Obviously suicide is an anti-social act in the extreme, and society of course must rise up and vilify it in the strongest terms possible, calling out the experts with looks of deep concern, agonizing over lost potential and mourning loved ones and a tragedy that bespeaks some deep cancer that is eating away at the fabric of blah blah blah... little knowing that even as they make their frantic pitch they are doing the work of their enemy, and selling his message more effectively than they know.

This group was acting with a kind of preternatural genius, whether by design or default, consciously or otherwise. Their entire modus operandi was tuned to generate an almost perfect viral information packet attenuated to the frequency of contemporary media. Certainly the leader ["Doh!" as Homer Simpson would say] would have known that in the wake of this act his 'recruiting' tapes would become major fodder for the content-hungry greed-based news machines; that his image and words would be cut and pasted across the minds of the millions to a massive degree; that the bliss-filled faces of his acolytes would appear again and again, professing their boundless joy and freedom; that the attractive website imageries and their simple evocative code phrases ("Higher Ground", "Heaven's Gate") would become vastly broadcast, and those sites amongst the most publicized and visited online locations in history; that the images of their bodies, laid out in obvious care and peace, ritually arrayed under noble purple shrouds, each adorned with identical unblemished running shoes (surely the most enigmatic, bizarre, and possibly most powerful of the elements of this whole virus!) (don't ask me why, though it may have to do with 'tagging' messages with images, especially consumer-freighted ones, that will carry them across media boundaries) (of course, they were Nikes, goddess-of-victory shoes, so maybe it was a straightforward symbolic gesture) (then again, maybe this will turn out to have been the first mass suicide with corporate sponsorship!) would communicate more than a billion pamphlets or a lifetime of lectures; that the little hologram pendants they gave away to local friends would plant resonant memes into the minds of the masses as they were caught, flashing, by handheld news cameras; that the connection by way of Nichelle Nichols' brother to the most popular sci-fi series in history would add a pop culture hook of starship dimensions; that the millennial/UFO energy presently revving at such high levels in world culture would add fusion-power to the popular perception of the act; that the associated ambience of the group that would undertext the attendant commentary - abstaining ascetics, living in affluence, at ease in a technologized world, taking supreme control of the ultimate facet of existance - would survive all the pounding by the so-called experts and emerge on the other side as an intact and authentic expression of something unquestionably powerful and genuine...

And what is the message that all this (calculated?) imagery is designed to carry, the legacy of these lives lost to this world? That there is another, higher world to which we might aspire, and to which we should turn not with fear and pain but in peace and joyful bliss. Not bad, really, compared to, say, the implicit message of many of the sponsors of the news programs exploiting this event for their own gain: the world is a terrifying ordeal and death is worse, get your comfort now with this wonderful product.

And it's not as if Christianity didn't begin as a cult that called for it's elite to abandon all worldly ties to sacrifice themselves to the message that there is another, higher world to which you can aspire and to which you should turn not with fear and pain but in peace and joyful bliss, and whose leader cemented that message by going to his premature death with a near-suicidal determination (and who, it hardly need be added, were overwhelmingly vilified by the mainstream in their own time and for centuries after). And what about the mass suicide by Jews at Massada, and the Christian martyrs. And if you had to choose between this and the kind of religious self-sacrifice practiced by Hamas... ?

Okay, so I'm playing devil's advocate here. Obviously these guys were fucked, their leader a nutbar, their act crazy escapist bullshit. One look at their goofy giggly shit-eating grins told you they were high as kites on sublimated sexual energy channeled into ego abandonment on a low-protein diet. You can't get much more carefree than to eschew all social connections and human relationships and avoid all fear of an uncertain future by refusing to have one. Suicide is generally referred to as a coward's way out by the survivors because its largest social impact is in the rejection of all responsibilities, which generally means the foisting of those on others.

The reality is that these people did have families who were in some cases slammed very hard by this act, like the mother amongst the dead who dumped her large brood of youngsters just last September, having been recruited directly by way of the internet. And society does have to pick up the pieces here, bag the bodies, manage the stress, sweep up the fallout. Nobody exists in a vacuum, and to so selfishly foist their infantile circle-jerk secret-handshake-of-doom clubhouse fantasies on the fragile psyche of the world is an act of profound evil.

And, of course, both of these versions are correct, and woefully wrong, and the reality (I believe) is that we are simply not equipped, being merely human, to understand the "true" implications of an act such as this. Scott Peck has a phrase I like, he talks about how only evil acts from a position of absolute certainty, and that the healthy mind draws its answers and makes its choices out of "the emptiness of not knowing"...

I dunno...