Remember that scene from Conan the Barbarian (1982), in which the cult leader Thulsa Doom (played by James Earl Jones), portrayed as a charismatic figure with absolute power over his followers, silently gestures to one of his female devotees, who immediately steps off a cliff to her death without hesitation?
The moment powerfully illustrates the extent of his control and the total devotion of the cult members. It is a cinematic example of what French sociologist Émile Durkheim described as altruistic suicide, where an individual’s identity and will are completely absorbed by the group, and death is embraced as an act of loyalty, obedience, or sacrifice rather than personal despair.
I want to leave a sociological note here to emphasize the horror of what Democrats are doing in seducing true believers into putting their lives at risk by interfering with law enforcement.
For Durkheim, suicide is any death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim, which the victim knows may produce that result. He includes not only a woman who explicitly takes her own life, but also a woman who knowingly places herself in circumstances where death is a likely outcome. The latter case is also suicide.
For example, when a woman interfering with ongoing law enforcement operations is told by authorities to get out of her vehicle, but instead backs up, points it at a police officer, and steps on the gas, she does so with the knowledge that her actions are likely to provoke a police response that may result in her death.
It’s like when a man who wants to die points a gun at a police officer. Even if he does not intend to shoot the officer, he knows that pointing the gun at him will likely result in the officer shooting him in self-defense. He will have committed suicide as surely as if he had put his own gun to his head. (Bonus: the BLM cult can claim that systemic racism killed another black man.) (See Suicide by Cop and Victim-Precipitated Homicide; Death by Cop Redux: Trying to Save the Narrative in the Era of Trump.)
Perhaps the man who provoked the police into shooting him is suffering from one of the other types of suicide Durkheim identified. The pertinent one in the Minneapolis case is altruistic suicide, which occurs, as depicted in the scene from Conan, when an individual is excessively integrated into a social group and places the group’s interests above her own life. Conan is fantasy, to be sure, but altruistic suicide is a very real phenomenon.
According to Durkheim, in such contexts, personal identity is absorbed by collective duties, expectations, and values, such that the individual feels morally obligated to die for the group. We see this not only in this case, but in a video dropped yesterday where a woman is begging ICE officers to shoot her. She does this for moral reasons, which she states explicitly.
This is the psychology of martyrdom, which is then used by political or religious movements (and woke progressivism is both) to advance the cause. We see this in Islam, and it helps us understand why the progressive left allies with Islamism in the Red-Green movement. The woke see in Islam the collectivist totality they desperately want to control their lives.
Erich Fromm characterized this phenomenon as the “escape from freedom.” It’s a core feature of the authoritarian personality. People feel lost in an open society where they are expected to chart their own path through life as autonomous persons; so they seek the warm comfort of collectivism (as the mayor of New York City would have it). They want an authority to tell them what to do so they don’t have to think about it. They stop thinking for themselves and obey the commands of the group.
The abandonment of autonomy and reason, which in itself appears a pitiful choice, is sublimated as a greater cause beyond the individual. Ideology gives freedom’s escape transcendent meaning and purpose. From this standpoint, suicide is not seen as a personal tragedy but as an honorable or necessary act, one tied to strong norms of duty, loyalty, or sacrifice. Thus, the escapee wraps about herself the cloak of nobility and moral superiority. This is why virtue signalling is so highly prized among woke progressives—and why those external to the tribe are depicted as evil.
There are many historical examples of this across time and space: ritual suicides, soldiers who die willingly for their country, or, as in the case of Renee Good, individuals who sacrifice themselves to uphold pathological subcultural ideals, such as the notion of social justice.
Durkheim argued that this type of suicide results from too much social integration, where individual autonomy is minimal and social pressure to conform is overwhelming. Erich Fromm roots this phenomenon in a personality type that prepares some individuals to lose themselves in the mob—not in a situational sense (most of us are frighteningly susceptible to this), but as a way of life. Eric Hoffer calls this type the “true believer.” Look at the left today. A synthesis of these views completely describes them.
Woke progressivism has indeed become a cult. There are several signs of this, such as in the irrational religious-like gibberish we see in critical race theory, queer theory, etc. As if that weren’t dark enough, members of the Democratic Party groom emotionally weak individuals whose strength of autonomy is such that they are easily absorbed into the group, and have them behave as zombies for a cause they have convinced them is worthy of sacrificing their lives. Many true believers are manufactured in the assembly lines of public schools, including colleges and universities. As adults, the Party uses the finished commodities as weapons of political warfare.
At this stage in the development of the machine, millions have been ensnared in a mass psychogenic illness with increasing probability that some of them will put themselves in situations that are likely to result in death, which the Democratic Party exploits as propaganda to push its project of managed decline of the American Republic. The more the true believers put themselves in harm’s way, the more instances Party leaders can use as proof of the authoritarianism and violence they project onto the defenders of the American Republic, those who promote the wicked doctrine of rugged individualism.
Altruistic suicide is not the only pathology associated with the Democratic Party’s political method. We see a similar pathology with the Party’s advocacy of so-called gender affirming care, which destroys the lives of emotionally dysregulated and psychologically vulnerable youth, a destruction they invert as “trans joy.” We see another among inner-city blacks who have been idled and made dependent on welfare. Indeed, the high death rate associated with gang violence is characteristic of altruistic suicide, with a healthy dose of another type of suicide Durkheim identified, namely fatalism.
freedom and reason 