It seems that the young pilot Andreas
Lubitz who hurled himself and the airplane, packed with innocent people against
the rocks of a mountain, concealed the medical certification of depressive
pathology from his employer, Lufthansa. This is bad of course, but totally
understandable: turbo-capitalism does not like workers who go on leave for
health reasons and most of all it dislikes references to depression.
Depressed, me? Don’t even mention it.
I feel fine, I’m perfectly efficient, happy, dynamic, energetic, and most of
all competitive. I go jogging every morning and I’m available for over time. It
is the philosophy of the low cost airlines, you know? And the philosophy of the
perfectly deregulated economy where everybody is demanded to give ceaselessly the
best, in order to survive.
After this suicidal mass murder air
companies are invited to double-check the psychological conditions of the
workers. Pilots should not be maniac, depressed, melancholic or panic-prone.
And what about bus drivers and policemen, steel workers, and school teachers?
Everybody will be subjected to psychological screening in order to detect and
expel from the labor market those who suffer from depression.
Good idea indeed, except that the
absolute majority of the contemporary population should be put on leave. It’s
easy to target those who are officially labeled as psychopaths, but what of all
those people who suffer from unhappiness, try to keep calm but might fly into a
rage in dangerous situations? Hard to distinguish between unhappiness and
looming aggressive depression, and the proportion of people who suffer from
despair is growing and growing. The frequency of psychopathology has been on
the rise in the last few decades, and according to the World Health
Organisation, the suicide rate has increased by 60% in the last four decades,
and is dangerously high among the youngsters.
What in the last four decades has
been pushing people to run and willingly embrace the black dog? There is a
relationship between this incredible surge in suicidal propensity, and the
triumph of neoliberal coercion to compete. And also between the spread of
psychic frailty and the loneliness of a generation that is meeting people only
through a connected screen.
For every person who succeeds in
committing suicide there are twenty people who unsuccessfully try to kill
themselves. We must acknowledge that a sort of epidemic of suicide is underway
on the planet earth.
Here possibly lies the deep
explication of some appalling phenomena of our time that we tend to read in
political terms, but cannot be fully realised through the political lens.
Contemporary terrorism should be interpreted first of all as the spreading of a
penchant for self-suppression. I know that the shaheed (suicidal terrorist) is
apparently acting for political, ideological or religious motivations. But this
is only the rhetorical surface. The inmost motivation of suicide is always
despair, humiliation and misery. He or she who decide to destroy their own life
is someone who is experiencing life as an unbearable load, and sees death as
the only way out, and in murder the only vengeance against those who have
deceived, humiliated and insulted her/him.
The most likely cause of the surge in
suicide and particularly in murderous suicide is the transformation of social
life into a factory of unhappiness of which it appears impossible to escape.
The decree to be a winner, compared with the consciousness that winning is
impossible, means that the only way to win (at least for a moment) is destroying
other’s lives then committing suicide.
Andreas Lubitz has sealed himself in that gory
cockpit because his suffering was intolerable to him, and because he blamed his
colleagues and the passengers and all the human beings of the planet as guilty
of his suffering. He did what he did because he could not get rid of the
unhappiness that has been devouring contemporary mankind since advertising
began bombing the social brain with mandatory cheerfulness, and digital
loneliness has been multiplying the nervous stimulation and encasing the bodies
in the cage of the screen, and financial capitalism has been forcing everybody
to work more and more time for the miserable salary of precariousness.
Labels: Andreas Lubitz, depression, despair, digital loneliness capitalism, financial, franco biffo berardi, germanwings crash, neoliberalism, precariousness, suicide, turbo-capitalism, unhappiness, verso books blog