Hollowed Out - Part 2

The Meaningful And Meaningless Deaths

Count me as one of the people having an existential crises of sorts in the wake of the executions in Indonesia. Here were lives that were building meaning after committing crimes and being sentenced to death by shooting squad. I can remember when they are originally arrested in 2006 and seeing them on the news report thinking, "well, there you go a bunch of idiots and they'll face the death squad". Nine years on I have to admit I was the one that had not entertained the emotional ramification of the sentence.

To be honest, Chan looked like a shifty little con man, while Sukumaran hardly registered as and entity. The rest of the Bali 9 looked like kids from the outer 'burbs, short on education, civics, and common sense, and long on daring. It was easy to look down on these people - especially if you were from anywhere middle-class. These kids looked like the off-spring of the hopeless welfare class, trying to win a break through crime. They were - and I'm ashamed to say it - easy to dismiss.

In the decade since, we saw Chan and Sukumaran became the focus of just why we believe capital punishment is wrong. They grew into men we could respect and in the process made us confront the reason why Australia did away with capital punishment, anew. These were not meaningless lives; they were as meaningful as any life you might witness in this world, if not more so than your average joe or joan. Being a nihilist of sorts, I'm pretty sensitive to things that are meaningful in a simple secular (i.e as in a non-metaphysical) way. Meaningful in a way that you could ask yourself "Would Jean-Paul Sartre think that was meaningful?" - and if the answer was yes, you'd be delighted. It doesn't come by a lot on a personal level and universal ones are even harder to find.

I've no doubt Jean-Paul Sartre would have found the pair of reformed drug smugglers, more than meaningful. Had Joko Widodo granted clemency, he too would have burnished his reputation and found himself in the constellation of meaning forming around these two men. Instead he chose to have them killed and all that remains is this utter sense that yes, capital punishment is still wrong and that there is something very wrong with the state institutions of Indonesia.

Which brings me to the other, equally disturbing experience as that of the meaningfulness of Chan and Sukumaran's lives being cut short. I'm reminded of Katrina Dawson who perished in the Lindt Cafe siege last December. She did just about everything ins life and was doing good work for society. You couldn't have asked for a more meaningful life than hers, and then one day a crazed idiot takes her hostage and they wind up dead. I haven't really processed that either, but it was enough to put me in a despairing funk for weeks. The nihilist inside of me was screaming "it's all fucking meaningless!!"
It took weeks to shut it up; and maybe it shut up because it eventually lost breath and lost the appetite to humiliate.

And it just might still be meaningless as a fart in the wind. Most people would insert a bit of metaphysics to get by, but I'm just not wired that way. I'm seriously struggling to see the point of existential meaning that could emerge from actions - as advocated by JP Sartre - that would transcend this morass of idiocy. Chan and Sukumaran came close, I'll give them that. Yet coming an inch within and missing by a mile offer no qualitative difference. And if we are seeking the qualia of experience, it is overwhelmingly tinged with the futility of human existence.

I'm telling you, it's seriously debilitating.  But then, you read news like this. There are all thee states out there that keep justifying they need to kill people. It's really too bizarre for words.