Suicide TV: Turn on and Tune in

Welcome to the Carnival of Self-Destruction

Modern life really has become a carnival of self-destruction. The question is, why are so many people, young and old, acting in wildly self-destructive ways? In many cases, such as obesity, it derives from a lack of self-discipline compounded by genetic susceptibility. In other words, over the millennia the human body has evolved to fit its environment like all other life but just over the past 100 years we have gone from existing in a natural environment to an artificial one where we can much more easily acquire in abundance all the things we crave on a biological level.

Weak minds are easily influenced by the power of suggestion, especially when it originates from formative authorities such as the mass media. This is why the American public, and increasingly the rest of the developed world too, is witnessing an unprecedented pandemic of obesity. Biological predilections coupled with high levels of mental suggestibility are a deadly combination.

We have the benefit of our intelligent human mind to override instinctive impulses when they become self-destructive. Yet in the majority of cases, whether due to habit, lack of self-control, or other reasons, the override is not occurring. Over thousands of years our human bodies have evolved to survive with a minimal subsistence lifestyle in a natural environment, yet now due to our own collective technological success we've advanced to the point where our own artificial environment presents us with a drastically different situation.

Despite our technological achievements we have not overcome the primal rules of natural selection and we are all forced to adapt or perish! It's clear amid a pandemic of lifestyle diseases, everything from obesity and diabetes to self-destructive behavior patterns, boredom, sloth, and drug abuse, that a large proportion of the human species is simply unable to adapt to our new environment; or at least to adapt fast enough! Indeed, the human species has engineered its own extinction event. Eventually the environmental pressure will create a new species to replace Homo sapiens.

Even the rampant employment of technology in the effort to alleviate these problems, stemming from the very fabric of the human organism, have by and large failed to solve them, and in many cases made them worse through unintended consequences. For example, antibiotics are becoming less effective through over-use as disease organisms evolve resistance, and anti-impotence drugs are abused in parties leading to explosions of sexually transmitted disease (STDs).

Who will protect me from unhealthy desire?

We live in an age of anomie and turmoil, where technological advances collide with the archaic aspects of human nature. We have the internal power to adapt and overcome, to act with wisdom and forethought and not to simply react with impulse and lack of self-control.

One way or another a new human species will emerge that's capable of resisting ancient impulses while possessing the intellectual stamina and self-discipline to live a healthy life of moderation, tuning out destructive influences from the lowest-common-denominator of mass media and elsewhere.

The choice we face today is suicide or struggle. Which one will you take? Or perhaps the better question is: which one can you take?