MORALIDAD SIN ADICCION

1 Why do you think it’s OK to have children if you oppose the idea of another human feeling pain, suffering and dying? You seem to be in favour of preventing these things, yet you risk (or intend on) producing children that will feel pain, suffer and die. It is most noble to start a family and you’re congratulated for it, rather than being politely advised that you’re a killer hypocrite. To procreate is to inflict upon others what you appear to spend your life avoiding, reducing or preventing – pain, suffering and death. What makes you think your kids will want these if you don’t? We are all potential killer hypocrites – I wish to never start a family, however, I have been previously, unexpectedly, intimately involved. We did not have sex, but I was in such a state of abandon that contraception was not a concern. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite, but it’s more-or-less a one way ticket when your body reacts to such stimuli. In my mind, I’m an anti-natalist, but my brain is subject to the whims of my body. A body that feels first and thinks second; a body whose organs are organised and systems are connected in a way that ensures sexual pleasure bypasses intellect, hijacking the host to continue the sentient narrative. Whilst my body has no choice but to be pleased by sexual pleasure, I feel a strong sense of objection to this stimuli, that if put into words (directed at whoever I interact with in this way again (and if I have anything to do with it, will be no one)): “Do not propose to know my mind through my body, for, my body will tell you a different, pre-programmed story which favours procreation.”. With instinct, it seems there is little free will in the senses – but I think there is enough of a degree of avoid-ability to realise our criminal measure of culpability. Consider the crime – life: pain, suffering and death made possible. But we consider life to be more of a ride than a crime. If a rollercoaster injures or kills more than 0% of its riders, it is more than likely shut down, perhaps permanently. Life has a 100% injury and death rate, yet we are biologically and institutionally driven or dragged over the crumpled bodies of our predecessors to sacrifice our progeny on the altars of ‘accident’ or purpose. Who else but a killer – a terrorist – volunteers others to feel pain, suffer and die? Lifers (parents). There are estimates that around 100 billion humans have ever existed – this is the death toll of ‘progress’ and the number of chances we’ve given life to get ‘better’. We still suffer. We still die. We appear to be under some sort of misconception to keep doing this. Pleasure drives us to propagate pain, suffering and death – the ‘devil’ is in the dopamine. It always has been. Before you carry on fucking yourselves into the next illusion: there is no confusion. We are the loss-locked. Pain always finds and death always wins – it’s about time we refuse to lose. 2 Joe I recall a brief conversation with an associate who wants to start a family (he’s bought a three-bedroomed house on the purpose). As I reflect, I will attempt to distil our positions. Me: “Do you support pain and death?” Joe: “No.” Me: “Then you shouldn’t have children.” Joe: “Why?” Me: “Because by procreating, you’d be exposing them to pain and you’d be killing them.” Joe: “No I wouldn’t, I’d be creating life.” Google Procreation, as an act, which results in death, matches this definition of killing. It is also, creating life… Me: “That will feel pain and die. You’d be a killer.” Joe: “I wouldn't be killing them because they'd die of natural causes.” 3 Me: “Natural causes that can only affect them if they’re alive in the first place.” Killing is typically observed (primarily through news, TV shows and movies) as “causing death as the more-or-less direct result of an act” (a ‘hands-on’ approach, in the form of (if killing with intent) beatings, stabbings, shootings etc.). If Joe is operating under this definition, then of course procreation isn’t killing – the direct result of Joe having sex (with the intention to procreate) will be getting his wife pregnant (thus, “creating life”); neither would he be responsible for his children dying of natural causes (his hands wouldn’t directly be choking his children’s arteries later in their lives, causing them to have a fatal heart attack, for example). I find Joe’s intention to procreate equally as questionable as that of a person who intends on ending someone’s life by direct means. In both scenarios, the procreator and the killer performs an act that they know will result in the pain, suffering and death of another person. You’ve got good intentions, but your ‘good’ intentions will torment and kill your kids. You’d be killing them with your glands instead of your hands. The result is the same. I do not accept the definition of ‘killing’ that Joe appears to be operating under – a definition that conveniently leaves him unhindered and unpunished to afflict on his children certain torment and certain death. Joe: “I want to leave a legacy. My children might cure cancer or stop the world from burning up.” To use ‘curing cancer’ and ‘stopping the world from burning up’ as reasons to procreate, leads me to believe that these causes are important to you. To want to leave a legacy (which is a statement of intent), leads me to believe that you’ll be making an effort to do so. I imagine that the bare minimum effort required for someone who intends on leaving this kind of legacy, would be to set an example to their children. Dictionary.com Joe does nothing to help cure cancer or stop the world from burning up – neither of these things has he mentioned as an active concern, nor do I know of any initiatives he’s part of, to effect these goals. The behaviours don’t exist for your children to imitate, which means the chances of you leaving this kind of legacy are near zero. How will your children learn of these causes (let alone be inspired to contribute to them) if they’re not even on your radar? Why should your kids solve these problems if you can’t be bothered? At this rate, 4 your legacy is more likely to be mass murder – terrorists have more interest in indoctrinating your kids to a cause than you do. Since it is apparent that you are not capable of achieving your intended legacy, perhaps you misspoke. Should your response have been: “I want to leave a legacy. My children might cure leprosy or develop a vaccine for malaria.”? Or: “I want to leave a legacy. My children might cure AIDS or instigate world peace.”? What else might they do (no thanks to you)? You don’t care enough about any of these ideals to set an example to anyone, which means the chances of you leaving this kind of legacy remains at near zero. The effort behind your gesture amounts to “procreate and hope for the best”. If terrorists don’t have their way with your children, rest assured – you’re fully capable of ensuring that the legacy you leave will be your kids can play video games moderately well. I thought you were using the word ‘might’ in the sense that it’s going to be incredibly difficult for your children to cure cancer or stop the world from burning up in their lifetimes. Actually, it turns out you also meant ‘might’ in the sense that you might not give enough shits about said issues to bother getting your kids on the case. Who knows – perhaps you’ll surprise me when your children are born and you’ll suddenly start caring enough to meet the bare minimum effort your statement requires. Since it is apparent that there is nothing concrete behind your intention to leave this legacy (other than relying on blind hope), I am inclined to suspect that the primary (perhaps only) purpose of your response was to make yourself feel good. Your response might as well have been: “I want to leave a legacy. My children might {insert dopamine-inducing ideals here}.” Perhaps I’m wrong – perhaps I don’t know you as well as I thought. Perhaps you’re the most qualified person to make this kind of statement. Let’s pretend then, that you, with your PhDs in the related fields, spend every waking moment working on a cure for cancer or preventing the world from burning up (or whatever cures for ailments or achievements you pass through this statement to get your hit). Let’s pretend that you’ll guide your children to contribute to these causes to the fullest extent of their abilities, at the expense of all unreasonable time-wasting. Your own morality forbids you from practicing slavery, yet by procreating (with this legacy in mind, or to fill the purpose-shaped hole in your life), you’re forcing your children (through their screaming, tears, blood and deaths) to achieve someone else’s goals. Your goals. Your slaves may be subject to the problems you created them to fix. Why should the unconceived fix the problems of the conceived? Only the conceived have problems. Leave the unconceived out of it. Leave the unconceived in your imagination, in your pants, or as a stain on your bed. 5 Me: “Legacy? Isn’t that just an idea that makes you feel good? If there were no people, cancer and the world burning up wouldn’t be a problem for us.” Joe: “But then there’d be no people…” Think about it – you supposedly don’t support pain and death. You don’t want cancer and the world burning up to be a problem for anyone. So… don’t have kids. You get to feel good by not having kids – knowing that you won’t subject another human to any pain and suffering; neither will you consign them to the death sentence that is life. Cancer? The world burning up? No people = no problem. I interpreted his response as a sign that he was coming round to the idea. I nodded once, positively, with the intention of nudging him over the finish line. Joe: “OK, this’ll blow your mind – you can’t say that there isn’t an immortal person walking around out there.” It would appear that one person’s finish line is another person’s wall. The subject of this discussion is that Joe will be a killer if he procreates – how does his response change this? It doesn’t. It doesn’t change facts. It does change feelings. When Joe said “But then there’d be no people…”, he had a look of loss and despair on his face. Proposing that I cannot deny the existence of an immortal (changing the subject) made him feel better – he was right about something (else). My argument still stands. You are free to shoot up on dopamine and ignore it. That’s what this entire conversation has been – an exercise in Joe making himself feel good, rather than to justify procreating (perhaps these are one and the same thing). Having moved into the three-bedroomed house in question, he gave me a tour. From room to room, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of space two people had. I thought – “I do not like what’s going to happen here. A child, or children, who need never exist, for some reason must exist and therefore must suffer and die”. Joe later portrayed our conversation to others by claiming that, according to me, he’d be a murderer if he had children. I called him a killer, not a murderer. Murder is “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another”. Killers aren’t always murderers – there are, of course, government sanctioned, legal killers in your security services. Procreation should be criminalised, but it would be a stretch on the resources of the forces to police this as murder. 6 Chloe I recall a colleague who’s trying to fuck every man in sight. After two miscarriages, Chloe is incapable of becoming pregnant. Criticised by her mother for “not being a real woman”, she hopes to get a strong dopamine hit by conceiving children through IVF treatment and disallowing her mother from seeing them; rubbing salt in the wound by sending her an ultrasound scan. I suspected there were more (perhaps ‘better’) reasons for having children than this. Chloe: “I don’t know, actually… because you get free shit from the government like dental care, tax breaks and benefits. Maybe it’s because everyone else is doing it, all your friends are settling down. I want to continue my family name.” Having paused for a moment, she added: “To feel like I have made a successful step in my own life of having a child and seeing them grow up, knowing I’m the one that’s given birth to them and have made them into the person they have become. To be proud of myself for achieving something that some don’t have the opportunity to do.” Could you do something else? You’ve covered how conceiving children will make you feel good – I’m not seeing how this justifies putting new humans in coffins. If you’re at the stage in the relationship with your mother that you want to deny her access to your potential children, I imagine she won’t give a shit – you told me that she’s already been furnished with a couple of hobby horses by her son. 7 “…because you get free shit from the government like dental care, tax breaks and benefits.” A lot of us struggle with survival. If it’s the case that tradition or circumstance dictates or shapes women into no/low paying jobs where you live, and there is financial support available to you if you procreate, then I can understand the appeal of the financial alleviation that procreation can bring. But why should your children pay the ultimate price to alleviate your suffering or fill your pockets? It is your responsibility to improve your life without causing damage and destruction to other people in the process – gone are the days of child sacrifice for better weather …in all things but procreation. “Maybe it’s because everyone else is doing it, all your friends are settling down.” The human body produces (and can be induced into producing) dopamine, which we experience as good feelings and pleasure. Humans become addicts to this ‘drug’ from day one. As a child, I remember how good it felt to play with a toy (the dopamine ‘hits’), and the distress at having lost it (the psychological withdrawal/cold turkey). At the time, it was the most important toy I had, because it induced the highest amount of dopamine in my body – it was my ‘primary dopamine inducer’ of toys; likewise, my siblings and parents were my primary dopamine inducers of humans. At any one time, we can have multiple primary dopamine inducers in their respective categories. As a child, one of my primary dopamine inducers was a doll. As I grew, I became aware of and sampled other objects and experiences that induced stronger dopamine hits. Whatever those objects and/or experiences were, the new dopamine inducers replaced the old ones. For a time, I revisited the old dopamine inducers, but it wasn’t long before I left them behind, for good (quite literally for ‘good’ – for dopamine). When I lost my doll, how do I know it didn’t leave me behind for a better toy (a stronger dopamine hit)? It left me distraught, wailing for its return. As I grew, I did the same thing – I left it behind for a stronger dopamine hit (video games). How did that make the doll feel? Perhaps as distraught as I was, when it ‘left’ me. The doll, of course, did not leave me and it felt nothing – it’s a toy. But replace the toy with sentient beings who can hurt (pets, family, friends and lovers) – it becomes a less trivial matter for those left behind. Case in point – “all your friends are settling down”. Your primary dopamine inducers (friends) have found new primary dopamine inducers (their partners), leaving you in withdrawal. They’re still your friend, but their footfall in your life becomes that of a stranger. So you figure – make new friends (which seems to get harder as you age). Even then, a new friend is a relationship away from becoming an acquaintance. Why? The stimulation of sex organs induces the strongest dopamine hits – friends typically seek other people for this kind of activity. Pleasure seeking leaves in its wake a trail of suffering. Lovers leave the greatest amount of suffering in their wake because: 1. Lovers typically focus on one person to the exclusion of all other dopamine dependencies (their ex-partners and friends). 8 2. Love typically results in sexual reproduction – lovers leave in their wake all of the suffering that their children will experience. It is no surprise that you want to follow in your friends’ footsteps, given that they appear to have won the dopamine jackpot – yet, you forget that they’re having a great time at your expense; yet, you don’t realise that you’re about to do the same thing to your friends. If you’re in love, you leave in your wake your suffering ex-partner(s) and friends. If you focus on a ‘best’ friend, you leave in your wake your other suffering friends. In all of these pursuits, you leave in your wake your suffering family members. Behind us is wake after wake after wake of suffering. Everyone who likes you suffers because of your pleasure seeking, and your pleasure seeking blinds you to the suffering you cause. That sounds pretty dangerous to me, and all we’re talking about is improving our wellbeing. Then we must contend with a life that infects us, breaks our bones, abuses and: kills us – the final wake of suffering unleashed by life. Despite our intentions, there is no result in reality where we don’t leave or die, causing one of us to be left behind again as the suffering spectator. “I want to continue my family name.” I ate a salad and I enjoyed it. When I think about salad, that memory is triggered. Not only is the memory triggered, but so are the dopamine hits that were originally induced by that experience. You’re familiar with this process – a classic example of this is when you take trips down memory lane, remembering the good old days. Why do we do this? Because it makes us feel good now. As memories fade, so do the dopamine hits associated to them (both in their number and intensity) – we call this ‘diminishing returns’. When you invoke the notion of continuing your family name, you are remembering (thus, re-inducing the dopamine hits associated with) your family experiences so you can feel good now (refreshing the returns). Dopamine is addictive, it makes you want more of it. Because family members have made you feel good, you want more family members. I don’t know what ‘continuing your family name’ means. When you invoke the notion, all I see is a drug addict shooting up, getting high off the idea. “To feel like I have made a successful step in my own life of having a child and seeing them grow up, knowing I’m the one that’s given birth to them and have made them into the person they have become. To be proud of myself for achieving something that some don’t have the opportunity to do.” You don’t need to create people to feel good. You have a dependency for a quantity and quality of dopamine generated through peopled experiences – initially through pleasant family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues and strangers. Through time into adulthood, you become distant from these dopamine inducers; you suffer from withdrawal. It’s logical to seek the quantity and quality of dopamine you’ve become accustomed to, by starting your own intimate relationship and family. But this is the logic of a drug addict. If your addiction only hurt you, then it’s nobody else’s business, but you have reproductive organs – the stimuli of which enhances the 9 addiction to the point where people invariably afflict their addiction (thus pain, suffering and death) on other people via procreation. You have a choice to do something else. Realise that the quantity and quality of dopamine you’ve become accustomed to can be generated by other activities and experiences. Ask yourself: “Can I feel good without causing damage and destruction to anyone else in the process?”. The answer is yes, and you’ve probably already done it – by babysitting your nieces or nephews. I’ve done it. A classic babysitter response is: “It’s nice having them round, but it’s equally as nice to send them home.”. Granted, we don’t all think this way – me and my niece would’ve liked me to become her missing parent, full time. I wasn’t looking to become a parental figure by being the go-to babysitter, but it happened and I understand the appeal – but I also know that you don’t have to create people to have these experiences and you can live a satisfying life. Consider… 1. Babysitting 2. The caring of pets 3. Fostering/adoption …as the methadone substitutes to your heroin-like addiction. I’m not suggesting that we breed more people and pets to maintain these substitutes – this would continue to inflict pain, suffering and death on the involved species by proxy. The ideal scenario is to be drug-free – but given that we are born as drug manufacturers and addicts, to be drug-free is to be unconscious or not alive. If these options aren’t available to you without significant pain and suffering, then consider other substitutes. I work through my own suffering by writing this book; watching TV; listening to music and playing video games. I’ve been toying with the idea of teaching myself to play the piano. You have countless dopamine-inducing activities available to you and a lot of them don’t involve risking sexual reproduction. Since you can sate your needs by other means, there’s no excuse to inflict further suffering, right? Speaking about a lover, who she suspected of cheating on her: "I just want something to live for. If he gets me pregnant then I've got what I want and he can fuck off.” You make it sound like you cannot go on living without having kids, yet you’ve lived this long without them. Not only lived, but presumably you’ve been entertained enough by life without kids to refrain from committing suicide. Clearly, kids are not necessary for your entertainment or survival. 10 Criminal Consequences How can you claim ignorance of, or deny inflicting pain, suffering and death via procreation when: 1. You suffer? 2. You witness the suffering of others (typically your loved ones)? 3. You witness death (typically in the form of attending funerals) and the suffering it causes? 4. The news repeatedly reports on suffering; on the dying and dead? We protest against suffering; we grieve and complain when we lose our loved ones, but virtually no responsibility is taken (or assigned to) parents that are primarily culpable for causing the pain, suffering and death of children that never had to be alive to suffer and die. When are you going to take responsibility for the suffering and death you cause by procreating? If you’re pregnant, which of the more-or-less 161,280 opportunities to arrange an abortion are you going to take, to prevent your children suffering any more than they should have to? Why do you concern yourself with morality when you pause it to satisfy your addiction at the expense of your children? 1. Your body manufactures dopamine and you are addicted to it – to be alive is to be a captive addict. Quite literally, captive – under the care of parents or guardians who, at the very least, catered for your basic bodily needs by feeding and cleaning you. A lot of us will have had our dopamine induced by their stimuli; by the stimuli of our siblings – through games and story time, experiences and adventures, through friendships – cultivating the belief that overall, people are good. You were conveniently not informed that your parents were the authors of all of your suffering and inevitable death. Instead, you were told that your birthday was happy, and you were made to feel happy on that day – the association of good feelings to your parent’s crime; the association of good feelings to birth and people, serving as encouragement to repeat your parent’s crime. 2. The strongest dopamine hits are attained through sexual activity between two or more people – usually a man and a woman. As our bodies develop through and beyond puberty, we carry the belief that people are good into our sexual landscape (when our reproductive organs are fully active to induce the strongest dopamine hits, upgrading the addiction). Sexual intercourse usually causes the participants to experience maximum pleasure in the complete absence of pain. As a child, I knew it probably wasn’t a good idea to kick the pebble finish off a garage wall, when one day I kicked it so hard that my big toe became swollen and 11 black, causing me to limp home in tears. People seldom ‘stub their toe’ during sex – there is no pain; no biological warning signs to suggest that the reproductive consequences of sex is bad. 3. Children can provide you, the drug addict, with your lifetime’s supply of drugs. You can create and hold your own dopamine factories hostage, reliving your childhood through them; catering for their basic bodily needs by feeding and cleaning them; inducing your and their dopamine through games and story time, experiences and adventures, through friendships; cultivating their belief that overall, people are good. You get a life-long multitude of dopamine-inducing interactions with your children because they typically outlive their parents. The likelihood of a child dying before its parents do are slim, so a parent, in general, never expects to be emotionally inconvenienced by their children’s deaths because they themselves will have already died. In summary, you were unknowingly born as a drug addict; an addiction that typically associates good feelings to people (thus, if you want more good feelings then you want more people), and as it happens, you have the ability to create more people; and the act of creating people feels good; and the end product is a drug factory for a drug addict. How could you have ever suspected that it was wrong to procreate when your body is built to do it; your body tells you it’s good and you’re surrounded by beings who are afflicted by the same condition? You live in a world of addicts enabling addicts, a circus of clowns creating clowns because clowns are good because good feels good. You were on biological auto-pilot, abetted by pleasure and aided by time – the stealth technologies of the sentient condition that allows the negative consequences of procreation to a) appear benign/friendly to, or b) avoids detection on, your emotion radar. That is what we are – emotion radars. What are radars primarily useful for? Sensing danger, such that those dangers can be avoided, reduced or prevented. The pain signals detected on our emotion radar form and inform our rules of behaviour and conduct – the building blocks of morality. It follows then, that the purpose of morality is to promote the avoidance, reduction and prevention of pain, suffering and death. Procreation is the creator of pain, suffering and death, therefore procreation stands in direct contradiction to the purpose of morality. The rules of any morality (held personally and/or organisationally) that encourages procreation are based on the benefits of a drug addiction, benefits that are considered more important than sparing humanity (often children) from starvation, disease, broken bones, abuse, rape, torment and depression; sanctioning it entirely acceptable that new people must experience dying – tortured by their failing bodies or succumbing to (often violent) accident, suicide or murder. Your ‘morality’ is addiction-weighted, camouflaged by parents as ‘caring’. 12 There is a fault in the underlying technology of our morality – dopamine disables our emotion radar at detecting procreation as dangerous because the only way to attain the greatest ‘hit’ is to engage in sexual conduct with organs capable of reproducing the species. The organs responsible for our suffering and death are conveniently the ones that give us the greatest pleasure (both in the act of procreating and through the dopamine-inducing interactions of the lives created), which is why procreation (as a cause of suffering and death) gets a free pass through our morals and laws (the morals and laws whose entire purpose is to prohibit and punish the causes of suffering and death). Life is a battlefield upon which no one is required to participate, but we are forced onto it by parents who seem to have had every chance to make other choices. Where was our parent’s concern for our safety and wellbeing before we were conceived? They live their lives in a world that prohibits and punishes acts that will cause other people pain, suffering and death, yet prior to conception, we were somehow exempt from these basic protections; exempt from the rules that make up the ‘morality’ that our own parents live by; exempt from the laws that were inspired by such rules and moralities. At the very least, we should consider the concept of consent before we procreate. Critics of anti-natalism find the concept of consent absurd and irrelevant, because how can you get consent from someone who doesn’t exist? An un-conceived life is unable to give consent to being conceived because they do not exist to give it. Their mind is not available to be queried. A person in a coma is unable to give consent to participating in sexual activities because they are not conscious to give it. Their mind is not available to be queried. How do I tell the difference between a procreator and a rapist? Both of them either haven’t considered the concept of consent in their actions, or if they did, they considered it irrelevant in the process of pleasing themselves. “The longest human lifespan is that of Jeanne Calment of France (1875–1997), who lived to the age of 122 years, 164 days.” Wikipedia Everyone alive today will suffer and die within the next 122 years, 164 days. Most of them will suffer and die within the average human lifespan (72.6 years). That’s about 7.8 billion children, women and men. Why do you give a shit about The Holocaust where only 6 million people died? Or World War 2 where only 70-85 million people died? Is it because you can see it happening more-or-less all at once in documentaries, in all its gruesomeness (whereas, in comparison, we normally learn of a few deaths in our lifetime, separated by decades and we rarely see the bloodied bodies (they are quickly scraped off roads and buried or burned))? Is it because they were killed without being made to feel good beforehand? That’s how you justify inflicting pain, suffering and death on your children via procreation, isn’t it? It’s OK if the victim feels good about what you did. If the SS had done with their prisoners what parents do with their children (provide adequate water, food and health care; entertain them and foster a sense of hope for the future (along with not mentioning the whole “you’re going to suffer and die and it’s my fault” thing)), then nobody could’ve complained 13 about what they were doing. Hey – don’t get angry with me, I’m using your rules here, from your morality. Of the 7.8 billion children, women and men, over the next 122 years, 164 days, every 5 years of that (split evenly) will see just under 325 million of them suffer and die in the gas chamber that is Earth. This is the number of peace-time deaths we‘re supposed find ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ (but not the 70-85 million war-time deaths in the same amount of time). We’re supposed to find it ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ that sentient life is a continuous Holocaust and basic human survival requires us to exacerbate the Holocaust of several other species on an industrial scale. I watched a video entitled ‘male chick maceration’, a solid 5 minutes of a conveyor belt feeding live baby chickens into a meat grinder, along with the egg shells they shouldn’t have hatched from. Each procreator, when they conceive new lives, turns the wheel of the conveyor belt – not just for their own species, but for the species they depend on to survive. Each and every parent contributes to this mass killing; each and every parent is a pixel in the portrait of their species’ morality, and that image is red. It is ironic that antinatalists care more about the safety of children than parents do. You are prepared to (or have) put your children in a world that always inflicts pain, suffering and death on sentient beings. We don’t. https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com Criminal irresponsibility is innate in the sentient condition, a built-in defence for its crimes that uses ignorance and addiction to perform a moral bypass on its hosts, ensuring the continuation of the species. On the other hand, nobody, it seems, is pointing a gun at your head, compelling you to reproduce. If you do, your kids will suffer and die to get you high. I propose that ‘innocence through addiction-lead ignorance’ is no longer an acceptable defence. 14 Why do foetuses get to die better than us? We need to align our purported morality with reality, perhaps enshrined as a ‘National Mercy Service’, whose mission statement could be: “Life is not healthy. It is a terminal disease. Suffering is guaranteed. The prevention of life is our primary mission. We should promote the idea that procreation should be a well-thought conscious decision, rather than an instinctual consequence by irresponsible pleasure seekers. Given that our bodies have a head-start on indoctrinating us to multiply, we should build into our species artificially innate measures that force us to consider the implications of what we’re about to do (beyond getting our next hit): 1. Build into our sex education the concept of anti-natalism. 2. Apply a Do Not Resuscitate order on existing and new people; an order that the subject can opt out of. 3. Sterilise all new people, but make it reversible. 4. Imprison parents for one day per child if carried to term. We died when we were conceived because no one intervened. When the subject is taught anti-natalism in conjunction with sex education; when the subject learns of their Do Not Resuscitate order or sterilisation; when the subject observes others (or is themselves) imprisoned for carrying to term their offspring: it is at these points in the subject’s life, we hope they pause for thought to understand why these measures were implemented – life will torment, damage and destroy everyone afflicted with it. Creation contradicts the morality our common behaviours portray. If our mission fails and life is brought to suffer, we should facilitate a willing subject’s termination in as painless a manner as possible (render them unconscious via general anaesthetic, followed by a lethal dose). No effort and expense should be spared to acquire the best drugs and materials to aid in this endeavour, or to transport the subject to a participating facility. This is the only decision about the subject’s existence that the subject has a choice in – it should be harassed equally as much as the decision to procreate is. We didn’t ask to be here, we damn well deserve an easy way out.” Abortion is an easy way out… “Deciding to have an abortion The decision to have an abortion is yours alone. Some women may be certain they want to have an abortion, while others may find it more difficult to make a decision. All women requesting an abortion can discuss their options with, and receive support from, a trained pregnancy counsellor if they wish. 15 Impartial information and support are available from:  your GP or another doctor at your GP practice  a counselling service at the abortion clinic  organisations such as Brook (for under-25s), BPAS, Marie Stopes UK and NUPAS You may also want to speak to your partner, friends or family, but you do not have to. They do not have a say in your decision. If you do not want to tell anyone, your details will be kept confidential. If you're under 16, your parents do not usually need to be told. The doctor or nurse may encourage you to tell a parent, carer or other adult you trust, but they will not make you.” https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/abortion/ …but once you’re conceived, you’re a slave to the addicts that created you – primarily your parents, then siblings, friends, partners, associates etc. Thus, you are usually brought to term to operate as part of your family’s (and society’s) drug supply. What are your options if you’ve decided you want to die? How easy is it to commit suicide? Well, you being dead denies your addicts their drugs, so it’s incredibly difficult. Suicide is legal, but assisting suicide is illegal. It is illegal to assist someone who is performing a legal act. The suicidal are therefore deprived of a humane death (in a clinic or hospital, perhaps), forcing them to consider painful, possibly violent alternatives, which can result in further suffering through injury and disability (if the attempt fails). Should the suicide be successful, the suicider risks their family, partner and/or friends finding their body, perhaps in a shocking, gruesome state. The authorities addicts, of course, know what they’re doing. They know that they can't prevent suicide, but they can heavily discourage it by making it as difficult as possible. For the suicides that they don’t discourage, the suicider died inhumanely at the hands of a manipulative and barbaric legal system. Suicidal thoughts/depression are interpreted as signs of an illness, but what if depression is withdrawal from our built-in addiction? What if the addiction is the illness, and depression is a sign of sobering up? To be drug-free through this lens would require you to be unconscious or dead, but you don’t necessarily have to die with your negative emotions and you don’t have to procreate to be re-addicted to life. That being said, if you want out, you should be let out, near enough no questions asked (unlike a foetus, you can assess the evidence of your suffering and communicate your preference). Instead, the authorities addicts conduct an interrogation on the sufferer: they are questioned; commanded to re-assess; to be made to feel like they don’t know their own mind; second-guessed; unsupported in their aim; emotionally blackmailed; prohibited; detained, counselled and medicated at the hands of a manipulative and barbaric health system. 16 Anti-natalism extremely detracts from a natalist’s addiction to life, so it is understandable that our critics believe that we have arrived at our position via depression; that our position is invalid because we arrived at it via what they consider to be an illness. As much as I dislike the feeling of having my world view dismissed by the suggestion that I’m ill, it is not obvious to me how someone becomes an antinatalist without having their drug supply persistently depressed by the negative aspects of life. People can experience this depression in a general way – witnessing and empathising with the suffering of others. A lot of us, however, have to experience our own suffering as a constant or repetitive torture. You might find that surviving depression makes you appreciate that compassion for future suffering should result in its prevention, not its propagation for the sake of addiction fulfilment, especially when the addiction can be fulfilled by non-procreative means. Suicide causes future suffering too, so it could be argued that anti-natalists should be in opposition to suicide for the same reason; that the suicidal have an obligation to their dopamine dependencies not to proceed. You are emotionally blackmailed by the simple fact that you were brought to term in a world that forces addicts to become addicted to each other, who will then suffer if that addiction is ripped away. Not only did you have no choice but to be brought into this world to suffer, you seemingly have no choice about leaving this life at a time and painless method of your choosing; no, your suffering must continue in order to protect the addiction of your dopamine dependencies. Fuck that. Where are your parents? I feel like punching them in their junk. Just as parents have flagrant disregard for the pain, suffering and death they author on their children by creating them, so should the suicidal be afforded flagrant disregard for the suffering that their suicide causes. You don’t necessarily have to be depressed and/or suicidal to have these thoughts, you’re just assessing the options kindly provided to you by your parents. The nonsuicidal seem happy to continue sucking every last drop of dopamine from reality’s teat until they are subject to one of the aforementioned ‘options’ (causes of death (list not exhaustive)): stroke, heart attack, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer, asphyxiation, beaten, stabbed, shot, burned, crushed or blown up. Is it wrong to want an easier death than these? Most people would wish to die peacefully in their sleep. Well, they can. We have the barbiturates to render people unconscious and kill them by overdose, making all other methods of dying inhumane (especially inhumane when the addicts give the suicidal no other option than to do something like stand in front of a moving train). We could’ve repurposed Harold Shipman for the job. Unfortunately, the Nazis gave organised dying a bad name. The suicidal want to die peacefully in their sleep too, but they don’t have to wish when there is Nembutal. Guess what the addicts banned. In the regions where physician-assisted suicide is illegal, your ‘right to die’ is an illusion. You must beg, plead, ask the addicts nicely that alongside Maternity wards (entry from nothingness) we add Eternity wards (exit to nothingness), such that we can die gracefully; with dignity; at a time of our choosing. In the regions where physician-assisted suicide is legal, your right to die is conditional: you must be of a certain age; already suffering; usually terminally ill. You must get other people’s opinions, meet various criteria, sign multiple documents, confirm and re-confirm your intention until you are blue in the face (from suffocating on the bureaucracy). Parents get to kill their kids by 17 creating them on a whim, no questions asked, with encouragement, support and benefits from governments and health systems. I've never liked the idea of dying on life's terms (at the hands of a random ailment, accident or attack), but I don’t consider myself suicidal in the classic sense. I enjoy life just enough to risk the regular fates, but I’d like to have the option of a graceful exit at any age (when reality focuses on my mortality). I can, however, envisage a day where I get slightly annoyed and down Nembutal as if it’s nothing more eventful than drinking a cup of tea (stubbing my toe for the one-hundredth time might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back). Sure, I’d be acting on an emotion that might not be there this time tomorrow. When all dopamine leaves all thoughts and I am empty, my body still breathes – there is no necessity for my body to die with the dopamine. To pause my suffering, I carefully re-addict myself to life without propagating suffering via procreation. Through my understanding of life as an addiction, I take the suicide out of depression and the killing out of happiness. I might appear content. Happy, almost. Perhaps successful. But don’t confuse management of suffering with affirmation of life. Make no mistake – I am here under duress. 18 Your dopamine destination doesn’t have to continue the species I recall a colleague who was talking about how many children she wanted with her fiancé. Grace: “I want four kids and he wants two, so we’ve compromised on three.” Me: “How about zero kids?” Grace: “I like kids! We’ve got to have some otherwise humanity will go nowhere.” Me: “Why does humanity have to go somewhere?” Grace: “Wow, this has gone a bit morbid, hasn’t it?!” You have expressed a need to drive our species via procreation to some sort of destination, but you have not stated where (just that if we don’t have kids, our species will go ‘nowhere’). When questioned as to why humanity has to go somewhere, your response was indicative of you having your dopamine supply reduced or depressed, revealing that the destination you’re referring to is a dopamine hit. This is typical sentient behaviour – we strive for our next dopamine hit; we are biologically driven to our next dopamine destination. What you meant by “humanity will go nowhere” was: its members would no longer have a dopamine destination to travel to (on the assumption that every member of our species is sufficiently addicted to the dopamine induced by new lives, such that they have a desire to procreate). Google You’re the one that has (what is sadly considered) a ‘normal’ and ‘healthy' interest in the disturbing and unpleaseant subjects of afflicting disease on your children before filling three coffins with their dead bodies via procreation. 19 Given that the word ‘morbid’ is commonly associated with death, you appear to be conflating there being no more people with losing people (losing people – aside from relationship failures – is typically achieved by them dying). Whilst the children you plan on creating don’t exist (thus, cannot die; thus, cannot be lost), your dopamineinducing expection of the dopamine hits you’d receive from them does exist (thus, can ‘die’; thus, can be lost). Google Dopamine gives life meaning; ‘the meaning of life’ is whatever is inducing repeated dopamine hits in your body through repeated ritual. Love is a famous meaning of life because the intensity of the dopamine hits is high due to the close physical (thus emotional; thus intimate (in the case of lovers)) proximity of lovers and family members; through the related rituals of courting, marriage, procreation, rearing etc. For those who are distracted from the dopamine hits offered by intimate physical relationships, they receive repeated dopamine hits (that are purportedly an equivalent intensity as that of physically-induced feelings of love) through new or established belief systems; through the related rituals of study, worship, ceremony, sacrifice etc. A person who does nothing but build and play with model railways also has a meaning of life, regardless of the fact that she/he would be receiving less intense dopamine hits than the people we typically consider to have a ‘true’ or ‘proper’ sense of meaning in their lives. By removing new lives from your addiction equation, anti-natalists are removing the dopamine hits that give your life meaning, making us appear to believe that life is meaningless; making us appear to be nihilists. A person who writes a book that could be described as “sucking all the joy out of life” has a meaningful life, because I’ve received repeated dopamine hits from the repeated ritual of writing this book. Who says life is meaningless if we stop procreating? The addicts who rely on procreation to get their dopamine hits. This reveals a failure of imagination. Whilst I don’t believe that life is ever worth starting, once you’re lumbered with it, life has many aspects to it that can make it meaningful, thus worth continuing (assuming that you have the emotional agility to re-addict yourself to aspects of it when depressed (or if you choose the easy option: to take anti-depressants)). We don’t believe that life is meaningless, we know that life can be meaningful without forcing new people to pay the price for our wellbeing. Anti-natalism, if adopted by everyone, would result in our extinction. What, exactly, is bad about extinction? The movie and TV industries have done a fantastic job at making us recoil in horror at the notion – we almost exclusively believe that becoming extinct causes immense pain and suffering. Temperature extremes; hurricanes; earthquakes; tsunamis; resource depletion; disease; nuclear war; alien invasion; planetary destruction. The focus is on losing; loss. Anti-natalism, as a method of extinction, inflicts no pain, no suffering and kills no one. No one is lost. It’s a gradual process whereby the existing addicts find non-procreative ways to 20 entertain themselves until they die. There are plenty of people who, for various reasons, don’t procreate – and their reasons don’t necessarily ally with, or align to anti-natalism. They are addicted to other aspects of life that don’t require its propagation. The only loss is the dopamine hits you expect to receive from procreating, which are replace-able. Nobody’s crying about all the non-existent people on Mars. You don’t have to cry about there being no more people on Earth. Change what you’re addicted to. Change your dopamine destination. 21 It’s about the journey, not the destination I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve been kidnapped; snatched from nothingness; stolen from peace; ripped from my freedom from disturbance to suffer my parent’s journey; to suffer: 1. Physical discomfort (too hot/cold; atmospheric/weather-caused clothing discomfort; maintaining the same position for too long (necessitated by using public transport etc.); exercise). 2. Thirst. 3. Hunger. 4. Being fed (and addicted to the taste of) meat and other animal products; made complicit in other sentient beings’ suffering and deaths from an early age. 5. Excretion of unpleasant substances. 6. Chores. 7. Small injuries (scuffs, bruising, cuts). 8. The common cold. 9. The flu. 10. Intense tooth ache (the “banging your head against a wall all night to distract yourself from the pain” type). 11. Tooth removal. 12. Broken bones. 13. Aches and pains of varying intensity. 14. Boredom. 15. Stubbing my toes. 16. Familial ‘duties’ imposed upon me in a family I never asked to be a part of. 17. The continued harassment of being torn from the peace of sleep to attend school. 18. Bullying. 19. Physical assaults. 20. Pressure to (or frustration/feelings of inadequacy by failing to) achieve something. 21. The continued harassment of being torn from the peace of sleep to attend work (slavery to survival). 22. Humiliation/loss of dignity. 23. Stress. 24. Fear. 25. Anxiety. 26. Panic attacks. 27. Grief. 28. Depression. It all adds up, however minor or mitigated these pain points seem or become. Compared to my previous state (of not existing), I do not appreciate paying these prices for my parent’s optimism. But calling these ailments and injuries “prices” (or “impositions”) is being too polite. These are attacks. Attacks that will result in my death. I consider my conception an attack. If one person inflicted some (or all) of these ailments and injuries upon me, with the result being my death (whether they intended to injure and kill me or not), it would be hard not to take it personally. 22 Instead, two people did this to me. Nothing has changed. Anti-natalism isn’t just a philosophy. This is personal. We tolerate these attacks because they’re compensated with nature’s currency – dopamine. We are biologically lead to believe that dopamine is a fix; a solution to our problems, but it’s a drug fix. It’s the equivalent of giving morphine to a mortally wounded soldier. Sure, you’ve fixed her suffering (temporarily), but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s still bleeding to death. You made her feel good about a bad situation. That’s all we’re doing – making ourselves feel good about this bad situation. Dopamine is addictive, drug-like; it has withdrawal symptoms such as distress, grief and depression – we invariably become addicted to temporary dopamine inducers (other humans) that will leave or die, so these ‘fixes’ (and happiness) are also future suffering in disguise. Pleasure, via propagation, creates the problems it ‘fixes’. Unfortunately, it seems that we’d rather have the problems so we can feel good from the ‘fixes’, than to not have the problems at all. Is it possible to be happy without it being compensation for (or a cause of) suffering? What makes you happy that isn’t needed to distract you from (or delay) your suffering? Natalists and anti-natalists, at their core, want the same thing – to solve suffering. Natalists remain addicted to the biological belief that the problem can be solved with dopamine (they want to maintain the addiction in the process). They focus on improving the potency of the temporary drug fixes – their innovators and inventors greatly improve (or otherwise revolutionise) our modes of living, socialising, health and mobility. Innovations and inventions imbue and enrich words like ‘progress’ and ‘future’ with an inordinate amount of dopamine, subconsciously requiring or commanding us to create more engineers and consumers to innovate, invent and consume the dopamine hits that each innovation or invention promises to induce. We need to resist these calls to conception – the mission is to solve suffering, not to feel good about the impossibilities of achieving it without extinction. We cannot be free from suffering if we insist on creating new lives; we cannot have morality and humanity. We’ve had about 200,000 years and thrown over 100 billion people at this problem – I tentatively suggest that we’re pissing in the wind. If the addiction-retaining solution to suffering is to be continuously under the influence of dopamine, perhaps this explains why we immerse ourselves in ‘dopamine bubbles’ (family, friends, fucking, faith, fortune, future), whose walls we fortify to mitigate or deny the depressing effects of reality’s dopamine disrupters. The extent of our (almost wilful) ignorance or denial of our suffering possibilities (to protect our dopamine bubbles; to protect our addictions) can be extreme – I’ve met people who genuinely believe that they can prevent all harm to their offspring …until cot death strikes. Reality does not have ignorance of, nor does it deny unsavoury possibilities because you do. Religion was/is most effective at ensuring its adherents receive a continuous supply of dopamine (or desperate concoctions of antidotes to suffering that bend or break the constraints of reality); it has the advantage of outliving the more temporary dopamine-inducing alternatives. But the World Wide Web and an increased understanding of reality (delivered through refined atheist rhetoric) have made it too easy to puncture the faith dopamine bubble. When the religious find release from their dopamine-inducing beliefs, they face the stark prospect that there is no cosmic parent or purpose; they might contemplate their 23 insignificance in the vast cosmos – it can be a bit depressing. They might ask: “What’s it all for?” and “What’s the point?”. When non-anti-natalists find release from their species addiction, they face the stark reality that all of their suffering and eventual death was for the sake of an orgasm by addict parents whose addiction camouflages itself as a cure (but is in fact the cause of all suffering); they might contemplate that the only purpose of life is to continuously create, torment and kill innocents – forget depressing: it’s a sick joke. One day, in all likelihood, I’ll have a heart attack, clutching my chest as I crawl to call for help. My life won’t be flashing before my eyes, I’ll be thinking about the alternative decisions and options my parents could’ve made or had, that could’ve prevented all my suffering and this fate. I might ask: “Why am I suffering when I didn’t have to?”, to then consider all in life I love and ask: “What was the point because I can’t keep any of it?”. Some people believe that by conceiving new lives, they are bestowing a gift on their children. Some of them believe that they are owed a debt of gratitude for doing so. You are owed, but it will not be with gratitude that you are repaid. I discovered early that to minimise deep suffering would be to minimise deep happiness; I would need to become a ‘dopamine minimalist’ (primarily, to avoid intimate relationships). That being said, my hormones kicked in and puberty took hold; after a few short relationships (one where I was on the brink of risking reproduction), I decided to distance my body from temptation; I banned myself from friendships and intimate relationships with members of the opposite sex. Over the years, I’ve crossed paths with many tempting, very compatible candidates for both, but I denied them all. In retrospect, perhaps I should’ve explained my position: “Liking you requires that a drug-like effect takes place in my body, of varying intensity and addictiveness. The degradation/loss of any relationship we have will cause me to experience withdrawal-like symptoms such as distress, grief or depression. I do not wish to experience these things again. In addition, we’d be inflicting these symptoms on any children we create, ensuring their deaths. I don’t dislike you, I dislike the inevitable suffering that liking you entails”. Given that anti-natalism withdraws natalists from their addiction, it can be an unwelcome philosophy; you are likely to reject it because it will deprive you of good feelings, but do you reject it for reasons that don’t stem from it depressing you? Or to put it another way, do you reject it for reasons that stem from your addiction to other dopamine-inducing aspects of life (that you feel warrants the continued reproduction of our species)? To reject anti-natalism on these bases is a declaration that your happiness (or the happiness of potential/actual parents) is more important than the pain, suffering and death of your (or their) children. Perhaps you reject it simply because I offended you – you might find anti-natalism as offensive as the person who exposed you to it. Your natural response might be to (predictably) act in opposition to the offender’s suggestion – you are free to procreate to spite an anonymous antinatalist that cares more about your children than you do. They say “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”. Must I really pander to your addiction? Pretty please, with sugar on top, stop torturing and killing your kids. Anti-natalists and mothers do it for the kicks because dopamine is the ‘do’ in do and don’t; we are both motivated by our addictions, but anti-natalists also do it for compassion. Compassion without exception defines morality. 24 I sometimes question whether it was necessary to attack Joe, Chloe, Grace, you; whether it was necessary to put this book past your eyes. What’s at stake here is the suffering and deaths of another 100 billion lives (and the rest). The suffering I cause by promoting anti-natalism this way is a small price to pay if at least one life is spared from suffering via non-procreation or abortion. My only regret is that your nature conspires to keep you ignorant of (or distracts you from) the suffering your addiction causes; necessitating an attack to penetrate your addiction (to burst your dopamine bubble(s)), to ensure the message gets delivered. Despite the vitriol, I don’t hate you. I hate suffering – but it seems that the only way to apply a permanent solution is to attack; to attack the cause (your body through your mind (because your mind is the controller of the cause, and the cause is your body (that has been evolutionarily designed to be an addict; an addiction that impels you to propagate suffering)). I appreciate that the motivation to write and distribute this book appears to come from a place of anger. This is not anger. This is weaponised compassion. Life does not just happen. Shit does not just happen. By procreating, you write a blank cheque for all possible outcomes – don’t complain when reality cashes it in at the expense of your children’s wellbeing and lives. The buck fuck stops with you: keep your trousers on, or your legs shut, or use contraception at all times and abort when pregnant. Better still, get yourself sterilised or fuck something other than the reproductive organs of the opposite sex. Your kids will suffer, your kids will die, you made it happen and you could’ve prevented it. Look, if you have to fuck, please – go fuck yourself.