death and measures of stupidity

radikal's lead story on monday recounted how a 12 year old girl in urfa hanged herself and suffocated after telling her sister and cousin that she would come back from the dead as she had watched in a show aired on samanyolu tv, a decidedly religious and conservative channel. "i'm going to rise again, too", she reportedly said.

the next day, the "secular-ist" press mused that the child's death "caused" by the samanyolu program put the state's regulatory body of communication, rtük (the superior radio and tv committee) which in practice is a board of censors for tv and radio stations, in a quandary because they were reluctant to impose sanctions on a religiously oriented channel, much less one affiliated to the rather popular and politically influential fetullah gülen hoca, but the direct reference of the deceased girl to the show made some action mandatory.

what else would you call a delusion of grandeur but the assumption that some tv show can carry the power of life and death? the media have blown their own industry so much out of proportion that they can presume and pretend to possess such might.

since psychoanalysis was foregone by mechanized and digitalized squads of intellectuals in search of scientific idiocy instead of idiosyncracy, we have been condemned by a mediated collective obtuseness to suffer such aetiological nonsense as demonstrated by the editorial command of radikal, not differently from any other member and manager of the media.

there exists no shred of evidence that can conclusively assign blame for any act of violence on viewing visual material which contains or suggests violence. the homo sapiens sapiens is an aggressive breed by nature and seeks the cultural material that suits such urges. violence prone individuals, depending on their level of intelligence among other factors, either derive cathartic pleasure from vicarious violence or at the very worst, learn from movies or tv shows the methodology of venting brute force and if necessary, making moronic excuses for it. "normal" people, as they are called according to statistics of rule-obedience, devise methods of sublimating their destructive drives or simply get married and beat their spouses or offspring.

at the same time, by nature, the homo sapiens sapiens is a nice, benevolent, altruistic creature but nobody attributes its generic goodness to religious, moralistic, educative etc. electronic evangelism on air or online. one could almost be led by the alleged correlation between tv and aggression to assume that there were no wars before moving pictures were invented. nor was there charity.

war was one of st. john's horsemen of the apocalypse. then, too, as at all times, the personality of an individual was shaped by the exigencies of a cultural environment one had to adapt what he could of his personal potential to. in other words, personality was a structure that evolved for adaptation of survival means and skills to a social milieu. some employed violence and/or generosity to survive, others turned their aggression within, to themselves and who was theirs. the rate of suicides to population and various causes of death was probably still the same at the times of lion heart and saladin as it was when emile durkheim was writing his famous study. rape or murder were probably no more uncommon than it was in west manhattan of the eighties.

in short, death lives with and within the human individual. depending on the degree of obstruction and frustration that the individual feels life imposes, death may become a pseudo exit or relief from the tensions of life. master sigmund freud said it represented a wish to return to the inorganic state of matter, with zero level of stimulation on one's psychic apparatus. if idiosyncracy had dominated intellectual thinking instead of (digitalized) idiocy, even radikal could discern and perhaps inquire into why and how a 12 year old girl in urfa, incidentally, a region where women are suppressed and restricted into quite frustrating and restrictive social roles from very early on, wanted to die that much so she could be reborn.

what was it that made her want to leave this particular life in the hope of coming back to another?

how, then, could a mentally debilitated tv show encourage her to die? or was it other features of life as she knew it that generated and raised her interest in death so that she sought the methodology of dying in that idiotic episode?