Anti-Natalism, Can It Really Exist?

It can be debated whether it's possible to reach "peak antinatalism" or even make it known as vegetarianism.

If there is worry that antinatalism is not diverse enough or that it only includes middle-class white men, let's not forget antinatalism is under the umbrella of childfree. The latter is a lot more diverse, with many women of different race and class.
 
Vegetarianism/veganism is a good comparison. Unlike antinatalism, which is mostly based on purely subjective values, there are sound scientific arguments for outlawing meat-eating. These go beyond matters of animal welfare and mistreatment to related environmental issues and questions of sustainability, land clearing, greenhouse gases, excessive water and resource consumption, massive waste and pollution problems, and so on.

Clearly, though, any attempt to ban industrial-scale meat production would be doomed to failure, because people want to eat meat and damn the consequences.

I don't know about "childfree" but I get the impression it's about people who just don't like kids and don't want any. That's not what I think of as antinatalism, which is based on a moral objection to childbirth, but as long it produces the desired result, who cares?

Diversity is irrelevant as long as antinatalism remains a personal choice for individuals. It really shouldn't matter who else is and isn't an antinatalist when choosing for oneself, and it's really nobody else's business.
 
Still not really sure what the downside is to being more aware of how antinatalist ideas can be perverted regarding class, ethnicity, women's rights, etc.
 
As far as I'm aware, and as far as I care, the term "antinatalism" has one meaning, the moral case against childbirth arising from the view that it essentially forces its "victims" into a life of non-trivial suffering.

Matters of class, race, gender, religion, and whatever never come into it, for reasons that should be obvious to those who claim to possess a shred of empathy (a quality much talked about but which I increasingly suspect is actually nonexistent).

For one thing, while there is naturally going to be variability in quantity and quality of suffering experienced, between individuals and between any randomly drawn groups of individuals, there is no way of reliably quantifying the sum total of suffering experienced throughout the full lifetime of any given individual, and so any attempt to compare these sufferings is beset with inaccuracies and omissions. The results of any such comparison are of questionable value, at best, if not outright false or deliberately misleading.

All who are born must suffer. That's basic biological fact, and the core of antinatalism. To extrapolate beyond that with necessarily incomplete information is mere presumption and adds nothing useful to the picture.

Furthermore, and much more importantly, as I see it, antinatalism is largely grounded in the idea that no one should be granted the power to determine what constitutes an "acceptable" level of suffering for any other person, even one who has not yet been born. Nobody is qualified to speak with authority of anyone's suffering but their own. Likewise, nobody is capable of measuring how tolerable life is (or will be) for anybody but themselves (and even there lurk myriad uncertainties).

These are, as I have been led to believe, the considerations at the heart of antinatalist thinking. Any form of anti-reproduction argument that disregards or distorts these positions is not antinatalism and should not be confused with it, and furthermore should not be allowed to be confused with it.

The only reason I can see people doing otherwise is to discredit legitimate "egalitarian" voluntary antinatalism, or perhaps to promote some fundamental distortion of antinatalism in the service of political demagoguery of one form or another.

As should be perfectly clear by now, I am fully opposed to any such trends.
 
cannibal cop said:
Matters of class, race, gender, religion, and whatever never come into it, for reasons that should be obvious to those who claim to possess a shred of empathy (a quality much talked about but which I increasingly suspect is actually nonexistent).
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I don't think it's obvious. These things all come into it. In antinatalist/nihilist spaces online I continually see advocacy of misogyny and racism. It's a deep-rooted problem with many classic writers on the subject, and the view of women as birth givers to be punished and held solely accountable is alarmingly prevalent. I don't want incels taking over a movement I already think is full of too much trash, bar the odd exception like the amazing Ligotti. Antinatalism is going to take centuries to be implemented, if it ever is, so maybe maybe make a point of not expanding the suffering of those already here?

Have you read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race? Or any interview with Thomas Ligotti? Your conclusions are really bizarre considering how fundamental humanist empathy is to Ligotti's philosophy. :/
 
“And we humans the restless maggots in a rotting excretion of the sun. And yet – we go on breeding!”
— Walter de la Mare

My review today of WDLM’s ‘DISILLUSIONED’: HERE
 
Forgive me God - but there are so many disgusting people, especially among egotistic materialists who are too block-headed to appreciate art and literature. It really is appalling. Sure, there are some kind people among simple folk, but most these days seem purely wicked and self-centered. It makes me sick having to deal with their deplorable narrow-minded sly ways. And if you are a bohemian with nonconformist unconventional routines, they are sure to target and pounce on you.
 
Nemonymous said:
ANTI- NATALISM (including Ligotti) is here Aetherised and Brainwrought:

howivi.wordpress.com

ANTI-NATALISM Aetherised Upon A Table, Brainwrought For My Old Age and Hawled

LIGOTTI FICTION AETHERISED AND BRAINWROUGHT: AETHER SAID: The Philosophy of Anti-Natalism: A Descent into Pessimistic Ethics Anti-natalism is a philosophical stance that posits procreation as moral…
howivi.wordpress.com howivi.wordpress.com
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Interesting. I don't think Ligotti's CATHR is a hoax in the least. With each passing year, I am more attuned to his words. The best thing I ever did in this life is not have children. Even at a very young age, I never wanted any.
 
Is it Dadaistic to never finish à la Zeno?
DADAISM, ZEROISM, NEMONYMITY, AVANT GARDE, EXISTENTIALISM etc. Aetherised Upon A Table, Brainwrought For My Old Age and Hawled
howivi.wordpress.com

DADAISM, ZEROISM, NEMONYMITY, AVANT GARDE, EXISTENTIALISM etc. Aetherised Upon A Table, Brainwrought For My Old Age and Hawled

Dear Des, This is a layered exploration, weaving the threads of avant-garde movements through the fabric of your own creative legacy—those self-described acts of genre-bent audacity that span from …
howivi.wordpress.com howivi.wordpress.com
IMG_6837.jpeg
 
The other day, I was thinking about antinatalism from a perspective that governments might consider “tolerable.” Here in Chile, many poor people have children irresponsibly, partly because of a lack of education about contraception. Many of those children end up living sad and painful lives. So it occurred to me that a birth-control policy could be proposed, similar to what China implemented, but applied to the West. I’m sure the current president of my country would approve of it and find it tolerable.

I would honestly support it simply because I know how those children’s lives turn out, and everything that comes with them being born because their parents decided to have unprotected sex.
 
R. von Pnaklendorf said:
The other day, I was thinking about antinatalism from a perspective that governments might consider “tolerable.” Here in Chile, many poor people have children irresponsibly, partly because of a lack of education about contraception. Many of those children end up living sad and painful lives. So it occurred to me that a birth-control policy could be proposed, similar to what China implemented, but applied to the West. I’m sure the current president of my country would approve of it and find it tolerable.

I would honestly support it simply because I know how those children’s lives turn out, and everything that comes with them being born because their parents decided to have unprotected sex.
Click to expand...

It worked so well in China that they’ve since had to swing their policies around 180 degrees to dedicated pro-natalism in an attempt to reverse their collapsing birth rates. Clearly, waking people up to the unintended consequences of their actions can have enormous benefits—to the blissfully unborn most of all, by far.
 
Ligotti cites many ingredients of a depressed human's views on the world, one being that “The image of a cloud-crossed moon is not in itself a purveyor of anything mysterious or mystical;”
– but what, I ask, if that cloud-crossed moon is TRULY mystical (even when the view of it by the depressed human is initially that it is unmystical), will the human then gradually feel the lifting of his depression once the moon’s intrinsic mysticism starts to sink into him involuntarily?
 
Nemonymous said:
Ligotti cites many ingredients of a depressed human's views on the world, one being that “The image of a cloud-crossed moon is not in itself a purveyor of anything mysterious or mystical;”
– but what, I ask, if that cloud-crossed moon is TRULY mystical (even when the view of it by the depressed human is initially that it is unmystical), will the human then gradually feel the lifting of his depression once the moon’s intrinsic mysticism starts to sink into him involuntarily?
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Yes, I think so. Living by materialism alone is a certain way to misery and depression. The mystical and spiritual can be a relief. But most materialists refuse to believe in a spiritual dimension of reality, and will not attempt to look for it or open up to it; they only believe in the body, in what the ocular organs planted in the sockets of their heads perceive, and what the nerves in their flesh feel.

In Lovecraft's case, I see him as an unconsciously spiritually inspired man, who believed himself to be nothing but a mechanistic materialist purely out of a need to hold up a rational intellectual dignity; and to be motivated and able to move forward in accumulating more scientific knowledge of the world and the universe.

And Ligotti surely has a spiritual side, visible in his inspirations and humour.

Spirit is in all living things; only that many humans completely repress it, especially so in our decadent materialistic mass-consumption society that has lost track of all else but greed and gluttony.
 
Funnily enough, I did once have a mystical experience of sorts involving clouds crossing in front of the moon, though it would be too tedious for me to describe it here at length. Suffice it to say I am almost certain in retrospect that the whole thing was a hoax, but I also do not believe we can ever be 100% certain of anything, including even what appears to be the direct evidence of our senses. Our minds are simply not up to the task of processing reality or storing our impressions of it with complete, faultless accuracy. We are thus left groping in the dark to an extent and must draw what conclusions we can from our individual interpretations of the data presented to us.

For me, antinatalism appears to be the obviously correct response to the reality with which we have been presented, but I would not claim this to be the necessarily correct view for everyone else, the same way I will not tolerate anyone else claiming their views were also necessarily the correct ones for me.
 
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