Anti-Natalism - A solution for ending materialistic human suffering

[bringa]

In the material realm, Anti-Natalism is the solution to end all human suffering. Some people tend to straw man it by saying that I'm talking about genocide or I should kill myself; the answer a straight BIG NO. 

It's about stopping procreation. Don't procreate. End of story. 

Edited Friday at 01:51 PM by bringa

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

This philosophy might be true on some level but it's just not practically feasable to think this way. As much as I may always be among the first ones to notice and point of all the ways in which life sucks, or just anything sucks. However, this is sort of like admitting defeat in life because non existence would be better than existence, and makes any kind of motivation for self improvement very limited or essentially impossible, it is similiar to being a socialist in this way, except on a much larger scale.

I don't think it is very probable that I will ever produce children, however I cannot seem to concede the idea of ever having one, or ever having a family, it is sort of like yielding to life and/or being anti-life, it is just not feasable to think this way for me.

[Hojo]

God celebrates life. You dont need to have kids but to become anti baby shows that no one celebrated your life so you are angry.

Edited Friday at 06:38 PM by Hojo

[Ishanga]

7 hours ago, bringa said:

In the material realm, Anti-Natalism is the solution to end all human suffering. Some people tend to straw man it by saying that I'm talking about genocide or I should kill myself; the answer a straight BIG NO. 

It's about stopping procreation. Don't procreate. End of story. 

Interesting concept, never heard of it before, but I sort of am in that space, I have a child already that is an adult, but I do not want to bring anymore children into this messed up world, for sure, unless the are on the spiritual path from day one, they will suffer allot.  The world has changed a ton since I was a kid in the 70's, and its getting worse by the year, so why bring another human to a hell hole that this place is going to be, makes no sense!

[aurum]

Having babies is essential in the geopolitical game of power. The larger your population, generally the more power you have.

[Emerald]

Good luck getting people who want to have children on board with that.

First off, antinatalism is a pretty extreme ideology that would have dire consequences for the human race if it were adopted on a broader scale. We're already trending towards lower birth rates, and that could lead to some really difficult living circumstances for the humans who are already alive.

It's something we should try to pump the brakes on slightly, if we can. We don't want to end up like South Korea will be in a generation or two.

But beyond that, people who want to have children just aren't going to adopt antinatalism.

The only people who agree with antinatalism are a percentage of people who didn't want to have kids anyway. And they adopted antinatalism as an ideological justification for that decision long after they knew they didn't want children.

It would be a very rare person indeed who really wants to have a child but decides not to because they heard the antinatalist philosophy.

The rhetoric rings quite hollow unless you're looking for ways to feel better about your decision not to have kids by framing it as morally superior to others' decision to have them.

I can see it really appeal to people who don't want to have children (especially women who don't want to have children) because people are always harassing them about having kids... and saying bullshit like, "people who choose not to have kids are selfish" and other things like that.

So, I see antinatalism as something that the childfree people who get harassed by breeders adopt as a way to push back and say, "Actually, you're selfish for having kids because life is suffering!"

[Leo Gura]

17 hours ago, bringa said:

It's about stopping procreation. Don't procreate. End of story. 

This makes no sense.

The economy requires procreation to be robust.

There is no problem with over-population. The Earth can easily sustain 10B+ people. And those extra people will invent new tech.

Edited yesterday at 07:42 AM by Leo Gura

[Ishanga]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

This makes no sense.

The economy requires procreation to be robust.

There is no problem with over-population. The Earth can easily sustain 10B+ people. And those extra people will invent new tech.

The world the way it is now cannot sustain 10+B ppl, not with Consumerism as the basis of our Economies, that is for sure, and is why we have the problems we have.  If People were more natural, didn't need things outside of themselves to feel fulfilled, etc then maybe yeah we could sustain a population that large, but not today.. The tech created won't help either if the present economic system stays the same as well as the mindset and general consciousness level of the avg person!

Edited yesterday at 09:49 AM by Ishanga

[Something Funny]

3 hours ago, Emerald said:

First off, antinatalism is a pretty extreme ideology that would have dire consequences for the human race if it were adopted on a broader scale. We're already trending towards lower birth rates, and that could lead to some really difficult living circumstances for the humans who are already alive.

It's something we should try to pump the brakes on slightly, if we can. We don't want to end up like South Korea will be in a generation or two.

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

This makes no sense.

The economy requires procreation to be robust.

He is talking about ending suffering so I think he means humans dying out completely. So your points about economy or ending up like South Korea don't really matter anymore from that perspective. 

 

[Something Funny]

3 hours ago, Emerald said:

The only people who agree with antinatalism are a percentage of people who didn't want to have kids anyway. And they adopted antinatalism as an ideological justification for that decision long after they knew they didn't want children.

It would be a very rare person indeed who really wants to have a child but decides not to because they heard the antinatalist philosophy.

The rhetoric rings quite hollow unless you're looking for ways to feel better about your decision not to have kids by framing it as morally superior to others' decision to have them.

In what ways does it ring hollow?

The main point of anti-natalism is that it's ethically wrong to have children because:

1. You are doing it for selfish reasons like: I want to have a family to make MYSELF happy, I want someone to take care of ME when I AM old, WE need to keep the economy going. None of this is about a child you are about to bring into that world. You are just using them as a means to an end, like a tool basically. 

2. You cannot guarantee that the person you are about to give birth to will be happy to be alive or if they will hate it and suffer. At worst you don't care about how they will feel and if they will enjoy the experience, and at best you are making a gamble with their life, hoping that it will end up being a positive thing. 

3. A child cannot consent to being born, and giving birth without consent is unethical according to anti-natalism. Taking two of the above points into an account, what makes you think that it's okay to make a gamble with someone's life, using them to fulfill your own selfish needs without consent?

Do you have any valid counter-arguments to those points?

In my opinion, you can only rebuke them by using spirituality. Like: "Everybody has a soul and its the soul that decides to get born" or "You are God imagining yourself being born".

Or by saying that morality is relative and that nothing is really wrong. So you can use children selfishly, create suffering, and give birth without consent, and there is nothing wrong with it. Just like there is nothing wrong with genociding people.

I don't think there are any valid counter-arguments from a regular, human perspective. So how is it hollow? Anti-natalism is more advanced than most people can handle. Usually, if there is a critique of it, it's a critique from below.

Edited yesterday at 10:13 AM by Something Funny

[Something Funny]

You could also use anti-natalism to argue against itself. 

"I was born and brought into this world without my consent. I didn't sign any contracts. So I can be and do whatever I want. I can be Hitler if I want to."

Basically, at this point you are admitting that anti-natalism is mostly right in pointing out issues with giving birth, you are just correcting them in that you have no moral obligation to be good.

[zurew]

44 minutes ago, Something Funny said:

I don't think there are any valid counter-arguments from a regular, human perspective.

1) You can just reject the main premise that suffering is something that you have to care about the most (to the point where you ignore everything else).

Generally when it comes to moral intuitions , I dont think most people agree with the underlying thoughtprocess. Like imagine biting bullets like "No,no no even in a world where there is only 1 millisecond of suffering  and 10 trillion years of guaranteed full bliss, its still wrong to have children, because they cant consent to that 1 millisecond of suffering"

Once you start to think about hypothecials like that, you suddenly realize that you are not against suffering in a principled way.

 

2) The other one is a pragmatic one - You dont have the means to kill all humans and even if you did, there would be still incredibly amount of suffering on Earth when it comes to other beings reproducing. So the argument is that you have reason to have children and or to not stop people from having children as long as you believe that there is a chance for technological progress, because the more you progress there the more chance you have to end up in a place where you can actually kill and destroy all life (and with that end reproduction and suffering).

Edited yesterday at 10:57 AM by zurew

[Something Funny]

14 minutes ago, zurew said:

1) You can just reject the main premise that suffering is something that you have to care about the most (to the point where you ignore everything else).

Generally when it comes to moral intuitions , I dont think most people agree with the underlying thoughtprocess. Like imagine biting bullets like "No,no no even in a world where there is only 1 milisecond of suffering  and 10 trillion years of guaranteed full bliss, its still wrong to have children, because they cant consent to that 1 milisecond of suffering"

Once you start to think about hypothecials like that, you suddenly realize that you are not against suffering in a principled way.

Its not about that. It's not the main premise.

Some people like that life has suffering to it, so that it's not all honey and rainbows. That's what makes it living worth for them.

But so what? This is their personal view on their lives.

It's about consent. The child you give birth to might have a life of pure bliss or they might suffer and end up killing yourself. They might enjoy suffering or they might hate it

They might not have wanted to have any experience at all.

The point is that it's not up to you to make this decision. Who are you to sign up other people for all this?

14 minutes ago, zurew said:

2) The other one is a pragmatic one - You dont have the means to kill all humans and even if you did, there would be still incredibly amount of suffering on Earth when it comes to other beings reproducing. So the argument is that you have reason to have children and or to not stop people from having children as long as you believe that there is a chance for technological progress, because the more you progress there the more chance you have to end up in a place where you can actually kill and destroy all life (and with that end reproduction and suffering).

This is a strawman.

Nobody is advocating for killing people.

Nobody is even advocating for forcing people not to have kids.

It's like saying that vegans want to murder all the meat eaters or that they want to force everyone into veganism using violence.

No. Anti-natalism just points out issues with giving birth and is mostly being used as a personal philosophy.

If you resonate with it, you are welcome to join. If not, that's your choice.

It's just that most people who are against it, have no good arguments. So they must on some level know that they are choosing to just ignore being wrong and staying ignorant.

Edited yesterday at 11:10 AM by Something Funny

[zurew]

6 minutes ago, Something Funny said:

It's about consent.

No it isnt.

So in a hypothetical where there is no chance of any suffering at all and there is guaranteed pure bliss , you are telling me that these people would still be against having children?

 

9 minutes ago, Something Funny said:

This is a strawman.

its not, most who are not virtue-signaling pussies about it would say what I said - If they would have the pragmatic means to do so , they would end all suffering forever and that involves killing all life.

Because again this often times goes back to negative-utilitarianism.

[Something Funny]

11 minutes ago, zurew said:

So in a hypothetical where there is no chance of any suffering at all and there is guaranteed pure bliss , you are telling me that these people would still be against having children?

So in a hypothetical where you are a sex god and sex with you is a guaranteed pure bliss, is it okay for you to be raping people?

 

Quote

its not, most who are not virtue-signaling pussies about it would say what I said - If they would have the pragmatic means to do so , they would end all suffering forever and that involves killing all life.

Because again this often times goes back to negative-utilitarianism.

 

This is BS and empty talk since all you have to back it up with is "I feel this way".

There is an anti-natalist subreddit with over 200k people on it. You are welcome to ask there how many of them are pro killing people.

[zurew]

16 minutes ago, Something Funny said:

So in a hypothetical where you are a sex god and sex with you is a guaranteed pure bliss, is it okay for you to be raping people?

Cant see your answer - whats the answer to the question I asked?

[Something Funny]

@zurew this is my answer. Is consent not necessary if the experience you are about to give another person is perceived as good by you?

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Ishanga said:

The world the way it is now cannot sustain 10+B ppl, not with Consumerism as the basis of our Economies,

I think it can.

Edited yesterday at 12:07 PM by Leo Gura

[zazen]

@Something Funny

But did they consent to non-existence? Did they consent to non-being? There’s no subject to consent with or not to being with.

Existence is its own consent. Being is the universe saying yes to itself.

Stage green philosophies are philosophies of empathy that ultimately self terminate. A overcorrection to a Western arc of development that made life mechanical through scientific rationalism and disenchanted life, literally questioned the value of life itself - because science demands questioning everything.

Now stage green new age philosophies try to re-enchant life with BEing again - but over correct into philosophies that make being itself an impossibility. A non-vegan diet grew our brains big enough to even platform enough conciousness to contemplate eating non-vegan to begin with.

Voluntarily going vegan and depriving the brain of certain nutrients on a long enough time horizon may devolve our brains - shrinking the very vessel for conciousness and “compassion”. Anti-natalism voluntarily extincts the vessel (body) for being to even BE.

The issue with both is they deny suffering, rather than sacrilize it. Something religions and much of the world still does - that liberal progressives mock as backward yet suffer for and over correct for. This then becomes the benchmark for “development” but it’s actually Western civilizations self therapy for going down a rabbit hole detour of materialism that much of the world hasn’t.

De-colonize spiral dynamics - that takes Western stage green which is a remedy for the Wests own de-souling, and imposes that linear model of development on the world that hasn’t yet de-souled itself and thus doesn’t need to go down the same route to be considered “higher” up the spiral catching up with the Wets that is always “ahead”.

Anti-natalists be like - but you’ve suffered rite? Why inflict the possibility of it on a non-being? 

But did you die? Yes, as we all will. But I lived too. 

I was a user called Zazen dropping bombass golden nuggets on a forum once - because I studied, and I Zazen’d, and I was alive to even Zazen and be concious in the first place.

Something funny, something profound, something with suffering too.

Edited yesterday at 12:11 PM by zazen

[Something Funny]

6 minutes ago, zazen said:

A non-vegan diet grew our brains big enough to even platform enough conciousness to contemplate eating non-vegan to begin with.

Voluntarily going vegan and depriving the brain of certain nutrients on a long enough time horizon may devolve our brains - shrinking the very vessel for conciousness and “compassion”.

I don't even feel like spending my energy arguing with you after reading this bro-science.