Suicide Note
Mitchell Heisman
Language: English
Pages: 1217
ISBN: 2:00238249
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Mitchell Heisman, the man who shot himself September 18, 2010 in Harvard Yard, killed himself as ”Experimental Elimination of Self-Preservation,” according to an extensive suicide note he has published online. The note, found at the domain http://www.suicidenote.info/ , is over 1,905 pages long, and divided into complicated subsections. In its totality, the document sketches Heisman’s dense, heavily-cited social, political, and ethical philosophy, and promotes his book, heretofore unpublished. Heisman worked in several bookstores throughout the area, and consulted with Harvard professors in the process of writing the document.
Most arresting of all: the note — tome, really — is probing, deeply researched, and often humorous. Heisman personality and erudition shine through every page, as he traces the philosophical steps that have led him to suicide: not really desperation or depression, but rather, intellectual curiosity, and a desire to test the limits of the unknown. After a quick read, comparisons to Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” abound. All the more sad that such a deeply intelligent young man would choose to cut his scholarly output off at one, interesting book.
Christianity’s relationship to modern values. Christianity, he claimed, was a slave morality, and modern egalitarianism rests upon the underlying victory of value revolution Christianity initiated. Yet the secularization thesis is not an exclusively elitist insight. As popular historian Thomas Cahill put it in The Gift of the Jews, “There is no way that it could ever have been ‘self-evident that all men are created equal’ without the intervention of the Jews.”229 No matter which way one looks
Nathaniel Curzon. Biographer Kenneth Rose observed, “Curzon’s pride in his Norman ancestry sometimes aroused the envy, not to say the malice, of his enemies.”463 The malice directed at surviving lineages of the English caste system probably influenced his decision to marry the daughter of a Chicago millionaire. Did internal “class” war or civil war help disintegrate the original “class” basis of the British Empire from within? Understanding the malice directed at Curzon is a key to understanding
of native ethnic self-preservation. Because assimilation to the Conquest was partially successful, and they could not fully separate themselves from their conquerors, the Anglo-Saxons were partially overthrowing themselves in revolution. Because the Norman graft was partially successful, the full realization of the principles of the revolution was partially an Anglo-Saxon self-conquest. The final Anglo-Saxon conquest in the American Civil War was also a kind of self-conquest. Somehow, in finally
collective unconscious. Richard Wagner, writing about 1850, told his audience: be brave enough to deny our intellect...Ye err when ye seek the revolutionary force in consciousness and would fain operate through the intellect. Not ye will bring the new to pass but the Volk which deals unconsciously and, for that very reason, from a Nature-instinct....The Volk has ever been the only true inventor; the unit cannot invent....The artisthood of the future [must rest] on the principle of
nineteenth century, German biologist Oscar Schmidt concluded, “The principle of evolution is certainly the abolition of the principle of equality.”1227 What is the evolutionary significance of equal rights? How can one make sense of the humanist right to life in light of evolution through natural selection? The idea of human rights has demonstrated a remarkable survival success in its great political battles for cultural survival. Yet should human rights nonetheless be completely abandoned if it