The life and suicide of an Iraq veteran who could take no more
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington and Oliver Duff
25 January 2006
By his own admission Douglas Barber, a former army reservist, was struggling. For two years since returning from the chaos and violence of Iraq, the 35-year-old had battled with his memories and his demons, the things he had seen and the fear he had experienced. Recently, it seemed he had turned a corner, securing medical help and counselling.
But last week, at his home in south-eastern Alabama, the National Guardsman e-mailed some friends and then changed the message on his answering machine. His new message told callers: "If you're looking for Doug, I'm checking out of this world. I'll see you on the other side." Mr Barber dialled the police, stepped on to the porch with his shotgun and - after a brief stand-off with officers - shot himself in the head. He was pronounced dead at the scene. [...]
Comment from Signs of the Times: While we can certainly understand why this young man felt that he had no option but to take his own life, we do not support suicide. We know that there are exceptional cases of terminal illness and individuals who suffer chronic and intractable pain. In those cases, we bow our heads and acknowledge that the individual has the right to make their own decision without judgment from others.
What we see in this case, of course, is a case of chronic and intractable emotional pain. This is a common malady of our world, due primarily to the patologizing of our society. Again we must point out the work of Andrew Lobaczewski who has so thorougly described this process and its effects on normal human beings. The most tragic thing about all of it is that a very small segment of the population is responsible for the sufferings of the majority.
One of the reasons for the existence of this website is so that those who do begin to see, or who have struggled all their lives trying to make sense of a society that has been shaped by The Cult of the Plausible Lie. The primary problem that I see humanity struggling with today is precisely delineated by Lobaczewski: it is an almost total lack of adequate psychological knowledge on the part of the masses of humanity - the population of ordinary, normal people.
Plausible lies are monstrous things propagated by evil people for the express purpose of deceiving good people into doing the will of those who do not have their best interests at heart. It's that simple. The most powerful of these lies are so plausible that nobody even dreams about questioning their validity.
Learning about evil in our society, how it operates on the macro-social scale, is considered by many to be "unpleasant." They don't want to go there. It is too disturbing and even frightening. More than that, talking about these things as we do here at SOTT is not familiar. To talk about evil as though it were a REAL concept is something we have been programmed to NOT do!
We clearly need to study this problem of macro-social evil in our world in a systematic and scientific way. And we need to get over the idea that thinking only good thoughts, thinking about happy and "nice" things is the way to good psychological health.
It's clear that trying to think "happy thoughts" did no good for Douglas Barber; his observations and experience were in conflict with this plausible lie. But it is so plausible that millions upon millions of people are taken in by it.
Who knows? If Douglas Barber had known about SOTT, if he had known about our work with the Quantum Future Group, if he had known about our studies in psychopathy and Ponerology, perhaps he would have been able to come to a resolution about the fact that Evil does exist, that it rules this world and has done for millennia, and then he would have been able to convert his suffering into positive work for the promotion of that which is good, decent, and normal.
But of course, there is no possibility of a world that is ruled by normal people to come into being until they begin to wake up from the spell of the Evil Magician, the Ponerological union of pathological elements in our society. And it is for this purpose, waking people up, that SOTT exists.
25 January 2006
By his own admission Douglas Barber, a former army reservist, was struggling. For two years since returning from the chaos and violence of Iraq, the 35-year-old had battled with his memories and his demons, the things he had seen and the fear he had experienced. Recently, it seemed he had turned a corner, securing medical help and counselling.
But last week, at his home in south-eastern Alabama, the National Guardsman e-mailed some friends and then changed the message on his answering machine. His new message told callers: "If you're looking for Doug, I'm checking out of this world. I'll see you on the other side." Mr Barber dialled the police, stepped on to the porch with his shotgun and - after a brief stand-off with officers - shot himself in the head. He was pronounced dead at the scene. [...]
Comment from Signs of the Times: While we can certainly understand why this young man felt that he had no option but to take his own life, we do not support suicide. We know that there are exceptional cases of terminal illness and individuals who suffer chronic and intractable pain. In those cases, we bow our heads and acknowledge that the individual has the right to make their own decision without judgment from others.
What we see in this case, of course, is a case of chronic and intractable emotional pain. This is a common malady of our world, due primarily to the patologizing of our society. Again we must point out the work of Andrew Lobaczewski who has so thorougly described this process and its effects on normal human beings. The most tragic thing about all of it is that a very small segment of the population is responsible for the sufferings of the majority.
One of the reasons for the existence of this website is so that those who do begin to see, or who have struggled all their lives trying to make sense of a society that has been shaped by The Cult of the Plausible Lie. The primary problem that I see humanity struggling with today is precisely delineated by Lobaczewski: it is an almost total lack of adequate psychological knowledge on the part of the masses of humanity - the population of ordinary, normal people.
Plausible lies are monstrous things propagated by evil people for the express purpose of deceiving good people into doing the will of those who do not have their best interests at heart. It's that simple. The most powerful of these lies are so plausible that nobody even dreams about questioning their validity.
Learning about evil in our society, how it operates on the macro-social scale, is considered by many to be "unpleasant." They don't want to go there. It is too disturbing and even frightening. More than that, talking about these things as we do here at SOTT is not familiar. To talk about evil as though it were a REAL concept is something we have been programmed to NOT do!
We clearly need to study this problem of macro-social evil in our world in a systematic and scientific way. And we need to get over the idea that thinking only good thoughts, thinking about happy and "nice" things is the way to good psychological health.
It's clear that trying to think "happy thoughts" did no good for Douglas Barber; his observations and experience were in conflict with this plausible lie. But it is so plausible that millions upon millions of people are taken in by it.
Who knows? If Douglas Barber had known about SOTT, if he had known about our work with the Quantum Future Group, if he had known about our studies in psychopathy and Ponerology, perhaps he would have been able to come to a resolution about the fact that Evil does exist, that it rules this world and has done for millennia, and then he would have been able to convert his suffering into positive work for the promotion of that which is good, decent, and normal.
But of course, there is no possibility of a world that is ruled by normal people to come into being until they begin to wake up from the spell of the Evil Magician, the Ponerological union of pathological elements in our society. And it is for this purpose, waking people up, that SOTT exists.
posted by Traveller at
1:34 p.m.
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