Why I'm No Longer an Antinatalist

Levels of logic

So yeah, after I got raped a couple of times and almost died of typhus, I disappeared for a while (PUSSY!), but I was still mildly surprised to find out there are still people on X who associate me with antinatalism. From two decades ago. But you want me to notice your new hairstyle.

OK, so: I realized, y years back—between being chased from climate to climate and continent to continent by criminals and scumbags, I lost track of the timing, so go on, feel free to fact-check me about my own interior life—that I was making a sort of error by accepting antinatalist logic.

Granted, in its own closed domain, if you draw some little boxes, the logic is airtight as far as it goes. And the idea of opting out of the cycle of life can be pretty appealing, not merely logically but even emotionally, to undiagnosed autists with fucked-up parents who never experienced the joys of being nurtured as a child.

On an individual-to-individual level, antinatalism makes sense: Bringing a child into the world is an act of aggression against the child, because they are guaranteed to experience suffering.

Do most children experience more pleasure than suffering? Couldn’t tell ya, as I was not most children; the appeal of antinatalist logic to people whose parents upped the ante by pouring excess, unnecessary suffering into them like they were a wineglass is embarrassingly obvious. “My parents inflicted a lot of unnecessary suffering on me and therefore life is like that.” What can I say, pain doesn’t always help you think clearly, but FWIW, I had Grok explain Benatar’s Ass-ymetry (rimshot) for you in the graphic below (David Benatar is the philosopher responsible:)

But when you go up a level, it falls apart.

I don’t know what to call the error I made, as the philosophy bros of my youth were so repugnant—not unlike Benatar—that the only way I managed to sidle my way into the discipline was through my Classics degree, so I’m sure there’s some word for the mistake I made in accepting the logic at this level; please inform me.

But I can describe the error longhand: Yes, on an individual level, giving life to a child and then letting it be miserable, much less actively adding to its misery, is a shitty thing to do.

HOWEVER, you and your real or hypothetical child are not the only members of the species.

There’s nothing you can do to control everybody else’s behavior.

And if you assume that it’s the “nice, moral people” who will become antinatalists—yeah yeah, this is a very generous assumption, as I’ve already hinted; it’s much more likely to attract people who were relentlessly abused by their own parents. But for the sake of argument, I’m looking at the best possible outcome of the philosophy:

All the “nice” people who buy the logic and decide that condemning a child to suffering is mean are going to take themselves out of the gene pool.

You know what that means?

More mean people. Who are going to go on breeding ad nauseam.

Congratulations, you just created a world with ean even higher balance of suffering than before!

Granted, I was never a “nice” person, nor were most of my fellow antinatalists; being viciously abused by your own parents isn’t your own fault, but nor is it a badge or guarantee of goodness. In fact, it’s more likely to mean you will become an abusive, nasty person yourself.

But congratulations, you never abused a child.

Too bad the best-case scenario for your philosophy is that it will create a hellscape of mean people.

I mean, maybe taking abused children out of the gene pool isn’t an entirely bad thing; it’s brutal, particularly to my/oneself, but what the hell, true is true.

Nobody ever built a better life or a better world by being full of shit.

But TL;DR, I’m not an antinatalist anymore. Have a nice day.

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(PS: Not that it adds anything philosophically, but the shit Grok coughed up when I asked it to make a picture of the Benatar asymmetry chart was too bizarre not to share:)

(Yeah. I’m pretty sure that AI is always hallucinating.)