"Do not unjustly eat fish the water has given up, and do not
desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals,
Or the white milk of mothers who intended its pure draught for
their young, not for noble ladies.
And do not grieve the unsuspecting birds by taking their eggs;
for injustice is the worst of crimes.
And spare the honey which the bees get industriously
from the flowers of fragrant plants;
For they did not store it that it might belong to others, nor did
they gather it for bounty and gifts.
I washed my hands of all this; and wish that I had perceived
my way before my hair went gray!"
"Whenever I reflect, my reflecting upon what I suffer only rouses me to blame him that begot me.
And I gave peace to my children, for they are in the bliss of non-existence which surpasses all the pleasures of this world.
Had they come to life, they would have endured a misery casting them to destruction in trackless wildernesses."
-Abu al-'Ala' al-Ma'arri (26 December 973 – 9 May 1057)
I am deeply wounded by my birth and not all that impressed with the medicine.
I cannot understand the miracle of creation. Everything escapes me. Animal kind has been entranced by a demonic incantation and it possesses mothers to bring a little child to a place where unforgivable things happen to little children all the time and everywhere. Are the rainbows and puppies and whatever beautiful things life has to offer SO fucking important that a new pair of eyes had to be CREATED to goggle at them? With the risk that unspeakable acts of violence and degradation will be enacted upon them?
Should have hanged myself with the umbilical cord. If only I had known. For the bliss of never-being, I would have traded everything. But I couldn't save myself from being pulled into this putrid place. Not a soul has that power.
Why did I have to wake up now? I have only one life. One body. What made my family think "now is the time"?
They saw a planet swarming with cancer and pedophiles, and thought "eh, good enough". They saw the thralls of the working class cry out their parts in this death rattle orchestra, and thought "what more could our child possibly want?" They saw our bodies slowly but surely betraying us, crumbling apart in thousand little deaths, until the day the loss of internal equilibrium does one in and yields up all hope and meaning, and thought "yes, those are quite fit to house our child". Because apparently I am the most 'precious thing in the universe' yet not precious enough to deserve better - not precious enough to be spared from the horrors of a universe that cares for me none.
I am stranded in the middle of a stygian ocean. My ship is sinking. Blackness reaches out, in all directions, as far as the eye can see, into the endless sky without stars, into the restless waves of the dark waters, and beyond to infinity. Maybe, behind the horizon, beyond where my ship can carry me, there is an island where no child has to bleed. Place where no one's fullness is depended on someone else's emptiness. But I will never get to know.
i know you think being a wild animal is inherently suffering but are there any animals out there u like
Suffering predominates in nature, and that's a fact, not what I think, ya know?
But hmm…no. I mean, I like all animals in that I care for their well being, but I don't think I like any particular species over another. Why would I? I just want all of us to be okay.
I'm not saying it's wrong to have a favorite animal, but I have no such thing.
I suppose there are animals I find beautiful, like orcas, millipedes and sunbeam snakes. Bugs are very cute. But isn't it weird to like a group of sentient creatures more than another, just because they are more aesthetically pleasing?
What about liking an animal because of their behavior? It is admittedly adorable, when an elephant calf is born and all the herd members gather around the newborn, and caress the little one with their trunks. It is less adorable when a Christmas Island red crab picks up offspring from her overproduced brood, and munches on them like doritos. But should I therefore like the elephant and dislike the crab? That doesn't feel quite right. It is not the crab's fault she sees the world with the eyes she was given.
From The Hypothetical Consent Objection to Anti-Natalism by Asheel Singh
You are part of a tourist group on a train traveling through a rainforest. As with everyone else in your tour group, you have fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep. The tour leader is awake, however, and, looking out the train windows, he sees a most beautiful scene. [Long, poetic description of the sun setting through treetops.] Now, this is quite a large tour group, and the sun is just about to disappear beneath the horizon; your tour leader does not have enough time to race through the train to wake everyone up. It just so happens that every seat and bunk in this train is electrified: With the push of a button, a mild electric current will be sent through every seated and lying passenger on the train, waking anyone who happens to be asleep. Your tour leader has this button on his remote keychain; he presses it. You and everyone else in your tour group are awoken with a start. You are all greeted by the last few moments of a most memorable picture as the train’s carriages are lit by the soft orange glow of a glorious sunset.
In the above case, the tour leader harmfully intervenes in order to procure others a pure benefit. Do his actions look justified? There is nothing inherently harmful to not seeing a sunset. Missing out on such an experience, especially if one alone has missed out, can make one feel very disappointed. And one is arguably wronged when another seeks to disappoint one by denying one a nonessential but desirable experience or good. But that sunset is breathtaking! It could be held that the tour group members would surely be acting unreasonably—ungrateful, even—if they (after soaking up the scene, perhaps) confronted their tour leader over his (they might allege) ill-treatment of them.
But note that the Sunset case states that a "mild electric current" will be sent through every passenger. Suppose that mild electric shocks count as trivial harms, all things considered. What difference would it make, morally, if the voltage were increased to a level where it was a matter of reasonable dispute whether electric shocks of such an intensity counted as trivial or not? Further, what difference would it make to one’s evaluation of the tour leader’s actions if his interventions were such that they imposed lasting, ongoing effects? For example, if he risked burning and scarring some or all of the passengers, I doubt that his actions would meet with universal approval from the tour group. I doubt, in other words, whether the tour leader could reasonably assume the objective hypothetical consent of all those he acted on behalf of. Procreators, to my mind, take a similar gamble when they opt to "awaken" individuals to the (pure) benefits of life.
I propose that, despite its status as an objective good, the degree of harm required to secure this benefit (in Sunset) is indeed, as Shiffrin believes, of utmost moral relevance. There ought to be, in other words, limits to the degree of harm we are willing to impose for the sake of conferring such goods. The Sunset case works only if the imposed harm remains trivial, and is thus, as I will motivate, relevantly unlike procreation. For I am doubtful as to how analogous this and other pure benefits are with the "real thing"—procreation.
The decision whether or not to procreate is far more complicated than weighing up, on the one hand, the imposition of harms as trivial and transitory as pinpricks or mild electric shocks against, on the other, objective goods (whatever they may be). The harms procreation imposes are serious, protracted and inescapable (without great cost). New existers are greeted by all kinds of distressing stimuli, are immediately set upon by a mass of infectious organisms, and would quickly perish without close and attentive care. If they survive infancy, there are still all manner of hazards they must navigate with the help of caregivers. In the US in 2016, unintentional injury was the leading cause of death in age groups 1–4 through 35–44 (CDC 2016). Illnesses—from minor infections to terminal cancers—leave no one untouched. Natural disasters, too, can have devastating impacts, as can heartbreak. And finally, by "inescapable (without great cost)" above, I mean that there is no way to escape the harms of life without succumbing to, or imposing upon oneself via suicide, the harm of death.
For the tour leader’s actions to be more like those of procreators’, he would have to recreate each passenger’s life anew. For being born is not like awaking from a deep sleep to continue on a pre-existing journey; being created is starting experience from scratch. And thus, for his actions to be more analogous with those of procreators, the tour leader would have to reset, as it were, the psychological narratives of his passengers. Further, he would have to run the risk of permanently maiming or imposing disabilities of varying degrees upon his passengers.
To be fair to the paternalist (and to myself!), I acknowledge that conceiving suitable analogies to procreation is very difficult, as procreation is weird: It is an activity that involves the creation of a brand new moral agent seemingly out of the ether. Arguably, no other human activity comes anywhere close to replicating the strange, wondrous magic that is bringing-intobeing. Thus, I do not claim to have captured all the morally relevant features of procreation (for this would be a nearly impossible task), only those that I think are most relevant to assessing the claim that harming in order to offer the pure benefits of existence can be justified by appealing to objective hypothetical consent.
And so, though the paternalist may well appeal to the objective attractiveness of certain goods, he cannot reasonably deny the moral relevance of the degree of harm required to bestow these benefits. The moral issue of procreating to "benefit" children really is more complex than this, and we thus ought to reject the argument from hypothetical consent.
i do wish someone would love me or like me for me rather than my ability to go along with them, idek what that means but i wish i was loved
Oh dear, I feel ya.
Sorry I'm gonna go off on a tangent...
The web of social interactions is so exhausting to navigate and honestly completely incomprehensible at times. I don't want to emotionally invest in something so ephemeral and illusory.
I feel, there is this ravine impossible to close, between me and others, and between everyone. I wish I could reach the other side, so I could touch someone's inner most being and share with them a true love beyond bargains and performances. I want to merge souls basically lol.
But what would such a thing even look like?
Is there something beyond the transactions, or are we really just nothing more than bargains and performances?
I don't want to be loved if it means being put on trial. For someone to mentally scale all the times I have been annoying and boring against the times I have brought pleasure? Ew!
And all those times I did something kind or funny or embarrassing, and all those stupid things I've said…were they really me? Who is she? What is that thing? "Gah, I didn't truly mean any of the things I said! Can you forget everything about me so we can start all over?" I feel like every day I try to be myself and I'm doing a really bad job. Like my true self cannot be communicated because it doesn't translate to words or actions. To coagulate phantom shadows into something tangible…something that can be loved…something is always lost in the process. Maybe that phantom doesn't even exist. I can never truly be known.
This is insanely embarrassing but sometimes I daydream about being courted by a vampire, who'd love me for my blood forever and always, and I could just sit back and relax - never having to worry about performing ever again.
Is true love possible? Maybe it is! Who the hell knows!
I hope you find what you are seeking for, dear stranger <3
When I was a little girl I used to rear caterpillars into butterflies. Patiently I sat by their pupa beds waiting for their grand entrance. Oh and I so rejoiced when they emerged with bodies sewn anew, and the gentle summer breeze carried them far away from this sullen place, from this sullen house of his.
"I am a life giver."
One day my little friend started behaving strangely. She was sleepy and couldn't eat. In the evening, little worms burst from inside her while she was still living.
Savoring her, carefully saving her vital organs for the last supper.
There are no guardian angels for little girls. Only one black angel and it takes whoever it wants.
Unforgivable things happen, all the time and everywhere. Though the little worms couldn't help themselves and no one could blame them for their hunger, still each and every one of us a victim of that very innocence.
I am so afraid. There is something very very wrong with this place. There is nowhere to escape. All is eaten and all is sullen.
I'm never beating the cartoon villain allegations but I don't entirely understand love nor friendship.
There are people who want me around, and who care about me, for some reason, and I appreciate it. And I care about them too. I truly do. But I don't understand it. If I die today, they will find me again, wearing hundred different faces. It's all the same. I'm easy to replace. So why me? Why this body? What do they mean, when they say they love me? That my pattern of behavior amuses them? That I had been entertaining?
No such thing as unconditional love - all relationships are so tragically transactional to the core. I do a little dance and they keep me around. And this performance is exhausting to hold up. I'm so tired of dancing.
Is it not exhausting for others? Are other people so immersed in their performances?
"Just be your self." Is there such a thing? Do people seriously have a 'true self' that they think is authentically theirs? Precious, warm and pulsing with life, they can, for a brief moment, give for someone else to hold? Ain't no way...ya gotta be shitting me.
I dive into the people's world and I can feel myself getting dissolved in futile attempts to please and belong. I say the next funny line. I listen. I share a topic-related anecdote. I compliment. I console. Gross. Gotta keep up, lest they be bored and find someone who can entertain them better, because of course they would and should. Some unfortunate times I forget the script. Then they catch me in my mimicry and say "You are not acting like yourself today". What does that mean? What do they know who is me and who is not?
There is nothing inside me. Nothing at all. Nothing to hold. Nothing to love.
Identity is delusional.
"Though he hardly knew what he did, the move he made was his own doing – an act of impulse. The stranger he becomes emerges as if from nothing – a response to the sights, sounds and smells he encounters when he sheds his old life.. . . the impressions through which we pass are more real than the selves we think are authors of our lives.
In his study of Proust, Samuel Beckett wrote:
The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantor of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals … The creation of the world did not take place once and for all, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave sheets serve as swaddling clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.
The world in which you live from day to day is made from habit and memory. The perilous zones are the times when the self, also made from habit and memory, gives way. Then, if only for a moment, you may become something other than you have been."
- John Gray, The Silence of Animals.
It's like everyone is playing pretend. Life is theater. And when you lose your sense of verisimilitude, when the cardboard decors fall flat on their faces and you stop believing in the play, what can you do? How can such a thing be remedied?
Everything has revealed itself: Everything is nonsense.
The Speciesism of Leaving Nature Alone and the Theoretical Case for “Wildlife Anti-Natalism”
by Magnus Vinding
Sentient beings should be granted moral consideration based on their sentience and nothing else. Fortunately, most of us now realize this when it comes to humans: the sentience of human individuals alone implies that they should be granted full moral consideration. Neither their intelligence, gender, nor race is relevant. What we have yet to acknowledge, however, is that this insight applies to non-human beings as well. Discriminating against individuals based on their species membership is no more justified than discriminating against individuals based on their race or gender. In other words, speciesism must be rejected. From this simple starting point, the indefensibility of refusing to help non-human beings in nature follows quite directly.
The Speciesism of Non-Intervention
The speciesism of leaving alone non-human beings who suffer in nature is not difficult to see if we turn our attention to the case of humans subjected to the torments of nature. When it comes to humans, we realize that we have strong moral reasons to help individuals who suffer from natural ills such as starvation and disease, regardless of whether humans played any role in bringing about these conditions. Not only is it not wrong to help humans who suffer from these ills, but it is wrong not to do so. Consider, for example, the case of smallpox: given that we were able to eradicate this horrible disease and save people from the suffering and death it caused, we were clearly right to do so. The same holds true in the case of humans who are about to be eaten by predators. If a human individual is about to be eaten by lions, and we are able to interrupt this horrific event, we clearly should.
So we generally realize that we have strong moral reasons to help humans who suffer from such natural horrors. Yet in the case of non-human beings who suffer from the exact same ills — starving to death, suffering from diseases, being eaten alive, etc. — we not only fail to realize that we have similar reasons to help, but we sometimes even consider it our duty not to do anything to help. This is a clear double standard based on mere species membership. In other words, this position of indifference and inaction toward the suffering of wild animals is an expression of speciesism: discrimination against non-human beings merely because they are not human. And given the indefensibility of speciesism, it follows that we must reject this discriminatory position of indifference and inaction. It follows that we can no more defend allowing non-human beings to suffer from horrors like starvation, disease, and predation than we can defend allowing such horrors to befall humans, provided that we can safely prevent them.
Zooming in on Predation
The problem of predation is often the sole focus of discussions concerning the problem of suffering in nature, so it seems worth taking a closer look at this particular problem. However, it must be remembered that this problem is only a subset of the much larger problem that is suffering in nature. Even if one could rid the world of predation by the wave of a magic wand, suffering would still be endemic in nature due to other afflictions such as starvation, disease, and parasitism.
For reasons I shall not speculate on here, many people, including people who show great concern for non-human beings, passionately defend the “right” of predators to kill and eat other sentient beings. The main argument is typically that the predators’ lives depend on killing and eating other beings, and hence their killing is justified. Yet the same argument could be made with equal force in the opposite direction, namely in defense of the predators’ victims. If the lion does not kill, she will not survive, but if the antelope does not avoid getting killed, she will obviously not survive either. It is a symmetrical situation, so why should we take the predator’s side by default?
Moreover, a closer look reveals that the situation is in fact anything but symmetrical. The one-to-one picture presented above is sadly far too rosy and by far understates the real number of victims that a lion — or virtually any other predator — would kill in reality. A more accurate picture is that if the lion kills, she survives another week or two, and then she will have to kill again. If we keep this fact in mind, and consider, for example, a lion who can manage to survive in nature for more than five years, we see that the ethical dilemma is not between one lion who gets to live versus one antelope who gets to live, but rather between one lion versus more than a hundred antelopes (or monkeys or warthogs) who get to live.
So the question arises again, this time with more than a hundred times the force: why indeed should we favor and defend the lion’s predation by default? If we believe in the equal value of individual lives and in weighing equal interests equally — or anything close to that ideal — how can we defend the lion’s predation if it involves unspeakably horrible deaths of countless beings who are of equal value to herself?
But what should we do about predators, then? To think more clearly about the problem of predation, and to get beyond our speciesist biases, it may be worth re-phrasing the problem such that it only involves human beings. If we imagine that there are some humans who cannot make moral decisions — i.e. they are not moral agents with whom we can reason — and if we imagine that these humans cannot survive unless they eat at least one other human every week, we have reframed the problem of predation in terms that should sidestep our speciesist biases. If we found ourselves in that situation, could we defend not doing anything about it? Could we defend letting each of these humans go out and kill another human of choice every week? Or should we prevent them from killing humans, and instead provide them with cruelty-free substitutes for the human flesh they otherwise need in order to survive?
It seems clear that the latter is by far the superior option, and, if we reject speciesism, this does not change when we revert back to essentially the same problem involving non-human beings rather than humans. If it were possible, it would be much better and more ethical to provide cruelty-free food for predators than to let them torment, kill, and eat other sentient beings.
Wildlife Anti-Natalism
As noted above, we can no more defend allowing non-human beings to suffer from ills like starvation, disease, and predation than we can defend allowing these horrors to befall humans. To maintain that we should not intervene to prevent or mitigate such horrors when we can is to maintain a speciesist position.
So what would be a morally appropriate response to these natural horrors? This is a difficult and open question, and extensive research is no doubt required in order for us to give properly informed answers. Nonetheless, I will here briefly present one possible answer — a tentative conjecture — that I think is worth taking seriously, which is to prevent the births of non-human beings in nature, a position we might refer to as “wildlife anti-natalism.”
This is a controversial idea for sure, not least because it goes against what many people think about nature and our moral duties toward it, namely that we must do what we can to preserve nature as it is. Yet merely appealing to an apparent majority opinion will not suffice to refute my conjecture. Rather, to make a fair evaluation of this conjecture, we must take a sober look at the arguments for and against it.
Anti-natalism is the view that procreation is always bad. It is a position that has been defended by various authors in recent times, including philosopher David Benatar, who argues that coming into existence is always a harm (Benatar 2006). Benatar’s main argument is essentially that there is nothing bad about someone not coming into existence, whereas coming into existence does involve something bad: the presence of suffering and other harms. Benatar also argues for his anti-natalist view based on an asymmetry in magnitude between the suffering and pleasure in life, which means that even the very best of lives are still very bad. He argues that we are not keen to acknowledge this reality due to various positivity biases inherent to our psychology (Benatar 2006, pp. 60-92; see also Vinding, 2020, ch. 7).
The current literature on anti-natalism, including the work of Benatar, focuses almost exclusively on human procreation, and thus says precious little about wildlife anti-natalism in particular. This is a missed opportunity for anti-natalists for at least two reasons. First, because non-human beings in nature constitute the vast majority of sentient beings on the planet, more than 99 percent of them. Second, because regardless of how strong one thinks the case for anti-natalism is in the human context, the argument for an anti-natalist conclusion is much stronger when it comes to non-human beings in nature. Indeed, one need not even argue for a novel stance on procreation in order to make the case for wildlife anti-natalism, at least with respect to most non-human beings in nature. One need only reject speciesism. Hence, although the arguments of Benatar and other anti-natalists would generally support the conjecture I present here, I will neither defend nor rely on those arguments in order to make the case for wildlife anti-natalism. I will merely rely on the basic premise that speciesism should be rejected.
The reason one need not argue for radical positions on procreation in order to make the case for wildlife anti-natalism is, in a nutshell, that life in nature is for the most part extremely bad. In fact, it is so bad that even the most conservative position on human procreation would, if applied without speciesist compromise, recommend wildlife anti-natalism (at least for the vast majority of beings).
Perhaps the most obvious way to see this is by considering the survival rates of non-human beings in nature. For example, only about one in eight male lion cubs survive into adulthood; the rest of them succumb to maladies such as starvation, illnesses, and, quite commonly, the teeth and claws of other lions (Main 2013). Bringing a being into this circumstance of infanticide — or early death by other means — would hardly be considered permissible on any commonly accepted view of human procreation. And yet the survival rate of lions does not constitute anything close to a representative example of the survival rates of most non-human beings in nature, as mammals generally have the highest survival rates of all classes of animal species in terms of reaching adulthood. A more representative example would be fish. For example, a female Chinook salmon usually lays over five thousand eggs, more than half of which hatch as small younglings called alevins; and out of these thousands of young fish, only about 20 will survive to reach adulthood (Quinn 2005, p. 254).
Out of more than 2,000 small sentient individuals, less than 20 survive into adulthood, a survival rate of less than one in 100. Again, we will have to admit that on no accepted view, much less any plausible view, of the ethics of procreation could such survival rates be deemed justifiable in the human context. Bringing a being into existence with such dire prospects — death before adulthood being a virtual certainty for any randomly chosen individual — is ethically unacceptable as far as humans are concerned. So how can it be considered anything but speciesist to accept these monstrous odds in the case of non-human individuals who likewise prefer to avoid a premature and likely painful death? I submit that it can’t.
One could make a similar argument without reference to these dismal survival rates. Indeed, even if we focus only on the relatively lucky beings who do survive into adulthood, and look only at their quality of life, I submit that we would reach the same conclusion: most of these lives are not worth starting on any non-speciesist ethic of procreation given their extremely poor quality. However, I will not explore this line of argument here, in part because focusing only on the individuals who survive to adulthood is a narrow focus that wholly discounts the vast majority of non-human beings.
Clarifications About My Argument
It is important to clarify that my argument does not support the killing of non-human beings in nature. Confusion on this point often results from a failure to distinguish between a life worth starting and a life worth continuing (Benatar 2006, pp. 22-28). For example, it is one thing to say that one would not want to be born as an alevin who will live with a 99 percent risk of dying before adulthood (as I assume most of us would not). It is another thing entirely to say that one would not want to survive and make it to adulthood if one had already been born as such an alevin. After all, one would in that case have been born to want and struggle for that more than anything.
It is also worth making clear that the conjecture I have argued for above is mainly a theoretical as opposed to a practical one. That is, my argument holds that, other things being equal, it would be morally better if (at least most) non-human beings in nature were prevented from coming into existence (on any non-speciesist ethic of procreation). But my argument says nothing about how to implement the prevention of such births in practice, or whether it is practically feasible. These are open questions that require much research. If one acts without carefully researching these questions, attempts to prevent bad lives in nature could well end up causing more harm, such as by inadvertently increasing the number of non-human beings. The purpose of my argument is thus in no way to encourage reckless and premature actions, but rather to make the case that it would be morally better if most non-human beings in nature were prevented from coming into existence, and to encourage further discussion of this controversial claim.
Objections to Wildlife Anti-Natalism
It may be objected that wildlife anti-natalism would itself be a speciesist position, in that it can only be put into practice by humans, not the non-human beings themselves, and yet we would not deem it permissible to forcefully prevent other humans from giving birth to bad lives. So how can such a totalitarian course of action be considered defensible in the case of non-human beings?
It is important to maintain a sense of proportion when considering this issue. True, when it comes to humans, we do not support, say, forceful sterilization to prevent them from bringing short miserable lives into the world. But there are some relevant differences here, an important one being that the survival rate of human children is nowhere close to the survival rate (in terms of reaching adulthood) of the vast majority of non-human beings in nature. And the extremely low survival rate of most non-human beings is one of the main reasons their birth is impermissible on any non-speciesist ethic of human procreation.
So am I saying that we would forcefully prevent humans from procreating if the prospects of their children were anything close to that of most non-human beings? Here we get to another relevant difference between human and non-human beings, namely that we would usually not need to do anything by force in the case of humans. Most human parents would likely agree that they should not have a child if their child were to face a seven in eight risk of dying an excruciating death before reaching adulthood, much less if the risk were 99 in 100 or worse. No force would be needed, provided the parents are but minimally compassionate.
So in order to make this an accurate analogy, the human parents in question would have to live in circumstances, or have some genetic condition, that would mean that their children would face extraordinarily bad chances of reaching adulthood — such as a one in a hundred chance — and it would have to be impossible to convince these parents to use birth control. Should we not intervene in that hypothetical case? Anyone who says “no” is, I maintain, guilty of not taking seriously the victims whom these parents are sure to create. Yes, intervening in this scenario is problematic, and for many reasons, yet passivity cannot reasonably be considered within the bounds of ethical permissibility. That would amount to a stark indifference toward human life, the kind of indifference we normally only reserve for non-human beings.
Another objection is that we cannot reasonably compare the survival rates of non-human beings with those of humans. We cannot hold non-human beings to our anthropocentric standards of what is acceptable with respect to risk and procreation. This is a problematic claim, however, as it implies that we should hold non-human beings to a lower standard when it comes to these risks and the concern we show for them as individual beings — beings who likewise want to live and who each want to avoid having unmet needs and frustrated preferences. To say that it is acceptable for non-human beings to face a 99 percent risk of dying before adulthood, but that it is not acceptable in the case of humans, is a speciesist position — a position that shows radically diminished concern for non-human individuals merely because they are not human.
The claim is also problematic in that it could be used to argue that humans are justified in exploiting and killing non-human beings if they only do it in these same “permissible” numbers. That is, if one maintains that a 99 percent risk of death before adulthood is acceptable for certain species, this could be taken to imply that humans are justified in bringing individuals of that species into existence, as long as they make sure that for every 100 individuals they bring into existence, at least one will become a free-living adult; they are free to kill and eat the rest. One may object that there is a critical difference between 99 salmons dying in excruciating ways in nature and 99 salmons dying in excruciating ways by human hands. But what could ground this claim? Not, I submit, the perspective of the non-human beings themselves.
Our Dogmatic Defense of Nature
It seems widely presumed that what goes on in nature is somehow good, or at least not bad. Yet what justification can be given for this widespread assumption? What justification is there for holding that, say, the birth and brutal death of 1,000 non-human beings in nature is inherently less bad than the birth and brutal death of 1,000 non-human beings in human captivity? I suggest there is none. The non-human individual who is born to live a brief life that is ended brutally does not care whether that end is caused by human hands or by the jaws of a predator.
Our confused reverence here is not so unlike the bizarre rationalization one often hears from “hunters” about how much they respect the non-human beings whom they kill — which is, of course, irrelevant since their “noble” intentions do not change the reality for the victims. When it comes to the naturogenic harms that afflict non-human beings, it is as if we smear a similar rationalization out on nature as a whole. Non-human beings live horrible lives and die in brutal ways in nature, alright, but that is okay because it is nature, and nature does not have the exploitative intentions of humans. Yet, as is true in the case of the victims of human “hunters”, the intentions, or lack thereof, behind the events that cause extreme suffering and brutal deaths are irrelevant for the victims involved. It is just yet another manifestation of our inflated sense of self-importance that we think that only the suffering that humans impose really matters and is worth preventing.
How did we come to accept such a twisted view? Just like the human “hunters”, we entirely overlook the perspectives of the non-human beings who suffer in nature when we rush to defend the horrors of nature, which is why our defense of nature has little to do with ethics. It is merely an exercise in ignoring the lives of non-human individuals and the tragic truths about what those lives entail. Indeed, it seems that no matter how bad life is in nature, no matter how much torturous horror one documents and brings to light, many of us are still eager to defend it — not so unlike those who will defend humanity’s exploitation of non-human beings regardless of how many atrocities one can point to that we routinely commit against them. In fact, the rationalizations of the horrors of nature tend to mirror those made in defense of our exploitation of non-human beings: it’s natural, it’s necessary, it’s how it has always been, and so on.
Our dogmatic defense of nature and the suffering it entails most of all seems to be the product of a deep-seated bias toward favoring the status quo. As philosopher David Pearce notes: “For the most part, we are possessed by the deep unspoken feeling that ‘what has always been was always meant to be’. Status quo bias has deep cultural roots” (Pearce 2011). For example, if there were no beings suffering in nature — no births of sentient beings of whom more than 99 percent will have their most basic needs unmet and die before reaching adulthood — would we then have any duty to bring such a condition into existence? This seems most dubious. If anything, it seems we would have a strong duty not to create such a condition, which suggests that our defense of nature, and of leaving it alone, arises not from careful moral reflection, but rather from the circular notion that things should be the way they are because that is the way things are. In other words, it appears little more than an expression of status quo bias.
Again, as I hope stands clear, my aim with the preceding discussion has not been to encourage rushed interventions in nature, but instead to start a conversation about these important issues. In particular, we need to question and debate the sanctity of nature altogether. We cannot allow ourselves to spuriously rationalize away the suffering that takes place in nature, and to forget the victims of the horrors of nature, merely because that reality does not fit into our convenient moral theories, theories that ultimately just serve to make us feel consistent and good about ourselves in the face of an incomprehensibly bad reality.
A wealthy man can look at his worth and say that the system is good because it benefits him. He is on top, he gleefully profits from the pain and suffering of the poor man. In his eyes there is no problem with this, after all they each have their own role in the system, to serve one another and eventually back to the wealthy. It's a closed loop, a beautifully functioning machine. Sure there is some strife every now and then, but what worth would it be to attempt to upend that system? Do you not find it beautiful?
It is not unlike Man's view of the natural world. Being on the top of the food chain, he is able to look down upon the other animals fighting amongst each other and claim that this system is good. Yes, It causes considerable pain and suffering, but would you look at the benefits he can reap! It must be a good system after all, it rarely if ever hurts him (save for the pains of procreation and death). To him it is a well oiled machine, a piece of art. To the other animal-kind, it is a black box that tears flesh for all eternity.
I hate how much the environment so frequently flies under the radar of morality.
Literally every horrible thing you can imagine that happens to humans, will happen to wild animals a million times over. Even without man's intervention, the entire system is set up for suffering and death and rape and anything else.
What can we do about it? I don't fucking know. But that's the problem- no one fucking cares. No one cares to look into a solution. Not even a way to help, in fact most people believe that you shouldn't help, in order to avoid interfering in "nature". Not even vegans care, y'know the ones who are supposed to care about animals? Radio silence, 99% of the time.
I think that if someone had access to a chemical that would render all animal life infertile, then they would be cruel to not use it. Too bad it doesn't exist since no one fucking cares to even try. Everyone is a sadist.
7. Ok maybe I'm cheating cuz this is kinda the same thing as above, but there are things I want to see and feel, and this is the only chance I get to see and feel them. I love dark coffee. I love the rain. I think making art is kinda neat. And there are things I am looking forward to, at least a little bit. Hold on, I have almost figured out the ephemeral truth that will explain everything (I'm joking). I need to read all the books in the world. I have a novel in my head and it would get spilled all over the pavement together with my brain! Aww, who's gonna take care of all my little guys then? Also there is funny shit on the internet. Now, these are not advantages over never being born, for I would have never cared for them or have ever missed them, had I never known. But now I do care, unfortunately.
6. I can do more than a corpse can do. I am the most useless woman ever, but a corpse? The bar is on the floor (underground even). A corpse can't donate to, nor volunteer at the local nursing home, vegan soup kitchen, animal shelter and sanctuary, nor can a corpse donate blood. Living organ donation has many advantages over deceased organ donation. A corpse can't give anyone a hug. It is actually very unclear to me if killing myself would be better for everyone. This is my only chance to enact my will upon the world, and only I know how it's done.
Adding to that: Suicide is a temporary solution to a permanent problem lmao. I hate life, but by living myself I prevent more life from being ushered into this fallen place. By my environmental impact alone, I prevent bugs from being born, and those poor little guys would have lived lives far more wretched than mine. Also. If I blow my face wide open with a shotgun as a final act of rebellion, and paint the walls red with my sadness, mother nature will take my body and she will make sad girls out of me. Sad flies are to lay sad eggs inside my sad wounds and my sad body openings. Sad maggots are to hatch inside my sad putrid eyes. Sad beetles are to eat my sad rotting flesh. Sad parasitoid wasps are to lay their sad eggs inside the sad maggots. Sadness! Upon sadness! There is no end to this madness! So I hold onto my bodily nutrients and bear them like a cross.
5. I do not think I deserve death. Ok fine I admit, I do struggle with a sense of worthlessness and I do think I deserve death some days. But in those days I gotta take a step back and look at myself with the eyes of someone else:
I'm a pathetic lonely lesbian and I kinda suck at everything, but I wouldn't kill a pathetic lonely lesbian who kinda sucks at everything, so why should I kill myself?
4. Eerm not to brag but there are at least like 2 people who might get a little bummed out if I killed myself. There are also people who want me dead, I bet, but I'd rather live for those who care about me, than die for the sake of those who do not. Also, I'm not gonna kill myself because of a fucking internet anonymous. Holy aura loss.
3. Death is scary. In a nanosecond, the atomic arrangement of everything I know, everything I am, gets hurled into bleakest abyss, where trillions of years pass as quickly as a blink. People talk of death as freedom, as peace, but when I think of freedom I think of growing wings and taking off in flight, when I think of peace I think of snoozing on top of soft pillows. My friend told me, he imagines death is like floating atop an endless sea. Death is nothing like that. Death is nothing. It is unimaginable.
". . . My chest was heaving. A deeper blackness than ever rolled in over me, submerging my being, whelming it in a flood of utter darkness, a darkness innocent of sensation, innocent of thought; a darkness careless of all save a blind, unenvious commerce with the dust of unending ages."
- Llewelyn Powys, Love and Death: An Imaginary Autobiography.
Naah that shit scares the bejeebers out of me. Spooky stuff, I won't lie! Maybe I'm being irrational. What is there to be so afraid of? But it is a terror straight from my animal center. I can't help it.
2. Why should I? If I truly am worthless, my death will be as worthless as my life. I mean really, even if I'm a miserable bag o' shit, who cares? I don't care that much about my suffering. I can take it. Maybe if I was my own old hound, I should get shit for not putting that bitch down, but my life is my own, my suffering is my own, and I am allowed to be the victim of my own self.
1. I can only die once. I gotta make it the best death ever. There is no hurry. I don't know what good me dying today would do, but there may come a day, when I can be sure my death will be a good thing. I am waiting for the day an opportunity arises - an opportunity to become a martyr - and I hope I will be brave. What a waste it would be for me to be dead by then. I want to die so someone I love could carry on! I don't want to die for sadness, I want to die for love!
“How much nonsense can we take in our lives? And is there any way we can escape it? No, there is not. We are doomed to all kinds of nonsense: the pain nonsense, the nightmare nonsense, the sweat and slave nonsense, and many other shapes and sizes of insufferable nonsense. It is brought to us on a plate, and we must eat it up or face the death nonsense.” - Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race.
The game was rigged from the start. All who saw life as the nightmare nonsense that it is, wised up and never continued their lineage, and now, as dictated by natural selection, the world is populated by people whose brains are wired to love this nightmare nonsense. So they can push their genes into the future. To keep the gore party going.
“At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed - a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, 'each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.'” - Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil.
But is life truly good? What purpose does all this suffering serve? What if life isn't worth the cost? People are not eager to admit this. Between two eternities, we only get one chance at life. Who wants to think that the only life they've got wasn't worth beginning?
People have crafted all sort of coping mechanisms that allow them to go on about their merry lives. "All happens for a reason" "Suffering makes life meaningful" "That's just how things are, suck it up" or, a stoic reading of "One must imagine Sisyphus happy".
Why should we? It is true that delirious optimism can make people's lives go easier, but such delusions are not entirely without blame: The failure to recognize the full weight of our suffering leads people to inflict that suffering onto others. It is one thing for Sisyphus to be happy on his stupid rock quest, but it is another thing entirely to drag others into his hell. And that is what the optimists are doing; Dragging others into this hell because they have deluded themselves into imagining they are happy and their children will be happy. But not all of us can delude ourselves. Not all of us can be happy.
Maybe life isn't hell for you, but why isn't it enough that it's hell for some people?
One of the most revealing examples of the pronatalists' callousness is the retort "if life is so bad, why don't you kill yourself XD". Firstly, though death ends the suffering, it cannot rewrite the past and erase the suffering that made the person consider suicide in the first place. As Emil Cioran said "You always kill yourself too late". Is it okay to impose suffering onto someone because they can kill themselves afterwards? Do you all hear yourselves?
And why speak of suicide as if it's something unheard of? According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in 6 U.S. high school students reported making a suicide plan in the past year, and suicide is one of the leading causes of death among youth and adults. Even when our brains are wired to survive and propagate, even when the final decision is harrowing and difficult to carry out cleanly and painlessly, life gets so bad that people end their own lives. Exactly how many people do the pronatalists need dead by suicide before it gives them pause? Before they stop to think, their own future child may very well be one of them?
Also, suicide is not guaranteed to work. People fail all the time and end up vegetables or with awful disabilities, and those are two reasons why many of us don't try. There's also the guilt we feel at leaving the ones we love. Life is a trap. Natalists are selfish, short-sighted, brainwashed soldiers for the status quo.
People who think humans should keep procreating because their life was personally great, happy, and loving are basically telling others that they should suffer for their enjoyment. For someone to have a great and wonderful life, someone else somewhere is suffering that person's worst nightmare every. single. day just because humans forced life upon them. Every generation will have these sacrificial lambs that have to exist just so others can live wonderful, happy existences. The happy one's pleasure is greater than the agonized one's suffering, even though misery is 10x worse than pleasure is great.
At least antinatalism advocates no one to ever suffer for someone else's "fun" life.
I think experiencing depression is the sane, healthy reaction to the world we live in, especially as girls and women, and even more so if we are the subject of additional oppression. It bewilders me that so many women seem overly fine; that so many manage to function under the circumstances. Is it resignation? Is it cognitive dissonance? Is it unawareness? Is it wilful ignorance? Is it a conscious decision not to look too hard at the unsavoury parts of life? I can’t blame any women to be tired, to be worn out, to feel hopeless, to want to let go and give up. It’s hard to see, to find a way out. Some days it’s a wonder if there’s any at all. Depression is a perfectly reasonable response to the stimuli we experience. Anyone who’s saying you’re broken for feeling that way isn’t acting with your best interests at heart.
Step outside for like five minutes and you can see hawks disemboweling still kicking rodents, ants slaughtering each other in the thousands in territorial disputes, male dragonflies and turtles harassing females and nearly killing them, birds pushing their disabled babies out of the nest and into the mouth of a predator, sick deer wasting away left abandoned to die, cats collecting dead animals for fun, bees kamikaze attacking a predator to protect each other,
And I'm supposed to accept this? Even more, I'm supposed to accept this as a good thing? The environment is a place of hell, it is a place of constant pain, sacrifice, and bloodshed. How immature it is, to think that just because we are able to siphon a little resources from it ourself, then it must be a benevolent force.
How supremacist it is, to say it is a place of beauty, a place where pain is cancelled out by the few fleeting moments of peace that may or may not exist. Easy for you to say, as you sit in your cold isolated building, as far as you can get from it. The suffering never reaches you. The pain never reaches you. How easy it is to glorify the ecosystem when you are the one at the very top. One must imagine the worms and bugs have a much different outlook on things. How selfish you are to ignore them.
You bow down to a demon thinking it is a god. The demon of causality. There is no point here except cold logic and cruelty, evolution and natural selection at it's finest. These pains are a feature of the system. What kind person would love such a thing?
Admittedly the flowers are beautiful, but only because they do not scream. I suppose even hell is beautiful when you stand on top of a spire.
I never understood why foids get turned on by the size difference between men and women, why are they obsessed with a 6'6 chad. Every time when I stand next to a man much bigger than me I'm angry I'm so much weaker and smaller and no amount of training will give me 50% of the strenght of that fucking ape. I was a competitive kid and I loved the fact I was taller, stronger and faster than most of the boys in my class. The rush of adrenaline when you beat someone at sports was great. Two times I beat up a boy in a fight too and I made him cry. But then the puberty hit them and I could no longer match them and it got me seething with rage. They mogged me with no effort. I just know there has to be something fundamentally different about me and women like me on a biological level. There is no possible way to cope with it and you have to be a spiritually submissive faggot to be ok with it, and a subhuman to get aroused by it.
