Some natalists try to gaslight antinatalists into thinking that they actually have no issue with procreation. Let’s dispel this silliness.
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 – Intro
00:41 – Life Worth Starting vs Life Worth Continuing
04:04 – Catch-22s
06:40 – Natalist Stockholm Syndrome
10:40 – Doing Good
10:55 – Outro
“Why don’t you kill yourself right on the spot? If you are still here, you don’t regret being born.” Foolish comments such as these, alleged refutations of antinatalist philosophy, are quite telling of the naivety of “pro-life” advocates and their poor argumentation, which often takes for granted an inherent (and indisputable) goodness of coming into existence and life as such, on ontological and moral grounds. Lawrence Anton exposes the simple-mindedness of such claims and explains why the issue of antinatalism is not – and could not be – that simple (just as our humaine condition is not a simple thing, but a very complex one). Cioran would beg to agree.
According to Karl Barth, we could not even “draw a breath of life if, deep within us, there did not exist this certainty: God is just.” Yet there are those who still manage to live without knowing that certainty, even without ever having known it. What is their secret, and knowing what they know, by what miracle do they still draw breath?
CIORAN, History and Utopia (1960)
Why don’t I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.
CIORAN, The New Gods (1969)
The same man who says, “I don’t have the courage to kill myself,” will the next moment call cowardly an exploit before which the bravest would cringe. You kill yourself, we are forever being told, out of weakness, in order not to have to face suffering or shame. Only no one sees that it is precisely the weak who, far from trying to escape suffering or shame, accommodate themselves to such feelings—and that it requires vigor in order to win free of them decisively. In truth, it is easier to kill yourself than to vanquish a prejudice as old as man, or at least as his religions, so sadly impermeable to the supreme gesture.
CIORAN, The New Gods (1969)
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