He didn’t leave a note. Neither the widow nor the rest of us knew clearly why he did it. Not long before he got up early, grabbed a knife from the kitchen and ended it in the backyard garden, he confided to me that he was experiencing a lot of general inflammatory pain. He was visibly stiff and may have needed better physical help. I don’t know if that was the reason.

We were shaken and left wondering. At the wake, a fellow friend of the family told me that suicide is sometimes prompted by an impulse – short term impulsive decision, long term consequence.

Like accidents, suicide is a risk for everyone.

I have another post coming on the subject. Of course, we can’t know the secrets of the human heart. But from all I’ve read, I continue to strongly think that, without the training and especially the persecution sparked by it, he would be alive today. He was 60 years old, professionally successful and very well-respected, unmarried (gay) but not secretive or shameful about that fact, beloved by a large family including lots of nieces and nephews, and had a 94-year-old mother still alive.

I went through this enough times to see how it worked. I got stronger. These words of a hippie teacher on mind control, which he called “head-cop,” helped:
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I began to teach, out loud, that there was such a thing as head-cop, and that you could get your head copped, and that you ought to be sure you weren’t getting your head coppped, and that you ought to know what the symptoms of head-cop were … I tried to teach a little head-cop prophylaxis in the scene.

–Stephen Gaskin (circa 1967)
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It’s in hippie lingo, which I offer for your amusement rather than persuasion.

Gaskin taught personal responsibility and honesty. He was an important teacher for me.

neo:

I’m not as sure. In my view he could just as well have been one hard trauma away from spiraling into suicide. Divorce, death of a loved one, loss of a job — all these could have done the job too.

See Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’, in which she describes her visit to the former East Germany in 1994, five years after the Wall came down.

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/33672.html

He was, essentially, slaughtered.
Darkness by goons.

Totalitarian societies thrive on betrayal.
Encourage it.
Sanctify it.
Teach it.
Indoctrinate it.
Demand it.

Whether it’s the betrayal by children of their parents.
Or by workers of their colleagues.
Or by so-called friends of their friends.

One MUST betray others for the “higher” cause.
For a “morality” that transcends mere—bourgeois, white, middle class, BIBLICAL—morality.
(Just like one MUST lie for the higher cause, for a transcendent morality…)

FOR THE HIGHER TRUTH.

File under: New—“Biden”/Trudeau/WEF/WTF—World Order.

We are living in perilous times, where evil has become the law of the land.
Has become VIRTUE.

And so, time to step up…

I certainly didn’t mean to imply that you are unaware of struggle sessions and indoctrination. But I was using your exchange with IrishOtter as a springboard to discuss those things.

Nor do I think Bilkszto’s suicide was an inevitable result of the anti-racism training. You are certainly correct that what causes one person to kill himself or herself does not do that to everyone, and that other factors are almost certainly at work in some sort of synergistic manner. But it’s also pretty clear that without the persecution that was sparked by the training session, the guy would still be alive today. It seems to me, reading his story, that the session was just the beginning, and what bothered him even more was the virtue-signaling piling-on from others who effectively abandoned him after years of knowing him and working with him.

I’m aware of the struggle session format and I did mention the mandatory factor in a later comment. I was not thinking of a single random insult without context.

I agree that mandatory indoctrination in a job setting is not a good thing and such abuse can be quite intimidating.

Reading the Quillette article I see that Billstzko killed himself over two years after the initial incident and he was not isolated without support. He also obtained a judgment against Ojo-Thompson:
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Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) took the incident more seriously, determining that Bilkszto was owed seven weeks of lost pay due to the mental stress he’d endured.

The WSIB judgment, later obtained by the National Post, concluded that Ojo-Thompson’s behaviour “was abusive, egregious and vexatious, and rises to the level of workplace harassment and bullying,” and that she’d intended to “cause reputational damage and to ‘make an example’” of Bilkszto.
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Sure, Bilkszto had a terrible experience, but people have terrible experiences all the time without killing themselves. My read is that there is more to his story.

That said, I do hope Ojo’s karma catches up with her.