ABSTRACT
In this chapter socio-philosophical insights into the problem of suicide are studied and applied to the farmers’ suicides. David Émile Durkheim, Albert Camus and Talcott Parsons were studied to understand the complexity of the issue of farmers’ suicides. The effort in this chapter is to not only understand the real nature of the farmers’ suicides problem but also to figure out the sociological and philosophical approaches to tackle this problem. Discussed herein is Durkheim’s concept of seeing suicide as an individual phenomenon; its social character is confirmed in my evaluation of the causes of the higher rate of suicides and in the point that the solution lies in using a group approach. Similarly, I draw on Talcott Parsons’ view of suicide as an issue arising out of the imbalance between deviant behaviour and a social mechanism to control it. To that extent, it can be tackled only by using a social control mechanism to improve socialization and to carry out adjustments in the fit–lack spectrum of an individual. Lastly, the philosophical insights of Albert Camus reveal that suicide is a manifestation of an individual’s inability to cope with whether life is worth living. He argues that instead of thinking that life is not worth all the problems that it entails and thus dying by suicide to end it, the deciding factor for suicide is a desire for an existence driven by a body which more often than not shrinks from annihilation and settles for life even if there is the slightest amount of hope. But under the extreme condition of hopelessness, the body does the opposite. The message is that suicides, like those of the Indian farmers, indicate that the farmers’ socioeconomic problems are so grave that they do not see the slightest hope. This necessitates a measure for socioeconomic programmes to bring back this hope in their life by changing their conditions.
