Antinatalism, Social Justice & Power

Intro (Black Lives Matter, Reddit comment)

In this video I want to talk about antinatalism and social justice. I want to address some of what has been said by antinatalists amidst the Black Lives Matter protests, which have now evolved into larger anti-authoritarian protests. The subject of authoritarianism pertains to antinatalism as well, and I’ll be touching upon that later in the video. I’m going to look critically at the idea that antinatalism is a social justice movement, and that, assuming that it is, it’s also compatible with other social justice movements. And I’ll be critiquing certain attitudes coming from people who are confident that antinatalism should be the central focus of social justice activists today.  

To start with, I came across some comments that were made by antinatalists during (and about) the BLM protests where, basically, some antinatalists were somewhat hostile towards BLM activists, while others rebuked those antinatalists, and argued that it’s insensitive and it simply isn’t the right time to push the antinatalist agenda forward right now. Here’s an example:  a reddit comment that shows a certain ambivalence or confusion as to whether antinatalists should fully support BLM or try to supplant it, in a way, with the antinatalist agenda. This person says:






This person believed at the time of writing that it is probably better not to push the antinatalist agenda, but also asks that we entertain the idea that it might be effective to say to people fighting for racial justice that they are essentially “fighting the wrong fight.” That the real fight is the fight against life. I strongly disagree, and I think there is a pretty obvious irony in saying that fighting for racial justice is “tantamount to utopia” here, considering the position that is held by the commenter, but I want to take all of this seriously, and I will, in the rest of this video, address some of what is said or implied here.


 First thing I want to say is that, unlike the commenter, I don’t feel confused, and I don’t think it’s complicated; I think you should support these movements as much as you can.  And I’ll bluntly state that I think framing the issue around timing is naïve and disconnected from reality. The problem, as I see it, is that this strand of antinatalism is a confused ideology, so it follows that it’s going to be confused about how to do basic outreach during these highly fevered times. This is just one manifestation of that. By “this strand” I mean the one represented by those who reach the conclusion that the end of human suffering (or sentient suffering) ought to be pursued as a social justice issue. This is sometimes called extinctionism. In this video I’ll also make a few remarks on the philanthropic versus misanthropic split, and as I do, keep in mind that those two also collapse within ‘extinctionism’.

Professor Tina Rulli says, “ “

But I will not be using that definition here, because the view that dominates here on YouTube – and which has been popularized in academia by David Benatar implies “extinctionism”. If you subscribe to another strand of antinatalism, this is not about your views, so bear that in mind.



So, the issue of timing is presented by antinatalists now. Let’s start here. When is it okay or not okay to bring up antinatalism? I’m not part of any antinatalist group now, but I wonder what this argument is looking like internally. It’s not okay right after an unarmed Black person got brutally killed, they might say. What about after 2 weeks? Or two months? I think it’s clearly not the right question to ask. For as long as people are emotionally invested in this cause, there is never going to be a time where anti-racist activists don’t think that anti-racist activity ought to be intensely pursued. The obvious issue is that if your agenda negates theirs, rather than complementing it, they’re not going to be receptive, regardless of when.

BLM activists tend to promote an intersectional approach, so they support other social justice struggles. The problem, more fundamentally, is that, antinatalism doesn’t intersect with their struggle. Ideas advanced by antinatalists don’t really have anything to offer in the way of support for them. And that’s why they are not interested, it’s not because of a delusion. Being alive, and being invested in your life, and the lives of your loved ones, and trying to make them better, isn’t a delusion. But if it were, I mean, there would be nothing you could do about it. (https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/)

I think it’s true that the antinatalist ideology does not contribute towards social justice, except in the case of animal rights, specifically the fight against factory farming, where many people intuitively feel like the non-human animals exploited and killed there would have been better never to have been born, so they can be reached with those arguments. Other than that, there is no contribution made by antinatalist activists that I can see.

There is of course the tangentially related BirthStrike movement, but they explicitly reject the antinatalist label; their focus is not on morally condemning procreation, or limiting births, it is environmental sustainability.


In fact, BirthStrikers argue that population reduction is not a goal worth pursuing. They cite a 2017 study on their website from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA which, “explored various scenarios for global human population change by adjusting fertility and mortality rates. It found that even imposing one-child policies worldwide and “catastrophic mortality events” would not significantly reduce the global population by 2100. It proposes instead that “more immediate results for sustainability would emerge from policies and technologies that reverse rising consumption of natural resources”.” So, despite their temporary anti-natal bend, antinatalist cannot count even them as allies.

 

To be clear: there is no denying that antinatalism, as personal philosophy or strategy, can certainly be useful for supporting social struggles: when you know you’ll never have children, you have less of a need for stability, and you have more time and resources to invest in activism. But antinatalism as a movement – again, antinatalism as Extinctionism -- doesn’t seem to align with social justice struggles or represent one.

Two fundamental characteristics of social movements are the belief that they can make a difference for some living beings in the here and now, and that they can organize politically to that end. They don’t just talk and debate with people as individuals. If you don’t organize as a group, with a political purpose, are you really  a social movement?  You can’t put pressure on your government, you can’t make demands, you can’t express solidarity with other struggles and support them meaningfully, and as a result they cannot also support your movement. This is a key part of how social movements gain more exposure and adherents. Antinatalism, on the other hand, either antagonizes other movements or has nothing to contribute to them, as a movement. Often times, antinatalists are simply unconcerned with these movements. The general sentiment is that, things have always been bad, and they will remain bad, and no amount of effort is going to fix the broken system that is life. People are overwhelmingly seen as “deluded life addicts”. This doesn’t doesn’t give you the sort of hopeful, future-oriented mindset that activists must maintain, nor does it give you the mindset to connect with people on a basis of mutual respect.

Benatar and Voluntary Antinatalism

Benatar in his Better Never to Have Been doesn’t mention social struggles. Race and poverty get a single mention each, and only to say that they are the source of problems for people, and that they always have been, therefore justifying antinatalism. But this is a non-sequitur. That life involves a lot of bad, and that it has always involved a lot of bad, does not logically lead us to the conclusion that antinatalism is the solution. Even we were to grant that Benatar’s case for antinatalism is internally consistent– which even some antinatalist thinkers would disagree with—this does not suffice to say that it can turn itself into a solution, i.e. a project of liberation for human-kind, or sentience. For something to be able to liberate the human species, it would have to not only be logical, but applicable. Antinatalism would have to be political. Yet the word ‘politics’ does not appear in Benatar’s book, and the word ‘political’ appears only twice in order to discuss the ways that “pro-natalism operates.”

 The focus is entirely on the abstract and the ideal, on the degree to which things are bad, on logical constructions and arithmetic. Antinatalism is presented as the only possible solution to social problems, to the human predicament, and yet, its focus is uniquely on the moral sphere, not the broader human sphere: the sphere within which ideas can be put into action. The book, along with virtually all that has been produced on this subject, is bereft of an analysis of existing socio-economic structures and power relations. This is how Benatar can make the absurd claim that “the misanthropic argument is not in the least incompatible with the philanthropic one” which he leaves fully unsubstantiated, but which we will touch upon later.

 In his book, Benatar writes  of a hypothetical “last generation”. Contrary to the individualistic “Last Man” from Zapffe, who is an iconoclast, Benatar presents the idea of a generation which would pursue an antinatalist programme voluntarily as a collective. Although this is not fleshed out at all, it is evident that this is a world in which homo sapiens would have to be drastically different from the homo sapiens of today. By virtue of being a voluntary programme, it must be assumed that in order to accomplish this fantastical task, this animal that we are would somehow have transformed itself into a being that is overwhelmingly other-regarding, self-negating, and inconceivably unafraid of pain.

Prior to this, crucially, we would have had to be socially organized in such a way that we would not want to deceive or exploit each other as the collapse of societies advance. We could all trust each other’s ideological commitments. The “chosen ones” who would bear the worst of the suffering resulting from this self-engineered collapse of global civilization at the very end would all do so willingly. Throughout the whole process, the world would have to be unified and synchronized, power vacuums and pro-life rebel groups looking to capitalize during the rapidly accelerating collapse would be a thing of the past. Self-sacrificing altruism would rule human behavior, and rationality would overwrite the instinct of self-preservation, turning it into a complex drive for self-annihilation.

Let’s do the impossible and grant the possibility of this happening. Since this is not the being that we are today, the anti-natal paradox should become obvious. In order for this state of affairs to exist, it would have to evolve. What is evolution? Change over time. Change over time means building upon the efforts of generation after generation, therefore necessitating procreation. For the antinatalist programme to be followed to the end, the human species and the world would have to be radically different than it is today. But antinatalists argue that people should stop procreating now, and they very often morally condemn someone after the act, on the ground that it is unjustifiable to have children, or mistakenly assuming that one less birth is one step closer to human extinction. How do antinatalists address this paradox, and this assumption?

 Benatar makes no point to say that the current order of things stands in the way of this happening. That the only world in which we can conceive of an antinatalist program being pushed through voluntarily, consciously and successfully is one where organized human life is horizontally structured, meaning that humans would have abolished all forms of hierarchy and competitive political programs. Only in a world without dominance hierarchies could we “walk into extinction” voluntarily.

Authoritarian Antinatalism

 Now, you might say, “yes, but this isn’t the only option; antinatalism as a political program could be imposed by force.” In which case, if we go through the intellectual exercise, we run into a similar problem: the world would have to be very hegemonous and ruled by an exceptionally powerful and stable World Government in order to be able to carry out an antinatalist program until the end. An antinatalist programme that is local would be useless for obvious reasons: that area would be overtaken and world population would stabilize right back. So, the world still has to be transformed. If this were the last generation, it would not be possible to build this powerfully stable, all-encompassing global institutional structure.

Additionally, enormous amounts of suffering would have to be imposed, making this a much more difficult selling point for the ideology; and if history and current socio-economic conditions are any indication of this, it would not be imposed upon the world population equally. Where there is hierarchy, there are always justifications for why certain groups ought to have the power to exploit and discriminate against others. Those others would of course be resisting against their oppressors.

The means and the Ends

Another paradox becomes visible here: if a group has this kind of power over others, then they will not be the kind of self-sacrificing person Benatar has in mind. They will never be able to transform themselves in that way, for they are bathing in the intoxicating waters of coercive power. A transformation is only possible where it has been prefigured. You cannot have a means to an end approach to social transformation; where liberation is concerned, the means must also be the ends. The very nature of the process of hierarchical ascension is to foster egoism and ruthlessness. It has been shown for instance that the richer a person gets, the less concern and empathy for others they will have. The ultra wealthy’s priority is to maintain their wealth and power, which they feel that they deserve. And this ties into a process of social reproduction, where those who are at the top of a given society seek to reproduce the beliefs and sociopolitical systems that helped them get there, and that allow them to maintain their power. Social and cultural reproduction is of crucial importance, yet is never once explored in antinatalist theory.

To put it in another way: if you have a group that has the monopoly on force, and that has the power to control human reproduction, then it follows that they will also control other aspects of your life. No matter what this tyrannical group purports its goals to be, it is never trustworthy, and never benevolent. The idea of a benevolent dictatorship that could push through an antinatalist programme is a contradiction in terms, in the same way that China or North Korea is. One can imagine a benevolent dictatorship that will pursue its own demise – its own withering away -- in the same way one can imagine a person walking on water: by ignoring structural reality. Living things, small and big, have a purpose to them. Their purpose is to maintain their biological structures. Societies are a higher order system, but, consisting of living things, their purpose is the same. In the same way that you wouldn’t willingly give up your capacity to obtain the means for the continuance of your life, societies will not willingly give up control and ability over their continuance into the future.

Marxism and Vanguardism


  I think it’s worth exploring the similarity between Antinatalism and authoritarian Marxism in a bit more detail. Both seem to share the same idea that you can program human beings with a certain “scientific understanding” and believe in a vanguard’s ability to enlighten or lead the masses towards liberation. If you’re not familiar with this term, a vanguard is basically an elite group of people who see their role as educators and leaders and who represent the interests of non-elite people and can guide them towards liberation. According to the vanguard party, all the masses have to do is trust their judgment and authority and go along with their socio-political programmes until they are liberated. Of course, such liberation never happened. Instead, working-class movements and marginalized people were deceived, trampled and exterminated.

Where Marxists argue that, if they were to get control of the state and the means of production, the state would eventually wither away, antinatalists often have a similar naïve view of power, imagining that if you got the “right people” in positions of power – people with the right understanding of life -- the state could lend itself to an antinatalist programme, which would reduce and eventually abolish suffering. But as mentioned previously, there is no reason to believe this. What we know about centralized power is that it cannot be trusted to advance the interests of those not belonging to the ruling class. Whatever good intentions some might have before gaining power – power transforms them. The means transform the ends.


Unlike the Marxist vanguard though, the antinatalist vanguard is not concerned with the potential liberation of those who are alive: it is said to be protecting the unborn from ever becoming enslaved and wanting liberation in the first place. Liberation is non-existence. And who stands in the way of achieving that desired end? For the Marxists, it’s the bourgeoisie which doesn’t know any better. For the antinatalist, it’s the delusional breeders who don’t know any better. This attitude towards those who stand in the way of the liberation of non-existence is something like: “We did the arithmetic, we did the philosophizing; we are rational and we know you would have been better off not being born, and that you should not impose life on someone else.”


This “I know better”, this “I am rational and you’re deluded” is hugely problematic for those who wish to claim that antinatalism is a civil rights issue, because it is absolutely not the hallmark of a transformative social movement. It’s not interested in equality and it doesn’t speak for itself.

Intersectionality

Today, a social justice struggle is usually looked at in this way: “I exist on this axis of oppression (or multiple axes), and I will fight for my life, because I want my life to be better than it is now.” And of course, this extends to your loved ones. This is completely different from an antinatalist agenda, which claims to know what’s best for everyone—that no one exists—and which does not fight to improve one’s life. It’s not surprising that there are going to be antinatalists who antagonize people and engage in victim-blaming as a result of having this mentality.

I think these behaviors simply follow the logic of an ideology that is centered on the idea that people are reckless and deluded about their experiences and irrational in their judgments. So it follows for me that misanthropic antinatalists who engage in victim-blaming are being consistent with their views, and at the same time they illustrate precisely why their antinatalism is not compatible with social struggles. You can’t negate people’s experiences and desires and at the same time champion their causes.





If you are disavowing the misanthropic adherents of antinatalism, and you promote an idea of antinatalism for social justice compatible with other movements, then I cannot currently see or even conceptualize it. There is no axis of oppression for the antinatalist that fits into an intersectional framework. The oppressor for the antinatalist is nature itself – it’s life, or its more specifically life having evolved the processes that have made consciousness and emotions and feelings possible. But this exists *outside* of the “matrix of domination.”

Another way to put it would be to say that everyone who is struggling against forms of domination share at least one thing in common: they are fighting against bare life, fighting for more life—from the desire of living a fuller life. And that’s necessarily a future-oriented agenda. This is what binds all social justice agendas together. Antinatalism—and I’m not saying that people don’t have good intentions here—precisely makes the opposite demand: the demand for less life, and the demand for people to give up future-oriented projects. To his credit, Benatar talks about this latter problem in his book and regards it as a legitimate harm, but he follows “the numbers” and ultimately makes the claim that the sooner it happens, the better, giving us this sense of urgency and the need to advocate for antinatalism right now.

 The right-to-die agenda, which on the surface seems to be about less life, is in fact about more. It’s a demand for more investment into healthcare, for the Church to stay out of people’s lives, and for more recognition of the marginalized people who suffer chronically and often invisibly. It is about having more freedom to unburden their loved ones, emotionally and materially. It’s a demand to secure the means of guaranteeing that more lives will be able to end in dignity in the future, making the totality of a life more worth living. It is a fight that essentially serves human life:  people are more likely to enjoy their lives or feel less dread about it if they know that they have this option available to them. There is a pro-social, qualitative gain that has no parallel in antinatalism.


Racism

The next point that I would like to touch on is the idea that antinatalism can solve racism. I touched on this early on and I’ll just briefly say a couple more things. First, Racism-- the kind that begins with pseudoscientific pretensions—is usually said to have largely emerged out of white people’s imperialist interests in the 16^th century. The scholar Ibram X. Kendi points to systemic oppression’s origins actually being in the 15^th century, where a chronicler called Zurara introduced the idea that Africans were inferior, and justified slavery as an opportunity for their religious salvation. This idea “began to seep in and stick in to the European cultural psyche,” and a few hundred years later it reached America.

What’s not discussed in Kendi’s book, or most anti-racists writings, is that race is a social construct which was built upon a speciesist construct. Basically, it allowed Europeans, and later on Americans, to see Black people as ‘animalistic’ -- less than human --  and this gave them the justification they needed to deny their desire for autonomy and self-determination and treat them with the same disregard they had for non-human animals.

It’s not something that’s inherent to our species, and it’s not something that we have to do as a species: what is socially constructed can be socially deconstructed. This is not to say that conflicts based on perceived differences and cultural diversity can ultimately be avoided, but racism in its current from can be greatly disempowered if we address its false assumptions and the material conditions that gave rise to it as societies.

We probably all know people who have went from being racist to being anti-racist. We might be one of them. From this, we should understand that, the extent to which racism can be solved is the extent to which we can challenge prejudices in a constructive manner. That’s often very hard, and since racism has a long history, built on an even longer history in speciesism, this problem is very persistent. But a solution doesn’t have to solve every instance of a problem in order to be a solution. If antinatalists argue that a problem such as racism cannot be properly addressed because it is ultimately a problem that pertains to the broader category of ‘life’, they are not making a claim based in knowledge, and they will only alienate themselves and fail the people who exist and struggle today.

Cruel Optimism


I think that aside from the issue of vanguard thinking previously mentioned, the belief that antinatalism can solve racism or any other social problems is a form of “cruel optimism.” In her book Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant analyzes some of the reasons that human beings cling so firmly to hopeful ideas. She defines “cruel optimism” as “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.” What makes these attachments cruel is not just the harmful impact of the object of desire, but the sense in which the object comes to provide something of “the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.” Without the object of our desire, we fall apart. Underneath of a cruel optimism is an existential abyss, and yet severing ourselves from it poses the only real possibility for growth. As Berlant writes: “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies — say, of the enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work — when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds?”

The idea of antinatalism as a cure-all solution to all social ills could be seen as a positive illusion -- something in the distant future that we can always strive towards-- but I have to agree with Berlant – the attachment to its utopian vision is not positive, as it impedes our growth as individuals and precludes any truly liberatory action from occurring. It leads people astray. It alienates them from meaningful resistance, from building bonds with others who struggle. The idea that if you have a headache, a bullet through the head is the solution, should make us laugh. But when the same logic is applied to an argument for antinatalism, many people take it seriously.

The negation of people’s desires, and the rejection of every day struggle in favor of one impossible solution is never going to reverberate powerfully. And this isn’t just an issue of optimism versus pessimism (or realism), it’s an issue of localizing a problem at the right level of analysis. The solution to racism is a broad, intersectional anti-racism, as imperfect as it is.

If one wants to be optimistic about a cure-all solution, why even pick antinatalism? Why not, say, transhumanist bioengineering, à la David Pearce? Or argue for the implementation of some fantastical utopic virtual reality world? Here I think Nietzsche had something to contribute, when he spoke of "the resentment of those beings who are prevented from a genuine active reaction and who compensate for that with a merely imaginary vengeance."



Reason, Argumentation, Power


I think underlying this cruel optimism we also find the liberal presupposition or assumption that “truth will out”, in Shakespeare’s words. That there is a battlefield, a marketplace of ideas, and the best ideas eventually come out victorious. There is no recognition that knowledge is always embedded in a power structure. Instead, arguments are divorced from power. Reason is seen as this infallible light that pierces through illusion and falsehood and can definitely establish what is and isn’t true, and what ought or ought not be done. “If we only follow reason, we will be fine.” No time is spent considering the darker side of reason, a darker side which exists because one of reason’s main functions is to gain people on your side, and in order to do that, you don’t necessarily need to be reasonable or to rely on classical logic. Sometimes deception, distortion, omission and exaggeration work better. Sometimes, ‘he who shouts the loudest’ will end up drowning out others, and some people are impressed with that.

The notion that debate inevitably leads to greater understanding is false, and most of the time, especially on the internet, narcissistic gratification is prioritized over learning and mutual understanding. Almost exclusively only in scenarios where there is mutual respect between communicators can a greater understanding actually be reached.

The laws of thought do not lead to the realization of a fundamental truth divorced from power. Not that power is intrinsically problematic: the issue is whether the form that power takes is one of attempts at injury, domination and appropriation, or resistance to those, and empowerment in one’s life.

Reason has a number of so-called flaws that have been made a-parent by social and behavioral psychologists. What explains them? Clearly, we have evolved the ability to use reason because it was selected for; it’s useful, and can be used to challenge one’s prejudices and misconceptions, but it is a function that is adapted to a pro-social context, a dialogic setting, where there is an interactive back-and-forth. Where reason appears to “misbheave”, it is in situations where such interaction is prevented. To be reasonable is to realize this. To realize the limits of reason; to distrust oneself, continually re-evaluate ourselves, and reflect on the contextuality of knowledge.




Ego & Power

Unfortunately, pro-social, loving behavior is becoming increasingly impossible in today’s world. Market forces have atomized us, and sold us a false image of ourselves. There is too much noise in communication. There is a lot of information, but little knowledge. Brutalizing power is winning over liberatory power. This results in an inability to have constructive conflicts with others. We no longer care to integrate the Other – the enemy. We only care to see ourselves in others, to have ourselves mirrored back to us, and to replicate ourselves in others.

Byung-Chul Han, in “What Is Power”, writes: “Nietzsche does not limit the range of power to human conduct. Rather, he elevates it to the status of a principle of life as such. Mono-cellular organisms already strive for power: ‘Let us consider the simplest case, that of primitive nutrition: the protoplasm extends its pseudopodia in order to search for something that offers resistance – not because of hunger, but because of the will to power.’ Even truth is interpreted as a process of power: it is the perspective of the powerful, which the powerful inoculates into the others, thus continuing him- or herself in them. Truth is a medium of power. [...] Power secures the continuation of a type. Thus, it creates a continuity. Philosophers, too, strive to extend their perspectives and thus to continue themselves. This is how Nietzsche interprets Plato’s belief ‘that even philosophy is a kind of sublimated sexual and procreational drive.’”

From this view, philosophy does not exist outside of power dynamics. Philosophy is one tool of possible empowerment (or disempowerment) but it serves a reproductive purpose: the reproduction of the ego into the alter. In other words, we reason and debate with each other in order to colonize other people’s mind with some of our self. The idea that one’s activism has evolved out of pure reason or pure concern with others is false and deceiving. Colonizing other people’s minds can be a violent act where it disempowers them or gives them a narrow or false understanding. For as long as antinatalists weaponize reason and empathy, and present themselves as the ones who are truly caring, and truly rational, they can expect fierce resistance.

Human beings are only momentarily other-regarding, and we are never purely rational, impassioned. Emotions can’t be divorced from reasoning. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and others have shown, even the pure mathematician is emotionally engaged in his work.

Praxis

What makes antinatalism activism so hard to “do” in the world is not just due to its sheer utopianism – its desire for biological salvation through extinction --  but its disempowering and impractical nature. What makes so many antinatalists so fearful of engaging in activism is precisely that which they claim is possible to destroy: the homeostatic imperative. The imperative that drive living systems to maintain themselves through time. Fear is an emotional response that arises when one’s biological systems feel threatened. One’s biological systems feel threatened when we advocate for views that are not pro-social, because we are social animals. The social world shaped us to be who  we are, it encompasses us. It is not separate from us and our understanding of the world.

Even for people who are sympathetic to its appeals, antinatalism is easy to reject due to its lack of praxis: its apparent inability to challenge the systems of life. Social problems do not improve — marginalized people’s daily reality does not change— by investing in these ideas. No matter how much we care about them, this is not going to change. The nature of totalizing, perfect solutions, is that they are far removed from reality, and from most people’s daily experiences and goals. As Voltaire said, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

 It’s worth pointing out that social Anarchists are traditionally accused of being utopians in this way, and their concerns dismissed as a result, but this criticism does not apply to them. Social anarchists might have an idea of a near perfect society, in the form of a lack of hierarchy, but this vision does not get in the way of what is good to act upon today. The means and the ends are aligned: they engage in direct action that helps marginalized people today, and they attempt social experiments in certain zones of resistance in order to show the legitimacy of their ideas. They are not mere dreamers; their ideas have anthropological backing, and they are fully aware that the world they want to live in will never be made possible if it is not prefigured.

What anarchists understand, and what antinatalists who wish to make antinatalism a social justice struggle need to understand, is that, historically, when you fought a social injustice collectively, you could sometimes make your life better, even if just slightly, and even if just temporarily. It cannot be understated how much people value that. The promise is empowerment today, rather than salvation later. People are very much interested in that. When there are only far-off goals to invest in, their patience can be exhausted. You can’t rely on an ideology that only promises something in the far future, even if that something is very promising. That’s not a sustainable motivator over time. Most people’s lives are hard here and now, and your ability to influence them is going to depend entirely on whether or not you can convince them of a path of action that can make some kind of difference for them and their loved ones in the present or the near future.

Antinatalists face a seemingly intractable problem because they make their case by appealing to the interests of those who do not exist, and not for their future interests while living either, unlike those who are concerned with specific social and environmental problems affecting future generations, but on the basis of the non-existent’s perceived would-be interest in not having existed -- no matter what.


Evolutionary theory.

Now, I think I understand why some people remain hopeful about antinatalism’s chances of succeeding, even though crucial concerns about its ideology and practices are not addressed, and despite the resistance that they face every day if they speak about it, and the obvious stagnation of what some may call a movement. I’ve named “cruel optimism” and ressentiment, which I believe often plays a part, but I also believe there is an error made by antinatalists who believe that they truly understand life – this, despite not knowing very much about it on a scientific level. This conviction is enough to remain invested in the project.

 It is enough for them to know that evolution appears to be a pointless process that generates a lot of suffering. And I get that – the suffering is truly horrifying. But I think the right response to it is to direct one’s sadness and outrage towards constructive ends. Ends that do not reproduce the systems that we have constructed as a species and which are responsible for a lot of the suffering. We have some control over those systems, because they are socially constructed. We have no control over the laws of thermodynamics, through which life emerged.

Sadly, by narrowly focusing on “life as the oppressor”, many antinatalists do not care about the part that they play in reproducing systems of oppression, of which they have some control over. It is inconsistent to concern oneself with the sole fact of biological reproduction and the suffering that it enables, while not concerning oneself with other forms of reproduction in which we all can play a part: sexism, ableism, racism, ageism, classism, religious persecution, or the reproduction of our self into others through violent means.

 I also think that it is a profound error to elevate the Selfish Gene theory to the level of “absolute truth”. Armed with this certainty, it’s understandable that antinatalists would then make the opposition to life itself their central concern. But the problem is that no one seems to be particularly concerned with the fact that this theory that has received a lot of criticisms. It paints a very restricted view of evolution and it has not been able to provide an answer to numerous challenges. I will post a link to some of those challenges in the description box. You can also pause the video right now if you want to read them on the screen.



Exposure, Spectacle, Sameness

Another reason why this optimism persists I believe is because online antinatalist groups have kept growing, and there has been a few instances of the subject being mentioned in the media. One person last year sued his parents and received mainstream attention for it (and the phenomenal film Cafarnaum also exposed people to this very idea). The topic might have gained a bit more interest within academia as well. This might seem promising to some people. But none of this actually means much if the ideology can’t have any political clout. This isn’t defeatism – this is a simple fact.



I’d argue that in today’s age—the age of the Spectacle— just about every idea can be used as a curiosity designed to generate clicks. To cheer representation in the mainstream media is to miss the point that representation on its own only leads to co-optation, to the disarming of an idea. An idea has no transformative power when it is fetishized or commodified. No ideas are immune: the idea of suffering, and the idea of extinction included. It can be presented to the masses because it generates controversy and entertains, which generates profit. The phrase “the revolution will not be televised” exists for a reason. What is mediatized is so because it is not threatening to business-as-usual, or is mediatized in a specific way in order to limit its threat to business-as-usual. Ideas that are consumed are not necessarily reflected upon, or acted upon – or not meaningfully so.

Antinatalists often fall into the trap of fetishizing life’s horrors online. Its condemnations lead to an impotent, if not self-defeating, form of activity, which benefits the corporations who own those platforms. Online outrage, no matter about what, is only minimally beneficial to those who engage in it, as a way to blow of steam, and be validated by others who feel like us, but it is rarely constructive. Eventually, its benefits turn into something detrimental. The Sameness that comes with echo chambers. The Sameness of narcissistic gratification: of seeking those who reflect our own views back to us. It’s easy and riskless. And where no risks are taken, no transformation is possible.



Progress occurs when the dominant order is challenged (at any level). As trans historian Susan Stryker says in Disclosure (2020): “Everything can spin on a dime. We can’t think that just because you see trans representation, that the revolution is over. Having positive representation can only succeed in changing the conditions of life for trans people when it is part of a much broader movement for social change. Having representation is not the goal. It’s just the means to an end.” An increase in representation is good only if it can lead to a change in material conditions.



The greatest challenge for philanthropic antinatalists who believe in its revolutionary potential is still to show how, even with greater representation, these ideas could start legitimizing themselves, in the world as it is, or as it is shaping up to be.


Misanthropic antinatalism

Assume that I’m wrong about the total incompatibility of antinatalism with political action. Assume that antinatalism starts something politically. What can antinatalism realistically accomplish without being part of a broader movement, or how does it become a part of it? There is a rift between the misanthropic and authoritarian camp and the libertarian and philanthropic one that is not going to be bridged. Their methods to achieve their ends would be completely different: one focused on voluntary libertarian goals of supporting human and nonhuman rights, while the other is necessarily going to advocate authoritarian measures on such things as population control, immigration and redistribution of resources. Misanthropes can also believe in accelerating the multiple crises that our global, interconnected world faces today by supporting far-right politicians and militias, so as to bring an end to organized life faster. If they want to move forward, philanthropic antinatalists have to make a decision whether to include or exclude these advocates. By refusing to exclude them, they would have no chance to be included in an intersectional movement.



  Conclusion

There are other things that could have been mentioned in this video. I chose to touch on numerous things instead of going into depth about any one of them. Most importantly, I believe an exploration of the concept of homeostasis and its application beyond biology, and into the social and cultural realms is necessary in order to realize the full extent of the ‘cruel optimism’ of antinatalist theory. I may address that in a later video.

Thank you for listening.