And I gave peace to my children for they are in the bliss of the abyss Which surpasses all the pleasures of the world, And had they been born they would’ve endured misery. ― Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, The Arab Poet
So glad to see another video from you, Daniel, and happy new year to you! Your take on the happening of life and the implications of the choices we enact upon it is the sort of discussion I have been craving from this philosophical bubble. And that you see the benefit in encouraging open discussion from every position is incredibly refreshing. If I ever find the inspiration to start my own channel someday, I hope to run into more individuals like you. Take it easy out there!
The animal world is NOT awesome !!! Its absolutely dreadful, nature is horrific !!! Animals devour each other in a vicious survival system. Nature is FULL of pain and death. At least humans can attempt to control their amount of pain through the use of medical science, but animals cannot do this. How can an animal seek help when ill? Also, animals do not have a secure food source and struggle much more than humans to obtain food, so they are more prone to starvation. Example: a zebra is attacked by a lion but survives the attack. However, the lion managed to bite the zebra and now the guts of the zebra have spilled out! The zebra is still alive but in pain and unable to walk. Its gonna die a slow death and there will be no doctor to place back the spilled out organs and stich up. See what I mean? Antinatalism, therefore, applies to ALL life forms and not just to humans.
Thank you for another good video. I have read David Benatar’s books BETTER NEVER TO HAVE BEEN and THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT. Both these books are very compelling in their arguments for anti natalism. The very fact that we humans must accept our own death, and thus possibly our complete annihilation, is very hard for me to personally cope with. I have spent a lot of painful time in contemplating the idea of complete and utter non-existence after death and I have yet to find peace with that idea. I feel like I can also understand and find compelling the arguments for not wanting to exist eternally, because of the tedium and boredom possible with eternal life. So . . . damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I feel compelled not to have children because of my frustration with not being able to answer the questions of is life eternal or not, and is there any final point or purpose or reason for living. I am, however, excited for the possibility of my possibly adopting a retired-from-racing greyhound dog. I haven’t been given permission to adopt one yet, but I am very thrilled with that prospect. I realize a dog’s life is way too short (I am still grieving the loss of my previous dog; she died six years ago) but the joy they bring is just enormous. I don’t think it is very easy to find evidence for eternal life. And I understand the traditional argument of needing to have faith. Thus I acknowledge the idea that when I die I may simply disappear from existence eternally, but I can’t yet say I am okay with that. But, to enjoy my life while I am alive, I have chosen to try and adopt a dog.
First off -- love philosophies of all kinds. The following comments are written out of my own explorations and do not necessarily represent an argument for or against, but are more food for thought: I think the consent argument is interesting, but ultimately flawed. I believe it gives far too much personal agency to birth and life in general. When we look at a forest or an ecosystem -- do we think that all the algae, bacterium, and cells within that framework consented to that creation? Usually, no. But we do remark that it is a wonderful and fully cooperative space of nature that gives us beauty/life (as you mention, the animal world is quite amazing). You spoke of "an intelligent energy" conspiring to create new life in terms of childbirth. If this is true, then we must ask -- who is making those decisions and at what point does this "agent" , the human, become conscious or sentient enough to begin to control that process? Where is the exact step where consciousness now is separated from the process that is the ongoing unfolding of the universe as we know it? If you're a pure materialist (most Westerners choose to be so and I grew up and know the framework very well) then by that token, we must accept physical laws play themselves out and the idea of "choosing to be" never enters the picture at all. Consciousness would merely be the end-product of complexity out of the laws of physics that govern that local spacetime. Some call this an "emergent" property of matter. The idea of "natalism" or "anti-natalism" being nothing but competing and ultimately futile patterns on a brain trying to self-conceptualize in this context. Now, regarding the birth control/population argument: I would be hesitant to say women's decrease in birth rates is so directly involved with anti-natal sentiments in a conscious manner. Again, I think the idea comes after the behavior, not the other way around. Large batches of children made sense for many centuries due to societal organization at the time -- you needed labor for your farm or your family enterprise and losing children early and often was the norm, so having larger amounts of children made pragmatic sense. Fast-forward to a highly advanced industrial society with large-scale factory farming and manufacturing capabilities, you begin to see massive numbers of people being less useful -- not because people don't like children but because it no longer is necessary for functioning. I like to think of it as "quality over quantity" in childbirth terms. There are also countless examples of past demographic goofs in the academic literature that show that trying to guess how populations fluctuate is an extremely tricky game with many many factors. See: Thomas Malthus thinking half the world was going to starve and die off and instead the Earth ballooning to 8 billion people instead. (I would highly recommend looking into Chaos theory / mathematics for a more robust understanding of dynamical systems and how our perceptions of thesesystems can be so off-base from the true and complex reality.) Overall, I see natalism and anti-natalism ultimately as centering humans and their decision making too much. We are part of the Earth. Even if you wish to drain that statement of all of its spiritual weight and place it within the realm of known science, it is objectively true. More than half your cells that make your body function are not "human" but rather microbes and viruses that help your immune system and digestive tracts. We may be more "advanced" in certain senses that a few other species, but I do not think that means that all the sudden we become separate from it and are birthed into mini-Gods who get full control over how it proliferates. What is to stop that original force/energy/intelligence from recreating me again without "consent" in a second after I'm gone? I also just generally think that while there is great suffering, there is great love. And I think sometimes our more rational minded folks who have suffered sometimes overestimate the suffering and underestimate the joy and the love and the will to live people have even in the direst of circumstances. But that's just me. Thank you for sharing your thoughts
something i heard recently kind of made me puzzled: what if there is something sinister about the origin of human life or life in general? let's be honest, none of us understands why we are here on this planet, what if the origin of life was something evil? what if by giving birth we are actually doing something very sinister? we don't know what kind of universe we are living in and why things are the way they are what if by having kids we are engaging in something very insidious?
What is the point of ''what ifs''? We know enough about life. It's full of unnecessary suffering and it has no deeper meaning. Who says we have to know everything? We just feel that we need to know. That is just another frustration and another reason not to breed.
A thought experiment: You're interviewing an elderly person, who may have a year to live but probably doesn't have a decade. You ask them to think back on their entire life, and say what was the most important thing about how their life went. In one version, they answer that their marriage was the center of their life for fifty years. They said so while their spouse was alive, and since their spouse died they still think they were right to have felt that way. In one version, they answer that they lost their nerve. They found someone they wanted to spend the next fifty years with, and they didn't tell that person how they felt. In one version, they answer that the state of dentistry in their youth was absolutely awful. The anesthetics basically didn't work, the drills ran at too low a speed, and every cavity was absolutely excruciating. And in one version, they answer that they moved away from a small town where the dentist used out-of-date techniques, to a city where the dentist had good anesthesia and modern high-speed drills, therby avoiding absolutely excruciating dentistry for the years until the practice in their home town caught up with the state of the art. Which of these answers is plausible? Suffering isn't what's important. Suffering is the awareness that whatever makes life good -- thriving, joy, relationship, or whatever -- is being thwarted, prevented, or stopped. It matters that people (and other sentient beings) get to live the good life. Suffering can interfere with that, even if it's only interfering with a peaceful and dignified ending: if so, then suffering is bad. But suffering that's merely an inherent part of greater sensitivity or greater understanding? That's good, to the same degree and on the same criteria by which any other life-of-the-mind stuff is good. It's better to be nostalgic than to have your memories just fade into oblivion, unless nostalgia for your past interferes with your life in the present. It's better to be compassionate than oblivious, unless the awareness is more than you can bear. It's even better to be aware of physical pain than oblivious to potential or incipient injury, if you can bear the pain without having it bend your consciousness out of shape -- but that doesn't usually apply, because the bending, the psychological need to avoid pain, is such a deeply rooted part of how we avoid injury that we do more violence to our own mind by resisting it than by depriving ourselves of awareness. Enjoying the sensation of hot pepper, or recognizing the mild soreness that follows a good workout, is as far as we can usually go in that direction
I'm quite new to this subject, but I agree at the very least it is quite fascinating. I appreciate how objective you are and how well you express these perspectives. You're quite good at it! I am one very, interested, in what it means to truly love. To live with love, what that looks like. And these questions are indeed important to me to answer. In my eyes, love is a rising thing, a light thing. In that, I don't believe it to be a serious and weighted thing. But I still believe it to be...searching, striving, pushing, and a creative thing. Death, destruction, the end of things; these are part of love too. It's probably just my instincts, this reluctance to allow the candle to burn out when I could keep it lit, and even nurture it to a great flame. As for consent, I would look at life as a gift. A gift in the sense of an experience of adventure. I look at our life, the conscious life, as the universe's way of admiring and appreciating itself (Brian Cox, not my idea). And so then, a gift. A gift given to itself. And it's generally widely accepted that we don't need, or necessarily even want, consent when it comes to gifts. A spontaneous gift. An act of love, quite literally in couples often [: A proactive thing. Creation. God-like. And this to me is what love may look like. An invitation to dance. Courageous enough to deliberately take on the dark and all its suffering innate in life; and bring light, song, and meaning. There are many ways to look at this, but this is my perspective of love. I hope you keep sharing; you seem to have an honest curiosity and a good heart. These are always good things. Much love to you
To the consent argument pro-natalists usually say "well, if there is nobody you can ask consent from, then it's a non-issue". If there is nobody whose consent you violate at the very moment you start the process of bringing a new person into existence, you are not violating anyone's consent.
Both arguments are anti human ultimately. The presuppositions here are a weird concoction of relativism and objective morality. Can’t have it both ways homie
I would to be sure i heard you correctly You are saying you can be an antinatalist after birthing X amount because the next cannot consent to being, yet he X amount can as you were of means to provide? Then towards the end you claim when women choose not to birth due to the preference of not birthing, it is that consent we cannot break? Is this correct? I do not see how anyinatalism can be about consent. The is no strong argument for it if at one moment it is not applied and then suddenly applied, then lastly say its the consent of the birther to choose to birth or not. I hope you can seen my reservation towards your consent argument. Consent is not selective in antinatalism. Aum 666 subscribers
Why won't you try and share your ideas in Sub-Sahara Africa? The fact that anti-natalism is rising in the West really shows the imminent speciation event arising from a dysgenic overload from a extreme reduction of evolutionary pressures. Being an anti-natalist is essentially the spiteful mutant archetype: the choosing of oblivion over the emotion-baked human life.
