This depends on who's doing the analysis. For example, self-immolation is often seen as an extreme form of desperate but rational protest. The only way to understand and prevent these types of events is to understand and address the underlying needs.
I don't think you are taking into account the outcome when one persistently fails (or cannot) cover its human needs.
Give me an excruciatingly painful, slow-killing terminal illness, and tell me how do you not see suicide as a rational option.
I mean it totally can be:
1. Assume materialism/naturalism.
2. Experience pain or some other unpleasantness and dislike it.
3. Suicide solves the pain problem completely, and creates no further problems from the perspective of the person commuting suicide.
And so, Frankl bored holes in the skulls of his Jewish patients, who had taken overdoses of pills in the hope of escaping their Nazi tormentors, and jolted their brains with Pervitin, an amphetamine popular in the Third Reich.
The suicidal patients revived, but only for 24 hours. One wonders what agonies they went through in their last day of life, with Frankl’s amphetamines coursing through their trepanned heads.
[...] Frankl wrote, “When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. … His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.” The suicidal Jews had not borne their burden properly. If they lived they could still stake a claim to their suffering as a “unique opportunity,” Frankl believed.
What Frankl failed to see was that Austrian Jews were making a political statement by killing themselves, sometimes at the Gestapo’s deportation office. As Frankl’s biographer Timothy Pytell points out, their “Masada tactic” was an act of protest.
The Nazis in fact shared Frankl’s goal of preventing Jews from killing themselves, since they had decreed Jewish suicide to be “illegal.” Jews belonged to the Reich, to be disposed of as the Germans saw fit."
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/vik...
History can be quite ugly. In a way that makes suicide the better option.
> thousands of happily brainwashed and well-fed kamikaze pilots
The source is needed for "happily".
> The living need to keep living. Who knows why people kill themselves. Lots of incoherent reasons, basically. Your self-immolating monk might be the clearest version
This is incoherent.
Suicide in normal life is just people escaping unbearable pain. Of course, someone with a properly functioning brain could probably never understand what it feels like.
Everyone automatically has empathy for people they feel aligned or connected with. You don't even have to try.
"only"? What if that's their main goal? You're still judging them for having values that are different from yours, which is something that comes naturally to anyone. The whole point of learning to have empathy is so you can empathize with people whose values are incompatible with your own. You probably don't even understand their values and take their superficial statements literally because you're too keen to judge them as bad instead of understand their underlying feelings that they may not even be able to articulate themselves.
Examples: Anti-Vaxxers’ protest - need for autonomy, for being heard.
“I'll make you all shut up and listen to me.” - is the strategy to meet the needs to matter, to feel heard, need for competency.
Explosives to the chest - need for autonomy (from occupation/apartheid/oppression), for understanding (“see how it feels for your people to die?!”), control (powerless to do anything except this),
breaking into the senate chamber - need for autonomy (“freedom”), to matter (“stolen elections”), agency (being able to change things)
In some cases the beliefs which caused these particular needs to arise can be manipulated (and were), and the strategies for meeting the needs are flawed (insurrection, boom best etc. ) but the needs are simple, universal and deeply human.
I can never condone terrorism but can understand the powerlessness and pain behind it, the lack of agency, and the need to matter and have a voice that drive some of its acts.
So stopping terrorism has to do with addressing oppression etc.
>> So stopping terrorism has to do with addressing oppression etc.
This sounds so much like my former teacher and mentor - who was also an erstwhile member of the weathermen in the 60s. I do think that addressing oppression is half of the problem. But if you consider the problem to be humans killing other humans while taking their own lives in service of a belief ("right" or not), then it really can't be addressed without also giving individual humans the sense that their own individuality is wonderful and unique and worth preserving, even in the face of oppression or injustice. It goes deeper than whether the belief is wrong or right. It requires a form of self-respect and respect for life that can't come from a group identity. That overrides group identity and comes to its own conclusions. That is the basis of morality - the decision to refuse a wrongful order. It requires an internal moral compass and a desire for self-preservation and a sense of one's own life being valuable. And that's something that no organization or ideology will ever try to inculcate in its disciples, and which can't be achieved by e.g. America addressing oppression.
And yes, I understand the needs for agency, for autonomy, and the feelings of powerlessness and frustration behind such outrageous, inhumane and fruitless acts. I am also informed about the extensive preparation and brainwashing that go into it which also meet the person’s need for belonging and to matter (announced as martyr in their community). (See Syriana for a depiction in film?)
But solving oppression and murder by state terrorism will likely reduce suicide bombings, too.
Just to be clear - we are still talking about "nonviolent communication", right? Because a careless reading would interpret this as a call to hit people with sticks solely because we hold their actions to be motivated by incorrect beliefs.
In any case, it's still not true. Unless you have resigned yourself to hitting them with sticks, you're still in the realm of communication and persuasion. You'll always get further with that if you try to understand where they are coming from, which is what "nonviolent communication" is all about.
For the record NVC does not insist on never using force. Force is necessary for protection or for stopping clearly harmful actions.
