Anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Their views are not necessarily limited only to humans but may encompass all sentient creatures, arguing that coming into existence is a serious harm for sentient beings in general. There are various reasons why antinatalists believe human reproduction is problematic. The most common arguments for antinatalism include that life entails inevitable suffering, death is inevitable, and humans are born without their consent. Additionally, although some people may turn out to be happy, this is not guaranteed, so to procreate is to gamble with another person’s suffering. WIKIPEDIA
If you think, maybe for a few years, like 10-20 years, no one should make babies, and when things get better, we can continue, then you are not an anti-natalist. Anti-natalists believe that suffering will always be there and no one should be born EVER.
This photo was clicked by a friend, at Linnahall.
No one chooses to be born, which is a condition stretching back to the first cellular life on this planet. That anyone should get a “stake” in their own birth is a ridiculous premise that defies the logic of how life works and the impermanence of everything in our universe. We are the only species that cares to consider beyond biological impulses if we should reproduce, which is a luxury. Responsible use of resources to care for any being in your care, be that a human or a pet, is an individual choice. An unhoused person can be a better pet parent than a rich person, and if you’ll notice, the Idiocracy prediction of smart people having fewer kids is playing out with or without anti-natalist support.
Or if you want to go with the reincarnation-approved viewpoint, we ALL chose to be born in some pre-incarnation realm, and we’re all set up in soul groups and we all have lives to live that make none of this worth discussing unless it harms others, which is something the pro-natalists are more into by wanting to disenfranchise childless and child-free people.
@hansolo@lemmy.today
It doesn’t have to defy the logic. It just requires ourselves to look around and see to where this world is headed. It just requires ourselves to read a history book and realize how humanity is repeating the same errors over and over again. It just requires us to notice how the world the future adults will have to live is likely worse than today’s world, as the climate bill, from the imprudent consumption started in past generations, already began to be charged.
If a parent, knowing how the future will be harsher than the present time, how Science and evidence are proving how we’re past the point of Paris Climate Treaty, even if we were to stop pollution today (the best time to stop all the greed of Industrial Revolution was a century ago, the second best time to stop Industrial Revolution was yesterday), how wet-bulb temperatures will get increasingly higher, if a parent still decides to bring someone to this Underworld to eventually melt under +60 degrees Celsius, this is what defies any logic. What kind of “future” is being expected for their offspring, really?
Yet we keep endangering ourselves and the other lifeforms.
My spiritual views are based on (among other belief systems) Gnosticism, where there’s Demiurge and his Archons trapping everything within this cosmos. My spiritual views diverge from pure religion as I also tend to consider scientific, non-anthropocentric views on all cosmos, so Demirge isn’t trapping humans, Demiurge is trapping energy and matter into existence, and we’re just part of this energy (self) and matter (biological vessel) being trapped in existence.
Cool, cool cool cool. I get you.
As for having a “stake” in anything, you’re just making a lot of fancy excuses for parents making an educated guess, which is what some parents have done forever. Ultimately, it’s projection and hope that parents can manage resources appropriately. They don’t always do that. Maybe they end up succumbing to alcoholism or dying in a car accident or anything else that frustrates best-laid plans. Everyone simply not having children isn’t the solution, though. For starters, generational gluts and booms can be debilitating to a culture and economy even in good times. Humans are animals, and we live on this earth not much above animals in terms of being subject to natural disasters that can wipe us away in moments. We only barely survived as a species about 900,000 years ago, with genetics research suggesting we withered to as few as 1,280 individuals. And it wasn’t the conscientious objectors and resource managers with no offspring that let us survive. It was the foolish horndogs who passed on the genes of being foolish horndogs and from which we are all descended by virtue of nearly a million years of horndogging. Which is not a suggestion to “be fruitful and multiply.” Simply that things balance themselves out or they don’t until they do. Let people do whatever they want and my DINK self will educate and divert resources to my nephews nieces and cousins, and my friend’s kids. And so it shall be until I have no more resources left to apply because disease and famine and climate change will boil this place until it’s all either desert or rain forest.
As for your brand of Gnosticism, I’m not exactly too far off, just with different labels. So we might be able to meet in the middle that if consciousness is a form of energy as self, that we’re “trapped” in order to experience - to have gnosis - of the world, and which carries costs that must be paid before freeing one’s self from the trap. That is, we can’t deny any being gnosis of any part, be that the gnosis of living a life filled with fear, like the parent that is an anti-natalist or a pro-natalist, or as the child born into a wondrous life of privilege, or as the child born into a dystopian hellscape. Who are we to likewise deny consciousness a chance to experience the chaos and possibly of thriving in it? Some humans just do. So why assume that every human, and human society, is frail and weak by default? Humans have survived worse. The Younger Dryas cataclysm, for example.
Which is all to say, both absolutes are silly because they’re impractical, untenable, and wholly a disservice to individuals and to the collective consciousness to some degree.