Related: there's a big new movie out about the Shakers:
January 31, 2026
"Antinatalism Explained."
I'm not endorsing this idea, and I can even see why one would want not merely to resist but to actively suppress it, but I would recommend courageously hearing out the argument. It's quite challenging, but why is it wrong?
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38 comments:
This is the philosophy of pessimism of Rust Cohle on True Detective or Thomas Ligotti in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.
Or, in Internet parlance, "Taking the black pill."
The problem is that we are either thinking beings, made in god's image, who are commanded to be fruitful and multiply and believe in a brighter future, or we are merely the most cruel and cunning of the beasts.
If the latter, why should airy nihilistic philosophy deprive of us the pleasures encoded in the very core of our beings?
It shouldn't be suppressed but the idea is nonsensical; and, of course, you don't see the anti-natalists taking the exit door of suicide, do you? They don't really believe what they preach.
How different is antinatalism (eliminating humanity) from eugenics (improving humanity)? Both philosophies believe that humanity is deeply flawed and life is not intrinsically valuable. Suffering can be reduced by discouraging people to reproduce, especially poor people or people with mental or physical disabilities. They're like opposites but also the same.
If your life has an excess of suffering over pleasure, you can kill yourself. Currently about 1% of Americans choose to go that way. 99% don't. So if you're trying to predict what your imagined future child might think, the odds are about 99 to 1, that they will want to stick around.
In fact this overestimates the attraction of non existence, as lots of people wait a long time before killing themselves. So they live through all the years when pleasure exceeds suffering, and pull the plug only when the balance turns negative. So most of the 1% who kill themselves were OK with being alive at some point.
btw very few animals commit suicide either. They also pursue the creation of offspring vigorously. The assertion in the video that it is social pressure that twists our arms into having children is biologically ignorant. It's not social pressure, it is the instinct crafted by evolution, common to all animals.
In a war, the side that doesn't believe in extending its future will be destroyed by the side that does.
I don't care about the arguments, and Bertrand Russell pointed out, you can make arguments with language that sound really good, but ultimately they are rhetorical, not logical. A good working definition of rhetoric is language that sounds like logic, but isn't.
The biological history of the earth is full of dead ends, yet life goes on. Ask somebody making this argument if they think that the universe would be a "better place" if our planet were a sterile rock. If they address that question in the video, somebody tell me and I will watch it.
The Chinese proverb about "interesting times" contains at least one side truth, at least interesting times are interesting.
Baby Lives Matter (BLM) is an evolutionary and social imperative.
Antinatalism or transhumanism were featured in every episode of The Outer Limits... The Twilight Fringe in progressive culture with liberal elements.
Not "pro-choice," they are "anti-life."
They lost me at the first two sentences. No thanks! Ain't got time for that shit.
I would recommend courageously hearing out the argument. It's quite challenging, but why is it wrong?
Life is sacred and good. Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love the babies you create.
There were Japanese people who would read Schopenhauer and then throw themselves off cliffs. I'm like, "Why the fuck are you reading Schopenhauer? Cheer up. Have you tried the Marx brothers?"
"These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full." John 15:11.
Looks like something Margaret Atwood would approve of.
Why Are So Many British Women Getting Abortions?
"A good working definition of rhetoric is language that sounds like logic, but isn't."
No, as a matter of fact, a "good working definition" of rhetoric, or anything else, would be a set of criteria that enabled one to determine whether something did or did not fall into that category.
"Why Are So Many British Women Getting Abortions?"
Same reason a dog licks his balls.
Same reason a dog licks his balls.
No. Abortions are dramatically increasing. Abortion has been legal in the UK for my entire lifetime. Why are they skyrocketing now?
You think abortion is fun, like getting your balls licked?
Ann Lee -- shake it but don't break it.
On Rhetoric I would take Cicero's definitions most seriously, and his was complex, with no less than five branches, of which logical argument was just one.
I think the sad clown face is a Freudian slip. They are painting a sad clown on to an innocent child's face.
You might try to make a baby laugh before you stab her out of pity for her plight, jackass.
Yeah, there is rhetoric writ large which is a huge area of study, but one that I would argue boils down to persuasion, and yes, my 'working definition' was a little snarky, but we are left with the fact that lots of arguments that are intended to persuade are not founded very strongly in logic, but they sound logical.
Well, the guy has found reasons to live. He hasn't committed suicide. Yet, he says another person will have no reason to live. Then he lists off fears endemic in the left. Well, all the bad things won't happen to one person all at once. In fact the future of predicted bad things won't all happen. We won't "boil" and see AI take our jobs and die in a war and suffer malnutrition and watch our coral isle sink and watch bad things happen to others on the nightly news and see our leaders do nothing year after year, and then decade after decade about the end of the world being five years away. And if some of it does happen to your poor unfortunate son or daughter, they can make up their own minds what to do just as you are doing. Why not let them make their choice as you are doing? Or, be logical. Kill yourself to prove that you really find suffering unbearable. With you dead, your children won't be born. You dead, it all ends. And you'll have proved you meant what you said. You still alive? your talk is just that - talk. Like the rest of us, you know there's reasons for living though the real reasons might be hard to explain to someone busy showing-off their debating skills. Maybe you can't make yourself hear yourself. Put down your ipad. Go in the woods like Thoreau. Give peace a chance.
I would recommend courageously hearing out the argument. It's quite challenging, but why is it wrong?
It is so bad, wrong doesn’t begin to describe it.
It compares nullity against existence.
Infinity is a difficult concept. Nullity, the mirror image of infinity, is even harder.
The complete absence of everything is incomparable to anything.
wildswan : "Well, the guy has found reasons to live. He hasn't committed suicide. Yet, he says another person will have no reason to live."
One might argue that he is engaged in a performative contradiction. but that would only apply if he was arguing that nobody thinks his own existence is worthwhile. As I understand it he's arguing that existence is not worthwhile for most people, and so you're not justified in breeding if the odds are so strongly against the life you are creating being worthwhile.
However as you pointed out, and as I pointed out earlier, the evidence is that the odds are strongly the other way. At least if you take the value of existence at the creature's own valuation. Very few people kill themselves, and even fewer decide to do it as soon as they're able.
So I think his argument really boils down to "my valuation of your child's life trumps both your valuation of it, and its own valuation of it." In short "Shut up peasant, I know best."
Which is hardly original.
I'm a radical pro-natalist! It is one of life's great pleasures to impregnate a desirable 20-something woman and I like to do it whenever possible. I've suggested my wife rent me out like a proven bull to women of the village, but she declines to share her genetic fortune. Sadly, abortive ideation among the inseminated has prevented me from having the manifold progeny that I deserve, but alas, second wave feminism! And babies! Extraordinary! No work of art, no symphonic masterpiece, no sweeping vista inspires greater pleasure than I experienced this morning when my latest offering to posterity pried my eyelids open with her little fingers to see if I was merely feigning sleep. I was. Sigh.
In the Aristotelian/Scholastic tradition every good for a person, but it material or moral, assumes that existence of a subject must precede it.
A tradition that did assume an ant-natalist posture were many of the Gnostic traditions (e.g. the Manicheans) who thought that birth imprisoned a soul in evil matter, which was the realm of the Demiurge, as opposed to the spiritual realm of God. The orthodox (small "o" here) Christian tradition countered that God has dominion over both the Heavens and the material world, and that whatever might be the fallenness of the material world, it had been redeemed by Christ's Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.
One of the things that is notable about the fight over abortion is how dishonest the pro-choice side has to be. That's because abortion, or intentionally causing a healthy pregnant woman to have a miscarriage, is a tragedy and an awful thing.
This is why Justice Ginsburg got mad at the other side for calling abortion doctors "abortionists." She wanted them to be called "obstetricians." Which is to say, she wanted to hide the bad (abortion) practice through the use of a word to describe a good practice, helping women give birth. To object to the word "abortionist" is to object to abortion itself.
See also vague words like "choice" or "liberty" or "equality." The point of these words is to hide the reality of what we are discussing -- a doctor poisoning or stabbing a baby so the child will die.
Tell somebody who supports abortion rights that they support abortion rights, and they will often yell at you. This is bizarre. If I tell somebody who likes birth control that they like birth control, they will say, "of course I like birth control." They see no obligation to hide their appreciation of birth control under the rubric of words like "choice" or "liberty" or "equality." They support birth control, full stop.
Very few people will say they are opposed to babies or think babies ought to be killed. It is an obviously awful and negative idea. That is why so many people on the pro-choice side have to be dishonest and hide behind rhetoric and words. It's why the media never shows us abortion photographs. Killing babies is deeply unpopular with people.
Sometimes pro-choice people will say, "Nobody likes abortion." That's not true. The billion dollar abortion industry likes abortion. Specifically, they like the money. And there are a lot of men -- who will never have to undergo an abortion -- who like the Playboy sex that abortion provides. So, sex and money is why many people support abortion laws. But they nonetheless have to avoid thinking about the violence and how they have terminated their own children. They have to lie, to themselves and others. Because an opposition to babies, and a desire to terminate them, is a deeply unpopular belief system. We only get people to make that choice by lying to them, and ourselves, about what we are doing.
"Saint Croix said...
Why Are So Many British Women Getting Abortions?"
Metric
Jimmy Carter (1977–1981)
Abortion Rate Change ~21–32% increase
Ronald Reagan (1981–1989)~2% increase or ~4% decrease
Well. I'm having a good time. So screw him.
Do they really believe in it, or are they just solipsists wanting a captive audience so they can moan on and on about it? Honestly, I think they might really be the best argument against having language in the first place.
I feel like the guy should be narrating this video in a French accent, with a bit more railing at God, and how He has thrown us into the world, and abandoned us all.
Among the poorest arguments I have seen. It is incomplete, no one knows what happens when you are dead or unborn, you can only make assumptions about it based on nothing. I will stay in this safe harbor for as long s I can before I accept an unknown. Inevitable, but not today.
I made it to 3:40. The guy said the same thing three times. Life's too short.
I don't recall precisely how long I stuck with the Ann Lee teaser. Not long. I'm glad though it's called a teaser. Calling things like that a trailer bugs me. Not that teaser's all that great. I'd be okay with calling things like that a commercial.
Respectfully, the anti-natalist argument in the video (yes I listened to it in full) is not about abortion or about suicide. Those are the destruction of existing life.
The argument is to not create life at all. As a childless person myself I did not find it convincing. The supporting reasons seemed cry-babyish and child-like. (oh the irony)
"but why is it wrong?" I'm not feeling a compulsion to say that it is wrong. Certainly a minority position among childless people, none of whom would say that their not having children was a deeply felt desire to avoid potential suffering for their theoretical offspring. Many childless people go though hell trying to conceive. Others say that is just the way their lives worked out, others choose to be celibate.
Altruism is usually bullshit, and altruism for someone who does not exist is double bullshit. So not "wrong", but also not convincing.
One thing that keeps us going is the feeling that the world will be a better place for our children. Another is watching and being involved in the change and abundance of the world. Just focus on the suffering and you'll suffer more.
Here's my response: I don't have the right to decide for the future whether it exists or not. I'm part of a long chain of people and I'm not the one that matters the most. Historically, the world has always been awful, somewhere, and we only exist because our ancestors lived through it. How do we know that it will always be awful, everywhere, forever? If you think life is awful, everywhere, now, how do you know that any descendants you have would agree? It's all narcissism. How you FEEL now is not reality for all times and places.
Personally, shit, my life was tough. A lot of the difficulty was being intelligent and introspective. Once I got over that, it got better. My son is IDD, cannot be introspective, and is the happiest person I've ever met. He accepts whatever is happening, works hard, and doesn't ponder the unfairness of the universe or things he can't change. And, you know, I think he's a better person than people mad that they exist. I think he naturally has the mental state many people work their entire lives to achieve. I'm not rationalizing to make myself feel better. I don't delude myself that disability is really a superpower or any of that nonsense. No kidding, he's there philosophically.
On the condition of the planet or whatever... so what? Serious question. If we're getting into the nihilism of it all, why care about other species that are all going to die anyway in a near-infinite universe? Why are we any different if we're just trying to do what all life does, which is maximize itself? If we ARE special because we notice the problem, um, you noticed we're different morally and perhaps humans can be a good thing. I'd suggest that maybe you believe we ARE responsible, which means we DO have a special status.
I get tired of this crap. If you are smart enough to have existential angst, but not smart enough to find the exit, I feel for you. We're in a millennial moment, which will pass, and history will continue. The world might end, but then it might not! I am not the one who decides. My descendants will know things I don't, and I don't have the right to decide for all time whether they exist or not. That's insane. It's narcissism. I don't matter that much.
Also, why is life only worth living if everything is great and better for our children than it was for us? Maybe life is more meaningful when things are worse. A lot of social science and psychology seems to suggest it is! Again, why am I making the most important decisions on behalf of other people when I know damn well I'm not the brightest or most moral entity ever to exist? How the hell do I know what the future will be like for people who don't exist yet? That's their problem, not mine! Some humility is in order.
The argument, such as it is, starts out weak. You didn't ask the person if they would like to exist. On one hand: You can't ask a person who doesn't exist, anything. On the other hand, one could say that this potential person never indicated that they'd like to be left as potential, rather than actualized.
As for actual persons, most seem to enjoy life and are happy to be alive, but we should not care about that because some tiny minority, who could rectify their problem with ease, are bent out of shape by being born? No. This isn't rational, it's asinine.
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