The proto-fascistic language of optimism.

Positive Thought is the name given to a movement which started in the 1860s but only started to flourish a century later with such luminaries as Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, and Napoleon Hill. Its ideology is one of optimism writ large, and followers are exhorted to only think positive, hang around with other positive people, and good things will… somehow… come to you. The Secret is only an extreme manifestation of a belief system which has taken over the Christian megachurches, the economy, and modern psychology (see Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich for more information).

Very few people have made the connection between Positive Thought and fascism. Yet it seems to me that there is some connection, insofar as Positive Thought advocates often use violent imagery when they talk about negative thought and negative people (the enemy). Here are some examples of this propagandist imagery:

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* Exterminate negative thoughts

http://www.killnegative.com/
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Exterminate negative thoughts. First offensive against negative thoughts is to bring them into the open where we can see them.

Imagine a strong sun radiating a powerful light. Use this mental sunshine to kill your negative, undesirable thoughts, emotions and images as and when these are detected. Take this sun as a mighty weapon which is always on the alert and which automatically chases any negative thought and kills it with a flash and then withdraws.

Negative thoughts like cockroaches are better at hiding than we are at finding them, and their eggs are so deep seated they’re practically protected from extermination.

* Negative friends are a disease

Now that you’ve categorized everyone in your life as either uplifting or draining, it’s time to pluck the leeches from your life. Think of these people as having a nasty and contagious disease.

How negative friends can infect your relationship…
Your emotions and behaviours are similarly susceptible to contagion.

* Negative friends should be fired

Be prepared for negativity and to hear your family and friends criticize your desire for a better life. Don’t let it throw you off track. Use it to propel you forward. Of course, if it gets to be too much, you could always fire your negative friends.

Has God been telling you that there are some people you need to let go of? There are some people in your life who are plain old unnecessary. My mom always calls these people liabilities because they do nothing but slow you down, hold you up, and take away from you. Get rid of the unnecessary baggage if you’re looking to stay in this race called life.

* Pessimism is a disease

Pessimism is a disease of impaired vision which, unfortunately, cannot be corrected with eyeglasses. It is a state of mind caused by a limited perspective that shows us only the bad side, the problems, the difficulties and the reasons why something can’t be done.

Negativity and pessimism is a disease your staff can catch like a bad virus. And who wants to work for someone like that anyway?

Pessimism is a disease. It disrupts all forms of positivity and eats away at hope… Like any disease, if not controlled, pessimism can take over your life. Every waking thought and every waking action. It’s easy to fall victim to it because it provides such seemingly logical explanations for circumstance, albeit however dark and gloomy the outcome is.

De-motivation and pessimism, is a disease and it spreads like a virus as we grow up. It spreads from one person to the whole society. The sooner we kill it the better.

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You might think that calling this “proto-fascistic” is a flight of fancy, that there’s nothing fascistic at all about talking about how to treat thoughts or not contacting a friend. That’s true. What I am highlighting is not that positive thought advocates are fascists, but that their ideology lends itself to metaphors and ways of seeing the world which can lead to fascism. Fascism was big on images, and one of these images is that of society as an organism. The Jews were seen as a disease that had to be exterminated.

When the Führer took power in 1933, the German people’s body was severely ill. The poison of foreign worldviews ran through the veins of all the people’s organisms. Hardly anyone was immune. Then Providence sent the German people a doctor, the Führer. He knew the disease; he know that the German people suffered from a corruption of its racial strength. Using every possible medication, including if necessary the most radical, the bacterium was removed from the people’s body. Our people is becoming racially healthy once more.

Pity, brotherly love and forgiveness are useless. There are no good or bad parasites, decent or indecent parasites (lice!). The parasite always creeps up looking harmless, innocent, as if it belonged there. It is often attractive. It acts as an infection. A small cut, swelling, an abscess, poisoning, the destruction of the whole body. The infested body grows weak, sleepy, it resists no longer, produces no antibodies. The doctor notices, gives injections Perhaps it is still not too late…

The Jew is the parasite among humans.

I hope the analogy is obvious. Society is an organism, and pessimism is a disease of the social organism that should be killed. Negative friends are contagious and transmit the disease (some even say that negative friends can give you actual diseases and even cancer). Negative thoughts in your mind must be exterminated. It is only one step from calling individuals a disease which transmits propositions that must be exterminated, to justifying the actual killing of people.

There is however one major difference between Positive Thought and fascism as we’ve known it. In fascism, criticism is exterminated as a means to an end, the end of having a population compliant to the government’s extremist measures. In Positive Thought, the suppression of criticism is done for its own sake; it is an axiomatic principle that criticism must be suppressed at all costs, and literally nothing can be more important than that.

It has something else in common with failed political ideologies, and that’s the failure cycle. In religion, cults, politics, and other areas, you are set up for failure, and that failure is meant to make you work harder to succeed. When your faith lapses, you’re supposed to believe harder. When a system collapses, it’s because it wasn’t tried hard enough. When you think negatively, you’re supposed to self-censor even harder.

But the simple fact is that none of these things can work because they go completely counter to human nature. It’s impossible to control most of one’s thoughts. So the Positive Thought believer falls into a cycle of failure and ever stronger recommitment. But because of the shame of failure, ey also feels a great deal of frustration and anger. This frustration and anger can then be directed by the elite at their opponents (having trouble in your faith? it’s because of the gays/atheists/evolutionists/liberals in your life or environment). This is aggravated by the fact that Positive Thought already teaches people that they must purge “negative people” from their lives. How many steps from a metaphorical purge to a real purge?

As Ehrenreich points out, one of the salient things about the Positive Thought movement is that, while it was a reaction to the bleakness of Calvinism, it itself became bleak and restrictive:

If one of the best things you can say about positive thinking is that it articulated an alternative to Calvinism, one of the worst is that it ended up preserving some of Calvinism’s more toxic features- a harsh judgmentalism, echoing the old religion’s condemnation of sin, and an insistence on the constant interior labor of self-examination… To the positive thinker, emotions remain suspect and one’s inner life must be subjected to relentless monitoring.
Bright-Sided, p89

It is the combination of relentless extreme individualism (the entire universe exists to serve your personal needs…) and self-repression (… but you have to exorcise all your negative thoughts and live in constant near-utopian optimism) which makes it such fertile grounds for tyranny; it sends people into a spiral of self-obsession where they are too concerned about their own power and suppressing their capacity for criticism to care about human rights or even their own freedom. After all, criticizing your own government, the very government you’re supposed to believe exists to protect you, is negative and depressing. Better spend more time thinking about you getting that raise this time, for real!

Colombian Antinatalist Speech

Partial transcript:
“Heaven and happiness do not exist. That’s your parents’ way to justify the crime of having brought you into this world. What exists is reality, the tough reality, this slaughterhouse we’ve come to die in, if not to kill and to eat the animals, our fellow creatures. Therefore, do not reproduce, do not repeat the crimes committed against you, do not give back the same, evil paid with evil, as imposing life is the ultimate crime. Do not disturb the unborn, let them be in the peace of nothingness, anyway we’ll all eventually go back there, so why beat around the bush?”
Fernando Vallejo

Pessimism presented as a psychological flaw.

One of the messages that popular culture blares at us is: become an optimist, change your outlook and live longer, be positive not negative! And we know that the mainstream media does not bother printing or airing anything it doesn’t like, so when such a message is propagated so widely, it’s because it serves an important purpose.

Pessimism is framed as a psychological flaw, a speed bump to happiness, in the same category as low self-esteem, body image problems, or hoarding. Because of this, we get all sorts of unqualified, ignorant writers playing psychiatrists to a gullible population. Quack advice ranges from changing your facial expressions, visualization techniques, ostracizing other pessimists, to outright thought-stopping. No doubt people follow this advice; hopefully none of them have fucked their minds up with such nonsense.

There is a cruel stereotype that people with psychological issues should just “get over it.” In general, there is a belief that our feelings are entirely contingent on our state of mind, and that we just need to change our mind to make ourselves feel better:

That’s when I learned that you don’t have to be saddled for life with the mental attitudes you adopted in early childhood. All of us are free to change our minds, and as we change our minds, our experiences will also change.
Attitudes of Gratitude, M.J. Ryan, p26

It is difficult to distinguish extreme forms of optimism from delusion, because to maintain optimism requires an active rejection of the facts. Of course, this does not last forever, because our capacity to witness and ignore contrary evidence eventually translates into cognitive dissonance. I quoted one of these relapsing optimists in the entry I just linked:

Sometimes I lose my Life Lie. Reality sets in and it’s incredibly depressing. I feel my smallness, weakness, and the lack of control I have over my life. It’s almost unbearable. Fortunately, I always come up with a new Life Lie.

This brings us to the topic of whether optimism is hard-wired or not. Pessimists tend to believe it is, that we’ve been evolutionarily wired to only see the good side of life, because after all depression and suicide are not good “adaptations.” This would explain why it dominates our society today.

However, I think this is at least somewhat mistaken. It is true that optimism dominates in the present, but this has not always been the case. As Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her wonderful book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, the modern positive thinking movement, then called the New Thought movement (not to be confused with the New Age movement, which is a descendant), started in the 1860s as a reaction to Calvinism’s depressing, ghoulish version of Christianity. If optimism was hardwired, it would be hard to explain the fact that Calvinism dominated the American religious landscape for such a long time.

On the other hand, it does seem that some tendency to maintain optimism is hardcoded, at least for some people, although these results could be equally explained by disbelief. However, the fact remains that there is a vast gulf between how an optimist and a pessimist sees the world, which estnihil calls the Pessimist Gap. It could be that some form of cognitive bias separates those who see it from those who don’t.

This, incidentally, demonstrates that we are wrong in thinking that natalists who refuse to acknowledge the risks we impose on new lives are acting disingenuously. If this study is correct, they actually cannot understand the scope of these risks, and literally believe that their children are not subject to the same level of risk. This means that debating natalists on this issue may be pretty useless, or at least that we cannot hope to convince natalists not to have children with statistical facts.

Another piece of evidence is the fact that it seems to take people a great deal of reinforcement to maintain optimism in the face of reality, and that people are prone to “lose faith,” much like actual religious faith. If optimism is a natural feature of the brain, then why does it need to be maintained so much?

In the study I linked, 80% of people were classified as optimists. This may explain all of this: 80% of people go along with the program, and 20% either struggle to remain optimists, resulting in relapses and depression, or simply don’t try.

I said there must be a good reason why optimism is relentlessly pushed by the mainstream media. This reason is exemplified by the inane slogan “wag more bark less”; the more one is busy self-censoring all criticism out of one’s head, the less one is likely to criticize, including criticizing the mainstream narratives. All forms of thought-stopping prevent change.

Optimism means believing we live in a benevolent society and that all of us can succeed if we just want it hard enough. It is strongly linked with delusional beliefs about society itself: that our society is egalitarian, that our society is fair, that anyone can grow up to become anything, At the foundation of this pile of nonsense is the belief in free will, that we can “choose our own reality.” In that sense, The Secret and other New Age hackjobs are merely extreme forms of optimism.

Like most bullies, the New Age hackjobs and unqualified optimism peddlers flaunt their victimhood complex, and whine that we are surrounded by pessimism. As Ehrenreich points out, optimism has actually become so prevalent that it is sinking our society. She describes how optimism wreaks havoc on entire economies and positive-thinking dogma is taking over Christianity. In conclusion, she says:

In our daily lives, too, all of us, no matter how determinedly upbeat, rely on what psychologist Julie Norem calls “defensive pessimism” to get through the day. Not only pilots need to envision the worst; so does the driver of a car. Should you assume, positively, that no one is going to cut in front of you or, more negatively, be prepared to brake? Most of us would choose a physician who is willing to investigate the most dire possibilities rather than one who is known to settle quickly on an optimistic diagnosis. In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended…

Even some of the most positive-thinking evangelical pastors have recently acknowledged the threat of global warming. The notion that the world’s supply of oil may have peaked is no longer the province of a few environmentally minded kooks; “doomsters” are gaining respectability. Everywhere we look, the forests are falling, the deserts are advancing, the supply of animal species is declining. The seas are rising and there are fewer and fewer fish in them to eat.

It goes on and on, but you get the point. Optimism is a clear and present danger to humanity’s survival, because it strongly distorts the evaluation of risk and strongly downplays institutional flaws (both because you’re not supposed to think about them and because you’re supposed to believe everything good or bad is the individual’s fault).

Ordinary people, what we call “sane” in our society, are really shitty analysts. Really, really shitty analysts. Their bias to the upside is tiresome, predictable and makes them wrong, over and over and over again. They don’t know what real threats are, they constantly are confused about what is really dangerous. They think stranger pedophiles are a big danger to their kids, while it’s their family members or their own driving. They think terrorism is dangerous, when almost no one dies from it, as opposed to crossing the street or eating too many Big Macs. They fear “Osama” when the men who are most likely to cause their death or impoverishment have names like Bush, Paulson, Geithner, Obama and so on…

Of course optimism is wonderfully adaptive as long as optimists aren’t your leaders or analysts, and don’t run your nuclear power plants, or plan your economies, or make any decisions about anything which if it goes wrong can go catastrophically wrong. Optimists are happier, they live longer, they’re healthier, they “get up and go”, blah, blah, blah. Optimism is good for optimists and hey, they’re generally more pleasant to be around, too. There are time periods when they’re even right a lot (say during the 50s). But basically, they’re blind. One imagines conversations between cows.

On the other hand, there is evidence that optimism is good for one’s health, although it’s unclear whether one is more likely to be an optimist when one is healthy, or whether optimism makes one more likely to adopt healthy behaviors. The former does not contradict pessimism: obviously it’s easier for people to ignore the harms of life if they are not subject to them.

But even if optimism was linked to better health, one should not therefore consider pessimism as a psychological problem. People living in rural areas used to live longer, now city-dwellers live longer; neither fact is a convincing argument for calling people living in cities or rural areas psychologically damaged.

Alexander McNabb, the irresponsible blogger.

Alexander McNabb, of The Right Stuff (a right-wing blog, obviously), has taken aim at me personally and antinatalists in general in his entry “Anti-natalism and VHEMT, the irresponsible philosophy.” His argument is that the antinatalist ideology suffers from short-sightedness, and is therefore irresponsible. But it is McNabb who is irresponsible, because he has obviously not taken the time to research antinatalism in any depth.

The first problem is that he believes antinatalism only advocates human extinction:

They never actually seem to be conscious of what happens AFTER humans voluntarily vanish from the planet, which seems strange since most of them have probably read Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael” at least once. Essentially these childlike intellectually bankrupt nihilists just assume that with no humans, the earth goes back to being a verdant Eden-like paradise, free of the nastiness of homo sapiens putting down shopping malls and strip mining everything. The actual reality is, the earth will go back to remaining a paradise right up until the NEXT species in line achieves sentience…

But in fact antinatalists are adamant in stating that the problem is all suffering, not just human suffering. Of all the antinatalists I’ve talked to or read, there is only one ecological antinatalist that I know of, and that’s Nina Paley. She may be more famous than most of us, but that doesn’t make her our representative. No one else agrees with McNabb’s belief that antinatalists in general all share the same ecological aims.

In Better Never to Have Been, the seminal book on antinatalism, David Benatar concludes:

Although the end of humanity would greatly reduce the amount of harm, it would not end it all. The remaining sentient beings would continue to suffer and their coming into existence could still be a harm. This is one reason why the misanthropic arguments does not go as far as the arguments I have advanced in this book- arguments that arise not from antipathy towards the human species but rather from concern about harms to all sentient beings.
(bold mine)

I do not expect critics like McNabb to read entire books on the subject, but I would expect him to be at least a little familiar with the most vocal proponents of antinatalism, such as Gary Mosher, who again and again discuss the fact that suffering affects all sentient life and who berate people who praise nature.

Here is McNabb’s other argument:

If, ethically speaking, anti-natalists were at all concerned with preventing suffering, they’d logically investigate two options: Find a way to destroy the entire planet so thoroughly life could never exist on it, or become transhumanists and take very seriously the idea of immortalizing and improving humans. By any logical calculation, the second option is more conducive to providing pleasure for all species, while the first one simply removes the possibility for suffering.

I would also expect him to understand the “logical calculation” of Benatar’s Asymmetry, which he obviously does not; if he did, he would realize quickly that transhumanism is not, and cannot, be better than extinction. Again, this seems more like ignorance of the subject than anything else.

And antinatalists do discuss “destroying the entire planet,” because it is the only feasible way to eliminate all suffering within humanity’s area of influence (not transhumanism, which is a red herring at best), so it is a natural point of discussion.

Now, I admit that I don’t discuss these topics on my blog, so if McNabb has gotten all his information from my blog and VHEMT, then he might get the impression that all we care about is human suffering. My blog concentrates on theoretical arguments, not on consequences or strategies, and VHEMT concentrates on ecological antinatalism. But this is a problem of research on his part, not an obligation on my part to educate him (and he didn’t even contact me to get more information, or even ask basic questions).

In short, anyone who seriously believes in anti-natalism is actually condoning the future suffering of new sentient species, and deserves to be dismissed as a shortsighted crank.

But anyone who seriously investigates antinatalism would not come to the weird conclusion that people who oppose the creation of suffering only care about human suffering. Even ecological antinatalists advocate human extinction so that animal life will be subject to less suffering, not for the sake of prejudice. Now, you might disagree with their conclusion, but you can’t pronounce them “shortsighted cranks” for it.

On the other hand, reading his other entries, it seems McNabb suffers from verbal diarrhea and a love of berating things he doesn’t understand. I think we can safely call him a hack.

The belief that suicide is always irrational.

To declare any given suicide as rational is unthinkable for most people. Even people who claim to support suicide only believe that it can be rational under “hopeless” circumstances, such as having an incurable disease and exercising “sound” decision-making. This begs the question, who is this hopeless for and who gets to evaluate the soundness of any suicide’s arguments? Why should any given set of factors be declared “hopeless” and all others hopeful?

Again we come back to the concentration camp standard: what if I think conditions far better than a concentration camp are still not worthy of living in? The only response possible from the moralizers is that they are personally disgusted by suicide/antinatalism. So what? The fact that you are disgusted is not a reason to ruin someone else’s life. You don’t get to choose for other people.

Why is it that in most cases we readily accept that someone is making a rational decision, and the only standard that we use in those cases is being of sound mind, but in the case of suicide this basic respect for other people flies out the window? We are so mired in disrespect for suicides that even the most rational suicide must be declared non-rational in order to maintain the belief that life is worth living. Here is a perfect example:

A BRILLIANT schoolboy shot himself in the head after carefully calculating the benefits of life and deciding it was not worth living…

After weighing up the pros and cons, he decided to commit suicide and planned it meticulously. He taught himself to use his father’s shotgun and worked out how to fire it with a wooden spoon. He then waited until neither of his parents was at home before carrying out the plan last month.

Dr John Burton, the West London Coroner, said it was clearly a considered process and Dario “came down on the side of suicide”…

“He was quite stoical about it. He did not fear death. He decided on balance that life is not good and points out that the mathematics he has used are indisputable.”

If there is an open-and-shut, clear case of a rational suicide, here is one. But as far as I read, the reactions to this story were either to mock this boy’s supposed lack of logic (which was merely assumed, but his logic was obviously rational enough for him, which is really all that matters here), because anyone who comes out against life is obviously a raving lunatic, or to mock him personally. This is not an exceptional reaction but rather a very ordinary expression of the hatred of suicide and what suicide reveals about life.

Let me ask you this, how many people who are anti-suicide take a long, hard look at life? Not their personal life, but life in general? I am willing to bet you that not one of them has the dedication that this boy had.

I know someone will bring up the irreversibility objection, and I have not discussed that one before, so I might as well address it here. Actually it was estnihil, an antinatalist, who brought it up on my right to die entry. My reply was that all decisions are final and potentially regrettable, including passing on a job offer or entering in a relationship. So why should we think suicide is more regrettable than any other decision?

One may then argue that suicide is a special case because it entails death, and from there no further choices can be made to palliate anything. But I think that’s an arbitrary standard meant to single out suicide. Plenty of decisions people make entail the risk of death, and we don’t treat those decisions as if they were special in the same way.

Does the fact that a suicide may come to regret eir decision later on mean that it is therefore always an irrational decision? But this is a bad argument. Of course many people who continue to live come to accept that they are alive, because they have in the meantime accumulated new values and benefits. Some do not accept it and continue to try to kill themselves, but those cases are never mentioned, again because they are inconvenient to the status quo.

True, a specific person has no way to know if ey will end up in the former or latter category. But the fact that a person at time T+1 believes that suicide at time T would have been regrettable does not mean that suicide at time T is actually regrettable. Suppose a person wants to leave an abusive cult, but is recaptured and brainwashed. This person may then state that their attempt to leave was regrettable. But the fact that the cultist at that time states that such a decision was regrettable does not mean it was regrettable at the time it was taken.

Granted, the example of a cult is extreme, but I used it to clarify my point. All our ideological positions, pro or con in whatever shades you wish, are reactions to the indoctrination to which we are subjected. There is no atheism without organized religion, there is no Anarchism without statism, and there is no antinatalism without natalism. We are subject to indoctrination against suicide and for life, so why should we be surprised that some people change their minds?

Now that I’ve refuted the irreversibility objection, I want to talk about the larger issue of irrationality. What makes a decision rational or irrational? If anything, it must be one’s willingness to confront the facts and correctly assess expected consequences based on those facts. Surely not all people who commit suicide have done this, just as a lot of people who take all sorts of decisions do not confront facts. But on the whole it seems rather more likely that the decision to kill oneself is much more rational than the decision to continue to live, which is rarely ever examined if at all.

Natalists believe suicide is irrational because life is always (or almost always) worth living. There are three ways to understand this. One is to say that their specific life is worth living. This may be the case, but has no bearing on the lives of people who contemplate suicide, since everyone’s life is different. Another is to say that the suicide’s life is worth living, but this is illogical since one cannot make a subjective evaluation for someone else.

The final way is to say that life in general is worth living. But this is an equivocation between lifespan and life-system, as I’ve explained before. The life-system is not worth it, but individual lifespans can be. But this only pushes us back to the two previous options, which are illogical.

Any given life may or may not be worth living, but one cannot make such judgments. It may be that having an incurable disease makes life not worth living. What about those people who have an incurable disease but still find life worth living? What about those people who do not have an incurable disease and still find life not worth living? We can’t simply posit that their life is worth living because we have defined it as such. That’s a circular argument.

I know there is an element of loyalty in the natalists’ arguments. I’ve already discussed the belief that suicide means “giving up.” But no one has a duty to keep living. The only substantial thing we can do during our lives is to help alleviate other people’s suffering. If one cannot help others in this way, for whatever reason, then one can fulfill no purpose in this world.

The free disposal argument.

What Caplan thinks life is like. Like all idiots, Caplan’s worldview is more cartoonish than anything else.

SisterY raises a very interesting point in this entry: why do breeders consider starting a new life to be a no-brainer, and yet see many decisions about how to raise their children to be extremely difficult decisions? If any given decision about how to raise a child is difficult, then how can starting a new life, which incorporates all these decisions, be a no-brainer?

To give an analogy, it’s like immediately buying a broken down house and then being faced with a series of difficult financial decisions because of the need for renovations, permits, paying taxes, and so on. We would call that very irresponsible. And this only involves money, not human lives!

To counter this, Caplan and other natalists use a horrendously offensive argument which Sister Y calls the free disposal argument. Basically, that it’s okay to start new lives nilly willy and we shouldn’t feel like this is a big burden, because if the life is not worth living the child will just kill emself and the problem will be solved.

I hope I don’t have to explain why this is extremely offensive and why this is just another case of putting the burden on the victim (frankly I don’t really want to write an entry on such a disgusting topic, but unfortunately this way of thinking is so common amongst natalists that I really have little choice). But if this argument makes sense to them, then why are natalists horrified by suicide?

It is also very offensive for Caplan to call his argument “free disposal.” Suicide is not a “free disposal” of life, because it is not free (free as something you can do freely, I assume, not free as in beer) or painless. It’s easy for people to say that killing yourself is free or painless, but it’s not. “Free disposal” would be like receiving an actual gift (not life, which is not a gift but an imposition) and throwing it in the garbage once the givers are gone; “free disposal” is not like giving someone a house, which requires a great deal of work to sell and maintain in the meantime. Suicide is more like the latter than like the former.

The cartoon I posted at the top of this entry illustrates what an actual “free disposal” of life might look like. The fact that this is a funny cartoon, and not reality, proves that calling suicide a “free disposal” is absurd.

In the comments, muflax mentions rumspringa as another example which disproves “free disposal” rhetoric. According to Caplan, the low rate of suicide proves that life is worth living, because suicide is “free disposal” of life. But we can mount a parallel argument about the Amish: surely being Amish is inherently better than being non-Amish, otherwise many more Amish would take the opportunity of rumspringa to leave and join modern society. This argument seems exactly as valid as the free disposal argument and equally persuasive, and therefore contradicts natalists, none of whom as far as I can tell are Amish.

The reason why the rumspringa argument fails is exactly the same reason why the statistical argument fails: because being alive, or living in a certain society (such as the Amish) predisposes you to think and act in certain ways, to accumulate relevant values, and psychologically gives you a lot to lose if you abandon it. “Choice” comes so far down the line that it’s already a foregone conclusion in most cases.

At its root, this is another issue where consent is inferred or implied where no consent actually exists. False inference of consent is a major mechanism of control, and this is a very simplistic inference indeed. Inferring that people consent to life because they don’t kill themselves is as ridiculous as claiming that a man’s girlfriend consented to getting raped because she didn’t break up with him afterwards.

Basically, it makes the assumption that when one is accepting a “package deal,” one is accepting every single part of it. But there are plenty of reasons why one accepts package deals they are not entirely happy with. We all do it because we want to get a job, because we don’t want to be alone, basically because we want better social roles than the ones we had. So we take the good with the bad.

In the comments to Sister Y’s entry, Chip makes a similar point as to why Caplan’s position is paradoxical:

Most circumcised men do not go on to become anti-circumcision activists, aftet all. Does this make circumcision okay? Many people who are abused as children go on to abuse their own children, often defending their actions in hostile terms. If the rarity of suicide despite available methods constitutes evidence against the view that procreation entails special harm, then why shouldn’t the persistence of other seemingly harmful conduct — especially when perpetrated by victims — be weighted as evidence against the presumption of harm in such instances that do not bear directly on the value of being forced to live? Why should Caplan be convinced by the mob in one instance, but not in other cases? Gymnastics are required.

The argument also falls into the fallacy of confusing “starting a new life” with “continuing an existing life.” Suicide rates do not prove anything about life being worth living because suicide rates apply to lives that already exist, not to starting new lives. If any statistic should be applied here, it would be abortion (taking the decision to not start a new life, which somewhat more clearly implies that that life is not worth living), and abortion rates are far, far higher than suicide rates.

There is also the issue of hedonistic adaptation, which I have pointed out before. Part of our brain irrationally makes us believe that our life is worth living, even when it’s not. So the statistical argument is based on a known irrationality.

Finally, the “free disposal” is not a disposal of life at all. The life still happened and cannot be taken back. and this is the most fundamental and inescapable flaw with arguments of this type: existence cannot be rescinded. Suicide does not eliminate life but rather ends it, and there is a vast difference.

My wife pointed out to me that the free disposal argument is very similar to the Christian attitude about life: this whole concept that if life has an end then everything that happens in between must be completely meaningless. Likewise we’re supposed to believe that suicide makes everything that happened in between meaningless as well. This is false. Suicide cannot ever be a counterpoint to starting new lives, because starting new lives creates an irreversible fact of existence and irreversible harm.

In a similar way, this attitude that whatever happens to people doesn’t matter as long as they can kill themselves is very reminiscent of the Christian belief that the expectation of an afterlife trumps any amount of evil we go through in life. For natalists to desire to make life so meaningless seems to betray a pretty intense hatred of life, which is concordant with their rather cavalier attitude towards starting new lives. They are fucktards through and through.

Benatar’s asymmetry.

Antinatalism was given a huge boost by David Benatar’s book Better Never to Have Been. For the first time someone cogently and logically laid down the arguments against procreation in a way that can’t fail to give anyone pause. The asymmetry he contends exists between pleasure and pain is the fundamental claim of his book, upon which everything else, to a large extent, rests. I find that people don’t always understand it when I explain it as an aside, so I decided I might as well write a whole entry about it.

The asymmetry is illustrated by Benatar in this manner:

And he reviews it as such:

It is uncontroversial to say that
1)The presence of pain is bad
and that
2)The presence of pleasure is good

However, such symmetrical evaluation does not seem to apply to the absence of pain and pleasure, for it strikes me as true that

3)The absence of pain is good even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone,
whereas
4)The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom that absence is a deprivation.

This is a little obtuse, so let me rephrase it in a simpler manner:

(1) If a person exists, then eir pain is a bad thing.
(2) If a person exists, then eir pleasure is a good thing.
(3) What does not exist cannot suffer (therefore this non-existing pain is a good thing).
(4) What does not exist cannot be deprived of any pleasure (therefore this non-existing pleasure is not a bad thing).

The end result is that there is a clear asymmetry between pleasure and pain, because of (4).

What evidence do we have that these premises are valid? (1) and (2) are fairly self-evident; humans wish to experience pleasure and to evade pain. For us moral agents, pain is bad, pleasure is good (if you don’t like good and bad, then use desirable and undesirable).

(3) and (4) can also be easily understood if one does not fall into the “non-existing person” trap. Using the term, I think, confuses people because, even with the adjective “non-existing,” the mind is drawn to imagining a person. This is why I wrote “what does not exist” (Benatar’s formulation is more rigorous but harder to follow).

One thing we do know about what does not exist is that it cannot experience anything, because only that which exists can have experiences. So that which does not exist cannot feel pleasure or pain, neither can it be feel deprived at the pleasure it could be missing or suffer from the pain it cannot receive. No matter how many ice creams you list, there is no non-existing thing out there suffering from being deprived of them.

As for those of you who believe the argument is pointless because we cannot speak meaningfully about what does not exist, I’ve already debunked that position in my entry on the Non-Identity Problem.

Before I continue, I want to address an objection I’ve heard before about (1). It could be argued that pain is not always bad, that we sometimes seek out pain for a higher good (such as going to the dentist). But this is a misunderstanding of the situation. It is not the pain that we seek but the higher good; if that higher good could be obtained without the pain, we would choose that option instead. If your two options going into a long and painful operation is to bite a literal bullet or get anesthetized, which would you choose? Unless you are an inveterate masochist, the pain of the operation is not what you seek.

The consequence of the asymmetry is, I hope, obvious: a hypothetical person’s non-existence is more desirable (or better) than an actual person’s existence. When we bring a new person into the world, we create a situation which is worse than the one where this person was not brought into the world. It is bad to procreate.

Beyond the objection to (1) which I addressed above, usually people try to reject the asymmetry by rejecting (4). They argue that to not start new lives is a deprivation of pleasure. But for whom is this a deprivation? It cannot be a deprivation to the non-existent, since that which cannot exist cannot be deprived. Is it a deprivation to the parent, or to humanity?

We can imagine that the world might contain 12 billion people. That’s a whole 5 billion people that do not actually exist. And yet no one is mourning the loss of pleasure of these 5 billion imaginary people. A mother may regret that an expected child was stillborn, but the person whose death she regrets exists solely in her imagination. That which does not exist cannot be a person, or anything else.

At any rate, the fact that another person may feel deprived of the child’s non-existence does not affect the argument, which pertains to either a person’s existence or an alternative state of affairs in which this person does not exist. The fact that a parent might feel sorrow about an imaginary person is regrettable but there’s little we can do about imaginary sorrows.

Besides that, what if we reject (4)? This is where the real problems come in. If we reject (4), that means we posit that what does not exist can be deprived of pleasure. This means there is some space-fetus (or similar non-existing-and-yet-experiencing paradoxical creature) out there feeling the pain of not being able to taste ice cream, just waiting to be born in some woman’s uterus. And if this is the case, then we have an ethical duty to start as many new lives as possible. By that standard, only the Duggars are not avatars of pure evil.

Not only is this a claim that no one would be ever ready to make, but it is also paradoxical. To claim that women must be enslaved to their reproductive faculties nonstop is to use women as a means to an end, which is clearly evil (a similar sort of argument could be made against anti-abortion or pro-PIV advocates).

It can be said that antinatalism is unacceptable for many people. However, I think the consequence of rejecting (4) is just as unacceptable. The difference is that there’s no clear reason for rejecting the asymmetry, but there are clear logical and ethical reasons to reject any position which rejects (4).

What people who reject (4) really want you to believe is that having children is not bad, that it’s fulfilling some good. They don’t want you to draw the logical conclusion that rejecting (4) means that not having children is evil. They want to justify voluntaryism by making having children be equally ethical to not having children. But if (4) is false, and what does not exist is deprived and suffers from a lack of procreation, then not having children becomes the equivalent of deliberately starving children.

The natalists’ intuition is based, I think, on the false premise that starting new lives brings good with it because it creates pleasure. But this fact is only relevant if what does not exist is somehow deprived of pleasure; otherwise, creating pleasure does not make the universe a better place.

I think some people may still miss the point about absence of deprivation, so let me try to make an analogy to explain it more simply. Suppose Sober has no desire for alcohol whatsoever (because ey does not drink any alcohol, doesn’t use it for any other purpose, and has no need for the money ey’d get if ey sold it). In such a case, giving Sober a bottle of wine may appear to you to be a positive for Sober (since you gave em something), but to Sober this would not be an improvement, since Sober never feels any deprivation towards alcohol. All that’s been added is a net negative, since Sober now has to dispose of the bottle without offending you.

Obviously the analogy is not perfect (for instance, Sober actually exists in this hypothetical), but I hope my point is clear: an inability to be deprived entails the impossibility of improvement.

One may ask, why should we care about the asymmetry, anyway? People will have children or not have children regardless of ethical considerations. But people do consider ethical considerations when having children (just very stupid and stunted ones), while they disagree on what values should be instantiated.

What I am saying is that we should convince others that not creating suffering is a good value to instantiate, a better value than the very flimsy ones proposed as a support for reproduction. It’s stupid to want to propagate “your” genes (which are not “yours” to begin with), it’s stupid to want to continue the “bloodline” (another fantasy concept), it’s stupid to be irrationally scared of abortion (as much as it’s stupid to be irrationally scared of an appendectomy), and it’s not stupid to not want to create suffering.

My contention is that rejecting the asymmetry is far more absurd than accepting it. Two premises must be true for us to get to antinatalism:

1. Accepting that the asymmetry is true.
2. Accepting the principle that creating harm is bad.

Again, rejecting the asymmetry leads us to the conclusion that we must have as many children as possible, a conclusion which few would accept. Rejecting the principle that creating harm is bad leads us either to moral nihilism or to anomie, again conclusions which few would accept. I think it should be intuitively obvious to most people that antinatalism is less illogical or absurd than either conclusion. Certainly few people like the idea of human extinction, but it is still more desirable than procreation at all costs or a society in a state of total anomie.

“You don’t get to choose for someone else!”

A common retort against pro-abortion and antinatalist positions is that no one should make decisions for anyone else, and to enshrine such a delegation into law is tyrannical. So telling people they should abort or should not have children is wrong. They should decide for themselves whether they should do so, decisions about their lives are theirs to make.

There are many problems with this retort. One of them, as I’ve pointed out before, is that we already do this all the time. We prohibit murder, theft, rape, assault, and we “take the decision” for people who commit these actions that they should not repeat them. If this is tyrannical, then every society in history, including Anarchist ones, have been tyrannical. Surely this is nonsense.

But then we cannot say that it is tyrannical to, say, forbid a woman to give birth to a compromised child. Given the fact that all children have the right to the highest standard of health, giving birth to a compromised child is the equivalent of assaulting and severely injuring a healthy person. If forcibly making a person’s health compromised is a criminal act, then so it creating a person’s health as compromised.

People ask, where do we “draw the line”? They try to reduce it to an issue of choice, because people will always disagree. But disagreement does not mean the issue is an issue of personal choice. Billions of people think evolution didn’t happen, but it’s not an issue of choice, it’s a fact. Hundreds of millions of people think you go to some extra-dimensional cubical city when you die. So what? Arguing from dissent, without dissenting evidence, is not rational.

Given that, what evidence can anyone present to demonstrate that giving birth to a compromised child is not a criminal act? Well, they would have to either prove that children do not have a right to the highest standard of health (but even if children only have a right to living below a certain level of illness or disease, something which must still be proven, that still excludes many births), or that having a compromised health is somehow inconsequential.

The problem is that this request for evidence would never be answered, because to them children don’t have rights, period. Children are property, and therefore irrelevant from an ethical standpoint. In fact, they will look at pretty much everyone’s rights before even starting to consider the child’s rights. Which leads me to my next point…

“Choosing for someone else” is exactly what they’re doing! By deciding to start a new human life, they are deciding that the risks of life are low enough to make new lives desirable. But that’s their opinion. Everyone has a different threshold as to how much suffering or hardship they find acceptable. To some people, only concentration camp-level suffering makes life not worth living. To others, the threshold is much, much lower.

Unlike the previous point, there are no facts here, only preferences. People have different levels of tolerance towards risk, because that tolerance depends on a lot of other factors, some of which are personal. Some people wouldn’t even try skydiving, even though the chance of dying from a jump is 1 out of 100,000 (granted, the chance of injuring something is somewhat higher). Some people become firefighters, an occupation which is considered risky by others, especially where wildfires are concerned.

The point here is that, while any person can decide to try to be a firefighter, it would be wrong for that person to force anyone else to become a firefighter. This is exactly what people do when they start new human lives: they judge the risks of living sufficiently low that procreation seems reasonable, to them.

Furthermore, it’s important not to forget what happens after the new life is started: 18 years of parenting. After all, what is parenting if not constantly making decisions for someone else?

Some may reply that it is necessary to do so in order to raise children properly. That may be so, but such a reply misses the point. I am not passing judgment on the institution of parenting, merely pointing out that parenting does imply “choosing for someone else.” That’s all I’m talking about here.

The root of this objection is a desire to use voluntaryism and self-ownership as an argument. At this point I refer you to my entry “Voluntaryism: it’s not just about capitalism…” for further discussion on this line of argument.