this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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I didn't want to be born, I wish I wasn't born, so I'm not doing that to someone else. It's that simple and I don't really see the problem y'all have with it. I'm not forcing anyone else not to have kids.
The right to not have kids and not be criticized for it is very important especially on a feminist level. No one disagrees with that here
We’re not in favor of state enforced birth. That’s literally the anti-abortion position. I think there’s a miscommunication that happens because some people see anti-natalism as a universal moral claim whereas others see it as a personal choice. Furthermore there are people who believe that universal moral goods should be enforced by the state who will argue with people who haven’t thought about that conclusion of their lines of thought.
I mean, my reasoning is technically moral. I hate this hellworld and my life and think it would be bad to subject someone else to that.
But this is the part that matters. No matter what I think, I in no way want to enforce it on anyone else. At "worst" I'd ask someone to consider my point of view when making their decision.
Most people here treat anti-natalism as an ideology, and therefore determined to force people not to have kids. But it absolutely does not have to be that or anything close.
good luck getting anybody to listen when you say that. I think it's wrong to cheat on an intimate partner or fart in a crowded elevator too, but there's very obviously no way to have any legal enforcement of those mores.
i have no illusions of antinatalism becoming a majority opinion. people are going to keep having kids because they don't think about it or have the reactionary belief that putting someone in harm's way is OK, or because they were denied choice, and we should do our best to minimize the suffering of everyone forced to live, that is: working toward the abolition of capitalism, class, money, and the state.
I completely agree with you. Anti-natalism is just a way to avoid creating more suffering (and to that end, enforcing it would be counteractive), but the real imperative is to stop the cause of the suffering.
anti-natalism is inevitable in the long run, there is only a finite amount of land for a potentially infinite amount of people
It doesn't matter now because 1) we're nowhere near global carrying capacity and 2) capitalism needs its slaves, so talking about this seriously is something only for dwarf brained chuds
But if we lived under the best possible utopian global communist government imaginable, you'd still need population control policies from the start, your only other option is to let it get bad enough that people's diets start getting affected (just like now, except now it's because of inequality rather than malthusian)
Population control is not needed. Right now the working theory is the global population will naturally level off around 10 billion. Or more generally, population naturally corresponds with food supply, so when we've hit the limit for food supply, we'll naturally stop growing. Population control at 10 or 15 billion people would have all the same problems as population control at 1 or 8 billion people. To think otherwise is to believe in Malthusianism, just not yet.
I'm not coming from a perspective of population control or global capacity, I'm talking about the morality of forcing someone into a world that's already fucked up. It's not that having children is bad for the world, it's that the world is bad for children.
10 billion is fine, but in general, a more populated world (let's say 20 billion) would have way more problems, such as
Earth has a limit, our current population is perfect under a global socialist system, and even a bit bigger could be fine, but the margin between the human population and the carrying capacity is a good "buffer zone" should any catastrophes occur. You have to draw the line somewhere and I'd rather have a bigger buffer zone, people aren't gonna suffer because they can only have 2 kids instead of 3 kids
You could also hypothetically have systems that reward childlessness, etc. Not everyone has to have the same exact lifestyle, it's just that the global population should be stable.
also your argument has a problem:
This is mostly because the proles in the west (and even other regions) are being pushed out of upward economic mobility. People are having less kids because they can't afford to, not because they don't want to. Under a socialist system, everyone would have everything they need, so birthrates would increase. There's always going to be a few people who want to have tons of kids or whatever, this still happens in the US among Mormons/Amish/ElonMusk, and that needs to be penalized somehow, otherwise it's not really fair for the people who just have the maintenance level of 2 children--and if you let that problem fester it could get really bad in several generations time (hyperfertile parents tend to pass on their hyperfertile culture to their kids, etc).
I'm realizing now that I think I responded to the wrong comment since I had no issue with this position lol. It is kind of an "unfalsifiable" type of position though since you can't consent to your enjoyment of life without first being alive.
I'm also kind of an antinatalist and I think the answer is that it's hopeless to talk about on this website most of the time, and when you see someone else use the term, just replace it in your head with "malthusian"
idk, that kind of makes it worse. not really going to die on this hill but I mostly see malthusian arguments from ecofash types. equitable redistribution of the resources we already have goes a long way towards reducing birth rates -- people have lots of children, generally, because they need them to work/the kids tend to die -- and beyond that... let's cross that bridge when we get there as we're already talking about a world that's vastly different from the one we live in currently?
I do view malthusianism as basically fascist, what I was saying is that when HB uses the term "antinatalism" they mean a hodgepodge of positions mostly ranging from "r/childfree" to "sterilizing undesirables", neither of which are antinatalism in the proper sense.
A real antinatalist isn't even necessarily against personally having children (and letting all others in the present do so), because the goal is the end of any sentient birth and not some lifestyle choice, so it is a matter of developing human society in a direction where the society voluntarily lets itself die, which is unlikely to happen in the next few centuries. Whether or not any specific individual between now and then reproduces is completely inconsequential to that.
That's the most fucked up unacceptable end goal I've heard of
that's how I understood antinatalism and, despite not wanting children personally, I still don't think that's a society I'd want to live in, nor a position I find in line with socialism. the goal is to develop a society where life is livable and one in which the environmental impacts of human existence won't lead to the eventual death of society because of catastrophic load on necessary resources or on the climate - the continuation of society is implicit in that. if we can achieve that society, the choices of individuals to have or not have children remains a personal decision.
Who's to say? I'm not particularly seeking to convince anyone, just explain some of what the position is.
I personally view it as a matter of primary vs secondary contradictions, where -- if the pessimists are correct -- the problem of the basic nature of sentient existence is the last of all contradictions to be solved, after communism proper has already been achieved. I think the basic fork is between the essentiality of suffering and the possibility of transhumanism to end suffering.
Regarding personal choice, well, I think it's a good thing all things being equal, but rights are not the basic starting point of Marxist ethics (such as they are), consequentialism is. China made errors with its one child policy (see all the infanticide people committed in response), but that does not mean such a policy is deontologically wrong jn any circumstance. Of course, if most people want to reproduce, that indicates by normal Marxist metrics that society is not ready to let itself die. If it is overwhelmingly popular that all reproduction end, I likewise see no reason why the remainder should be entitled to have children. To prevent some particular group from reproducing is of course discriminatory, but if it's everyone, then that circles around to it being a matter of individual rights and those are less fundamental than democracy.
Or you can take the semi-optimistic view of transhumanism having the potential to bail us out of this problem, which I don't agree with personally but don't find fundamentally unreasonable.
you mean in the Hindu/Buddhist sense? if we're talking post-communism, it's such a different society from the one we live in that I don't think it's valuable to speculate on what we will need to do once we get there. but yeag, I get you and I'm also not trying to convince anyone and I apprentice the explanation.
Yeah, I mean I would probably ascribe an even more essential position to suffering than the traditional Buddhist account does (which emphasizes inevitability more than an essentiality that exists at the core of personal experience) but there is 100% an influence from Hinduism and Buddhism here.
i've seen users say "x is wrong" and immediately get dogpiled like they said "not x should be enforced at the barrel of a gun". Maybe there's a framework for left antinatalism out there somewhere but it's not going to be developed here.
Thank god for that
this could be about me but you didn't use the word "robot" so i'm not sure. definitely have encountered that "misunderstanding".
lol i think it was, but i also didn't use the word "with" or any underscores either so let's call it a 40% chance