Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Tonight's Pondering
Do you think that, just perhaps, there's an approach to antinatalism that might incline towards some degree of mental health and stability? I'd like to think so, although assuredly that's a hard nut to crack. The conundrum, imo, appears to circle around optimism bias and the kind of depressive mentality that ofttimes (always?) seems to be a prerequisite to seeing through the bullshit. Unfortunately, the answer from some quarters is apparently just shit on everything and let God sort it out. Anyway, not offering any answers tonight, just thinking about new ways to frame things, because after all it's supposed to be about the suffering, right, and surely those who choose to keep on living deserve at least as much care and attention as those not yet or ever born, yes? I'd really like the seed of AN to bloom into something that everyone eventually can get behind, after all, and not smashed under the boot of those whose self-hatred becomes weaponized and deployed by the sickest amongst us. My two cents.
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There does seem to be a decent amount of evidence to support depressive realism. I credit my depressive nature with keeping me out of the financial trouble so many of my friends have gotten into over the years. Their "optimism" blinded them from the risk of going deeply into debt. They always thought their income would only go up, and they would never lose their job! More often than not we have experienced long periods of illness, health issues, childhood abuse/neglect etc. This leads to one of my main issues with most AN's. They treat their subjective value judgments as if they are objective and definable. As Nietzsche said, there are no moral facts. Like other AN's I assign a negative value to birth, it makes perfect sense to me from a risk/reward perspective. Obviously the majority of people feel differently. Us AN's are the odd balls here, whether we want to admit it or not. Humans are animals, and animals breed.
Yeah, I'm also on board the anti-moral realism train. I often hear this Rush anthem spinning in my head-
Why are we here? Because we're here. Roll the bones. Roll the bones.
Why does it happen? Because it happens. Roll the bones. Roll the bones.
But that's another subject.
You're one of the more sensible AN's I've come across Jim. The community is full of fanatics, assholes, and wannabe Stalin's and Hitler's. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't feel like I'm living in a giant insane asylum. I once thought that conversing with other AN's would relieve that feeling somewhat. Unfortunately that didn't really happen.
Well, you're welcome here, anyhow. I'm not much involved with the AN community at large, though more power to them as long as they're not treading the Inmendham path. Really haven't written anything half worthwhile in years and years, but I still have ideas and attitudes like everybody else. It's a journey, I guess. Not one I'd have chosen, but again, it is what it is. Thanks for contributing.
Seems to me that a lot of narrative around AN tries to avoid relating it to depression. We talk about it pretty freely on Josh's forum, but other than that, what I've seen is more about trying to be as intellectual, detached, objective and rational as possible. To a great fault, really.
Since a lot of people who criticise AN like to suggest that it comes from a depressive viewpoint, which infers that there's something just mentally wrong with it, I can understand not wanting to have a focus on mental health in general when publicising AN. But really, I think it's almost impossible to avoid. AN, and pessimism in general, is, at the end of everything, a matter of opinion. It's not that rational arguments can't be made, it's just that any attitude towards reproduction has to come from how one feels about it.
The act itself is irrational - in a lot of cases it just happens. So presenting a rational argument against it is no problem. It's whether one feels any need to do so in the first place. And to have any kind of attitude towards reproduction at all, you have to feel something before you rationalise it.
"It's not that rational arguments can't be made, it's just that any attitude towards reproduction has to come from how one feels about it."
I absolutely concur.
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