Greece’s suicide rate, occupy Wall Street, and you

For the first half of this year Greece has seen a 40 percent increase in the suicide rate compared to the same time last year.  The sharp increase may seem intuitive or inevitable to many people but to me it seems like the most absurd waste.  Life it seems has a price as the Greek economy dissolves and individuals throughout their society are touched some, many by any standard, are choosing to kill themselves.  Individuals are losing hope.  Hope cannot be appropriately placed in something such as an economy or one’s hope for a bit of an economy; hope can only be securely placed in God.

                The disordered lives of individuals are, perhaps inevitably, becoming lethal.  If one places their relationship with God fully out of mind, even if one robotically attends mass once a week, and their relationship with material goods is perpetually at the fore life in Greece becomes unbearable.  The fact that for many these suicidal tendencies do not suggest the need for a reevaluation of one’s priorities but a dirt nap is incredible.  That is the intellectual thing to do though is it not?  Socrates can’t complain can he?  The Socratic precedent has simply become the way Greeks deal with hardship and the Greek government. 

                They feel hopeless in spite of their own “occupy Athens” protests.  Why?  What lessons can we draw in answer to our own “occupy fill in the blank” which sprouted from the “occupy Wall Street” protest?

                Protesters see themselves as the ninety-nine percent who have not been bailed out by the nanny state.  The nanny state was described by Noam Chomsky in his book “Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World” which postulates American capitalism being a sham propped up by the Federal government.   The book is a transcription of a talk delivered at Harvard University, April 13, 1996.  The talk obviously predates the Obama administration’s stimulus and bailouts this talk exposes a pattern of bailouts of all of the nation’s banks and elite corporations overtime.  It seems virtually no industry or bank has felt real economic forces without the safety of the nanny state to bail them out.  Our present situation is not a new problem but an exacerbation of the status quo.

                What the protesters seem most generally to be asking for is their cut in what the “one percent” enjoy.  Greece has actually experienced what this looks like having had such a bloated civil government that it found that level of government involvement; though job inducing, totally unsustainable.  So the idea that the answer is to increase the umbrella of the nanny state to involve every citizen of the United States of America has proven misguided.

                Some say that the nanny state umbrella should be removed entirely, seemingly embodied by “The Tea Party” at the other end of the spectrum.  I recall seeing a bumper sticker which exclaimed, “More Freedom!”  My thought about the bumper stickers sentiment was, “Boy that would take a lot more personal responsibility than America can muster at the moment.”

In order to eliminate external control internal control must make it redundant.  Internal control is absent without a well formed conscience which we choose to follow.  The following excerpt is from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

ARTICLE 6 - MORAL CONSCIENCE

1776 "Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment.... For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God.... His conscience is man's most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths."[47]

.               Moral conscience makes the laws of government redundant; but without individual citizens with well formed consciences the call to dramatically increase or decrease the role of government simply becomes a call to fascism.  We can see this illustrated by thinking of George Orwell’s “1984” on one end of the spectrum and Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” on the other.  Neither ideology is free of a fascist trajectory.  The key becomes internal control and conscience.

                As the individual engages with the conscience and builds the discipline to act out of the conscience the actual end becomes clear; the end must be engaging with God.  The search for truth will eventually lead us to the ultimate truth, the search for love leads us to the ultimate love, the search for hope leads us to the ultimate hope; hope in Jesus Christ.

                So hope must not be placed in currencies and their zones or what these currencies promise to purchase for what they ultimately purchase is disappointment.  This disappointment may lead to soaring suicide rates as is Greece but the remedy awaits our understanding in the person of Jesus Christ.