So... what's with people setting themselves on fire to protest things?

And why are our reactions to it so different?

The way people protest is strange, but it usually makes some kind of sense. Gather together with like-minded people. Wave signs. Chant slogans. That kind of protest makes sense. It’s a show of unity:

“There are a lot of us here who feel strongly about this and we want to be taken seriously!”

Even a hunger strike makes a certain amount of sense. It’s a drastic action. It could lead to serious harm (even death), but your actions will probably be noticed in time by people who can impact the situation.

There’s a good chance your efforts will spark change. Then you can pat yourself on the back and go have a burger and a shake. Job well done. You earned it!

But setting yourself on fire? Man… there’s no coming back from that. You’ll never know if your protest had any impact at all. I literally can’t imagine ever doing anything like that.

I can only remember four instances of self-immolation as a clear act of protest. I intentionally didn’t do any research for this article, because I wanted to rely on my memory as a gauge of “public consciousness” surrounding these acts.

So, please forgive me if my memory is sloppy and incomplete. I’m sure it is.

The first such act I remember was the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in the early ‘60s to protest how the South Vietnamese government was treating them. As I recall, he sat down in a public place in a peaceful pose and just lit himself on fire.

I remember there’s a famous picture of it. It was haunting. Seemingly, he never moved a muscle as he burned. I also remember that what I heard about the man and his act was that he was a brave hero protesting a tyrannical government.

The second that I recall was in the early 20-teens as part of (or a prelude to) the “Arab Spring” of resistant movements against dictators (usually US-backed) in the Middle East. This man was a frustrated cart vendor in Tunisia who was protesting some crony shakedowns of his business. Something like that.

I remember hearing a whole lot about that guy. The framing was that he was a heroic martyr who was protesting autocratic rule in the most dramatic and selfless ways.

I think you all know where I’m going with this.

The last two self-immolations I can remember were very recent. A US airman set himself on fire to protest US funding and arming Israel’s side of its conflict in the Gaza strip.

It was a shocking act. Especially here in America. This is the kind of thing that happened in the past, or in a third world country. Not here!

Even more shocking was the immediate public media derision of the man as a whacko, loony-toon, nutbag. Which seemed odd to me, given that the only other two times I remembered someone setting themselves on fire, they were treated as heroic martyrs.

I must confess, I never looked into this guy. Maybe he was a loon. And obviously the “justness” of his cause is controversial. But still, the guy was protesting his government’s participation in what he viewed as an atrocity. To see him so roundly ridiculed was off-putting.

And then this most recent case of self-immolation does seem to be just a psycho. Some guy who set himself on fire near a courtroom in New York, where Donald Trump was on trial for… some nonsense lawfare.

I briefly skimmed the manifesto he left on Substack (residence of all great writers), and it was literally the It’s Always Sunny meme:

As with yesterday, I must confess I don’t have any neat and tidy conclusions with which to tie up these fiery loose threads.

I’m sure how I feel about self-immolation. It’s one crazy and awful way to commit suicide. I can’t imagine what would drive a person to do that.

And I’m also sure that the way “we” respond to such acts really depends on the narrative that we want to embed the act within.

We have a story to tell: Diem government bad. Tunesian regime bad. Israel good. Trump bad (and probably involved with this somehow).

And so we use the data point to further the story we want to tell. It’s almost inevitable that we all do this. It’s how our species thinks — in narrative.

But we should be aware of what we are doing, at least.

Naturally,

Adam