Anti-Natalism is a Mental Illness: Childfree in Sanity & Insanity.

there is this terrifying tendency in human psychology to justify whatever it is that makes us abnormal and sometimes whatever it is that makes our family abnormal by claiming that it's something that in fact secretly we have in common with all mankind and this is becoming harder to see in the era of the internet because the internet by its nature invites us all to stand up and add our voice to the cacophony it invites us all to come out and celebrate the ways in which we're abnormal it's normalizing abnormality and in many ways that's a wonderful thing um the traits that made you feel uncomfortable in the classroom with your classmates the traits that singled you out to be bullied possibly by your own brothers and sisters those can become the traits that make you in some small measure famous here on youtube and they can be the traits that attract a small but significant following or even just a friend group around you whether it's on youtube instagram or any other platform we live through an era where people want to stand up and declare as never before exactly in what way they're abnormal and why and they want to show that they're not ashamed of it but a great many of us are ashamed of our abnormalities and our way of rationalizing it our way of even concealing from ourselves how abnormal we are is by going out and trying to convince others that this abnormality is a uniform aspect of the human condition that everyone else is suffering how many million of us will have to face up to the fact that either we would make terrible parents or that we already are terrible parents or more humiliating still maybe there was a time in our lives when we could have been a good parent but now it is forever past i remember talking very seriously with one friend of mine he was 51 years old at the time and looking at getting married and having a child she was talking to them well look the baby is born when you're 55 10 years old when you're 65 going through teenage problems when you're around 70 are you are you sure you can do this are you sure you're cut out for this are you sure you're the right man for the job now and 10 years from now 20 years from now and maybe you were 20 years ago right i remember having a very down-to-earth conversation with a guy who had lost one leg in an accident um not just at the knee but right up at the top of the leg his leg had been amputated and completely down-to-earth way he had to reflect he had a new wife and she wanted to have a child or children with him if you literally can't get up and walk after your child just a physical disability and it's not hereditary the kid isn't going to inherit having only one leg well yeah maybe you're looking at that in a very different way when now you know how difficult it is for you to go to the bathroom without someone helping you get up and and go and you may be in the position of helping someone else okay now i have to look at that from a different perspective well what if the reason why you can't have a child or you shouldn't have a child is psychological what if it's intellectual what if it's emotional what if it's ethical and what if it's philosophical what if you're just committed to a view of the world a set of opinions and beliefs that really disqualify you for parenthood either because they reveal that you're a terrible person or because they've made you into a terrible person with the passage of time isn't it easier to claim that everyone is abnormal in just the same way that you are isn't it easier to claim that everyone would make a terrible parent instead of looking in the mirror and really reckoning with the extent to which you are abnormal and you may be making the right decision by refusing to have or raise children yourself but you're making the wrong decision in blaming others you're making the wrong decision in vilifying all parents or frankly vilifying the whole human species when instead what you need to do is recognize your own position within the species with all due humility what you need to do is stop blaming others for faults that lie within yourself now i have been on both sides of this kind of argument if you've got really good eyesight you'll notice there's a poster in the background there related to learning the chinese language i've sat down with seemingly intelligent people and explained look i just can't learn chinese and i can't go any further with my career in chinese asian studies politics and easter asia because the university system is so bad and i've had people turn around use this kind of argument against me like oh you're casting aspersions on others you're blaming others for problems when the fault lies with you yourself that's it's a long conversation to have my point here is just note i realize how insincere this can be i realize that this can become gaslighting in the parts of our times okay um the passion with which anti-natalists argue against sexual reproduction in principle parenthood in principle all right i am making the claim here that it is in the strictest sense of the term insane and there's a subtle distinction i'd just draw your attention to all right i couldn't find a university and i couldn't find a university professor that was good enough for me for my standards to spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of my life getting a master's degree i i couldn't find that and i'm interested in engaging in a critique of the institution of the university and some of you may be sincerely interested in engaging in a critique of the institution of marriage a critique of the institution of kindergarten and primary school and parenthood in some sense right i'm not out here in this bitter vicious vitriolic way heaping scorn on other people who have found a university that was good if who have found a professor who have found a phd supervisor who's good at them i'm happy for them all right and i know people like that whether they're right or wrong right i'm i'm happy for them it would be a significant step closer to madness and a significant step closer to the type of madness the anti-natalists are guilty of if i were instead arguing that nobody anywhere can learn chinese that nobody should learn chinese or that you know the whole system is a giant conspiracy it's a scam these people are lying that it's somehow immoral for anyone who disagrees with me and takes a path other than my own even to exist i don't know if i should make videos like this once a year or once a month frankly but i think for everyone in my audience if you just look back at the last five years you've known somebody committed to anti-natalism you've known someone who's embraced this set of excuses and you've watched them over time you've seen how it changes their opinion of themselves and their evaluation of others and what i'd like to suggest to you is that anti-natalism is either a symptom of madness or leads to madness because these are people who would prefer to be insane they would prefer their own insanity to taking up the fundamentally humble and humiliating position of being happy for others saying oh you've decided to have kids you're raising kids and it's going great i'm so happy for you and to just admit that whatever your own reasons are for why you couldn't have children or why you shouldn't have children they may be psychological they may be ethical they may be intellectual they may be philosophical that those reasons don't apply to everyone else they don't define what's normal or let alone universal for human nature on planet earth they are in fact traits that mark you out as abnormal and you have to find a way forward you have to find a way to lead a meaningful life that contributes positively to the rest of humanity with that awareness of your own abnormality and you guys just think that it's fine to keep reproducing i mean i get it if you're in a place where there's the mouse the male apes are like wanting to spread their seed in the women and like society you have no way to say no and like guys guys are the most oppressive characters of all because they're the ones wanting to come inside of us and impregnate women so they can what keep their family line going their shitty dna and you know what you know who the one suffers is the women all right so i did get a couple of people one in email and this post by anti-gaya about some guy he sold mozzard and i made some video talk about anti-natalism [Music] i don't know what the hell that was but it's disturbing in this context of this conversation that you would just play something like that with video game music where you're playing again with real critters welfare so whatever that game was whatever that experiment was clearly it wasn't very nice to impose that on those little monkeys was it but you don't care torture anything everything is [ __ ] to be tortured by you because it's entertaining somehow [ __ ] you you know i think our species is so [ __ ] because people bring people here on planet earth and then they have to take care of themselves for [ __ ] ever like parents your [ __ ] your [ __ ] to do that to somebody you expect your kid to figure out how to take care of itself without even asking the kid first if he even wants to do this [ __ ] is that going to be your excuse till you're 65 years old you're an adult now what is romantic and what is not is up to you your parents may have told you that dandelions were poisonous you're an adult now you know better you can make dandelion tea you can make dandelion wine you can grow a whole garden floating oh jeez he's talking about dandelions now tea yeah well i i just want to say uh for some reason that always shocked people when i said that they just never thought of it when people ask me do you want to have kids obviously before i had a kid i would just say it depends on the woman i'm with yeah because you know when i was with my blonde ex-girlfriend we were together for years like you know we might as well have been married it was that kind of close long-term relationship but with her i would have never had kids i think she would have been terrible parents and yeah etc it was just no so so so he rifles through relationships right so let's get this straight and he thinks he thinks he's got it now so this one he's got under control now yeah sure and if we really took the average human being if i could actually make an average human being you probably wouldn't invite him over for dinner and that's the truth you would find him fat and stupid and a lot of things because that's what the average is and so why are you supporting something that on average really doesn't turn out that well sixty percent of the time it works every time i didn't think she'd blame the world for why they don't have kids you see i i don't see that way at all i think it's a judgment call about who you are i didn't watch you right okay so yes obviously so somewhere in this video they made some statement about the fact that look uh you know the planet earth is doomed uh some generation is going to be um stuck with the liability there's every prospect that human beings there's no evidence that we're doing the peaceable thing so our we're just going to escalate the violence and sooner or later a generation is going to live where a nuclear bomb goes off again and it could be the next generation and so i'm going to have a kid and place him in a world where nuclear bombs are going to start going off because i'm a generous person yeah nuked uh japs you know dying of radiation sickness 50 million people just disposed of in the prime of their lives just disposed of in ugly horrible ways raped to death all kinds of horrible things happened in the war and and then the war of just living a life living a grunt life in the modern society where everything is just so tacky so superficial so artificial our lives have just absolutely no genuine purpose because we're just here to screw each other over to steal money in some way i mean to steal value it's just disgusting to marginalize and you're saying there's some reason to force a kid to play that ugly game this ugly game should be perpetuated why would you perpetuate this uglier game i wouldn't impose it on a robot i wouldn't pose it i wouldn't impose it on a horseshoe i wouldn't impose it on anything well except an [ __ ] like you maybe if i could because you deserve it so all i have to do is convince you to understand that the only game you're playing on this type rope is don't fall off you're just playing the don't fall off game there's no winning to walking the type rope there's only winning and not falling off not getting cancer not getting malaria not getting humiliated not being a fool not being an [ __ ] not being whatever neurotic and insane and not being tortured in death many times over dying more than once these are the wings not dying more than one time that's a big win if i can wait oh if i can avoid dying of five or six times that would be excellent that's the win idiot so why walk the stupid type rope you can't win all you're doing is risking losing a guy wrote into me oh god this is this is an answer to a question oh wow how cool is that very very sincerely overwrought over the ethical and philosophical issues raised by the antenatalists now over wrought this is amazing well anyway i mean yeah of course when you're raised by a culture that keeps telling you it's worth it the gold medal is worth it everybody needs a gold medal i mean it doesn't matter what the preposterous thing is you got to win a gold medal so it doesn't matter how stupid it's like okay how many times in a row can hit yourself in the head with your fist in one minute yeah just find something try to do it really really good so you can win the gold medal and that means somebody else didn't win it and he'll be all sad and i didn't win and that's bad but to care who cares the game is about me me winning the game isn't about how stupid it is to sit there and say let's just change the name of the [ __ ] on top of the [ __ ] pile we have a big pile of [ __ ] let's just change the name we have the wrong name is on the [ __ ] so we have to put your name on the [ __ ] because the wrong name is on the pile of [ __ ] the king of the [ __ ] is the wrong king of the [ __ ] you need to be the king of the [ __ ] and that's all that's taking place here and somebody figures that out and they say okay yes i understand i've been programmed to climb a mountain of [ __ ] to do nothing but put a flag in it that sinks i mean yes this is really a stupid program why am i playing this video game king of the pile of [ __ ] and yes maybe somebody will have a little bit of cognitive distance when they figure out that that's the that's the game we're playing and everybody's putting a quarter into this stupid crazy video game like this makes sense we should play this idiotic game teach your kids how to play king of the pile of [ __ ] no suffocate your kids at the you know don't wait too long to do it okay but yeah do it oh melissa in the background she had a period of her life where those questions meant a lot to her blah blah blah anecdotal i don't think melissa had any of those thoughtful periods frankly she couldn't live with you if she did she obviously can't smell or think i think not these same philosophical questions but the questions raised by child free people and anti-nationalist people on the internet there's a reason why this is meaningful to millions of people it raises questions of how should we live yeah what means something to people again it's just so uh you know again the world is such a pile of [ __ ] i mean all these fake religious people all these fake pretentious i know best i know i know how to fix the economy i know how to find free energy you're all a bunch of [ __ ] idiots the human race is an idiot and you're a very nice example of the idiots should we or should we not be you know resolving a spender time raising an infant as opposed to doing the very small things well again this has nothing to do with any subject i am terribly interested about this whole thing of whether or not people should entertain themselves the question is should you entertain yourself in a way in a manner where you're subjecting risk to somebody else if you want to entertain yourself by throwing bricks in the air and seeing if you can make them land on your head then it seems to be your business so if that's what you want to do with your time is risk throwing bricks in the air that'll land on your own head fine if you're throwing bricks and they're going to land on your ignorant girlfriend's head that might be questionable but the idea of throwing bricks okay and letting the land on anyone's head that's really none of your right okay you want to [ __ ] your girlfriend that might be your business but you have no right to [ __ ] me bastard and that's what my parents thought they had they thought they had a right to [ __ ] me well no they didn't okay they were full of [ __ ] full of ego and bravado and nonsense that i'm going to play god and it'll all turn out wonderfully [ __ ] you that's stupid is it in fact net positive or net negative is it something selfish that subtracts from the world it can't be net positive as i pointed out there's absolutely no logical theory that gets you to a true positive all you can do is undo negatives so again if you want to justify the existence of human beings you have to explain how they fix something that would be broken if they didn't exist okay we make the universe richer you know and it lives in a better house with no leaky roof we don't do any of that we're not maintenance men we're breaking and we break things we don't fix things our existence we come into the world breaking okay broken and all we do is spend the rest of our lives trying to glue ourselves back together and that's it we don't accomplish anything we just bandage our injuries to decide to have your own child or is it something positive that has the world this is not um this is not a shallower simple question and something i know melissa thought about a great deal before she fell in love with me and basically went baby crazy oh yeah she drank lead to paint obviously i mean obviously we should go find out where she lived because there's lead in the water and she's [ __ ] [ __ ] sorry i'm joking around joking around she's really a lesbian you know wake weak you know what that means i am but her position her position on this is not shallow but it is true that when she fell in love with me she had a period of really being baby crazy which was interesting to see yeah it's bizarre actually uh the guy's lost his hair before he was like 16. uh genetically he's tubby and you know has good teeth but otherwise everything else is a pile of [ __ ] and i want to make more of those so again you know you don't want to make the argument that women are kind of irrational well frankly there's lots of things that indicate women do have a bit of this irrationality going on but i really don't want to beat up on women i mean that you know they have an excuse in the sense of that you know they come into the world even more [ __ ] up than we do i mean the whole period thing deep without meditations and reflections oh whatever i don't think that ever happened i don't think you have any evidence your girlfriend ever did anything called thinking meditatively never happened that's just a story you made up your girlfriend's obviously an idiot look i got a sincere question on patreon from a guy who was really uh overwrought not just about the anti-nato's critique about who he's french canadian okay it's applied to individual people getting pregnant having babies those decisions but in the broader ecological world view that sort of step one is the anti-natalist arguing that human beings do so much damage to the world that it would be better for the planet in an abstract sense that human beings didn't exist or if there were fewer and fewer human beings ultimately leading to the determination of the human species that's one angle but then i think the necessary uh kind of ethical and intellectual corollary of that karari there's a word i didn't have before let's see will i keep it karari yeah [ __ ] it no i'm not going to keep that one but it never evolves from this in this perspective is the view that all life is similarly deeply flawed so how ridiculous that anyone would think that you know a machine that tortured that could that manifest torture could in some way be flawed and being torture is just part of good machine making to make something that's torturable why would i ever make something that wasn't capable of being tortured i mean being people being tortured is just so cool isn't it obvious to a sadist yes that's it to a sadist it's obvious to everyone else it's like what are you talking about why add torture if you don't need it why put it in there why make something that's torturable when you could make something not torturable yes much better idea i obviously don't have a ton of memories of being an infant but i do remember that it was always struggling struggling struggling struggling i mean it wasn't just happy bliss happy baby happy happy happy those really aren't my memories okay i don't i don't have these i was so happy and happy smiling smiling laughing that really isn't the sense the sense is that you've got to grind this thing out you got to fight to make your arms move right you got to fight to do everything it's a struggle and you you're applauding that and i think that's just so [ __ ] sadistic that's all i can say you're psychotic you're really sick sick in the head you know i think our species is so [ __ ] because people bring people here on planet earth and then they have to take care of themselves for [ __ ] ever like parents your [ __ ] your [ __ ] to do that to somebody you expect your kid to figure out how to take care of itself without even asking the kid first if he even wants to do this [ __ ] because i understand evolution that this is a function of the biological problem of lack of function there were just a parasitic infestation on on the chemical surface of earth and it's just a bunch of little chemical models little little chemical molecules having a a competition with each other to take over the world and that's all that's really happening here is it's just a bunch of little tiny molecules uh you know a certain number a few billion or trillion little design changes and they're all struggling to be king of the world and the trick is is that you never can be king of the world because as soon as you grow enough that everybody makes you into food and so it's really impossible to ever take over the world so you just constantly fight with each other about who's winning oh we're winning over the over the dinosaurs but maybe the dinosaurs will still have a comeback you know that's all that's happening here is our little varieties the the nature of the weapons we use like you know for a few millennia we use swords and then we use guns and then we use sticks and then we use rocks you know we just come up with little different tools to [ __ ] each other over for the silly victory of saying i am king of a pile of dead bodies when i think of babies uh happy gurgles and giggles don't come to my mind i think more whiny annoying loud stinky smelly waste of time life for ruiner so if you go to the gambling house all right and you're going to play dice and on the dice are skull and crossbows on each dice and let's say they're 20-sided dice just for fun and so you think the odds are pretty low no big deal but if you get two you know snake eyes two skull and crossbones a gun pops out of the table and shoots your wife you still gonna gamble no we'll see when it's some non-thing you know it's a thing in the non-verse and you're just gonna pluck it out you don't know it yet you don't know its disposition it's welfare you don't know its sensitivities you know what if i found the thing that your wife fears the most and the worst possible kind of death now put that on the dice you still gonna play the game i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you philosophy is about problem solving sometimes the problem we need to solve is the attitude that lurks behind an argument not a specific factual claim and not a flaw in the explicitly stated argument the attitude that this youtuber in mendem is demonstrating for you here is an attitude that i hear from vegan gains again and again and again and the attitude is that they as people who would refuse to have a child ever that they are doing something bold and brave and defiant whereas in fact what they're doing is cowardly and they're trying to justify and normalize their own cowardice the assertion that everyone everyone shares this trait with them everyone is just as averse to these risks these negative consequences as they are or anyone who doesn't share their cowardice must be insane in mendem seems to think that it's absolutely absurd to take this risk to risk sudden violent death at a rate of 1 in 20. he thinks nobody would take that gamble if they knew what they were getting themselves into in world war one of canadian soldiers who served more than fifty thousand died very roughly your odds of being killed be one in twelve in world war ii strangely the statistics are even more vague i couldn't find out precisely how many people served in the military perhaps 1 in 22 your odds of dying in world war ii if you were born a citizen of poland or shockingly staggeringly terrible the fate of the polish people as whole both jewish and gentile during world war ii will give you nightmares so it gets much much worse than these statistics and some people were cowards some people were cowards and some people found ways to struggle and fight that were not nearly so easy as joining a conventional army that would at least provide you with meals and a place to sleep you know some people had to fight in much more terrible circumstances if your position is there is no risk worth taking at a rate of 1 in 20 that you wouldn't roll the 20-sided dice and risk your own life you are a coward and i understand that you want to justify that cowardice by generalizing that cowardice by saying that all of humanity shares this trait with you but you're wrong having a child takes guts having a child involves elements of risk you have to be bold enough to endure unspeakable suffering not everyone should join the army not everyone should become a combatant not everyone should become a parent not everyone has what it takes and i would never attempt to convince vegan gaines that he should become a parent he would doubtless be a terrible parent he is dealt with correct in his assessment that he should never have children but isn't it fundamentally humble humiliating to stop and reflect that this is something i can't do this is something you personally can't do this is something you're lacking but that others should do must do that even perhaps is a little bit heroic when others do it that's something you might be able to admire in others no no no what people like in mendem must do is justify their own ego by vilifying more than 90 percent of the human race by saying that everyone else is crazy everyone else is crazy because they don't share this fundamental cowardice there's a philosophically significant contrast between this problem i've been describing and what goes on in the minds of newly converted atheists people who've just made the transition from american christianity to american atheism in the 21st century let me just pause to disclose i am myself an atheist and i am not one of these atheists who has the attitude of whatever makes you happy like you do you i'm not an atheist who's in favor of spiritualism or spirituality or continuing to celebrate christmas just so that you can sing songs with your extended family i am i am much more of an extreme and uncompromising atheist but nevertheless i'm not interested in supporting an atheist movement that's built on a lie anymore that i'm interested in supporting a religion that's built on a lie i'm quite willing and eager to examine the defects and disadvantages of atheism and the attitudes atheism brings into our lives in the same way that i'm willing to examine the defects of religion and the attitudes and assumptions religions bring into our lives all right and there is a huge phenomenon in the 21st century searching now on youtube i couldn't find a single video examining it or discussing it there probably are videos and they're probably very censored and hard to find within youtube topic for another video um i couldn't find a single video just now talking about the psychological pattern of people converting from christianity to atheism and then assuming and then imagining that the most heroic thing they can do is live a life of sensual indulgence live a life devoted to sleeping around or seducing other man's wives or engaging in whatever sexual acts were forbidden before where suddenly they regard it as courageous heroic and manly shall we say to do all of the things their grandparents would have forbidden them to do before precisely because their grandparents forbid them to do it before they're incapable of recognizing that there is a kind of heroism there is a kind of virtue there is a kind of self-discipline in being a good person in the absence of that religious tradition their grandparents have in the absence of the delusions their grandparents subscribe to nevertheless they face the same challenge of what it means to be a good person especially in relation to controlling one's sexual desires or whatever other miscellaneous desires before they subordinated to these ridiculous religious delusions right in the same way it seems to be very easy for people to convince themselves that there is something heroic about anti-natalism that there was something heroic about refusing to take on the responsibilities of a parent just because their religious tradition just because their parents and grandparents conditioned them to believe that having a child that raising a child that making those sacrifices that taking on those responsibilities was something they were obliged to do okay in rejecting religious belief we reject the obligation as irrational and i would agree that you have no obligation to any god to be shall we say sexually a good person to be self-disciplined in dealing with your desires and the consequences of acting on those desires for yourself and others you have no obligation to any god you have an obligation to yourself you have an obligation to others you have no obligation to any god and you have no obligation to your parents your grandparents your cultural traditions that may be outside of religion strictly defined you have no obligation to your ancestors stretching back thousands of years or any of those values in your family you have no obligation anyone to have a child and yet you should still be able to recognize the type of self-discipline the type of self-sacrifice and yes even the type of heroism that is required that is involved in making the commitment to have and raise children when i look at people like vegan gains when i look at people like admandom and when i look at people who go off the deep end after converting from christianity to atheism and suddenly have to indulge in sex with prostitutes use of recreational drugs in all the things that were forbidden to them before all right what i see is a kind of cowardice what i see of course is a reckless lack of self-discipline that they are justifying in their own minds as if it were courage because for them it's an act of rebellion against these absent grandparents these absent ancestors yes even these absent gods go talk what you like tell people then his name because you can stand that i suck just still spreading my name