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2025/01/25
I will start with my background. I was born in the Soviet Union during the last few years of the country's existence. My parents were poor, and for a long time I lived in a student dormitory chasing cockroaches. Soon after, my father left me and my mother.
I never knew my maternal grandparents, but the story of my paternal ones is the first step to understand my convictions.
My grandfather was the only surviving child in a famine stricken family. His parents had a dozen other kids but none of them survived. The year he was born his father (my great-grandfather) was taken to the GULAG. After the war broke out in 1941, his father (my great-greandfather) allegedly volunteered to join the Red Army and disappeared without a trace.
My grandmother had a bad relationship with her mother-in-law (my great-grandmother) and may have killed her.
The relationship between my grandmother and my grandfather is still a foggy memory. All I can tell is that he was an alcoholic and a chain smoker. At one point he had his cup filled to the point that he divorced her and married another woman.
They had three sons (including my father), and two of them died young for various reasons. All I will say is that both deaths could have been avoided.
When I've seen my grandfather the last time, he had two daughters and a good spacy apartment in a large city. However, they were still schoolgirls when he died, leaving his widow and daughters little choice but to lease a room in the flat to half a dozen men from the countryside (they would switch beds between shifts) just in order to make ends meet, save enough cash and pay another flat's mortgage off. And mind you, we are not talking about a modern city in a first world country. I still fear that one day rockets will fly over that place.
But I digress...
When I was a small child I learned what it feels to be a helpless victim of violence and injustice early on. I was put into a kindergarten where teachers threatend and beaten kids. Then I have been through a series of schools, where the prison-like routine of humiliation and abuse persuaded me to stop attending school for several years, only to find a way to bribe the school authorities to provide me with the paperwork.
It was a success.
After I moved to Europe, I managed to get two degrees after eight years of study (and be good at it too), get a job as an engineer, and finally be naturalized and become a good, tax-paying citizen. That took me 15 years to accomplish.
Now I am saving enough in investments to have a monthly income that covers my modest expenditures, utilities and mortgage just to be able to afford to leave my job. That may sound underwhelming but consider what I described above.
There is a fundamental discrepancy between the way an optimist and a pessimist would see this. Perhaps a Nietzschean (an optimist) would say that this is something to overcome (like our own humanity) but a Schopenhauerian (a pessimist) would simply ask: "why bother?"
After having to go through all this all one wants is to lie down and rest. Wouldn't you?
And if you think this is story of someone unfortunate, you're wrong. I was very fortunate. Way more fortunate than a lot of people. Read on.
I could have just laid down a summarization of David Benatar's compelling logical reason to be an Antinatalist. But I would rather start with a few anecdotes.
I will tell you three stories.
The first story: a single young mother of two could not find a job; she made some cash part time leaving print ads throughout her town. One time she had no money and asked her kind but poor landlady to extend her rent. The landlady, who could not afford to pay for the home expenses from her pocket tried her best but had to deny her request. Desperate at her situation, the young mother of two killed her son and daughter by strangling them, and then hanged herself - only to be found by the shocked old landlady.
The second story: an alcoholic mother gave birth to a child during a drunken party. Her drinking buddies, drunk themselves, carried a newborn into a house and waited to call the ambulance the next day, because they had no phones available. When the cops arrived to investigate, they realized that the mother of the newborn had several of these births happen during her drinking escapades, and she threw these newborns out like a piece of excrement. Worse, the only other person who had knowledge of this was her own mother (the newborns' grandmother) who felt no remorse for being an accomplice to infanticide.
The third story: an alcoholic single mother of a newly born 22 day old girl seen her 3 year old daughter gnaw her newborn to death. Confusing her newborn sister for a doll, she abused and assaulted the baby, and when she got fatal injuries and bled to death, she would non-chalantly take her to the bathroom to wash her corpse. Cops could not do anything but refer the toddler murderer to pediatricians.
These three stories are not fantasies of a mad niche web site keeper or some 19th century Dickensian knock-off novel. These are real stories that happened in Russia just in the last two decades. How many of these happened in the USSR we may never know. The false façade of Socialism is a great tool indeed, especially when you deal with morons tasked with throwing bleach on it ... to whiten those red curtains turned black from all the blood.
Today, the worst promoters of natalism are not bloggers and podcasters but totalitarian dictators. Xi of China and Putin of Russia. Just like Mao and Stalin they want slaves. A very apt term for this was invented by the Russians a few decades back - a "bio-robot" - A seemingly living being with their mind replaced with a machine-like algorithm. The enemies of humanity are not those who want to see it extinct but those who want for it to proliferate and use it for their goals.
For all his faults and mistakes, and imperfections, Great German Immanuel Kant warned us about this kind of attitude towards humanity (see Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; Immanuel Kant: AA IV, 429).
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end
Handle so, dass du die Menschheit sowohl in deiner Person, als in der Person eines jeden anderen jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloß als Mittel brauchst
Jesus Christ and his Gnostic followers were Antinatalist in essence, but these self-evident traces of Jesus' teaching as found in the Gospel are layered with noise coming from the synods of the bishops, such as that of Hippo and Carthage. That alone would not be a problem had the dogmatists of the Church not began persecuting any dissenters and destroying Christian writings that were not made part of the canon.
But I will refer to the canon, first and foremost.
First the gospel of Matthew
Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it. (Matthew 19:10-12)
λέγουσιν αὐτῶ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ, εἰ οὕτως ἐστὶν ἡ αἰτία τοῦ ἀνθρώπου μετὰ τῆς γυναικός, οὐ συμφέρει γαμῆσαι. ὁ δὲ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, οὐ πάντες χωροῦσιν τὸν λόγον τοῦτον, ἀλλ᾽ οἷς δέδοται. εἰσὶν γὰρ εὐνοῦχοι οἵτινες ἐκ κοιλίας μητρὸς ἐγεννήθησαν οὕτως, καὶ εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι οἵτινες εὐνουχίσθησαν ὑπὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, καὶ εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι οἵτινες εὐνούχισαν ἑαυτοὺς διὰ τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν. ὁ δυνάμενος χωρεῖν χωρείτω.
Then Luke.
If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)
εἴ τις ἔρχεται πρός με καὶ οὐ μισεῖ τὸν πατέρα ἑαυτοῦ καὶ τὴν μητέρα καὶ τὴν γυναῖκα καὶ τὰ τέκνα καὶ τοὺς ἀδελφοὺς καὶ τὰς ἀδελφάς, ἔτι τε καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν ἑαυτοῦ, οὐ δύναται εἶναί μου μαθητής.
The message of Jesus thus is that of the renunciation of one's family for the sake of Jesus. If we add the apocrypha to the context, it is made clearer.
Continue with the Gospel of Thomas.
"Whoever does not hate [their] father and mother as I do cannot become my disciple. And whoever does not love [their] father and mother as I do cannot become my disciple. For my mother gave me death, but my true mother gave me life." (Thomas 101)
In this excerpt, the Christian scholars interpret the True Mother of Jesus as the Holy Spirit, but some Gnostic scholars would identify this as a reference to Sophia (Wisdom).
Take it as you will.
Whichever way you look at it, the Christian religion of the gospel was the one preoccupied with the message that the followers of Jesus should prepare for the life in the hereafter as opposed to the life in this world. And yet, somehow, the bishops, the priests and the pastors took the message of the gospel and put it upside down!
How strange it is to see celibate priests come to the secular men and women and chastise them for not producing more kids.
Have you ever seen a vegetarian let alone a vegan telling you to eat more meat?
Odd.
A more nuanced view can indeed be taken from Eastern religions and from the Gnostics
From a Dharmic perception, the first world lifestyle many of us a re accustomed to is the peak we reach before the preparation to the next life. That fewer kids are being produced can be interpreted as a sign that more souls are being prepared to be reborn not in this world but either in the Pure Land, or that the Nirvana \ Moksa (the cessation of suffering) is due.
A Gnostic view is such that the men and women, having extinguished the benefits of the Demiurge's world are preparing for the world of the Father, or the Lord of Light (the Father of Jesus).
Whichever way you look at it, the benefits of life are reaching its peak.
From a purely secular view, there is little to look forward to but more inconvenience. Especially when it comes to newborns and their future. They will enter a more and more lonely world filled with spiteful and dependent elderly. From school to adulthood they can look forward only to abuse from others and helplessness from their loved ones.
Worse. Once they enter the workforce they can expect nothing but confiscatory, even abusive taxation, with little prospects for ever reaching prosperity.
Thus. Their only hope is to wait until the old generation expires.
Either you take a religious or a secular view. There is nothing to look forward to.
David Benatar perhaps presents the most compelling argument of all, using his asymmetry argument.
As far as I can tell, nobody - so far - managed to propose a reasonable opposition to Benatarian assymetry.
It goes as follows:
Pain is bad (-1).
Pleasure is good (+1).
No pain is good (+1).
No pleasure is neither good nor bad (0)
Existing results in some Pain (-1) and some Pleasure (+1). Overall, +1 -1 = 0
Not existing results in No pain (+1) and No pleasure (0). Overall, +1 +0 = +1
Therefore, it is logical that not existing is preferrable to existing.
The Banatarian argument is very compelling, and albeit it was first presented over a decade ago, it became more and more prevalent in recent years, not only due to the general population becoming more familiarized with Utilitarianism, as a significant strain within the modern Western philosophy, but also as we began spending more time inquiring into the questions of good and bad.
Either way, though I do find Benatar's argument compelling, logically, I do not believe it is sufficient to persuade the general populace.
That does not mean we run out of good arguments.
How many times have you heard it?
Climate Crisis. Climate Catastrophe. Etc. Etc.
I am skeptical about the so called "Green Politics" and it is my firm belief these are a political tool of the no-longer-existant USSR and their sympathizers.
Greta Thunberg, the now infamous (no longer) underage activist once told everyone "how dare they"... and warned us about the incoming End of the world (and then shortly backtracked on that).
Now she is busy being an activist for the overpopulated hellhole of the Gaza strip, which used to be filled with trash and human waste.
After October 7 2023 it is now filled with corpses and ruins.
And yet I have no sympathy for it or those human corpses.
All that suffering could have been avoided by not procreating.
And for those accusing me of "Eugenics" or "genocide". ... Why don't you accuse me of the same when I throw the same line at the people in the Western countries?
Surely, if we are to believe that the growing and aging population of Europe is a strain on our planet, we should be ten times more concered about the same effect the overpopulated Arab countries have in the Middle East, or other so-called "Third World" states have in Asia and Africa, be they internationally recognized or otherwise.
The under-developed nations are a strain on this world. They are far more dangerous than even the worst offenders in the OECD.
India is perhaps the worst case of all.
It is not possible to not look at India's environmental disaster without tears: rivers polluted with plastic, human waste and corpses.
If there is a silver lining at all, it is that the poor hygiene and the depraved practices of the Hindu religion keep the most "vulnerable" Hindu masses at a heightened mortality. After all, dying early, despite the terrible suffering these poor people endure, will ease the damage they incur on the environment, but only marginally, unfortunately.
However, there are good news.
India's fertility rate is dropping, as well as the fertility rates among the impoverished nations.
A child spared being born in this hellish existence is a life saved. Not to mention how much good it does for the environment.
Urbanization drives people out of rural areas and suppresses birth rates, while more of the countryside is being left for the wildlife to reclaim.
Therefore, although Antinatalism can be seen as "anti-life", in a purely human context it is crucial for the restoration of biodiversity outside of the human domain.
Ironically, not all share the positive outlook of the Antinatalist philosophy.
Quite the contrary, a whole plethora of "right wingers" came out to decry the falling birth rates and urge people to procreate.
This led to some hilarious cases and poor takes among the critics of this rhetoric.
For instance, Hungary's long-standing PM Viktor Orban was criticized for implementing pro-Natalist policies while his apologists praised him for it.
Few, however, take a sober look at these policies and their impact.
The impact is negligible at best.
Worse, Hungary is now spending more on pro-Natalist policies than on defense. Its people are still leaving in droves to wealthier countries in the European Union, especially Austria and Germany, while others look for a relocation further away, to the U.S., U.K. and Australia.
Nobody with a brain wants to live in a post-Communist hellhole.
Meanwhile, Hungary's population is growing older. The government spending on the pro-Natalist measures drives inflation (after all it's 5% of the GDP!) and the pensioners don't like it.
Forint (the national currency) is diving against the Euro, and the voters, whether you like it or not, will vote with their wallets.
Another thing that no one is menitoning is that Hungary does have a high migration rate. A walk in the Budapest city center will inevitably lead you to conclude that the country's tourism is boosted by a plethora of Middle Eastern vendors selling souvenirs for visitors from all over the world.
Thus, the image of Hungary as some sort of a "right-wing" dictatorship is overblown, at best.
Hungarian countryside is dying along with the elderly, and those who are unlucky enough to stay in Hungary to retire are seen by their peers as "losers" who were unable to move out of their home country. Indeed, to retire in Hungary, for a Hungarian, in this year and age is a sentence, when he or she could might as well seek a better prospect in the neighbouring Austria.
But this case of "right-wing" pro-Natalism is an oddity. Indeed, starting with Thomas Malthus and up until the last 30 years we saw a stark Antinatalist drive by the right wing, be it the urge for people to be chaste in order to have a sustainable population, plan for a family and abstain from casual sex, or the explicitly anti-Natalist laws and regulation still in place, like the non-state-sponsored child support (even for non-genetic "fathers") or other laws that penalize fathers primarily.
All across the OECD countries, an extensive and over-bureaucratized legal system ensures that men are yoked to supporting "their" children, not justified by a genetic relation to the child but purely out of pre-genetic era nonsense ideas of "fatherhood", often rooted in conservative "Christian" morals.
Although they often oppose such interventions as contraception and abortion, right-wingers do not even bat an eye when they put a responsibility of supporting a child on a "deabeat" father, without realizing that it only supports Antinatalism.
But there is one interesting case of Antinatalism I find to be honest and refreshing among the so called "right-wingers" and that is Antinatalism of Ayn Rand.
She cannot be called an Antinatalist per se, but as a childless woman and a great influence on right-wing thought in the past 20 years, she was extremely "progressive" when it came to the issue of child bearing. Not only was she pro-abortion but pro-contraception, and like a staunch critic of any religion, very skeptical about papal opposition to birth control.
It is therefore, quite puzzling to see people who subscribe to her ideals, namely, a vehement defense of Capitalism and Individualism as driving forces of human progress (which I happen to share), chastizing the current generation for not having babies.
To these crowds I can only say what John Galt told in the Atlas Shrugged:
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Sounds familiar? Though the old hag hated Immanuel Kant, that was precisely an echo of what he said about Man being the end in himself ... never means to an end.
Thus, one cannot bring a child to this world for the sake of another human being, not even him or herself, but only for the sake of the child itself.
The problem is ... if you look at the Benatar's Utilitarian take, there is probably nothing more damaging to that yet unborn child than coming into this world.
This leads me to the final paragraphs of this essay.
There are critics of Antinatalism among Libertarians, but hardly anyone presents a rational argument against it.
Quite the contrary, Libertarian philosophy is primarily focused on an individual autonomy. Bringing a child into this world will only damage that individual's autonomy.
Case in point.
The moment you become a father, the Damocles' sword of paternity hangs over you.
You have no choice but to submit your child to the state authority - or else.
Not reporting the birth of a child can result in fines and penalties. So does refusing to send a child to a school to be brainwashed by strangers.
Becoming even suspected of being a parent by the state is a financial death sentence to a man. Whereas, single mothers get away with scamming men, even strangers at times, and get rewarded by the state for it.
The corrupt state is then using the innocent child as a ball and chain on the man it deems to be the parent.
Worse. As the child grows up, unwanted and unloved by his or her father, who suffers financial injury at the hands of the mother and the state, the child begins to blame him- or herself for it.
Thus the family dysfunction is proliferated and human autonomy, liberty and pursuit of happiness are minimized.
Who wins from this?
Let me tell you who wins from this.
The state. Just like the shepherd wins from his numerous flock, the state wins from the proliferation of chattel slaves it calls taxpayers.
In the Gnostic (i.e. original Christian) religion, cessation of material procreation is the only way to defeat the Demiurge, the evil creator-deity. Such cessation can only come from celibacy and vegetarianism, at least as it was practiced by the Manichaeans.
Though this may seem abstract when looked at from a transcendental (i.e. religious) perspective, it becomes more sinister when you see how humans are being used by tyrants and dictators for their goals.
The People's Republic of China has been taking it to the extreme lately, unleashing its "birth authorities" dogs upon single men and women. The tyrant Xi of Beijing needs cannon fodder for his geopolitical ambitions.
They know that they cannot reach those goals with a population of pensioners.
A similar drive takes place in the OECD states, albeit slightly less invasive.
Though Hungary is the poster child of Natalist policies, similar policies have been running for ages in most European states, especially in the Nordic countries.
Now that these policies aren't working, they try to replace the cattle that refuses to breed with the eager newcomers from Africa, South Asia and the Middle East.
They know that the pensioners are bad taxpayers. Not even the double digit VAT rates can sustain the state pension ponzi scheme.
However, if the less and less numerous young population is hit with the tax bill, they will just refuse to work.
With that in mind, a population replacement is the only temporary solution for this and the upcoming office term - don't expect a typical European politician to be looking past that.
So far, Europeans are using the carrot. But do not be fooled. A time will come when a stick will be the last measure.
Alas, it won't work.
Antinatalism is the only rational choice in the modern world. Whichever aspect you look at it, it's fool proof.
Some objections that come to mind need to be answered.
First objection is that Natalism is needed to stop the population replacement.
As a proof of this, some people bring the example of extremely isolated religious communities, like the Amish and the Ultraorthodox Jews. Indeed, they have extremely high birth rates, which are sometimes used as an example of populations with very conservative values, to justify those values as a stimulus for more births.
My response is thus. Neither the Amish nor the Ultraorthodox Jews can sustain their rates for three reasons, and neither work as solutions to declining birth rates.
First reason, is that there is an attrition among these communities, i.e. as the modern lifestyle, technology and awareness are introduced, their birth rates are expected to decline. If not among the current parents, but among the upcoming generations.
Second reason, even if these communities continue to give births at the current rate, there is no indication that they can work as a replacement for the population at large.
There are very fertile 100% native families in countries like Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, alas, these are not sufficient and are not common enough to work as an alternative to immigration.
Third reason, no matter how many children will be born today, they will not fulfill the business needs for working hands tomorrow. The most obvious thing that Natalists overlook is that children take 18 years to graduate school. An immigrant can start working within a week. Furthermore, it becomes even more dire if you look at the state of schooling in the current year (in case you wonder, the literacy rate in the state of New York is 77% ...), and in the context of the European Union, what's stopping a school graduate, say, in Hungary, from moving to Germany to get a degree in engineering and find a high paying job there instead of staying in Hungary?
A much more fool-proof method is to get an immigrant from Ukraine with an engineering degree or at least strong enough to go work in a car factory, promise him a permanent residency after 5 years of work with a sure pathway to citizenship. In contrast, what does the Hungarian state promise to Hungarian school kids, other than inflation (borrowing to pay for the elderly and fecund) and high taxes (to service the interest on the borrowed debt)?
Second objection is that Antinatalism is selfish.
My only answer is: So what?
After all, am I breaking any law by refusing to have kids? If so, you underestimate the degree to which some people are ready to go to not have kids - even risking fines, higher taxes and levies if needed. Having a child can be a far worse tax and a levy.
Third objection is who will take care of me when I am old?
Ah, I love this claim about how children will take care of us when we are old.
Let me answer it with another question once more: why do you think your children are obliged to care for you?
Have you ever seen young people ever taking care of the elderly in countries like Britain?
That is not happening in the future - it is happening now. The British public is discussing how bad it will be for the elderly if the country runs out of foreign-born nurses. And that's even before we take into account the fact that the birth rates among these elderly in their prime were higher than they are among the current generation!
Remember, again, what Kant said: Man is never means to an end, but the end itself.
To have children so that they care for you once you are old is slavery. And a bad one at it too. After all, is there a legal obligation for them to care for you? And even if there was, how do you know they will not give you a terrible time while at it?
Have you ever seen how teenagers argue with their parents?
Let me tell you - it gets way worse when they become adults.
In some cases - homicidal. So, let's better not dwell on it.
Fourth objection, which is especially relevant to men, is that we need to leave a legacy that will outlast us.
Even so, many of the same people subscribe to religious views. So, were the religious sources I outlined at the top of this essay not enough?
In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples to look for the world to come as opposed this world, urging them to "store up" treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21).
In the Qur'an, Allah through Angel Gabriel tells Muhammad that this world is merely a play, where things grow and die - a "delusion of enjoyment" (see Qur'an 57:20).
In the book of Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) King Solomon (assumingly) ponders about the meaning of his achievements, and in the end he finds none.
And it is one of the core tenets in the Dharmic religions, be it Jainism or Buddhism, or even the epic of Bhagavad Gita! (Whoso forsaketh all desires and goeth onwards free from yearnings, selfless and without egoism—he goeth to Peace. (2:71))
In truth, I have seen only one good argument for procreation and it's not persuasive.
Bryan Caplan, an economics professor, made a good argument that people should not dedicate so much time and effort to their kids as parents do nowadays, as the outcomes are far more deterministic than we think.
Even though I fully agree with Caplan's point, I do not see how that is compelling enough to make a non-parent a parent.
At best, it urges parents, especially those who want more kids but do not go for it due to burnout and economics, to go for it. And that is a good argument.
But it is not good enough to dissuade an Antinatalist.
Whichever way you look at it. It is better to never be born.