gender-fluidity. The center-left gets to spread lies about how inflation is just temporary and how identity politics is more important than class consciousness. Empirical truths don't matter, only our own. Facts don't matter, as we have "alternative facts" as well. The moment we, as a society, stopped caring about truth, the truth about our lifes, our history and the planet we live on, and when we placed the health of a completely irrational and inefficient economy above our own health, we stopped caring about what will happen to us. Our western society is Alex, on its way to jump off a ledge because it's hurting and doesn't care anymore. We live in a post-truth society, which could be the same as a pre-suicide society...

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