4
his
themselves off of a New York City roof hand in hand, the investor who
poured flammable liquid on himself and lit a match.4 But these were
exceptions, not the rule. Once the Depression hit its stride in 1930, '31,
'32 and '33, however, the number of suicides skyrocketed. In 1932
alone, it tripled.5 The men and women who killed themselves
contributed very little to their own survival or that of their closest
relatives.
Back in 1897, the seminal French sociologist Emile Durkheim
compiled a set of statistics that demonstrated the rise of self-inflicted
deaths after the market crashes of 1873 and 1882, and coined the term
"altruistic suicide." Durkheim seemed to sense that beneath the
surface, the suicide was destroying himself to rid the wider social
group of a burden.6 Sociologist and ethnologist Marcel Mauss, a
relative and follower of Durkheim, was even more specific. He noted
an occasional "violent negation of the instinct for self preservation by
the social instinct...."7
If our actions are geared to increasing the odds that our personal
genes or those of our near relatives will make it into the next
generation, what is the reason for suicide's existence?
And what about the other bits of death-in-life built into the
human psyche? Why do humans get depressed? Why do they
sometimes feel like crawling off into a corner and dying? There is an
answer but it doesn't quite square with the notion of genes fighting for
themselves no matter what. We are parts of a larger organism and
occasionally find ourselves expendable in its interests.
This idea is not very fashionable at the moment. Evolutionists,
myself included, believe that competition is vital to the creation of new
species. The beast with the bigger brain, the sharper claw, or the
cleverer way of building a nest outdoes his or her clumsier rival and
has more children. His offspring inherit his advantageous cranial
capacity, natural weaponry, or architectural skill and in turn have
plentiful broods of their own. Within a few hundred thousand
firm's chief product, the two stock speculators who flung
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