I understand (though do not wholly agree with) the stigmatization of stigma, because condemning suicide or addiction could inhibit prevention and recovery by deterring people from seeking help. So, however, can the opposite approach lead to the glamorization of self-destruction -- as in this piece by the novelist James Salter in the Oct. 13 edition of The New York Review of Books, about a biography of Ernest Hemingway by Paul Hendrickson.
Writes Salter: "[Hemingway's] suicide could be seen as an act of weakness, even moral weakness, a sudden revelation of it in a man whose image was of boldness and courage, but Hendrickson’s book is testimony that it was not a failure of courage but a last display of it." Which calls to mind George Orwell's remark in a 1945 essay: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
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