I mean I think the internet is quite good at producing insane fringes for pretty much _all_ moral theories. There is no internet-proof philosophy.
I'd argue that we'd do better considering a wider range of moral theories from a diverse set of current cultures. Asian, African, and South American moral thinkers get short shrift in popular culture (as do native North American ones). Some of those theories also have ancient roots, but on a very different basis from the European ones we have a hard time escaping.
No offense, but "utility monster" does not mean what you think it means.
Most people don't think this way, but it is very much consistent with their views.
I suppose the takeaway is that you take what you choose to take from your experiences.
I am struck by the difference in tone (and militarism) between that early-Internet-era, un-self-serious, strident-but-just-an-argument venture and these new forms of atheist death cults.
I wonder how much of that is down to shifting cultural norms and how much has to do with the way digital platforms foment extremism at a structural level.
Intelligence is a unique spark within a cold and presumably dead universe. We should be trying to awaken the universe itself.
We should be trying to extend human lifespans within the parameters of sustainability. We should be trying to extend our species beyond death and mortality and this single planet.
If we master physics, we should reverse the light cone and bring back everyone who has ever lived [1].
We should turn every atom in the universe into us.
And then we can try to prevent the death of the universe. Or build a new one. Or several.
[1] "Down to what level?", you ask. "Beloved pets that died?" I should think even the ants. Bacteria. If we're gods, then why not?
Nothing personal.
That's what I mean by dead. We aren't even alive yet. We're bacteria.
> [Cosmism] is characterized by the belief in humanity’s cosmic destiny, the potential for immortality, and the use of scientific and technological advancements to achieve control over nature and explore space [Wikipedia, 1].
> Cosmism, specifically Russian Cosmism, is a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in 19th and early 20th century Russia. It's characterized by its focus on the cosmos, humanity's relationship with it, and a belief in the possibility of humanity actively shaping its own destiny and the destiny of the cosmos through technological progress and spiritual transformation. [Google Gemini]
This is so much richer than efilism, nihilism, anti-natalism, and the rest of the misery lot.
This philosophy is a transhumanist, solarpunk ideal, full of infinite adventure.
It sounds like something an evil person in a space opera sci-fi book would talk about.
It's a great aesthetic and is basically how thousands of sci-fi bad guys and empires have been written.
And I don’t get this whole idea of using imperialism or fascism or whatever as an attack against ideas you don’t like. Because it doesn’t undermine the idea as much as it rehabilitates imperialism and fascism. So stop doing it.
It undermines the idea because it shows that the idea comes from a selfish place. "I am entitled to rape, kill, destroy your way of life because I have bigger weapons."
Humans are not the only intelligent life out there.
The human ego is comedicly pathetic and predictable.
As for the tragedy itself, it may be the author connecting the dots for us but it almost reads like Bartkus reacted to the emotional devastation of Sophie's cold, calculated act of assisted suicide.
One version of the story is of violence in the name of an ideological crusade. The other, a broken heart and a cry for help.
At any rate, sometimes you might find something boring or offensive, while it remains true regardless. This is one of those times.
You might be wrong! :)
Morality is a human invention. We can make it whatever we want. So we better make it fucking good.
Care about strangers. Love the unloved. Help the helpless. Work to fix hard problems. Make things better, even if you do it in an inefficient way.
Normies (us) are making parenting more untenable every year.
My parents (and their gen) parented some hours a week.
My kids required 24/7 adulting. Free-ranging was eradicated by
car culture and trespassing culture. Adult-free peer time
- where critical social and personal growth happened -
was replaced with a series adult-curated, adult-populated boxes.
Kids spend their days moving from one box to the next.
Compounding the above is the difficulty/impossibility for a
modern couple to fully support themselves on two typical wages.
You may eventually find that the normies dwindle and begin to die out, while the non-normies grow and spread and spread – those non-normies may eventually become the new normies
They are outliers. One-offs. Selected out within generation. Where's the "normy-ism" in that?
It just don't even make sense.
If true, it would suggest a future where the world is much more religious, or a world that somehow deindustrialized.
This needs to be repeated early and repeated often no matter what non-abnormal ideology you subscribe to. In as many words.
If you consider yourself a kind, decent & some what enlightened person and you do not procreate, in all likelihood the unkind or less kind people will do the procreating on your behalf. Mind you I did not even use the word tolerant which implies some measure of altruism; I'm merely saying kind & decent.
I do not know why people much older than us do not repeat this mantra more often.
I do not understand what could belie such intransigence.
What is so offensive about saying that line?
Say it early say it often.
I don’t see this as meaning ultra-traditionalists are bound to inherit- I think it’s more likely the discourse would revert to the mean, aka the centrists.
But it also applies at the national level. If country A consistently makes having kids miserable, then in the long arc of time, the way of life in country B (which makes family life great) will win out.
Country C which simply reduces the ability for women to not have kids will win out over county B, since country B is extremely unlikely. Even the Scandinavian countries can’t come close to being country B with a sufficiently large total fertility rate that beats country C.
Counterpoint: Country C is presumably a totalitarian nightmare, which historically tend not to prosper.
By contrast, countries like the US and the UK at the same time, while no doubt there were injustices, unfairness, discrimination, even oppression (and they still haven’t completely put those things behind them)-the state never tried to exert total control over civil society or public criticism-which is why “totalitarian” isn’t the right word to describe them. And I don’t think whatever direction they might have been moving in makes a difference-if you aren’t “totalitarian”, you aren’t “totalitarian” regardless of whether you are moving “further away” from it or staying completely still.
In my grandparents’ generation, people often retired in their 50s and had another 30-40 years left to live. If you don’t stop working until more than half way through your 70s, you might only have another 10-15 years of life left to financially support instead of 30-40, which makes it more likely you’ll be able to do so with your own accumulated retirement savings instead of having to rely on the taxpayer
And his dad was a tax accountant, and he had “trouble fully retiring” too. He retired from his job at a mining company, then started an unpaid job doing accounting for a charity. Then he retired from that, but still did the accounting for his church for a few more years thereafter. Yes, he wasn’t getting paid, but that was his choice, I’m sure he could have done the same work for somebody else and gotten paid for it.
If I’m still alive and healthy in my 70s, I imagine I may well follow both my parents’ examples and still be working too-having a job can be good for your health
No easy answer. If you want kids maybe not think about it so much and just yolo it. For my wife and I we didn’t really want kids in he first place and we’re much better off for it.
And that's the crux of the issue: Individuals in most western societies are currently better off not having children, while society as a whole absolutely needs individuals to have a certain amount of children or run into serious issues down the line.
Many societies (for example South Korea) are feeling this more and more. Way too many old people and not enough young to run the country and take care of the old. In those places not enough is being done supporting those who chose to have children for everyone's sake.
Foregoing children and having saved for retirement does not mean much if in 40 years you're competing for the now extremely limited basic services against people who are in the same boat. Worse, young people may now decide that they don't feel like feeding and providing for a large population of old people through sky-high taxes and being the victim of rent-seeking. They just might throw in the towel and leave for a more functional country, using their now higher income to support their own parents, but none of the others. Who now takes care of the childless?
It's going to be human misery on a scale you would expect to see in a modern society.
Most people I know with higher degrees don’t have children even though they have the means to support them.
Who is going to pay for other people's kids?
Opportunity cost of a kid for the parents is currently around $500,000.
Subsidizing babies with three zeros has no effect.
I'm sorry, but that's absolute nonsense.
Same here. As someone middle-aged and thus far childless, I've been thinking that "just do it" would've been the way, maybe starting as soon as a couple years after graduation.
An exception might be career planning for the woman who'd be carrying, in some career tracks.
Other than that, even the US has various ways that young parents are supported, and there are safety nets.
While one is waiting for the perfect timing, maybe partly because one's parents didn't, most other people are busy having babies in circumstances no more ideal than one's own.
A woman’s best bet to acquire financial security is to work through their 20s.
Add on top of that the disappearance of shopping malls, arcade centers and other "third places". The game arcades went during my parents' generation. My generation, we had electronics stores that had game consoles where one could play some car race game or whatnot against a friend. Today's youth? They got to deal with "mosquito youth repellent".
Which was probably true, but the drug fear mongering was another big piece of making sure kids didn't have anywhere they were allowed to exist without adult supervision.
Looking back, there is/was only one great difference - social networks. I played with computers from 13 onwards. Required going to a computer centre somewhere or finding a desktop minicomputer. In a car or on foot, but it was "elsewhere". The big advantage of that era is that it wasn't a solo activity. Weird society, yeah, but one had to be civil (enough) to be able to get help and access. Micro's ended that need.
Not having to be on line all the time gave me some slack until I got a handle on scheduling. In that I was (quite) lucky.
And I figure "joining the military" isn't freeing oneselves from supervision, rather the reverse. Is there still social agencies that let you go elsewhere and help out or have they all been branded NGO's and eliminated?
Perhaps the lack of an external threat or insufficient motivation vs. failure leads to a lack of focus? Certainly, helicoptering does horrible things to the younger participants. Might that see-saw from generation to generation, or have we not seen those participants becoming parents yet?
I recall "good luck, we'll do all we can do to help you. F*ck up, and you're on your own...".
Yet looking back, history doesn’t match this narrative. I’ve worked with younger people who get ideas from Reddit that everyone in the mid 1900s was living in giant houses and living a life of luxury on the income of a mailman (literally a meme that circulates on Twitter and Reddit). They all seem confused when I explain how my grandfather on one side had to work two full-time jobs, one of which was in a mine. My other grandfather operated a farm and still had to get jobs to make ends meet. Their kids slept 2-4 to a room in small houses. They worked hard and struggled. Kids were getting jobs in their teenage years to make ends meet at the house. The list of counter-examples goes on and on, but they just won’t believe it. They’ve been so convinced by the internet that the modern world is uniquely bad and history was easy mode for raising kids.
I think the weird internet communities discussed in this article are just an extreme version of this type of distortion: They gather together to reinforce some narrative, downvoting or banning the nonbelievers while rewarding those who amplify the message with upvotes, praise, and a sense of belonging. It’s scary stuff.
Birth rates are plummeting and most people are far more passionate arguing reasons to not have children than the opposite.
It’s striking that birth rates are plummeting globally across very different cultures.
It may be the reasons are completely different in different places, despite it happening everywhere all at once.
Or there could be common causes that are at work all over the world.
Not just the biological costs and risks of pregnancy/childbirth/breastfeeding/infant rearing, but the financial cost that forces most to give up independence and have to rely on and compromise with someone else.
If I was a woman, I could see having one kid, maybe two kids. Having 3 kids? Absolutely out of the question. I would never expect anyone to do what I saw my wife do (relatively uncomplicated pregnancies with secure finances) 3 or more times.
And that is generally what you see, very few women having 3+ kids, and most with 0, 1, or 2. The large proportion of 0s and 1s really drags the TFR down to below replacement rate.
Yeah, that’s the natural state of human existence. That you say that as if it’s something obviously detrimental is bizarre.
What is natural or bizarre is merely a function of circumstance.
The reason people don't have children - most of them anyway - have nothing to do with antinatalism.
Having children simply would be a massive, major inconvienience, and would negatively affect their quality of life, income, expenses, career prospects, housing, etc, etc.
Ie. their decision making for having children and not having them is exactly the same. I want to, I don't want to (inconvenience, etc), there's no deeper reasoning behind it in most cases.
Plummeting birth rates have little to do with antinatalism, and is a self-correcting problem. It will - without doubt - self correct. You just might not see the change in your lifetime.
All of those circumstances you described were there throughout history. Yet people had many more children than today.
1. I'm not going to have children because it's WRONG, unethical and unjustifiable to inflict serious harm and suffering (without their consent)
2. I'm not going to have children, because it will inconvenience ME, because then I'll have less time and money to jerk off and play video games, travel, etc? Or some temporary economic circumstance.
Like even if you don't have children because you perceive the world to overpopulated at this moment in time, you're still pretty firmly in the (2) camp. There's quite a lot of people that claim to be antinatalists that are simply in the economic circumstances camp.
And lots of things have changed now, contraceptives, less societal pressures, etc.
I'm not going to argue your private distorted perception and misunderstanding that falls completely outside of even the most pedestrian understanding of what antinatalism is - even the wikipedia, etc.
(2) isn't an antinatalist argument.
Now an antinatalist might try to convince a regular Joe-Schmoe not to have kids, by pointing out how much of an inconvenience it might be. And Joe-Schmoe might not have kids, because it would be incovenient for him and get in the way of more important things, like playing video games and jerking off.... or point out how expensive it would be economically and such.
Which means Joe-Schmoe does not operate on, or even considers or contemplates the antinatalist argument at any point, in any shape or form. Which is to say Joe-Schmoe would absolutely have kids if it cost him less, there were different economical social pressures and so on, or if he simply... wanted to.
Focal point here is the Joey-Schmoey and what he WANTS. That's all there is to it.
That however does not make it into an antinatalist argument, nor does Joey Schmoey think in any antinatalist capacity at all.
The fact I have to explain this also makes me suspect that... sadly not a lot of cerebral action is going here either....
Quite. The fertility rate is plummeting worldwide. I'd suggest these 'Efilists' visit South Korea to get their fix of low fertility. Even the nice Scandinavian countries are struggling to get their fertility rates anywhere near replacement—they are all at around 1.4 to 1.5 children per woman.
At this rate we will erase ourselves in about 200 years.
Not at all. Two hundred years is, what, 8 generations? (1.5/2)^8 = 0.1. We'd have a tenth the population in 200 years, so 800 million people. That may erase modern civilization, but it won't erase us.
Many studies have consistently revised and brought forward their 'peak population' estimates over the past two decades. In 2000, the estimate was around twelve billion by 2150. In 2025, whether humanity will reach even ten billion by 2075 is in question. It is highly expected that many sub-Saharan countries will reach replacement rate by the mid-century. China's population has already started falling. Many Indian states are below replacement. Nigeria—a good proxy for the rest of Africa—was expected to reach ~900 million by 2100 in 2012; in 2024, that estimate was essentially halved.
There is a strong correlation between education levels and emancipation (especially for girls and women), improved sanitation and health care (which means easier access to contraceptives), and fertility rate. This is what drove the fertility rate collapse in the post-war period for much of the West and East Asia.
Further reductions are a result of worse work-life balance (in the case of the 'Asian tigers'), a desire to enjoy one's freedom in young adulthood (coupled with a desire to 'stick it to society'), a lack of 'a village to raise a child' in urban lifestyles, and more.
Hang on let me check how much horse manure london is covered with rn and get back to you.
Antinatalism [Efilism] is a philosophical view that deems
procreation to be unethical or unjustifiable.
Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from
making children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AntinatalismWhen will Reddit be held accountable for encouraging violent rhetoric?
No other major social media network gets the free pass Reddit seems to get.
It's not hard to go to, say, r/Politics or AdviceAnimals and find people encouraging political violence.
Mostly contained to the most popular subreddits thankfully, the small subreddits focused on niche topics thankfully stay on topic.
There’s also a facet of strict benthamite utilitarianism that falls into the trap of accepting reified societal norms as being objective reality - for instance, the core idea that pain and suffering are bad.
On an individual level, I would hold that they are the whetstones that sharpen the soul - through crushing trauma we grow, and find new meaning, and experience “goods” in our existence hitherto unobserved or unappreciated for their nature.
In a societal level, they are an essential facet of empathy, and the ability to build cohesive societies.
There’s a commonality in popular philosophies in that they attempt to provide a universal framework, an imperative system of being - yet they almost inevitably lean on inherited dispositions and concepts with only selective examination of their foundations. This results in a tendency to either say that everything matters, or nothing matters. It’s hard for me to see much of a distinction between much of the large schools of philosophy and religion.
Like with so many things, the truth, if indeed there is such a thing, lies in a murky middle ground, and is in the eye of the beholder.
I suppose baudrillard, to my mind, has come the closest to explaining where we are, without attempting to systemise a way of being.
Anyway. This kind of thing has happened, happens, and will happen, as long as there are humans to have ideas, and language to promulgate them. Fatalistic, perhaps, but manuscripts don’t burn - they just metastasise.
But as the sibling comment noted, this can be taken too far quite quickly. Based on what you wrote, one could say that literally torturing people (crushing trauma) is good for them. Hopefully you don't believe that. I think it's pretty clear that suffering past a certain point ceases to be instructive.
Adversity isn't the only thing that encourages us to grow. Just one of many.
Man, people DO vax poetic online, but when you introduce them to the blowtorch, some tweezers and a steel pipe, they don't need much convincing that pain and suffering is ... in fact ... objectively bad.
They convert to recognizing the badness of pain and suffering..... very, very quickly.
> I would hold that they are the whetstones that sharpen the soul
You really have no idea what you're talking about, are you? How can anyone type this naive drivel?
I would like anesthesia for surgery, but I still participate in endurance sports…
From a personal perspective, I spent years suffering from a mystery illness (ah, the joys of tropical diseases), and it made me appreciate the times when I wasn’t having an acute episode immensely, which otherwise would have been “ordinary”. My wife would be like “there are leaves all over the driveway!” and I would be like “yes, aren’t they beautiful?”.