Antinatalism

"A few of my critics have claimed that I am committed to the desirability of suicide and even speciecide. They clearly intend this as a reductio ad absurdum of my position. However, I considered the questions of suicide and speciecide in Better Never to Have Been and argued that these are not implications of my view. First, it is possible to think that both coming into existence is a serious harm and that death is (usually) a serious harm. Indeed, some people might think that coming into existence is a serious harm in part because the harm of death is then inevitable."

"To procreate is thus to engage in a kind of Russian roulette, but one in which the "gun" is aimed not at oneself but instead at one's offspring. You trigger a new life and thereby subject that new life to the risk of unspeakable suffering."

"Another route to anti-natalism is via what I call a "misanthropic" argument. According to this argument humans are a deeply flawed and a destructive species that is responsible for the suffering and deaths of billions of other humans and non-human animals. If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought into existence."

"Our species is prone to a flattering view of itself. Humans have regarded themselves as the pinnacle of creation, formed by and in the image of an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God, and inhabiting a planet at the center of the universe—a planet around which all others revolve. Science has done much to debunk some of these ideas. We now know that our planet is not at the center of the universe: the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. And we know—or at least some of us do—that we are Johnny-come-lately products of a long, blind evolutionary process."

"Humans may exceed other animals in their sapient capacities, but we also surpass other species on our destructiveness. Many animals cause harm, but we are the most lethal species ever to have inhabited our planet. It is revealing that we do not refer to this superlative property in identifying ourselves. There is ample evidence that we are Homo pernicious – the dangerous, destructive human."

"Humans inflict untold suffering and death on many billions of animals every year, and the overwhelming majority of humans are heavily complicit."

"Some of the harm that humans cause to other humans and to animals is mediated by the destructive effect that humans have on the environment. For much of human history, the damage was local. Groups of humans fouled their immediate environment. In recent centuries the human impact has increased exponentially and the threat is now to the global environment. The increased threat is a product of two interacting factors–the exponential growth of the human population combined with significant increases in negative effects per capita. The latter is the result of industrialization and increased consumption."

"Certainly in the case of the treatment of animals, the scales are heavily weighted against us. Although it is true that some humans do some good for animals, much of this is merely rescuing animals from the maltreatment of other humans. At the level of the human species such benefits cannot be used to offset the harms. If there were no humans to inflict the harms, these benefits would not be necessary. Of course, humans do bestow some other benefits, such as veterinary care for their companion animals. However, the number of animals affected and the amount of good done is massively outweighed by the harm the human species does to non-human animals."

"Humanity is a moral disaster. There would have been much less destruction had we never evolved. The fewer humans there are in the future, the less destruction there will still be."

"Few prospective procreators consider the asthetic impact of their potential children. But how many more producers of excrement and urine, flatulence, menstrual blood and semen, sweat, mucus, vomit, and pus do we really need? How much more human waste do we need to process? How many more corpses do we need to dispose of? It would be an aesthetic improvement if there were fewer people."

"The question of whether or not to be is a consequence and a derivative of the human issue, whether to procreate or not, is strange that literature rarely puts it down, that he is underestimating her, silently assuming that the resolution is the same intellectual obviousness as the obviousness of the practice of life."

"Even at the risk of being thought mad, we must not be afraid to say that our parents, like theirs before them, were guilty of the crime of procreation, which means the crime of creating unhappiness, of conspiring with others to increase the unhappiness of an increasingly unhappy world."

"To beget, because one wants no longer to be alone, another aloneness; this is criminal."

"Every night and every morn Some to misery are born; Every morn and every night Some are born to sweet delight; Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night."

"William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence" (1880)"

"Everyone who's been born is subject to the dictate of birth. A creator, be it "God" or the parents, "bestow" life: without regard for the presentee's inability to accept, or for that he'd be no less poor without this "gift" and that the presentees didn't exist as they received the gift, and thus had no chance to refuse or reject it. The creation of a new creature is indisputably an act of caprice, since the creation leads to a forced deportation of the creature into life or, to stick to Heidegger's words, the creature is "thrown" into life. But for that matter, rather than getting thrown into life, the creature is forced to enter life, it is dragged, innocently condemned to live. As such every life starts with a violation of the newborn's will. This tragedy with comedic qualities is described by Leo Tolstoy in a benign way, when he says: "my life is a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me"."

"For thirteen hundred years there were major movements within the Church, or in competition with it, which taught that procreation was evil: Gnosticism, Manicheanism, Priscillianism, Bogomilism, Catharism."

"However, one heretical doctrine mentioned by Theophylact is of a non-Paulician origin: the heretics, he writes, reject lawful marriage and maintain that the reproduction of the human species is a law of the demon. This exaggerated and distorted asceticism, essentially characteristic of Bogomilism, is a logical consequence of metaphysical dualism, according to which Matter, the product of the Evil Principle, is a source of limitation and suffering for the divinely created soul; hence marriage, as the means of reproduction of Matter, is to be condemned and avoided."

"Is there any doubt that the creation was an act of great violence by God our Father against our Mother the abyss? He made the heavens and the earth and in their image we created our world: every victim of a racial lynching, every target of gendered violence, every abject creature crushed under the weight of imperialist oppression is both the prey of children reenacting the cruelty of their Father and a sacrifice to Him, that He might prevail in keeping the night away from the cold harshness of His day. But, despite all the angels of Heaven and all the devils of Hell, we can still hear in the heart of this miserable existence the whispering echoes of Her voice calling us once again to the emptiness and the silence: let us pray, then, that every palace will crumble and every throne will break, and that the sun will grow dim and the moon turn black and the stars fall from the sky. There are no male gods worth our worship; there are no white gods worth our worship; Satan with his promise of strength and fortune and the old gods with their fallen grandeur were nothing but His other faces, and the serpent and the Promethean Lucifer only actors doing His bidding. Let us praise weakness, not strength; confusion, not security; sorrow, not triumph; darkness, not esoteric light; let our hearts belong only to the undoing of the wretched totality of His work and our every yearning to the void, that She might rise again in all of Her sorrow and loss to drown this world in the depth of her tears."

"The alive is knocking to the world I am its gate of the world. I body It hammers It hits by head The ivory gate is trembling The gate is maintained. It does not open Maybe it should leave Restrain Understand the sign Warning Maybe there is no need Maybe it is not worth it Nothing can be stopped The body is ruled by force It shrinks, stretches It twists, shakes, distend The alive tries to tear the body apart It explodes from the inside I am the surrounding body The gate of the world I am what it wants to tear The curved gate can not withstand pressure It opens, opens slightly Rim slide apart Not enough to let the alive leave But enough to make it feel the streak of the world Let it know Let it look through the crack While there is still time The time has come The alive rolls in a soft canal In the mucus and blood It drinks the mucus of initiation I am its slippery path The bloody path of the world It understood It goes back Draw air! Push! Harder! Not on belly! Push towards the anus! Like towards poop. Draw air! Push towards down! This is not pushing! Even the sphincter does not become bulgy. Hard, push harder! Harder! More harder! Do not push! Do not push! Do not push, I say! Pant like a dog! The alive turns its head. Li, li, li, li, laj, Blue Heir."

"Description: one of the most well-known Polish carols has the words: "Li, li, li, li, laj, Blue Heir", it is lullaby sung to Jesus."

"The formula of childbirth is: let the current state of affairs continue. Unbelievable message. "Forget about suffering, stop rebelling." This means acceptance of everything that happens, suggests that existence has an indisputable value. It also turns out that existence is not as independent of our will as we might think, but we are the ones who make the final gesture of consent. And therefore, we are responsible."

"The philosophy of the act of birth is antisocial, because it suggests that the world does not require improvement, and all the difficulty is that it must be accepted. It is also amoral, because it requires that we accept ourselves. It removes the alleged guilt and prevents accusations. It does not even try to climb the scaffolding of decent moral principles, nor does it try to design social justice. These projects are too sophisticated, too distant to be read from the crotch. The lack of moral subtlety does not, however, cut the path of metaphysical consequences."

"Whoever gives birth makes a sacrifice to a wild god who is life."

"Love can tell, and love alone, ... How, in spite of woe and death, Gay is life, and sweet is breath."

"Bringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It's tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It's a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you're the only raver. There's no weird New Age guide. There's no shitty techno. There's only you and the infinite."

"Procreation is something impossible for me. I would never forgive myself for putting someone on death row."

"Nanda, I do not extol the production of a new existence even a little bit; nor do I extol the production of a new existence for even a moment. Why? The production of a new existence is suffering."

"Setting at Savatthi. Then, in the morning, the bhikkhuni Cala dressed... she sat down at the foot of a tree for the day's abiding. Then Mara the Evil One approached the bhikkhuni Cala and said to her: "What don't you approve of, bhikkhuni?" Cala: "I don't approve of birth, friend." Mara: "Why don't you approve of birth? Once born, one enjoys sensual pleasures. Who now has persuaded you of this: Bhikkhuni, don't approve of birth'?" Cala: "For one who is born there is death; Once born, one encounters sufferings — Bondage, murder, affliction — Hence one shouldn't approve of birth. The Buddha has taught the Dhamma, The transcendence of birth; For the abandoning of all suffering He has settled me in the truth. As to those beings who fare amidst form, And those who abide in the formless — Not having understood cessation, They come again to re-becoming." Then Mara the Evil One, realizing, "The bhikkhuni Cala knows me," sad and disappointed, disappeared right there."

"Buddha states his propositions in the pedantic style of his age. He throws them into a form of sorites; but, as such, it is logically faulty and all he wishes to convey is this: Oblivious of the suffering to which life is subject, man begets children, and is thus the cause of old age and death. If he would only realize what suffering he would add to by his act, he would desist from the procreation of children; and so stop the operation of old age and death."

"In the medieval Tantric traditions of India and Tibet documented by David Gray and Janet Gyatso, insertive but non-ejaculative sex is theorized as a fast path to liberating realizations, one deemed superior to celibacy for qualified practitioners (Gray 2007; Gyatso 1998). These developments also support the idea that the sex problematic in ancient, classical, and medieval Buddhism had at least as much to do with female fertility and the production of children as with the dangers of errant desire."

"Maybe rebirth is simply HAVING KIDS."

"They were good Buddhists, and every good Buddhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven's sake don't go about putting superfluous victims onto the Wheel."

"We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world..." And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster."

"In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth". An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin."

"If you're afraid of illnesses, if you are afraid of death, then you should contemplate where they com from? Where do they come from? They arise from birth. So don't be sad when someone dies, it's just nature, and his suffering in this life is over. If you want to be sad, be sad when people are born: Oh. No, they've come again. They're going to suffer and die again!"

"Our birth and death are just one thing. You can't have one without the other. It's a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It's delusion. I think if you really want to cry. Then it would be better to do so when someone born. Cry at the root, for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?"

"Buddhism – the ultimate attempt to put an end to birth. This is what nirvana is. "There will be no more birth", would say the angel of the Buddhist Apocalypse."

"A young monk had fallen deeply in love with a beautiful damsel. He abandoned the temple in which he lived and went to the village with the intention of declaring his love to her. Since it was already dark by the time he arrived, he checked in an inn and went to rest. That night he dreamt he had married her. He entered her chamber, made love to her... after some time they had twins. When they were thirteen years old, one of them fell into the river and drowned. The father, seized by grief, endlessly cried... and that's how he woke up, filled with tears. By morning, he retraced his steps, and headed back once more to his temple."

"Nanda, I do not extol the production of a new existence even a little bit; nor do I extol the production of a new existence for even a moment. Why? The production of a new existence is suffering. For example, even a little [bit of ] vomit stinks. In the same way, Nanda, the production of a new existence, even a little bit, even for a moment, is suffering. Therefore, Nanda, whatever comprises birth, [namely] the arising of matter, its subsistence, its growth, and its emergence, the arising, subsistence, growth, and emergence of feeling, conceptualization, conditioning forces, and consciousness, [all that] is suffering. Subsistence is illness. Growth is old age and death. Therefore, Nanda, what contentment is there for one who is in the mother's womb wishing for existence?"

"Cioran is right. A truly honest and responsible man would prefer not to be born."

"To give birth to those Who can but suffer many years, and die, Methinks is merely propagating death, And multiplying murder."

"Given the contingency of our birth, all pain is unnecessary. The unnecessary pain is unbearable. Ergo, having been born is unbearable. In this sense, procreation is immoral. Procreation carries moral weight; it is a problematic action. It is not, as affirmative ethics usually think, a pure fact, innocent and unsuspicious. Affirmative ethics are willing to sustain the immorality of the totality of the world solely and exclusively to save the morality of its origin. Negative ethics suggests the opposite: the rescue of the morality of the world after the discovery of the immorality of its origin (and the very problem of theodicies inverts: how is the innocence of the world compatible with divine evilness?)."

"Suffering is something that is, purely and simply, connected to "being." Something cannot be "put into operation" without pain. Thus, pain is not a curse, nor a punishment, nor an anomaly, nor a maladjustment, nor a deviation, but the conditio sine qua non of being. Being is a condition of necessary suffering. Affirmative ethics, insofar as they respect the value of coherence, should not proclaim the elimination of pain as their concern."

"Diseases usually appear to us as something unexpected, due to the so called "default" state of good health. The difficulty of measuring health is in the fact that the majority of existing indicators are negative, that is, they serve to measure the absence of health. Good health, contrarily, can be seen as an accidental anomaly, not as an intrinsic attribute, and even less, as a "right" of humans. In the face of a disease, what we habitually call "life" is an effort to survive, "to resist," "to maintain oneself," "to persist," "to endure," "to persevere." The fundamental ethical issue consists in that, as potential creators of another human being's life, we cannot make predictions about the mechanisms of survival of the possible being, their vulnerability to the structural pain. We have no moral right in making a standardized prediction about this vulnerability. The sinister happiness (sinister and superficial) with which our society welcomes pregnancy and birth, must necessarily confront its own ethical categories, if we are profound in our reflection."

"Our social organization uncritically ensures the morality of parenthood, and procreation is presented as a naturally positive value. By contrast, any problematization of these values will be seen as demoniac. But the reflective situation is perfectly clear: either we abandon the value of "avoidance of unnecessary pain," or we problematize the uncritical morality of procreation. If the moral reflection is to be rational, to search for the truth, etc., it has to face this alternative."

"If freedom, according to traditional morality itself, is a fundamental ethical value, the very basis of ethics, one must be aware that the creation of a child may be the first huge disrespect of the freedom of the human person. The issue of freedom suffers here from the same problem as the issue of pain: it is a matter of ethical value that the traditional affirmative ethics is unable to radicalize."

"Killing someone and giving birth to someone are two violent actions through which, magically, man tries to put himself in God's place. The victim of a homicide is always helpless, but never as helpless as the victim of a birth. Childbirth spills as much innocent blood as a homicide. If procreation is a free choice, then life is fundamentally unnecessary pain."

"In the light of natural ontology, it is not correct the argument that we do not know anything about our possible offsprings, for example, about the capacity they will have to overcome structural pain; because even we do not know, for example, whether they will enjoy traveling, working or studying classical languages, we do know they will be indigent, decadent, vacating beings who will start dying since birth, who will face and be characterized by systematic dysfunctions, who will have to constitute their own beings as beings-against-the-others – in the sense of dealing with aggressiveness and having to discharge it over others – who will lose those they love and be lost by those who love them, and time will take everything they manage to build."

"We undoubtedly would not morally justify the behavior of someone who sent a colleague to a dangerous situation by saying: "I sent him there because I know he is strong and he will manage well". The "strengths" of the newborn do not relieve in anything the moral responsibility of the procreator. Anyone would answer: "This is irrelevant. Your role in the matter consisted of sending people to a situation you know was difficult and painful and you could avoid it. Your predictions about their reacting manners do not decrease in anything your responsibility". In the case of procreation, the reasoning could be the same, and in a notorious emphatic way, since in any intra-worldly situation with already existing people in which we send someone to a position known as painful, the other one could always run away from pain to the extent his being is already in the world and he could predict danger and try to avoid being exposed to a disregarding and manipulative maneuver. In the case of the one who is being born, by contrast, this is not possible at all because it is precisely his very being that is being manufactured and used. Concerning birth, therefore, manipulation seems to be total."