In essays on this platform (e.g., Wokedom and the Problem of Lethal Altruism; “Assault Me, Motherfucker!” Suicidal Altruism and the Politics of Suicide Contagion), I have explored the problem of altruistic suicide using Émile Durkheim’s typology from his landmark 1897 work Suicide. Durkheim’s concept of altruistic suicide emphasizes the power of social integration over individual pathology. In the French sociologist’s framework, suicide is not primarily a psychological disorder but a product of social forces.
In this note, I suggest a connection between Durkheim’s conceptualization and individual psychology, highlighting variation in susceptibility to embracing such a role. This includes an observation about the mechanisms required to overcome the natural, evolutionarily ingrained proclivity for self-preservation.
I stress that I am only sketching a special theory—one that requires further elaboration, which I may pursue in the near future. In any case, such an explanation must be proposed in light of recent events in which individuals associated with moral panic over immigration control have martyred themselves. Those who celebrate the death of activists—while remaining passive in the face of citizen deaths at the hands of criminal aliens—must recognize their role in priming, as well as manufacturing, disordered personalities prepared to sacrifice their lives in service of narratives that seek to negate the rule of law in America, an expression of suicidal empathy (a term coined by Canadian psychologist Gaad Sad).
Durkheim defines suicide as encompassing “all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.” He stresses that it is intentional and observable, enabling a sociological analysis that transcends moral or psychological explanations.
As I have previously explained, altruistic suicide occurs when individuals are so deeply enmeshed in a collective or group cause that the group’s needs and values outweigh personal survival. Durkheim’s examples include soldiers sacrificing themselves in battle or members of religious communities engaging in ritual suicide, the latter often occurring without universal voluntarism, as we saw in the case of the Peoples Temple at Jonestown, Guyana, in November 1978.
I have suggested this framework to account for the actions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. In separate incidents weeks apart, they sacrificed themselves to protest the rule of law, elevating their status to that of martyrs. The core insight in Durkheim is that social forces shape the meaning of death, rendering self-sacrifice honorable or necessary. Good and Pretti illustrate this observation. Coupled with Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton’s “revolutionary suicide,” a political philosophy encouraging struggle against (supposed) oppressive systems despite the high risk of death, rather than submitting to conditions that cause despair (or “reactionary suicide”), one sees a more complete understanding of the phenomenon. Newton advocates dying for the “cause of liberation,” and it would appear that Newton’s calling lives in the modern Progressive movement.
However, when examining phenomena such as suicide bombings or efforts to obstruct the rule of law with an expectation of fatality, it strikes the rational person that ideology alone cannot compel everyone to act in such a manner. Even most true believers do not behave this way and likely struggle to understand why anyone would—even if they leverage the cases to advance the movement. It follows that some individuals are more susceptible or predisposed to extreme altruistic behavior due to preexisting traits, such as heightened suggestibility and impulsivity, which make them more receptive to narratives that glorify self-sacrifice. Newton’s calling recruits disordered personalities.
Accounting for such traits is perhaps essential because Durkheim’s framework does not explicitly address the natural historical baseline against self-annihilation—a trait present across mammals, the class to which humans belong. From an evolutionary perspective, organisms are wired for survival, so acts of suicide are exceptions that must overcome this innate instinct. This override can occur at a sociological level, as on the battlefield, or at the psychological level in cases of individual pathologies (e.g., depression). Thus, the phenomenon of sacrificing one’s life for political or religious movements may require a special theory. Here, the intersection of the sociological and the psychological draws susceptible individuals into roles involving self-harm that others would avoid due to self-preservation instincts. In other words, while ideology supplies the framework and justification for altruistic death, psychological predispositions determine who is most likely to internalize and act on it.
These predispositions often signal a disordered personality, especially in the cases that bring me to this note. As we have seen, woke progressivism is a unique gravitational force that draws disordered personalities into its orbit. And that force is itself the force of a disordered body. Indeed, as Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it in the wake of Donald Trump’s February 24 State of the Union address, “The difference today isn’t between right and left. It’s normal versus crazy.” We saw the craziness on display during Trump’s speech, when Democrats refused to acknowledge the victims of criminal alien violence; at the same time, Representative Norma Torres of California held up photos of Good and Pretti.
In this special theory, altruistic suicide emerges from the intersection of collective consciousness, over-integration, and disordered personalities. Social structures and ideology provide meaning and expectation, while individual susceptibility lowers the threshold for overriding the instinct for self-preservation. There is moreover an element of fatalistic suicide, another type identified by Durkheim, in which a person is subjected to excessive regulation and oppressive discipline, resulting in feelings of hopelessness and a sense that their future is blocked or strictly controlled. In the moral panic over Trump’s authoritarianism and the looming specter of fascism, this fatalism stems from a delusional worldview manufactured by progressive hegemony.
The interactionist perspective I am suggesting preserves Durkheim’s insight that social forces are central yet explains why only some individuals enact extreme self-sacrificial behavior, showing how collective and individual factors combine to produce acts such as we witnessed in the cases of Good and Pretti. Ideological narratives, social structures, and overly integrative groups create contexts in which self-sacrifice is valorized, while psychological traits—the desire for martyrdom, and escape from perceived oppressive circumstances—determine which individuals are primed to respond with extreme action. Understanding the phenomenon of progressive martyrdom through this lens enables a more nuanced analysis.
Theorizing the dynamic interplay between collective meaning and individual predisposition allows the observer to grasp that both social and psychological forces are necessary to explain why some people take the ultimate step of sacrificing their lives for a cause. However, even without a detailed theory, the observed pattern that demands such an explanation already condemns those who either exploit disordered personalities or manufacture them for political ends.
freedom and reason 