On MJ's Death

Isn't it odd how it always takes something which is a large scale event that always highlights interesting and differing philosophies? These things are really the core values we all individually live by, and yet we only discover them after the fact, as it were. I recently learned that as this blog aims to chronicle my life, I am compelled to blog about the death of Michael Jackson.

From a purely utilitarian perspective, Michael Jackson's death would be one of the more large scale deaths that have happened in recent years. The next earliest would be Princess Diana, and I don't even remember that... But MJ was a prominent figure in the media over the past years, what with his trials and erratic behaviour, which, on top of his already successful music career, places him as one of the biggest and most common household names (you know you're at that stage when you're parodied by like every cartoon/satirical series :P).

So yeah, with the passing of Michael Jackson and the flurry of tweets and blog posts and forum threads, I've had a good chance to observe some basic reactions. People are really upset and saddened and when questioned will respond with "every death is a sad one". The almost automatic response is "what about people in Ethiopia" or "the deaths in Iran", which I think is a legitimate rebuttal - you can't maintain that your crying over MJ's death is a consequence of his inherent humanity and its loss being sad AND still have time to sleep (as opposed to mourning the deaths of every other person in a 3rd world country every 4 seconds (or whatever that banal statistic is)).

Alternatively people have a very lukewarm response, their reasoning being precisely that because so many people do die has a matter of empirical fact that a single death doesn't warrant such an emotional response.

If you know anything about me and my philosophies, you're going to know I don't like either response. Chiefly because a reaction to death isn't going to be a logical conclusion. I suppose in a Husserlian and Wittgensteinan phenomenological way, the emotion comes prepacked with the event. Our reasonings and rationalisation are just post hoc processes and to treat them otherwise is just foolish.

It's just as ridiculous to propose that one can rationalise ones way out of an emotional state as it is to rationalise yourself into one. That's not how emotions work.

It's the same flaw in pretty much all the other standard reactions. It's sad because he made such a contribution to the music industry, he was so mocked before his died, he died before his time, "I have a personal connection with his music/him". It's not sad because he was crazy, a drug addict, a paedophile [note I'm not saying he was, these are just reasoning I've seen cited].

At a personal level, just to document my own reaction, I'm not phased much. I mean I can see and appreciate how he contributed to the music scene and our society in general and acknowledge the huge effect his death will have for many people, but I'm not going to impose any emotional state on me because of that. Nothing he's done has ever inspired me or been judged by me as having a beautiful quality to it. Not sure why I said that, now I think about it, even if something of his was beautiful or inspirational, that wouldn't affect my logical interpretation of his death, so long as I still have the original stimuli.

Perhaps most bizarrely, some moron over at the AW forums has suggested that because of the way MJ possibly died (ODing) that his death was some how less impactful than Ms Fawcett's, who died of cancer. Ignoring my own philosophy on post hoc emotional rationalisation, that's still such an odd thing to say. As if the power of someone's death can be altered in anyway by how they died... Surely what makes their life valuable is .. well their life? Can we placed methods of death into some heirarchy? Car crash at one level, cancer at another... What about dying in a car crash with cancer? Or better yet, on the way to the hospital to get cancer treatment? How about on the way out? Does it matter if you were terminal or not??? Porche or SUV?! Let's just totally ignore what they did, to whom they did it, how they did it while they were still alive.