psychology of bushido

Some people are willing to die for their beliefs. Some depressed people believe whole heartedly that their lives are hopeless and kill themselves because of these beliefs.

Not all Bushido warriors are willing to die but then I guess they wouldn't be called proper warriors even though they had undergone the required social conditioning.

I remember seeing on TV some Kamikazi survivors from WW2! They had managed somehow to escape their death duties and stated they had absolutely no belief in the use,or desire to, die for Japan.

The phenomana of Individualism and the primary importance of the self over collective community is a relatively new trend. Consumerism and the rise of individual 'rights' has probably contributed to this.

The Bushido tradition was born from a pre-commercial japanease culture where collectivity and the common cause were seen as more important than individual identity. European Knights (such as The Knights Templer) had similar chilvaric codes.

Maybe willingness to die for a cause only seems strange to our eyes because we spring from a culture of individualism rather than collectivity.

Mark.

Hi Mark

You are right to suggest that the cult of the individual is prevalent in modern western societies; and that individualism explains why many of us fail to understand why the Kamakazi pilots or the Bushido warriors behave the way they do. You are also correct that individualism is a relatively recent phenomena, but if we consider the behabiour of the Bushido warrior or the Kamakazi pilot as a form of suicide we see that the relation between the individual, society and suicide to be a complcated one.

Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology posed the following problem at the start of the twentieth century: how is a stable society possible when in terms of their occupations, lifestyles, class, ethics, and beliefs are so different from one another? Durkheim's answer was that society is only possible if there is a general consensus among the population over the norms and values that make social life possible. Durkeim argued that society should be understood as arising from that shared consensus; and Durkheimian sociology is the study of the relation between those norms and values and the particular social institutions and practices that arise from it.

The point to this is that Durkheim believed that what individual human beings believe in, and how they act is determined by the particular society in which they live. They are socialised into a particular value-system. So, in order to prove his thesis, Durkheim took what he believed to be the most individualistic act possible, and show that it had a social cause. The act he chose was suicide.

Durkheim categorised suicide into a number of different types, and each of those were determined by a particular relationship between the individual and society. So the type of you and Cangus are interested in is altruistic suicide and occurs when society over-regulates individual life, leading to the individual experiencing excessive social integration and identifying too closely with society. He or she commits suicide out of a sense of duty and gains prestige from his action.

However, just as suicide can occur because the ties that bind an individual to society can be too strong, they can also occur when they are not strong enough. Durkheim identified egoistic suicide as occuring when there is an under-regulation of individual life by society, and the individual experiences too little social integration, and feels lonely and cut off from social life. Durkheim compared the Protestant with the Catholic religion and found that Catholics were far less likely to be suicidal than Protestants because the Catholic faith stressed the importance of the church as the mediator between God and the individual, particularly through confession, and religious ritual. By contrast, the Protestant faith stresses the importance of the individual conscience as the very personal route to salvation through God. Consequently Protestants are more able to challenge traditional beliefs than Catholics. Serious doubt was cast on this idea though because for Catholics, suicide is a taboo, and therefore the families of the deceased may try to disguise the suicide to avoid the social stigma, thereby falsifying the suicide statistics that Durkheim drew inspiration from.

Briefly, Durkheim also identified two other forms of suicide. Anomie was Durkheim's term to describe the breakdown of cohesive, collectively agreed norms and values in favour of confusion, conflict, and normlessness. Anomic suicide occurs when there is a major disruption to social and economic life, such as the 1923 Wall Street Crash or the events of 9/11. Finally, fatalistic suicide affects those who feel they do not have enough control over their lives, such as slaves or the terminally unemployed, (lie me!)

Hope this helps.

Steve

It seems to me that there is a vast difference between a "mistake" and "dishonor". That line has been made blurry in the past two decades by the very people who are uncomfortable with honor and all it's trappings. If honor is not worth dying for, what is?