I really like this. Especially the rhetorical flourishes that add a certain charm to your writings. I think this is my favourite. That said, I have some observations (blame the philosophical training 😂) again just my opinion:
Firstly, there is a contradiction in your depiction of pleasure and antinatalists. At the beginning, you criticize modern society for being overly hedonistic, stating that "now we are all epicureans" who "live for the fulfillment of our pleasures." Later, however, you accuse antinatalists of being disciples of pleasure who avoid responsibility: "It is their pleasure they care for not the suffering of their ill-starred kin." This is inconsistent because antinatalism is typically rooted in the recognition of suffering and ethical concerns about bringing new life into a world of pain, rather than a pursuit of personal pleasure. Clarifying your stance on pleasure and its relation to antinatalism will strengthen your argument.
Secondly, your views on suffering present an inconsistency. You argue that antinatalists have not suffered enough to appreciate life's value: "It is not that they have suffered, it is that they have not suffered enough." Yet, antinatalists often emphasize the prevalence of suffering as a reason against procreation. Additionally, you share your own experiences of intense suffering leading you to value life more. If suffering increases appreciation for life, as you suggest, then those who have suffered greatly (including antinatalists) might be expected to value life more, not less. Addressing this contradiction will help clarify your position on the relationship between suffering and one's outlook on life.
Thirdly, your use of consent in the argument is inconsistent. You invoke the consent of ancestors who "put up with far worse than we" and question whether they consent to "the extinguishing of their line." However, antinatalists often focus on the lack of consent from potential future beings who cannot agree to be brought into existence and possibly suffer. If consent is a crucial ethical consideration, it should be applied consistently. Reflecting on this point will enhance the ethical coherence of your argument.
Moreover, relying heavily on personal anecdotes to generalize about universal experiences can be problematic. While your personal story of overcoming adversity is powerful, it may not be representative of everyone's experiences. Not all individuals may find meaning or increased appreciation for life through suffering. Acknowledging the diversity of human experiences and perspectives can make your argument more inclusive and persuasive.
Additionally, you propose a scenario where not procreating could lead to a future race that suffers more intensely: "Consider that life... might spawn a new breed, one whose aptitude for agony might far surpass our own... Is it not then our ethical responsibility to ensure this should never happen?"
This speculative argument aims to suggest that continuing to procreate could prevent a worse outcome. However, Antinatalists could counter that the certainty of preventing suffering by not bringing new beings into existence outweighs speculative risks.
Lastly, there is ambiguity in your portrayal of life's value. At times, you assert that life and its rewards are owed to us by virtue of existence: "We are born creditors to this world. Thus, we are owed the universe." At other times, you imply that life is something to be earned through enduring suffering: "I felt I had earned it. I esteemed it." Clarifying whether you view life as an inherent right or as a reward earned through perseverance will help.
1. The vast majority of American women are horrible banal materialists with woke tendencies. I am not going to give up a life seeking artistic excellence and peace and quiet in the wilderness to please some banal harpy. I live simply in a retrofitted cottage in the wilderness, yet nicely with very few material goods of high quality. My living room is a music studio, and my spare bedroom where I keep my laser cutter for my paper cut art. The average “educated” American woman can’t wrap her mind around this way of life, and the local girls are fat and stupid.
2. I cannot imagine bringing up a child in the Jew controlled forever war haunted hell world that is 21st century America where I am hated for being a proud rural white man.
Well said, and I enjoyed your writing style. I also noticed from encountering antinatalist redditors that they seem to also have a misanthropy towards their fellow man. Maybe they suffered in the slightest way due to others and couldn’t get past it. They tend to be the kind of people who unconsciously replace a child with a dog and say cringy phrases like “we don’t deserve dogs”. I tend to avoid discourse with these types but now I might have to dig into profile histories of regulars on /r/antinatalism and examine if they are as coddled as your thesis suggests. My curiosity has been piqued.
One last thing. I must defend Epicurus, and suggest hedonism is the default position. Epicurus suggested we be prudent with our pleasures and preached moderation. Modern people are far too indulgent to be epicurean. Epicurus believed that we must endure pain to achieve higher pleasure, but consider carefully which pains to endure.
Exquisitely expressed. You have an enviable ability to generate thoughts and ideas that are worthy of expression, and of finding evocative ways to convey them.
Unless I've inadvertently lead you to believe otherwise, I'm self-confessedly an antinatalist, but I draw a distinction between what I qualify as general and discrete antinatalism. The general antinatalist may agree and advocate for the arguments of David Benatar, which are moral and philosophical positions against procreation. According to Benatar, coming into existence is inherently harmful, and therefore, it is morally wrong to bring new sentient beings into the world. Benatar further divides his arguments between philanthropic (procreation causes unnecessary suffering, therefore preventing procreation precludes suffering), and misanthropic arguments (the flaws and shortcomings of humanity - the crimes and injustices throughout history and right through to the present day - advocates against procreation).
Enter the discrete antinatalist. Applying the misanthropic arguments of Benatar but applying them to the self: my own flaws and shortcomings as a human being which, furthermore, have also bestowed low social status, all disqualifies me from procreating. The flaws have afforded me frustrations and anguish, as indeed has the low social status, and a susceptibility towards sensitivity towards it from a very young age, which has accompanied me throughout life. In not procreating, I prevent my children, who stand a high probability of inheriting my flaws and my propensity for low social status, from similarly suffering as a consequence of those flaws and shortcomings. The re-emergence of these flaws in another generation can be expected, because they were inherited from my parents, who got them from theirs, and they have already appeared in the children of my siblings. As a moral agent, therefore, I will not bring new sentient beings into the world.
"The abandoning of conscience is part of pleasure's attraction."
It can be, but a heightened self-consciousness can also enhance pleasure. When awkwardness is minimised or is absent entirely, the pleasure of an intimacy in which one feels completely accepted and desired by the other. The effect is affirming, and only an engaged conscience notices. I don't really know if this kind of unconditional intimacy is common, perhaps it's even a rare thing, but it is still possible.
"A prize struggled and fought for, earned in the most alarming and desperate of labours, inherently that prize is precious. Am I wrong?"
Yes, it is precious. But the afterglow of culmination is short-lived and soon fades. Later, in the wake left by the departed sense of fulfillment there appears a new desire, and a new struggle is embarked upon. "If one does not tend to anything then one does not follow on it, and if one does not follow on it one is freed by not grasping (anupadaya visamyuktah)". "Documents," 571, SA, 15, 3a., Louis de La Vallée-Poussin, Belgian Indologist and scholar of Buddhist Studies. Accordingly, it could be said that the object of aspiration of the antinatalist is the unsullied void.
"Modernity, however, in its grim luxury and its easy proliferation, has made life cheap. Death is hidden by the dazzle and, irony of ironies, by becoming strangers with death there are now those who appear to worship it, it, and its oblivion. A peasant of the 13th century, that they, amid carnage, famine, and plague - suffering what we could barely dream of - struggled daily for their daily bread, that they did not abandon themselves to despair and death? We know this, for we are still here."
I've read that depression is a first world problem. When the survival and security imperatives defined by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs can no longer be resolved by 24-hour supermarkets and Deliveroo, gathering enough calories and keeping your blood in your own circulatory system rather than on the floor will very likely banish all concerns for social hierarchy of status. The warlord is selected for his ruthlessness and brutality, but also for his ability to harness that of his foot-soldiers. For a while, until they're killed by a rival, their fortunes will need to ebb less that they flow. Everyone else lives in fear.
"The antinatalist is a most curious case- an utter irony: it is not that they have suffered, it is that they have not suffered enough."
It could also be that the antinatalist will have suffered as much as any natalist, but the antinatalist is blessed/cursed by being more susceptible or is more sensitive to the suffering, or is capable of more cogent articulation of the causes and the suffering itself. Perhaps antinatalism is either a consequence of, or a response to weltschmerz.
"Modernity, however, in its grim luxury and its easy proliferation, has made life cheap."
Experience itself is commodified. Pay for your ticket, sign the liability waiver, climb aboard and ride. It's all laid out and ready, you just need to hand-over the readies. When anything is attainable, easily, almost nothing is worth attaining any more.
"Death is hidden by the dazzle and, irony of ironies, by becoming strangers with death there are now those who appear to worship it, it, and its oblivion."
I admit that the idea of oblivion, in contrast to living through this hell and being conscious to it, does seem preferable. As for all my children who will never be, of course I have prevented whatever joys they may experience, if any, but I have also prevented them from certain suffering.
Gah, I could go on. This is already too long a comment, and were I not as flawed and riddled with shortcomings as I am, I would even write a column as a full response to your article. But I must finish this by saying that your writing is such lovely stuff, as splendidly glittering and gleaming as are fine gems.
Wonderful wonderful comment! And you say you cant think of anything to write or how to say it? Well you did an excellent job taking the wind out of my sail xD
Well, if I really speak my mind, which I'm too dumb to arrest myself from doing, I'll have the thought police, or the real squaddies come knock my door down and haul me away. I'm not a complete coward, but I do believe in scrupulously picking my battles.
To live for one’s children is not to live leaning on someone else for your existence- a pressure to be x. To live for one’s children is to live for the future. We get up again every day relying that there will be something to live for.
Maybe it's every parent's dirty little secret, that were it not for the children, who in their right mind put themselves through this hell for their own sakes?
“From then on, I knew life was a serious matter, to be taken seriously. For there is something so strange in suffering… I wish it on no one! Ever! But that to suffer is to be human, that we reach a sort of anti-transcendence, and become grounded in the brutal disharmony of it all.”
The idea that not existing can be better is utterly absurd. We all already didn't exist, yet a life was still able to do "the Imposition" of... A life... Therefore, clearly, not existing is incapable of stopping a life from doing the imposition of a life. If it isn't one life that does "the Imposition" then it will be some other life. If there's no you, then there's no you to escape the imposition.
Hmmm… This almost prompts me to offer to adopt you! That way I could have my anti-natalism and secrete it too. It’s just that my earnest attornies at Cohan, Cohen, Coen, Cohn, Cohn, Roy, Titaglia, Barzini, and Corleone need to investigate how many offspring (legitimate, ill,adoptive, and virtual) you are already irresponsible for.
It is worth the suffering to then be rewarded with the profound beauty seen as we rise in equal measure to our fall. Though we must be sure to train our endurance in the highs so that our falls are eased with swift knowledge and tempered feeling.
I really like this. Especially the rhetorical flourishes that add a certain charm to your writings. I think this is my favourite. That said, I have some observations (blame the philosophical training 😂) again just my opinion:
Firstly, there is a contradiction in your depiction of pleasure and antinatalists. At the beginning, you criticize modern society for being overly hedonistic, stating that "now we are all epicureans" who "live for the fulfillment of our pleasures." Later, however, you accuse antinatalists of being disciples of pleasure who avoid responsibility: "It is their pleasure they care for not the suffering of their ill-starred kin." This is inconsistent because antinatalism is typically rooted in the recognition of suffering and ethical concerns about bringing new life into a world of pain, rather than a pursuit of personal pleasure. Clarifying your stance on pleasure and its relation to antinatalism will strengthen your argument.
Secondly, your views on suffering present an inconsistency. You argue that antinatalists have not suffered enough to appreciate life's value: "It is not that they have suffered, it is that they have not suffered enough." Yet, antinatalists often emphasize the prevalence of suffering as a reason against procreation. Additionally, you share your own experiences of intense suffering leading you to value life more. If suffering increases appreciation for life, as you suggest, then those who have suffered greatly (including antinatalists) might be expected to value life more, not less. Addressing this contradiction will help clarify your position on the relationship between suffering and one's outlook on life.
Thirdly, your use of consent in the argument is inconsistent. You invoke the consent of ancestors who "put up with far worse than we" and question whether they consent to "the extinguishing of their line." However, antinatalists often focus on the lack of consent from potential future beings who cannot agree to be brought into existence and possibly suffer. If consent is a crucial ethical consideration, it should be applied consistently. Reflecting on this point will enhance the ethical coherence of your argument.
Moreover, relying heavily on personal anecdotes to generalize about universal experiences can be problematic. While your personal story of overcoming adversity is powerful, it may not be representative of everyone's experiences. Not all individuals may find meaning or increased appreciation for life through suffering. Acknowledging the diversity of human experiences and perspectives can make your argument more inclusive and persuasive.
Additionally, you propose a scenario where not procreating could lead to a future race that suffers more intensely: "Consider that life... might spawn a new breed, one whose aptitude for agony might far surpass our own... Is it not then our ethical responsibility to ensure this should never happen?"
This speculative argument aims to suggest that continuing to procreate could prevent a worse outcome. However, Antinatalists could counter that the certainty of preventing suffering by not bringing new beings into existence outweighs speculative risks.
Lastly, there is ambiguity in your portrayal of life's value. At times, you assert that life and its rewards are owed to us by virtue of existence: "We are born creditors to this world. Thus, we are owed the universe." At other times, you imply that life is something to be earned through enduring suffering: "I felt I had earned it. I esteemed it." Clarifying whether you view life as an inherent right or as a reward earned through perseverance will help.
Again just my thoughts
I am anti-natalist for pragmatic reasons.
1. The vast majority of American women are horrible banal materialists with woke tendencies. I am not going to give up a life seeking artistic excellence and peace and quiet in the wilderness to please some banal harpy. I live simply in a retrofitted cottage in the wilderness, yet nicely with very few material goods of high quality. My living room is a music studio, and my spare bedroom where I keep my laser cutter for my paper cut art. The average “educated” American woman can’t wrap her mind around this way of life, and the local girls are fat and stupid.
2. I cannot imagine bringing up a child in the Jew controlled forever war haunted hell world that is 21st century America where I am hated for being a proud rural white man.
Well said, and I enjoyed your writing style. I also noticed from encountering antinatalist redditors that they seem to also have a misanthropy towards their fellow man. Maybe they suffered in the slightest way due to others and couldn’t get past it. They tend to be the kind of people who unconsciously replace a child with a dog and say cringy phrases like “we don’t deserve dogs”. I tend to avoid discourse with these types but now I might have to dig into profile histories of regulars on /r/antinatalism and examine if they are as coddled as your thesis suggests. My curiosity has been piqued.
One last thing. I must defend Epicurus, and suggest hedonism is the default position. Epicurus suggested we be prudent with our pleasures and preached moderation. Modern people are far too indulgent to be epicurean. Epicurus believed that we must endure pain to achieve higher pleasure, but consider carefully which pains to endure.
Exquisitely expressed. You have an enviable ability to generate thoughts and ideas that are worthy of expression, and of finding evocative ways to convey them.
Unless I've inadvertently lead you to believe otherwise, I'm self-confessedly an antinatalist, but I draw a distinction between what I qualify as general and discrete antinatalism. The general antinatalist may agree and advocate for the arguments of David Benatar, which are moral and philosophical positions against procreation. According to Benatar, coming into existence is inherently harmful, and therefore, it is morally wrong to bring new sentient beings into the world. Benatar further divides his arguments between philanthropic (procreation causes unnecessary suffering, therefore preventing procreation precludes suffering), and misanthropic arguments (the flaws and shortcomings of humanity - the crimes and injustices throughout history and right through to the present day - advocates against procreation).
Enter the discrete antinatalist. Applying the misanthropic arguments of Benatar but applying them to the self: my own flaws and shortcomings as a human being which, furthermore, have also bestowed low social status, all disqualifies me from procreating. The flaws have afforded me frustrations and anguish, as indeed has the low social status, and a susceptibility towards sensitivity towards it from a very young age, which has accompanied me throughout life. In not procreating, I prevent my children, who stand a high probability of inheriting my flaws and my propensity for low social status, from similarly suffering as a consequence of those flaws and shortcomings. The re-emergence of these flaws in another generation can be expected, because they were inherited from my parents, who got them from theirs, and they have already appeared in the children of my siblings. As a moral agent, therefore, I will not bring new sentient beings into the world.
"The abandoning of conscience is part of pleasure's attraction."
It can be, but a heightened self-consciousness can also enhance pleasure. When awkwardness is minimised or is absent entirely, the pleasure of an intimacy in which one feels completely accepted and desired by the other. The effect is affirming, and only an engaged conscience notices. I don't really know if this kind of unconditional intimacy is common, perhaps it's even a rare thing, but it is still possible.
"A prize struggled and fought for, earned in the most alarming and desperate of labours, inherently that prize is precious. Am I wrong?"
Yes, it is precious. But the afterglow of culmination is short-lived and soon fades. Later, in the wake left by the departed sense of fulfillment there appears a new desire, and a new struggle is embarked upon. "If one does not tend to anything then one does not follow on it, and if one does not follow on it one is freed by not grasping (anupadaya visamyuktah)". "Documents," 571, SA, 15, 3a., Louis de La Vallée-Poussin, Belgian Indologist and scholar of Buddhist Studies. Accordingly, it could be said that the object of aspiration of the antinatalist is the unsullied void.
"Modernity, however, in its grim luxury and its easy proliferation, has made life cheap. Death is hidden by the dazzle and, irony of ironies, by becoming strangers with death there are now those who appear to worship it, it, and its oblivion. A peasant of the 13th century, that they, amid carnage, famine, and plague - suffering what we could barely dream of - struggled daily for their daily bread, that they did not abandon themselves to despair and death? We know this, for we are still here."
I've read that depression is a first world problem. When the survival and security imperatives defined by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs can no longer be resolved by 24-hour supermarkets and Deliveroo, gathering enough calories and keeping your blood in your own circulatory system rather than on the floor will very likely banish all concerns for social hierarchy of status. The warlord is selected for his ruthlessness and brutality, but also for his ability to harness that of his foot-soldiers. For a while, until they're killed by a rival, their fortunes will need to ebb less that they flow. Everyone else lives in fear.
"The antinatalist is a most curious case- an utter irony: it is not that they have suffered, it is that they have not suffered enough."
It could also be that the antinatalist will have suffered as much as any natalist, but the antinatalist is blessed/cursed by being more susceptible or is more sensitive to the suffering, or is capable of more cogent articulation of the causes and the suffering itself. Perhaps antinatalism is either a consequence of, or a response to weltschmerz.
"Modernity, however, in its grim luxury and its easy proliferation, has made life cheap."
Experience itself is commodified. Pay for your ticket, sign the liability waiver, climb aboard and ride. It's all laid out and ready, you just need to hand-over the readies. When anything is attainable, easily, almost nothing is worth attaining any more.
"Death is hidden by the dazzle and, irony of ironies, by becoming strangers with death there are now those who appear to worship it, it, and its oblivion."
I admit that the idea of oblivion, in contrast to living through this hell and being conscious to it, does seem preferable. As for all my children who will never be, of course I have prevented whatever joys they may experience, if any, but I have also prevented them from certain suffering.
Gah, I could go on. This is already too long a comment, and were I not as flawed and riddled with shortcomings as I am, I would even write a column as a full response to your article. But I must finish this by saying that your writing is such lovely stuff, as splendidly glittering and gleaming as are fine gems.
Wonderful wonderful comment! And you say you cant think of anything to write or how to say it? Well you did an excellent job taking the wind out of my sail xD
Nonsense! :-D
You are a colossus, I'm even less than a midge.
Ever heard of David and Goliath xD
I have! It's just that I really dislike Jewish superhero narratives: David, Jesus/Moshiach ben Joesph, Moshiach ben David, Superman, etc.
;-)
xD
Just write :P what you got to lose? :D
Oh alright. I'll write something.
Thanks for your encouragement!
:~)
Well, if I really speak my mind, which I'm too dumb to arrest myself from doing, I'll have the thought police, or the real squaddies come knock my door down and haul me away. I'm not a complete coward, but I do believe in scrupulously picking my battles.
This is such a beautifully written comment. I hope you write soon!!
And this, in turn, is such a beautiful and gratifying thing to say to me. Thank you.
I like your name. In Italian, it means White.
I agree with you.
To live for one’s children is not to live leaning on someone else for your existence- a pressure to be x. To live for one’s children is to live for the future. We get up again every day relying that there will be something to live for.
Maybe it's every parent's dirty little secret, that were it not for the children, who in their right mind put themselves through this hell for their own sakes?
“From then on, I knew life was a serious matter, to be taken seriously. For there is something so strange in suffering… I wish it on no one! Ever! But that to suffer is to be human, that we reach a sort of anti-transcendence, and become grounded in the brutal disharmony of it all.”
“For the antinatalist, life is something cheaply earned, and therefore of little value, something that can and should be annulled.”
The idea that not existing can be better is utterly absurd. We all already didn't exist, yet a life was still able to do "the Imposition" of... A life... Therefore, clearly, not existing is incapable of stopping a life from doing the imposition of a life. If it isn't one life that does "the Imposition" then it will be some other life. If there's no you, then there's no you to escape the imposition.
Hmmm… This almost prompts me to offer to adopt you! That way I could have my anti-natalism and secrete it too. It’s just that my earnest attornies at Cohan, Cohen, Coen, Cohn, Cohn, Roy, Titaglia, Barzini, and Corleone need to investigate how many offspring (legitimate, ill,adoptive, and virtual) you are already irresponsible for.
It is worth the suffering to then be rewarded with the profound beauty seen as we rise in equal measure to our fall. Though we must be sure to train our endurance in the highs so that our falls are eased with swift knowledge and tempered feeling.