I hate antinatalism

I recently read the essay Neoreaction a Basilisk, by Elizabeth Sandifer. It’s an interesting read, although the author sometimes seems to dance around her arguments without ever quite making them explicit. But even at its weakest, it’s no more than poetically out-of-focus, and I snapped up the whole thing in two sittings.

One of the authors who Sandifer discusses is Thomas Ligotti, an existential pessimist and an antinatalist. His positions is that existence is agony, and we’d all be better-off not doing so. In fact, he thinks we should all just stop having kids and end humanity altogether.

Between this and a recent online argument, I’ve been thinking about antinatalism again. I’ve argued with my fair share of antinatalists, and frankly I just can’t stand them. I think they’re wrong, but there’s more to it than that. I think they’re wrong-headed. I think antinatalism isn’t just incorrect, but foul too.

Some antinatalist arguments are just flat-out incorrect. Some say that it’s cruel to bring people into being if there’s even the slightest chance that they’ll live sad lives. After all, you can’t ask a baby’s consent before conceiving it. But of course, consent is only a heuristic for how much pleasure or harm an action will cause. No one can consent to a surprise birthday party, but we throw them anyway, because we know that they will probably amuse and delight their recipients.

And I think most people enjoy their lives well enough. Depression only affects about 5% of the population, give or take, and I figure depression is a pretty good heuristic for the percentage of people who doubt the worthwhileness of their lives. And I imagine we could cut that number down a lot if we changed some stuff about our society. If we supported those in need and lived in more tightly-knit social communities, I bet depression statistics would plummet. Even the sadness that does exist is hardly essential to the human condition.

But some antinatalists seem to actually hold different axiomatic values, and nothing’s more frustrating than someone who just believes something different from you at a profound level. People like David Benatar say that the absence of pain is inherently good, but the absence of pleasure is merely neutral, meaning that non-existence is strictly better than existence. To which I respond, the absence of any truly good thing is necessarily bad by comparison. This asymmetrical outlook requires that pleasure be good in a merely superficial, inconsequential way where it could vanish without being missed.

I think pleasure is worth more than that, and that its absence is properly bad. And while that’s not the sort of position that can really be argued, I think most people agree with me there. It’s worth going out of your way to make someone happy. A world full of happy people is beautiful; a universe with no one in it is barren and worthless by comparison.

Ligotti’s position is based in existential dread — to him, family and hobbies are mere distractions from the inevitability of death and the meaninglessness of the world. And as an absurdist myself, I kind of have to laugh at that a bit. I think the void of death is a distraction from the rest of life. Of course we die. What else are we going to do, live forever? Ridiculous. Finishing a good book is melancholy, but that’s no reason to avoid reading books in the first place. The ephemeral isn’t so hard to overcome, and we’ve got our whole lives to do it.

But at the end of the day, this is just an argument why antinatalism is wrong. I don’t just think it’s wrong, I hate it. See, the overwhelming majority of the antinatalists I’ve met have been catastrophically depressed and trying to find ways of rationalizing it. And then they take that rationalization and use it to unload all of their feelings onto others from a position of absolutism.

And depression is treatable. Our treatments aren’t rock-solid, and they certainly fail sometimes, but I wish these people would see a psychiatrist instead of proselytizing existential pessimism. Not only does that reinforce their own depression, it spreads it around to other people. Hell, I’ve never really had problems with depression, and I find antinatalism upsetting to think about. It puts me in bit of a funk, you know? For my friends who do experience depression, this stuff can be harmful.

Antinatalism presupposes an inherent terribleness to the world, and suggests we throw away all the good things that I think matter in the first place. And because so much of it is presuppositional, it can’t even be satisfyingly debunked. Arguments with antinatalists inevitably devolve into gainsaying in my experience (although that’s the case with most online arguments anyway, frankly).

All of which is to say that antinatalism is a big hairy bug that crawled into my bed and grossed me out as I was waking up. It was never a risk to me— we’re fundamentally different in a way that precludes any real conflict — but simply by inserting its nasty little body into my life, it got me all grumpy. I can’t even satisfyingly dispose of it. At best, all I wind up with is a squashed bug all over my hand.

I hate it.

Ugh, I promised myself this blog would be full of short, fun posts. I promise the next one will be cute.

— Pan-fried, 2021-03-03. Back to top