Litnet

I took this photograph on the beach of Goa, a week after the tsunami had risen to swallow the world in 2004.

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This reflection emerged from a public conversation following the death of South African performer and writer Ian von Memerty, whose online series on “self-deliverance” sparked wide debate about autonomy, ageing and dignity, questions that increasingly confront societies everywhere.

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“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” – Iris Murdoch

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I did not follow Ian von Memerty’s journey in real time. Not out of indifference, and not out of fear – but because it felt performative. The chaptered unfolding, the slogans, the invitations to like and share, the carefully curated arc of revelation – it reminded me of a kind of theatre that has always left me weary. The self-conscious staging of the self. The polishing of anguish into narrative. The ego stepping forward even in vulnerability.

Perhaps that unsettled me because I am not immune to it. I know the seduction of shaping pain into art. I know how easily confession becomes performance, how quickly conviction can harden into identity.

I have, in an attempt to meet some of the very challenges Ian speaks of, embarked on a master’s in creative writing – trying to discipline my own voice, trying not to confuse confession with clarity. I did not want to spend energy on this unfolding manifesto. I did not want to be drawn into what felt, at first glance, like self-mythologising.

And yet, something in it has continued to disturb me. Not scandalised. Not morally outraged. Disturbed in a quieter way. Provoked.

There is something in the architecture of the argument that demands interrogation – not because it is crude, but because it is elegant. The seduction lies in its coherence. The calm tone. The measured cadence. The framing of “self-deliverance” as responsibility rather than despair. The claim that this is not suicide but sovereignty. It is precisely because the argument is intelligent that it must be examined carefully.

What is being proposed is not merely a personal choice, but a philosophy of dignity. Autonomy is elevated to its highest position. Control becomes the measure of selfhood. Contraction is treated as erasure. Ageing – particularly ageing without money, without applause, without agency – is cast not as tragedy but as indignity.

The shift is subtle. A deeply human fear – of humiliation, dependency, irrelevance – becomes a rights claim. “I do not want to become that” becomes “I should not have to become that”. Preference becomes principle. Anxiety becomes architecture.

The fears themselves are not trivial. Anyone who has watched decline, who has sat beside dementia, who has felt the exhaustion of responsibility, knows that love and resentment can coexist uneasily. Care can deepen tenderness even as it drains patience. There is no naïveté here about the difficulty of old age or the failures of care systems. The question is whether fear, however lucidly expressed, can serve as a stable foundation for moral law.

When dignity is equated with autonomy, what happens to those whose autonomy has already diminished? When worth is tethered to productivity, what becomes of the frail, the disabled, the dependent? If contraction of lifestyle – financial, physical, cognitive – is interpreted as the collapse of the self, then the self has been defined far too narrowly.

Beneath the manifesto lies a particular anthropology: the self as capacity. The self as performance. The self as expansion. When expansion slows, the self thins. When earning contracts, identity contracts. When applause fades, meaning fades.

But is that what a human being is? Perhaps the deeper difficulty lies in the modern assumption that the self is a discrete and sovereign unit, rather than something porous, relational and continually formed within the lives of others.

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Margaret Atwood once wrote that there is never one of anyone: we are many selves to ourselves and to others.

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As writer Craig Higginson observed in response to this unfolding conversation, the very idea of a unified and sovereign self may itself be an illusion. Margaret Atwood once wrote that there is never one of anyone: we are many selves to ourselves and to others. Those selves shift across time, circumstance and relationship. We do not fully own them. Nor can we exist outside the web of relations that shape and sustain us.

Seen in that light, the erosion of certain capacities does not necessarily erase the person. Even when dementia dissolves memory and recognition, something of the human presence remains – a place in the world where love, memory and relation continue to dwell. Those who sit beside a beloved parent whose mind has wandered elsewhere know this intimately. It takes a long time to die.

It takes a long time to die – and perhaps, as many wisdom traditions have suggested, we begin that process long before the body ceases. Buddhist teachings speak of impermanence not as catastrophe but as the very texture of existence: each moment dissolving into the next. The Vedic and Upanishadic traditions contemplate a self that is not sealed within the individual body but participates in a wider field of consciousness. Even the biblical imagination returns us to the elemental truth that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. None of these traditions imagines the self as a fixed possession.

Iris Murdoch observed something similar when she wrote that the chief enemy of moral life is the fat, relentless ego that constructs consoling fictions about its own centrality. The self we experience as sovereign is often a story we tell ourselves. In reality, our lives are interwoven – with other people, with memory, with language, with the fragile ecosystems that sustain us. The question of where I end and you begin becomes far less clear than modern individualism would prefer.

If that is so, then the erosion of certain capacities does not necessarily erase the person. The self was never a solitary island to begin with. We are less like sealed vessels than like currents moving through a shared sea.

Another dimension of this debate was articulated by the artist Kim Siebert, who observed that the voice speaking in this testimony emerges from a particular social formation. In many societies – and certainly in South Africa – dignity for men of a certain class has long been bound to earning, providing and maintaining autonomy. When those structures collapse, identity itself can feel as though it collapses with them.

In that sense, the argument for “self-deliverance” cannot be separated from the culture that shaped it. It reflects not only an individual reasoning, but a collective ethos that still equates worth with independence and contraction with failure.

This is not a condemnation. It is a recognition of grief. Grief over contraction. Grief over irrelevance. Grief over the body’s betrayal. Grief over a world that moves on. But grief is not the same as moral clarity.

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The seduction of self-deliverance lies in its promise of coherence. It tidies the chaos of ageing.

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The seduction of self-deliverance lies in its promise of coherence. It tidies the chaos of ageing. It removes uncertainty. It restores authorship. It offers the illusion that the self can remain intact by choosing its exit before erosion begins.

And yet the erosion may not be annihilation. It may be transformation. That possibility is rarely entertained within the system. The courage of staying – of allowing the self to change shape – is dismissed as indignity.

There is also something deeper at stake. The autonomous individual imagined in this philosophy stands curiously alone. Yet no human life is ever entirely self-authored. We emerge from the earth, live within fragile webs of relationship, and return eventually to the same ground that holds all living things.

The notion that we stand as sovereign authors of our existence sits uneasily within that larger reality. Our identities, like our bodies, are woven into a continuum far older and larger than individual will.

Autonomy matters. Honest conversations about death matter. Reform of broken care systems matters. But autonomy severed from relationship becomes brittle. Dignity reduced to control becomes exclusionary.

The theatre of self-deliverance is compelling. It is articulate. It is poised. But it rests upon a narrow understanding of what it means to be human.

It would be easy, at this point, to sharpen the critique further. But that is not the purpose of writing this now. There are children. There is a partner. There are siblings and friends. There are people whose grief is not philosophical but visceral. Whatever one thinks of the ideas, a man has died.

This reflection is not a condemnation of Ian. It is not a denial of his suffering. It is not an attempt to strip him of dignity in death. It is, rather, an attempt to resist the romanticisation of a thought system that may appear stronger than it is.

He was loved. He was complicated. He was talented, volatile, generous, frightened, principled and contradictory – as most of us are.

For his family, the work now is not argument, but grief. Not philosophy, but absence. It is not for them to defend or refute his reasoning. It is for them to remember him as a father, partner, friend – not as a thesis.

There is a time for debate. There is also a time for letting someone go.

May those who loved him be held gently in this season. May their memories not be overshadowed by the noise of argument. And may we be careful – intellectually careful, emotionally careful – not to confuse eloquence with inevitability. For, in the end, none of us authors live our life alone, and none of us will leave it entirely on our own terms.

Acknowledgement

This reflection emerged from a wider public conversation. I am grateful, in particular, to the writer Craig Higginson and the artist Kim Siebert, whose generous and perceptive responses helped widen the questions explored here.

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Jennifer Kestis Ferguson is a South African musician, writer and former parliamentarian based in Sweden. Her work explores music, memory, ecology and the moral imagination across cultures.

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