The Healthy Humanity of Aaron Bushnell
Part II in a series exploring the humanistic implications of Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation in protest of the war on Gaza
The following is the second part of a series examining the humanistic implications of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. The reader will not encounter photographs of Bushnell’s self-immolation.
Judged by the common sense of those in power, Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation, on February 25, 2024, in protest of the Gaza war was unhinged. But a conception of mental wellness rooted in timeless, objective human values yields a different perspective; one that recognizes the profound humanity and self-actualizing character of Bushnell’s agonizing self-sacrifice.
As much as modern bureaucracies might try to convince us otherwise, when the great theorists and researchers of the human psyche investigated psychological wellbeing in a person, they weren’t interested in determining who meets the mandatory expectations of a particular culture or society or how well adjusted they are to their social environment. The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow believed that the use of anodyne terms like psychological “health” and “illness” impoverished our psychological imagination and hindered a proper understanding of the human psychological condition.1 Nevertheless Maslow and his fellow humanists attempted to give these terms deeper, more existential meaning connected to the human condition.
Humanistic psychology rejects strictly defining mental wellbeing as a person’s successful adaptation to the dominant norms of their society. Rather than relying on adherence to culturally constrained and externally imposed values—values often rendered as invisible and therefore unquestionable “facts” of life—humanistic thinkers conceived of psychological health in universal, objective terms rooted in human experience, excellence, and our shared humanity.
In The Sane Society (1955), social theorist and psychologist Erich Fromm explained that mental health entails transcending narrow individual and group egoism, and the activation of our capacities to love, reason, and objectively encounter the real world. He wrote:
“Mental health is characterized by the ability to love and to create, by the emergence from incestuous ties to clan and soil, by a sense of identity based on one's experience of self as the subject and agent of one's powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside of ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason.”
Mental fitness, on this view, is essentially human flourishing, living what the philosophers have long referred to as the “good life.”
In Toward a Psychology of Being, Maslow explained that he believed “self-actualization,” connoting “full humanness” or the development of our most enriching human potential, was a better name for what interests us when talking about “mental wellness.” Resounding Fromm’s conception of mental health, Maslow explained that a self-actualizing human being is someone who perceives reality with clarity, opens themselves to experience, and prioritizes unity of self and spontaneity over perfunctory thought and social conformity. The self-actualizer also exhibits love, autonomy, and objectivity over egoism or ethnocentrism.2
Many commentators reactively categorized Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation as evidence of psychological sickness. A more thorough and honest analysis reveals Bushnell’s concern for the soul shocking and historic bloodletting in Gaza and his decision to give his life so that others’ would live exemplifies important parts of the humanistic conception of mental wellbeing and human excellence.
Reality, Integrity, and Responsibility
Aaron Bushnell took seriously the importance of independent thought, the love of his fellow human beings, and living with responsibility and autonomy. “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?,’” Bushnell posted to Facebook, the morning he set himself ablaze, including a link to a livestream of the action. “The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Bushnell’s post also spoke to his regard for the principle of integrity. Not to be confused with “being honest,” integrity entails wholeness or congruency of self; refusing to mutilate our principles or compartmentalize them in comforting rationalizations or blissful ignorance. To be in a state of integrity is to identify and eliminate the intolerable inconsistencies that inevitably creep into all our lives.
Bushnell’s succinct social media post challenged the public and those in the government to step beyond moral common sense—a reliance on popular trends and unthinking cultural conformity—and to contemplate the objective, logical, and timeless moral implications of their response to the killing of so many innocent people in Gaza. The critique challenges our core moral self-image as people opposed to injustice, revealing, upon reflection, how difficult being good can be when being good puts us at odds with popular opinion and the powerful.
Most of us would do well to recognize that we are what I call “moral freeloaders,” people who have contributed very little to the ethical conscience they take for granted as their own. To the extent that many of us are anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-racist, and so forth, it is because others came before us and willingly sacrificed so much—money, time, status, security, even their lives—to advance the cause of human dignity.
I am not arguing that we should forsake our inherited ethical insights or that we ought to be ashamed that we were not alive early enough to help achieve the abolition of slavery or women’s enfranchisement. The point is that we ought not smugly and self-righteously treat the fruits of others’ ethical vision and moral labor as our own achievement. We should, instead, recognize that many of our best moral opinions are gifts from heretical change agents of the past; gifts we should embrace with gratitude and humility.
We move from moral freeloader to contributor when we embrace the responsibility to nurture the vision of our predecessors into newfound ethical awareness. Lacking such humility we’re inclined to a moral arrogance that presumes intrinsic immunity from immoral belief and behavior. We see this play out when some spend more time signaling their virtue rather than engaging in honest self-examination.
Aaron Bushnell was not a self-aggrandizing virtue signaler. Some of his friends believed he was overly burdened by the weight of feeling guilt for his participation in systems of “hierarchy and injustice.” Bushnell’s Facebook post wasn’t just a challenge to the public, it was an echo of a challenge to himself: What was he willing to do about the mind and heart-boggling injustices befalling the people of Gaza, day after day, before his very eyes? What responsibility was he willing to take as a member of the armed services and citizen of the nation responsible for supplying Israel with 69% of its arms imports?3 A nation that, more than rationalizing Israel’s conduct of the war, has actively armed the Israeli military with 100 arms transfers, all through a loophole bypassing Congress, since the start of the war.
Bushnell responded to this moral travesty with intellectual and moral humility along with compassion. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he explained as he approached the Israeli embassy, speaking into a camera live streaming his action. “I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” In a certain sense, members of the political mainstream are right to view Aaron Bushnell as a “madman.” Bushnell’s purposeful death was indeed a heretical attack on their self-perception as members of a supposedly rational, ethical status-quo.
Bushnell’s Biophilia
Earlier in the day before his self-immolation, Bushnell gave advance warning to a set of news media outlets that he would be carrying out an extreme act of protest. His email read, “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.” Clearly aware of the nature of his protest and the way people would be impacted by it, Bushnell also indicated the act would be “highly disturbing.”
Bushnell was no necrophiliac—no lover of death. His biophilia—deep appreciation for life and living—made it impossible for him to turn away from the horrors being inflicted upon the Palestinian people. He believed that extreme action was called for to break through the political status-quo. “I hope you’ll understand. I love you,” Bushnell messaged a friend hours before his action. “This doesn’t even make sense, but I feel like I’m going to miss you.”
We may question the kind of political action Bushnell chose, but no one can credibly claim he was detached from reality or wished to expedite his encounter with oblivion. Quite the opposite, Bushnell was burdened not with fantasy but with reality. He could not turn from reality the way, for example, prominent Israeli historian, Benny Morris has. In a marathon debate hosted by Lex Fridman, in March 2024, Morris flatly denied the fact that a famine was taking place in Gaza, and insisted he had “not seen one Palestinian die of starvation in these last four months.”
Bushnell was uniquely unwilling to embrace the escapism that is so common during crises. Rather than rationalizing moral crimes or imbibing apathy’s blissful elixir, Bushnell retained his reason and sensitivity, and, therefore, aliveness to the horrors: social media and mainstream media outlets broadcasting withering child bodies; children weeping before camera crews, crying out, “I miss bread;” children dying of malnutrition and dehydration.
Aaron Bushnell made the willful decision to carry out a form of protest—a gruesome yet consenting blood sacrifice—that itself evidences the madness of a social circumstance in which powerful people donning suits and ties and proud titles like “Secretary of State” and “President” have chosen apathy, indifference, or rationalization. The rationalization of a military campaign that has produced a a more than 30,000 person death toll, two-thirds of which are women and children, shattered records in the killing of journalists; violated previously inviolable ethical principles against targeting medical facilities and workers; and features a famine fostered by actively blocking food and humanitarian aid.
Can one behave “respectably” within a social context which condones a military campaign that the International Court of Justice has determined to be a “plausible” case of genocide? One in which unarmed people posing no threat to military forces are obliterated by drones, without so much as a warning as they try to endure amidst a barren hellscape of a total siege?Where people who leave their countries and families to feed starving, desperate families in another country are obliterated in not one, not two, but three sequential missile strikes?
Bushnell could not join those capable of comfortably watching a film like The Zone of Interest (2023), in which the commandant of Auschwitz pursues an idyllic family life at the doorstep of the concentration camp, and fail to recognize the ethical parallels—which is not to say identical scenarios—between the dehumanization of Jewish people during World War II and the dehumanization of Palestinian people during the Gaza War.
The film’s writer and director, Jonathan Glazer outraged and discomforted many when he explained that the very point of The Zone of Interest was to help us realize these ethical parallels. “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present,” Glazer explained in his Oscar acceptance speech for the film, “not to say, look what they did then, rather, look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst.” Glazer added that he opposed having his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” Like Bushnell, Glazer refused to prioritize adherence to the status-quo over expressing an incendiary truth. And while Bushnell sacrificed his very life, Glazer now faces backlash including condemnation from many in Hollywood.
While some will claim Bushnell should or could have advanced his cause through alternative means, we ought not ignore the urgency of the conditions in which he made his decision and the failure of conventional political action to generate the immediate results necessary to stop the killing. By the time of Bushnell’s self-immolation, two historic marches, each comprised of hundreds of thousands had taken place in Washington, D.C., one on November 4, 2023 and another on January 13, 2024.
Protesters called for a cease-fire and the U.S. government to stop supplying Israel with arms. These civic efforts, coupled with countless local and regional demonstrations, call-in and letter writing campaigns, civil disobedience campaigns had not so much as impacted the Biden administration’s rhetoric by February 25.
We do not know what role if any Bushnell’s self-immolation played in the Democratic Party’s recent rhetorical shifts toward a more adversarial posture concerning Israel’s conduct of the war and handling of food supplies, or if a line can be drawn from Bushnell's action to the U.S. abstention on the 14-0 United Nations Security Council resolution demanding an immediate and unconditional cease-fire during the month of Ramadan, on March 25, 2024.
But we do know Bushnell’s actions inspired the second major resignation in the State Department since the start of the war on Gaza. Annelle Sheline, a foreign affairs officer at the Office of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, wrote that she hoped her resignation would “contribute to the many efforts to push the administration to withdraw support for Israel’s war, for the sake of the 2 million Palestinians whose lives are at risk and for the sake of America’s moral standing in the world.” Asked by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now about the impact of Bushnell’s self-immolation and final social media post, Sheline choked back tears and answered in a voice trembling with courage and authenticity. “That post I think spoke to me and many people who had to really look at what they were doing,” she said. “For me, I have a young daughter and I thought about, in the future, if she were to ask me, what were you doing when this was happening, you were at the State Department, I want to be able to tell her that I didn't stay silent. And I know many people who are deeply affected by those words that Aaron Bushnell posted.”
Those claiming that Bushnell’s self-immolation was inconsequential are not only mistaken in light of the impact he had on people like Annelle Sheline; but also because they mistakenly presume that the worth of our efforts is found only in their consequences.
Though our society is inclined to judge every action by its outcome, Bushnell’s efforts remind us of an insight long cherished by great thinkers and change agents throughout history: some things are intrinsically good—good in themselves. These are “ultimate” values or “Being” values (B-values) as Maslow described them. They are what philosophers usually call the “ends” in contrast to the “means” of life. Given that all of our lives result in the ultimate return to nonexistence, we would do well to identify the experiences and values we cherish for themselves and not only those prized for what they may generate. The deepest value of life cannot be located in a perpetually forestalled “return on investment.” As Maslow insightfully put it at the end of Toward a Psychology of Being,
“being in a state of Being needs no future, because it is already there. Then Becoming ceases for the moment and its promissory notes are cashed in the form of the ultimate rewards, i.e., the peak-experiences, in which time disappears and hopes are fulfilled.”
Erich Fromm made much the same point when he wrote, “The experience of loving, of joy, of grasping truth does not occur in time, but in the here and now. The here and now is eternity, i.e., timelessness. But eternity is not, as popularly misunderstood, indefinitely prolonged time.”
Aaron Bushnell chose to sacrifice himself in an admittedly desperate, gruesome, and shocking manner. He did so to contribute to the cause of trying to end an unjust war causing the deaths of tens of thousands. To the extent that Bushnell’s sacrifice was an expression of his deepest convictions and most authentic self, we can conclude, as strange and painful a thought as it may be, that he died in a “Being” state of fulfillment.
Rational Self-Sacrifice?
Some will recoil from the claim that Bushnell’s actions can be seen as consistent with self-actualization, insisting that no one who commits suicide can be said to be healthy. In the first place, Bushnell’s self-immolation was no more suicidal than a parent shielding their child from bullets. Suicide is the act of ending one’s life to alleviate personal suffering. By all accounts, Bushnell preferred not to die just as we would rightly assume a parent who dies rescuing their child would have preferred to live.
The inability of some to comprehend Bushnell’s self-sacrifice and their insistence that it must be categorized as a “crazy” person committing “suicide” reveals a problem Maslow described as “the ultimate disease of our time”: “valuelessness,” or what was variously described as “anomie, amorality, anhedonia, rootlessness, emptiness, hopelessness, the lack of something to believe in and to be devoted to.”4 A key characteristic of this valuelessness, wrote Maslow, is that “people have nothing to admire, to sacrifice themselves for, to surrender to, to die for.”
That actions like Bushnell’s are today described in a clinically vacuous language as mentally unhinged fanaticism may indicate the success of the pathological valuelessness Maslow spoke of. Such thinking inverts the reality that human liberation, to whatever extent it has been achieved, is the result of individuals and groups of people knowingly jeopardizing and sometimes outright sacrificing their precious mortal lives for a cause—for a value—that transcends their individual ego and existence. That people will sometimes devote themselves to, and die for, an irrational or flagrantly immoral cause no more discredits the virtue of rationally determined self-sacrifice—of martyrdom—than a bad argument discredits argumentation or a poorly written book condemns all books.
For the groundbreaking therapist and researcher, Carl Rogers, human flourishing occurs when we become a self-trusting, self-directed person open to organically and authentically encountering the dynamic world of experience. In “A Therapist’s View of the Good Life: The Fully Functioning Person,” he wrote that such a person
“is more able to experience all of his feelings, and is less afraid of any of his feelings; he is his own sifter of evidence, and is more open to evidence from all sources; he is completely engaged in the process of being and becoming himself, and thus discovers that he is soundly and realistically social; he lives more completely in this moment, but learns that this is the soundest living for all time.”
To the extent Bushnell’s action was self-determined, consistent with his foremost values, directed at addressing a problem of the highest importance and substantiated by the facts; to the extent that it was morally inspired by his deepest convictions—convictions rooted in universal human values including respect for life and justice—we cannot, from the vantage point of a humanistic vision of full humanness, proclaim him “sick.” To the contrary, Bushnell’s profound sacrifice, however discomforted we are with the thought—as I am—may well be understood as part of a journey to self-discovery and enhanced agency, journey to self-actualization.
No one should light themselves on fire in the same way that no one should shoot another person. Yet just as the basic form of self-defense is justified when another person tries to violate our basic bodily autonomy, so, too, are heretics like Bushnell justified in taking intemperate action—action which we should remember harmed no one but himself—when seeking to remedy the madness of an onslaught that has killed more than 13,000 children in less than six months.
We should also never lose sight of the fact that as outraged as Bushnell was by the senseless killing in Gaza, he refused the traditional path of the violent hero who physically and even lethally asserts himself upon others to force them to accept his wishes. Bushnell instead embraced nonviolent martyrdom—a benevolent witness to a grave injustice, giving up only that which was his to give; sacrificing his life in the hope that it would ignite such a cacophonous cry of outrage that even the powerful and “moderate” would be compelled to respond.
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In the preface to his book, Maslow wrote that he was “convinced” that terms like “psychological health” and “psychological illness” would “be obsolete within a decade.” Maslow as clearly wrong as these terms continue to hold significant sway over our psychological imagination since the publication of his book in 1962.
Maslow lists these characteristics in a chapter titled, “Deficiency Motivation and Growth Motivation” and again under the heading “Self-Actualization: Growth” in a chapter titled “Psychological Data and Human Values.”
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's March 2024 “Fact Sheet” shows that the United States accounted for 69% of Israel's arms imports between 2014 and 2023 (11), and that the U.S. is responsible for 42% of the global arms exports, nearly four times that of Russia and seven times that of China (2).
Appendix E in Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences.
An extraordinary article. Thank you.