Anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Their views are not necessarily limited only to humans but may encompass all sentient creatures, arguing that coming into existence is a serious harm for sentient beings in general. There are various reasons why antinatalists believe human reproduction is problematic. The most common arguments for antinatalism include that life entails inevitable suffering, death is inevitable, and humans are born without their consent. Additionally, although some people may turn out to be happy, this is not guaranteed, so to procreate is to gamble with another person’s suffering. WIKIPEDIA
If you think, maybe for a few years, like 10-20 years, no one should make babies, and when things get better, we can continue, then you are not an anti-natalist. Anti-natalists believe that suffering will always be there and no one should be born EVER.
This photo was clicked by a friend, at Linnahall.
One word: bullshit. One name: Siddhartha Gauttama. The guy nailed it about “inevitability” of suffering
I think it will die out.
Hell yeah Linnahall, it’s a cool place been there a few times myself
My relationship with antinatalism is very complicated.
First off, I personally will not be procreating, for multiple reasons.
Chief among those is the fact that I live in an ever worsening capitalist, patriarchal, xenophobic hellscape; even socialist countries are a long long way away from anything resembling communism, still require a lot of labor from their citizens in exchange for basic necessities (with good reasons), and patriarchy very much persists there. I have hope that we as a species can overcome this eventually, just as we mostly overcame slavery and achieved some semblance of emancipation for many oppressed minorities.
Another, more permanent reason: despite my relative privileges, my own experience of life has been very mixed, and I perceive there to be more suffering than happiness. Suffering is just a way for our body to push our brain to do something the body needs to survive; human beings have a lot of needs to be met, and as long as there are at least a couple that are not you will suffer (not accounting for things like drugs or other extreme dopamine hits which come with their own set of issues). Another big issue is how our bodies normalize the level of suffering to their environment; this is good because it allows us to get by with very little without going insane, but on the flipside even if you have all the basic needs met, the body is always demanding more via suffering. You can observe this by looking at rich people: even though their needs are met with seeming abundance, they crave to experience more and different pleasures, and suffer in the process of trying to achieve them. While frivolous, I think the suffering they experience is still real and similar to that of our own. I don’t feel any compassion for them (after all, for most of them their wealth was stolen from less fortunate), but it’s a good example.
As such, I personally don’t want to bring a new being into this world, mostly to suffer their way through life.
However, I also know for sure that different people experience life differently. I know that people with much worse material conditions than mine perceive themselves (and thus their life) to be overall happy, despite there being plenty of suffering too. I don’t know whether it’s a genetic or learnt trait of their psychology; in any case, I think those people are more likely to produce offspring who experience a happy life, and wish them the best in doing so. My hope is that they bring up their kids in the right way - both so that they are happy, and also able to eventually overcome all the issues in the third paragraph.
It’s incredibly stupid, but for those who truly believe in it it’s fine as long as they just use it as a guiding principle in their own lives. But it tends to attract the passionate sort, as any theoretically “anti-suffering” ideology will, so idk, I circle back to it’s stupid.
Does someone need an explainer about why suffering is natural, okay, not inevitable, and certainly not the only thing a being can feel? Or that the world is actually quite nice, but we generate suffering within ourselves?
Well, I don’t know about okay. I’d give it a pretty shit review actually.
I do not subscribe to the All Life is Suffering idea. Personally enjoy being physically embodied so much. My kids seem glad to exist too. We are the universe looking back at itself, it’s just so wonderful to get any time at all here to experience this.
I would never argue for everyone to have babies, at all. You have your own life, do what you want. But I don’t at all agree with extinction of all life because “suffering”. Yes that is part of life but it’s not all of it, not nearly.
I immediately reject any theories that pretend to “know” what they are talking about. I mean WTF are they talking about here ? We have limited senses to sense this world and limited communication capabilities, that was built on top of our fear of death and suddenly these theories trying to claim they “know it all” and this is the “judgment”. WTF. Get off your high horse.
Nobody knows anything. We ALL are just dumb. World is too big to know.
til im not an anti-natalists. I just think people should not have babies. I mean same with letting pets breed needlessly. anywho.
While certainly don’t appreciate being born (and correct about life = suffering no gꝏd outweighing it in my case) , dœsn’t mean procreation inherently unethical (although true peops often have children for selfish reasons)
Tꝏk lꝏk at antinatalist subreddit some years ago (curiosity) , felt more like contempt for (women|children) disguised as philosophical stance . “Breeder” used lots there :
- Implies women’s primary functions producing children (cannot be any thing other) , reduces women to their capacity for pregnancy
- Implies all women “chuse” to have kids
- Derogatory word toward black women during slavery , where they were forced to have children that would later be sold into said slavery
Also don’t think demanding every one stop having children dœs anything to reduce inherent suffering that comes with being living organism
Shouldn’t we be asking the unborn this question?
Tell them about this hellhole we live in and most would choose no.
In a society whose official ideology is that “There is No Alternative”, antinatalism is basically a dressed up version of “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.
It’s basically just lack of imagination. Doomerist defeatism.
I think you’re misunderstanding anti-natalism if you believe it’s about envisioning the end of the world. It’s not that grand, nor that pessimistic. It was never meant to remedy shitty living conditions. It’s not a tool for embettering society, it’s a philosophical exercise that questions one’s right to create a person and subject them to sentience and suffering.
Imagining non-existence is anything but lacking imagination because it so abstract to our minds. To be anti-natalist, you must first have attempted to imagine that in order to compare it to existence before asking if you feel it is right to subject a human to that.
It’s a philosophical exercise that challenges social conventions about child-rearing. Don’t forget that it’s an excruciating ordeal for women too. There is suffering involved for all parties. Not all kids are born healthy, secure, and provided for.
Ask anyone with disabilities, abusive families, trauma, financial hardship, and generally going though too much shit in life and you’ll find that it was never about a lack of imagination. We suffer because we are able to imagine how things could have been so much better. It is because we can imagine ourselves in a better place that we ask if not being born is necessarily any worse. That isn’t a statement made with just pessimism, it’s made with genuine curiosity towards thinking back what ‘life’ was like before being born, and deciding that it is the greatest gift you can give to your hypothetical children.
You’re contradicting your own argument:
It was never meant to remedy shitty living conditions.
Vs
Ask anyone with disabilities, abusive families, trauma, financial hardship, and generally going though too much shit in life and you’ll find that it was never about a lack of imagination.
This is a contradiction. You are literally picking the antinatalist option because of shitty living conditions.
And of course, the lack of imagination is not whether you can imagine things being better but whether you can imagine things becoming better starting from where we are here and now.
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We suffer because we are able to imagine how things could have been so much better. It is because we can imagine ourselves in a better place
If you can imagine such a place, steelman your argument then, try making it without a premise of shitty living conditions. Pick a convivial world, and make an antinatalist argument from that world. Does it still stand?
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Finally, the argument that says nonexistence might be better is literally vacuous: False implies True. Nonexistence therefore is trivially whatever you want it to be, but not In any meaningful sense.
Basically Malthusian eco-fascism. Nobody should be forced to have kids, having kids is a huge commitment that should be reserved for those who want kids, but the “humans are the virus” crowd just play into reactionary hands and cede all control to those directly responsible for the worst excess.
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It’s far from oversimplified “eco-fascism” strawman. To illustrate this, I’ll start from this argument of yours:
that should be reserved for those who want kids
Notice your own phrasing, “those who want kids”. The subject behind predicate “wanting” isn’t the object being “wanted”, despite the very object being “wanted” being a living being that’ll be unable to revert this decision imposed unto them.
People often say about “wanting kids” as if they were talking about wanting some kind of material belonging.
Yes, they have no means to decide on the circumstances of their birth, and that’s part of the problem: they can’t choose, neither positively nor negatively, they’re dependent on other’s wills because they got no agency…
…until they reach a certain age, when they’ll suddenly be recognized with agency and then the world will shift the blame upon them: they’ll be required to become a cog in the machine, they’ll be required to “work” and “serve society” in order to fulfill the basic needs (eating food and seeking shelter to protect oneself from elements) that their own body imposed upon them as part of involuntary survival instincts, they’ll be required to “pay” for eating and having a shelter (things that Mother Nature used to give freely), and they’ll be required to accept it as a “matter of fact” of “living among society”.
They can’t opt-out because they’ll be forbidden to live among wildlife as our Homo erectus ancestors did because “we’re different species”.
This leads us to this:
the “humans are the virus” crowd just play into reactionary hands and cede all control to those directly responsible for the worst excess.
IMHO, the fundamentum behind capitalistic greed is human greed.
Billionaires and riches aren’t extraterrestrials nor lizards: as far as Science is concerned, they’re Homo sapiens, differing from the majority of other Homo sapiens insofar they got “enough power” to give agency to their greed.
“Give enough power to a person and you’ll know who they really are” (a popular saying) and “humans are wolves to humans” (Thomas Hobbes).
In this regard, there’s a documentary from Derren Brown called “The Push”. Despite being cinematographic, it precisely depicts what humans are capable of doing to other humans, especially when pressed by life-or-death circumstances. It’s within us.
Finally, I must recall the initial, ecological point: if humans can endanger others from their own species (as we watch daily in capitalist-technofeudalist dystopia), other lifeforms are undeniable under danger that’s posed by human existence.
That’s because humans can’t simply blend with the all other species as one with Mother Earth (just like our ancestors used to do millions of years ago), we humans got this anthropocentric arrogance since the accidental discovery of the fire: now we’re slowly burning ourselves (literally, with fossil fuels) together with all the other lifeforms.
All of the problems you posited are consequences of capitalism and imperialism, the environmental damages included. You’re shifting the blame from genuine systemic failures to humanity genetically. It cedes all responsibility to move onto a better world, preferring to give up and adopt an eco-fascist position.
Jesus Christ stop calling it eco-facism! This is not that. Anti-Natalism is not eco-facism. The person you replied to made excellent points.
No they didn’t, and yes, this is eco-fascism. Desiring omnicide of humanity for ecological reasons cedes all agency to the ruling class.
And all the fundamenta of capitalism and imperalism are consequences of how we humans are our own wolves. Again, billionaires aren’t extraterrestrials or lizards.
It cedes all responsibility to move onto a better world
Some things aren’t reversible. For example, the species that went extinct (some of which we won’t even know they existed because there wasn’t enough time for them to be catalogued by Science) due to “Industrial Revolution”.
A naïve part of me hopes for a better world, where humans could finally coexist with Mother Nature, while we could improve things for all biosphere through Science and Academia, a Science and an Academia detached from capitalistic greed, a sincere pursuit of knowledge and scientific improvement not just for humans, but for all lifeforms, letting go from all our human malice and greed.
However, I can’t help but notice how this is getting farther and farther to be reached as the world is increasingly technofeudalist. I can’t help but see reality as it is: bleak, with a bleaker future awaiting for us, as we get increasingly trapped into a dystopia where the majority of humans would be required to fight against the asymmetrical forces possessing nuclear warheads and real-time control of public opinions from social media.
Sorry if I’m overly realistic and I can’t gaslight myself into hoping for the best, because I’m past this point, I grew tired of hoping for better times as I watch powerless to the dystopia where I was compelled to exist.
My hope now relies beyond this Pale Blue Dot: some supernova within this cosmic vicinity of the Milky Way blasting insurmountable amounts of energy towards here (not enough to vaporize the Earth, but enough to vaporize the machine where we’re forced to be cogs), or some solar CME/flare, powerful enough to free us from ourselves.
And all the fundamenta of capitalism and imperalism are consequences of how we humans are our own wolves.
- It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. — Frederic Jameson
- It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of imperialism. — Daniel Bessner
Genetic determinism was historically grossly over-applied and is still over-applied in popular (pseudo-)science and in far-right politics.Biological determinism has been associated with movements in science and society including eugenics, scientific racism, and the debates around the heritability of IQ, the basis of sexual orientation, and evolutionary foundations of cooperation in sociobiology.
Where exactly am I saying it’s something to do with human ethnic origins? Where exactly am I nodding or advocating for eugenics or other bigoted concepts?
Because my point is about the innermost human nature, imbued within every human that ever existed, exists and will exist. When, for example, Thomas Hobbes says “Humans are wolves to humans”, he’s not saying about a specific race or gender, he’s talking about the Homo sapiens. All of us, since humans discovered fire and became “fearsome” to other lifeforms holding this warm thing we think we can control.
It goes with saying how the fact that there are bigoted people using this science to try and “validate” eugenics (and how there are bigoted people in the first place) is, ironically enough, another evidence of how humans are wolves to themselves. It’s like I said in a previous reply, billionaires (and far-right figures) aren’t extraterrestrials or lizards, they’re humans with enough power to let their evilness affect other humans. Given enough power, many other humans are likely to pave similar paths.
Yes, not everyone, the end of Derren Brown’s “The Push” documentary shows how there are situations where humans can end up not ceding to their impulses to harm others in order to save their own skin.
But even when we choose to do good and help others (and this includes caring for the wellbeing of the unborn so they don’t suffer the consequences of current humanity’s actions) despite our own wellbeing, our wolves are still there, lurking inside us, because it’s born with us.
This doesn’t invalidate “Homo homini lupus est”, just shows how we sometimes get to be less of a wolf. The first step is letting go of our antropocentrism, our way of seeing the whole cosmos as if it depended and was centered on us humans, and starting to see things anachronistically, beyond human existence, and realizing how we’re just a speck in this cosmic timeline, just wandering star dust.
You aren’t being realistic. Being pessimistic isn’t realism, again you attribute the problems of systems like capitalism and imperialism to humanity, but we know for a fact that tribal societies didn’t have such problems, and neither do socialist states as they exist today. You turn hatred of symptoms of capitalism and imperialism to humanity. It’s eco-fascism.
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You hate humans and don’t want to be called fascist? LMAO
I’m pro-veganism and pro-socialism, so we can move onto a more ethical and environmentally conscious mode of production. Wanting humanity to go extinct is just ecofascism.
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While tribal societies were indeed better insofar they were closer to Nature as today’s humanity, I can’t see a haven in today’s world.
I mean, yeah, things can be going better in, say, China, insofar (AFAIK) Chinese people haven’t to worry about having a shelter and enough food, because they’re not relegated to the whims of capital as we are in the West. I can sort of agree it’s the best we can have in terms of social welfare.
But even China is far from detached, for example, from consequences of climate change. We’ve seen how floods and typhoons and drought have been increasingly hitting the Chinese, because we all exist within the same cosmic boulder called Planet Earth so whatever is done here also affects there and vice-versa.
Even though China is moving more and more to green energy, the way West countries are still "drill baby drill"ing inexorably affects them as well. And also their future, and our future, everyone’s future and every future generations upon whom climate consequences will inexorably hit harder (not to say, for example, about the mess waiting to happen above our heads due to ever-increasing amount of satellites, the Kessler Syndrome, which will also affect us down here if things get beyond control up there).
A better world is neither easy nor impossible, but merely difficult. Your pessimism takes this to be impossible and just cedes all agency to those who would perpetuate the worst excesses when you yourself acknowledge that countries like the PRC are making massive strides forward. It’s better to get organized and try to move towards socialism than it is to say the battle is already lost and we are doomed.
This reply of mine is probably going to diverge a lot from the main subject, but you suggested that I should “get organized and try to move towards socialism”.
Politically speaking, I live in a country (Brazil) where we already have nice relations with PRC and a country that been trying to counteract the Global North through BRICS.
So, to a certain extent, there’s some effort in this regard from the current government in the country I was born in, but Brazil is still a marionette of USian interests since USA pulled Brazil to their side during Cold War (1964 Military Coup, orchestrated by USA).
And Brazilians themselves are politically divided, with a significant part of the country advocating for their own economic slavery (far-right). Partly because people are held captive by a system that conceals knowledge from them, making them too busy with the “rat race” alongside the panis et circensis, so they rely in out-of-the-shelf opinions without pondering broader. When I try to talk with those geographically around me trying to wake 'em up, it’s as if I was talking in Sumerian or Akkadian, anything but contemporary language.
Then, there’s the religious aspect, very strong around here. Brazil is highly christian, while I went to Left-hand Path (highly-personalized syncretic spirituality involving Luciferianism and other esoteric beliefs) a few years ago, quite the opposite… If I couldn’t “convince” people back when I was still a christian, it’s worse now while I’m literally worshiping their “enemy”. Can’t really belong to secularists, either, because I got a belief in the supernatural, even though my belief tries to consider scientific facts.
So I doubt I can “get organized”. My worldview is very atypical, I’m very atypical. In fact, I’m just nobody. You’re likely the second person this week suggesting I got some kind of power when I got none. I can’t even have power over myself, let alone over other people (and I don’t even want to).
While I do talk and participate in discussions regarding the sociopolitical, philosophical and the mundane sometimes, trying to understand and be understood, trying to share knowledge while also trying to learn, open to what I don’t know yet, deep inside I got extensively de-realized and depersonalized, accepting how even the whole cosmos will end someday (Big Freeze / Big Rip / Big Crunch / Big Bounce), and I can’t see purpose except beyond existence.
It’s not about “ceding agency to those who would perpetuate the worst excesses”, it’s just that I went too far into staring at the Darkness and seeing how cosmic existence is pointless and fleeting, so deeply that I can’t simply “unsee” and/or forget Her stare back at me, so everything became fleeting. It’s my inner battle that’s already lost, because ain’t no battle, no spoon, nothing but the nothingness… And my weirdness before others… And Nature, Moon, Earth and Cosmos as closest manifestations of Her principle.
Anti natalism right now is pro long term human survival.
There are too many humans on Earth. There are two ways to get the human population down to a point where we can sustainably live here. You can either exterminate most the existing humans or prevent new humans from existing in the first place. Which would you choose?
"Oh but that will trigger a demographic crisis when tbere’s too many old people and too few young people!” OK? That’s a temporary problem compared to the very very permanent problem of extinction. Which we’re on track to doing of we keep living like this. And most of the issues of a demographic crisis has to do with recession and pensions, both unique to capitalism. The solution is to get rid of capitalism, not guilt people into having more kids to keep the capitalist machine alive.
Theoretical weakness:
Anti-natalism is a deeply pessimistic take on the possibilities of the human experience. Where, once, people looked to push the boundaries of humanity’s knowledge and experience (e.g. psychedelic drugs, space exploration, art movements, radical politics), this movement sees the scale as so heavily tipped towards suffering that the bit of joy and wonder we experience is not even worth it. Its calculus looks to me to be similar to Effective Altruism, because it measures all the suffering to come for the unborn as a greater infinity than all the good they will experience. It simply offers a different conclusion: instead of putting those at the top of the hierarchies in our world in charge reducing/ending suffering (a solution I supply disagree with), AN instead just wants life to end because reducing suffering enough can’t be done.
To me, this leaves no room for the possibility of changing the human experience for the better. If we’re just trying to do some accounting as to whether it’s worth having kids on a societal scale, couldn’t we make it worth it? Instead of extinction, why not try radically different ways of organizing society to get rid of the hierarchies that create most of our suffering? One lesson i take from the history i’ve been around for is that the status quo only lasts for so long.
Finally, the idea of unborn people not having consented to birth is odd. They do not exist, so they have no desires, needs, or ability to consent. We can equally say they don’t “consent” to non-existence and are stuck there until they are born. When life first came into existence in the universe, was consent involved?
Practical weakness:
If this movement ever goes beyond a purely voluntary movement, to the point of enacting policy or attempting to prevent births in any way, it will become monstrous very quickly. Every such program will face resistance and, without an anti-carceral component to the movement, will have governments (or roving mobs) criminalizing birth, sterilizing people, and destroying the infrastructure of child care. At their most extreme, “anti-natalist” movements could advocate for the murder of every single person on earth, because that would be the surest way of preventing birth. All of these things would multiply the suffering of everyone, but would be “justifiable” in their eyes because it would “prevent the suffering” of innumerable people to be born in the future. Would global nuclear war achieve their goal?
I don’t want to die, but if I could un-exist like Marty McFly disappearing from a photograph I would choose it in an instant. I have a pretty privileged life but, even for me, if I try to honestly inventory my experience there appears to be more suffering than pleasure. I don’t think this is unfair or unnatural, I believe suffering is integral to being alive because it’s how organisms respond and adapt to a world that is constantly trying to dis-organize them. Basically you can’t have life without it, given the laws of physics.
I don’t think “humans are a virus” is correct because it’s a pejorative and I don’t think viruses or humans are inherently bad. If I was going to classify anything as bad it would be the capacity to suffer, which is so foundational it actually informs the concept of “bad” rather than they other way around. I think suffering also becomes more acute the more processing power you have. Unfortunately for Agent Smith, the “virus” is intelligence and the machines already caught it.
I admit my ideas are probably half-baked on this because I just don’t feel articulate or intelligent enough to describe it. All I have is my own experience. As far as I can see, it appears that more complex animals have a greater capacity for suffering than less complex ones. It seems that the mechanisms of suffering are “body stuff”, mainly nerves, and more complex organisms simply have more of those in more robust configurations. This might just be cope, because the alternative is horrific. As a kid I looked through a microscope and saw an entire world of rotifers and paramecia ripping each other apart, struggling for energy, and realized that if all organisms can experience the same “level” of suffering than we are truly in Hell. It was literally inconceivable.
I don’t care for the “antinatalist” label. I admit that suffering is hard to quantify and may be totally subjective. This is why I don’t mind what other people choose to believe. It’s none of my business. Based on my subjective experience I will not be doing so. Sometimes people pry into why I don’t have kids and I am forced to expose my beliefs. Suddenly, in their eyes, I become an evangelist. I’m not. They won’t engage with the notion of 'the non-existent mind". They constantly argue from the position of a hypothetical mind that chooses stuff. Eventually they think I’m suicidal because in their mind dying and non-existence are the same. They also get angry and insulted even though I’m leaving more resources for their own children by not having my own which, by their logic, should be good. So I just don’t bother. Do what you want. Maybe they are right.
I think suffering also becomes more acute the more processing power you have.
I think this is right. If you’re more sensitive, you learn more about your environment because you pay more attention to it, but you also perceive pain more intensely. That is why sensitivity is both a blessing and a curse.
