10 the Survivor Mission

¶ … survivor mission is the particular purpose in life that a person ascribes to him or herself in the event of having survived a situation that others typically die from. The survivor mission is a phenomenon that is oft recurrent in attempted suicide cases where a person, trying and failing to repeatedly kill himself, may conclude that he has a specific mission in life and that, therefore, his life was preserved on that account.

Possessing this survivor mission poses both negative and positive effects. On the one hand, it presents direction to one's life giving the individual the certainty of what he or she wants to do with his life, a certain self-confidence and stability, whilst preventing him from indulging in trivialities and time-wasting concerns. The survivor mission presents the individual with a sense of purpose and may lead to significant contributions on a social, if not, global scale (Deegan, 2002).

On the other hand, the individual's perspective may be misguided and he may absorb himself in self-and/or socially destructive projects and endeavors (ibid.). A religious person may, for instance, believe that his mission in life is to become a terrorist or to actively kill others in order to obstruct abortion. Many religious fundamentalists become so and turn to aggressive actions as form of their survivor mission: that this is their purpose in life. Attempting to persuade someone that he or she is incorrect is difficult in the best of times due to heuristics such as my-confirmation and belief -- perseverance that prevents the person from challenging his perspectives particularly if those perspectives involve sacrifice of labor, time, money and other factors (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). In the worst of times -- when one believes that God or fate has called one to this mission -- resilience to change in views is tenacious and inflexible. This may cause a problem for self and others since both may be hurt in the process.

I saw a case in point of the survivor mission and its effect on others in a foreign country when a person, having survived a terrorist attack, somehow or other deemed it his mission to evangelize the world. He, thereupon, spent his limited resources to founding an illegal radio station and recruiting people to host their opinions (that had to echo his) during various parts of the day. There are many illegal radio stations in existence, particularly in that specific country, but the man lost his money and almost his wife (and possibly his kids, too) in his all-absorbing urge to operate and sustain a floundering station. More so, during the mist of running the station, the man suddenly became convinced that he was a messiah -- after all he was propagating views that denounced offenders to his particular opinions as deviant and socially destructive. Circumstances became quite comic if they were not tragic in that radio episodes were intertwined with the police irregularly closing the station, only for the man to sink more money into it and re-open it elsewhere. A barrage of hate mail and hate calls poured into the station, but the man remained oblivious to them, virtually establishing his home in this hideout way in a factory complex that could only be reached by a fire escape that meandered reaching several stories high.

I do not know whether the man's marriage survived, but his mental faculties apparently did not and neither did his economic resources. The man's survivor mission, in this case, tripped him up and rather than enabling him to maximize his life to the optimal good of himself and society, it wrought destruction on himself and related others urging him to achieve, but to achieve in a self and other-destructive manner.