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Did everyone hear about the anti-natalist suicide bombing?
I feel like this warrants a lot more attention than I have seen it getting so far. Of course, antinatalist spaces are working to clarify the difference between anti-natalism and pro-mortalism, but bombing a fertility clinic is not merely pro-mortalism (unless you count embryos as human lives, I suppose, which none of the anti-natalists or pro-mortalists I know do).
But this looks like it was a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position. If you count Matthew Livelsberger (maybe you don't, since I guess he shot himself first?) this is our second leftist suicide bomber this year. Are these just not getting more attention because they failed to produce a significant body count? Because they didn't come with articulate manifestos? Because they were "lone wolf" actors? Because we want to keep the oxygen out of that room, lest a greater conflagration result?
Considered alongside the whole Ziz cult murder thing, I feel like I am watching the tentative re-emergence of something I have long associated with the 1970s or thereabouts (when it was all letter bombs and airplane hijacking)--radical intellectualism. From the 1980s through the 2000s, painting with a broad brush, my reflexive stereotype of terrorism was Islamic terrorism. This is very American of me, of course--this was also the operating era of the Tamil Tigers, for example, but most Americans could not say what country they threatened, nor point to it on a map. Terrorism--loosely defined as violence in furtherance of an ideology--is an idea that can be applied much more broadly than it normally is, but the central case seems most often to involve a racial, religious, or ethnic group acting in furtherance of identitarian interests. The connection between identitarianism and terrorism seems to me underexplored! But as a liberal who eschews both left- and right-identitarianism ("woke" and "alt-right," respectively) of course I would put it that way.
Anyway intellectual terrorism seems like a different sort of animal. It seems difficult to really get a group of people to cohere around pure ideas. The "rationalist movement," for example, is deeply fractious despite having managed to develop into something of an identity group, at least in San Francisco. But the left-wing prospiracy appears to have advanced to the point where it is sparking an increased number of violent radicals, declaring for causes that average people seem more likely to find confusing than anything else. To the average American, bombing a fertility clinic in the name of anti-natalism is like bombing a Chuck-E-Cheese in the name of anti-baloonism. "Well, that's obviously bad, but also... WTF? Was the bomber schizophrenic? Who's anti-baloonist?"
Here in the Motte we have rules against writing posts that are purely "can you believe what $OUTGROUP did" or picking the worst, most extreme examples of a group and holding them up as representative--so I want to add that I do not think anti-natalists are usually violent, or that bombing fertility clinics is especially representative of leftist political action. But of course the corporate news media gives no such disclaimers concerning, say, abortion clinic bombings or other right-coded "terrorism." Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe. To some extent I guess I'm Noticing this particular suicide bombing in part because the FBI is actually calling it terrorism--and maybe in part because the intellectual, rather than identitarian, nature of the terrorism makes me a little bit worried. Because on reflection that doesn't actually sound like blue tribe terrorism, quite, even if it is "radical left" coded; it sounds like grey tribe terrorism. And while I am clearly not a member of either the Zizian or anti-natalist factions of the grey tribe, I think that distinction would be utterly lost on most people.
(Actually I experience something similar when people attack universities; many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted, but sometimes I find myself wishing I had more of a platform, so that I could remind Republicans that there are still many conservative causes served by academia, and that some faculty members are broadly on their side and want to help. Please don't catch me in the crossfire...!)
Ow. Lost my comment. Brief, broad strokes repeat. Gotta get in before the blackpill from FCfromSSC.
A plug for Katherine Dee's substack article from yesterday which reported on "Efilism" as a branch of pro-mortalism. It appears more like like a collection emotional intuitions of disaffected radicals than principled philosophy. Although that could just be because I don't like it. He looked to Adam Lanza for inspiration.
An archived link to promortalism.com which is part of Bartkus' manifesto that the FBI references. I think?
Eco-fascists might want to rid humanity to save Earth, but Efilists want to rid the Earth of all sentient beings to tackle suffering. Overlap with the Zizians, for sure. Conveniently, the position justifies limitless violence near as I can tell. "Polar opposite of nonsense like nihilism..." ehh.
Regarding leftism and its role. If you polled anti-natalists the majority would consider themselves leftists. That does make anti-natalism left coded. They are revolutionary, they are making trade offs in the name of the collective, they dislike hierarchy and standard order of things. Leftist, but it's not anchored in traditional leftist doctrine or theory as far as I know. Are anti-natalists citing Marx or the Frankfurt School? I picture them as more lefty than leftist, but I'm not sure how useful that distinction is. It's obviously a useful distinction for the leftists, even radical ones, so they can get far away from this mess.
Certain lefty impulses, preferences, and perception of circumstance (including ailments), and manners of thinking are facilitated by the internet that facilitates any cult. Death ones, too. Mangione was acting alone from a well known position to the public, people understood his position, and yes he had a grey tribe tinge. This guy acted for an entirely unknown, foreign cause.
An age of boutique terrorism. It does all have 70's-esque feel, eh. These people should look to Buddhism if they can't stomach Christianity, or wood chopping, instead of lusting after wicked martyrs.
I dont think those are exterminsationist, or even anti-natalist on principle?
I don't know if they are anti-natalist on principle, I guess not, but they are/were anarchists with a deep, moral revulsion to animal suffering. Which doesn't demand senseless violence against people on its own, though they were apparently quite willing to commit senseless violence anyway. Did any of them have children or were planning to? Not damning evidence regardless, but is food for thought. Maybe they are more anti-natalist than they even know. Were they less familiar cult and more isolated, instanced movement, then they might have landed on bombing instead of interpersonal conflict.
There's not much transhumanist about exterminating life, but the acts and rationalization are second cousins. The ideological overlap is more distant. However, if the guy identifies Abolitionist Veganism as an adjacent ideology I'd say there's cause to question.
I'll also accept a charge that I consider radicals to be too similar in general. I'd protest we do seem to be making a few too many lefty radical doers for there to be no overlap.
No, but thats more to do with other demands on their time - an idea found in normal rationalism as well, though obviously not as serious/demanded. Ive talked about it before, but the zizian doctrine blows up even independently of the values.
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What do they want to exist? Plants? Maybe only rocks, because plants compete with one another for resources and that causes suffering?
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read these sorts of manifestoes, because they make no sense at all to me. "Suffering is bad, let's kill everything"? "Everything is going to die anyway, it's just not dying fast enough for us"?
Suffering would be defined as a specific process in the brain, so plants for example don’t suffer. It is a sort of extremist veganism where you posit that, on average, (animal) life is a net negative in terms of suffering, therefore the moral position is to prevent/end it. A biosphere-wide euthanasia
Life will undoubtedly sprout elsewhere, though. Really the only moral position is to DESTROY THE UNIVERSE!
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Found the solution to the Fermi paradox: negative utilitarians of such extremity that they sterilize all possible life to prevent the suffering of dust mites and other microscopic bugs and that means all animals. Yes, especially bugs.
I don’t understand the negativity. When I clean up my sheets, I like to think those dust mites getting boiled on the 70C program look on fondly on a life well lived in my bed. To me a little bit of suffering, a little bit of death, does not invalidate the awesomeness of living.
I don’t want to give insect welfare people any ideas, but if you assingn some utils to a dust mite’s life, it would make sense to farm gajillions of them for their utils. For a nominal sum, you could be creating entire universes of all singing all dancing beings. Accessorily, you wouldn’t have to worry about clipping a mite life here and there when you’ve been raising throngs of them from the ether.
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I feel like you could also reference communist China's deliberate embrace of Malthusian ethics in adopting the One Child Policy. I can maybe imagine a right-leaning government adopting such a plank — I've heard radicals suggest that legalized abortion is a deliberate policy to depress the TFR of certain supposedly-less-desirable subgroups — but in practice I associate it with left groups. There is also a left-coded streak of anti-human environmentalism that seems relevant (the right-coded environmentalists have a religious concept of human "dominion" that the left lacks).
When eugenics was a mainstream part of political discussion it was typically a left wing position; you can actually predict modern views on abortion based off of 1920's views of eugenics better than off of 1920's views of abortion. The closest thing to righty antinatalism is maybe the Singaporean two is enough campaign.
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What is it about modern society that has given rise to this absolutely overblown concern for “suffering?” We live in the most hedonic times imaginable in all of human history, and so the idea that anything less than total hedonic pleasure, or even less than net (50%+1) hedonic pleasure makes life not worth living is utterly bizarre to me. Millennia of people, intellectuals and not, passed through life experiencing plague, famine, short life expectancies, unanesthetized surgeries and dying of untreated cancers without coming to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to stop having kids, kill themselves early, or kill everyone.
This doesn’t even get into the issues surrounding this anti-life thinking and the hedonic treadmill. If my Oreo is good today, should I live? If it is slightly less good tomorrow, should I propose panicide?
I don't think it is the main reason (except for EAs), but if you believe that
then the rise of factory farming means that the amount of suffering for which the average human (and even more so the average lower-middle-class American) can be held responsible really has increased by an order of magnitude in the last 50 years or so.
Concern for animal suffering became a big deal within a generation of avoidable human-blameable animal suffering becoming a big deal. Charity prohibits us from psychoanalysing why people hold true beliefs.
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The Course of Empire, cyclical history, decadence, hedonic treadmill, luxury beliefs...
Around here, when you see someone do something that is both stupidly destructive and utterly unnecessary, you cry out "Ich glaub dir gehts zu gut!", i.e., "I think you're doing too well!". Bad ideas invent themselves, but normally they fizzle out before being put into action because of practical constraints. When someone is doing too well for their own good, they lack those exact practical constraints that would nip bad ideas in the bud. Instead, they can go down the most ridiculous rabbit holes and never be called out for it.
There are no atheists in foxholes, women who are busy keeping house don't go around preaching feminism, men who are one paycheck away from actual starvation don't preach anti-work, liberals do a 180° on blank-slatism when it comes to choosing a school for their own kids, and right-wingers do the same when it comes to picking cheap enough contractors to build their houses for them without whom they couldn't afford it.
It's all the same idea. If you're sufficiently well-off, materially and otherwise, you can afford to engage in stupid behavior and take it much too far. And given the near-infinite production of stupidities, someone will find some very stupid and highly infectious meme that never would have survived in a more resource-starved environment, but does just fine and makes the headlines in our age of undeserved prosperity.
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I think it’s that modern people no longer see themselves as part of a greater purpose. There’s no meaning to the universe, therefore no meaning to the suffering that exists. A person living through a famine in 1225 did so knowing that the sufferings would unite him to Christ and His Church. It was still unpleasant, obviously, but it wasn’t meaningless and random. A person experiencing a famine in 2025 does so in an uncaring random universe in which the famine is caused by random chance. Suffering that means nothing. Suffering is pointless, and in fact would seem to mean the wider society and nature is letting them down.
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It makes it difficult for me to take it seriously. The demonstrated violence helps a little, but still difficult.
Humanity of all types at all times, creed, race, culture, and ideological persuasion has faced and examined suffering. We have thousand year investigations into what the condition of suffering is, what it means if anything, what we can or should do with it. Yet only now a culture of fat, bored consumers lands on a decadent despair. As we all know, there is nothing sacred, there is no meaning, but we are definitely not related to stupid nihilists. We, good people, are compassionate. We care. We've also done the math. Every discomfort, every ounce of pain, can be refunded by merely removing all sentience.
Don't worry, you don't need to commit suicide or harm anyone else, as one redditor explains:
Yes, it is a moral imperative to stop existing as soon as possible to reduce suffering, but don't forget about your compassion for others in the calculation. You might have other considerations on your utilitarian spreadsheet. We can't just round up all the dolphins to exterminate them. Despite their silly clicking noises and hijinks they suffer quite a lot, but we can't drive them extinct. We definitely don't endorse someone taking our beliefs to their logical ends in the extreme. No, that's very naughty. Bad, very bad indeed.
Sorry for not answering your question. I vote a combination of time to think, access to ideas to think about, and personal mental state. We create a lot of depressed people for various reasons. Give them all girlfriends/boyfriends, compensate them decently for picking and packing oranges 8 hours a day, have them live by the beach or somewhere with lots of sun, and force them to share drinks at the end of the day. Voila! Only the most serious of believers are left.
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I think it's just personal deep depression compared with some form of a myopia that makes you think everyone else is suffering and joyless all the time too and is just faking otherwise. Psychological condition expressed as a figleaf ethical view.
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I think these feelings arise because we eliminated these external causes of suffering and so we are left with the internal ones. It's the difference between a house battered by winds and one with rotting foundations. When you eliminate all external causes for your unhappiness, you are left with the fact that there is simply not much capacity for happiness within you. The starving can hope for food, the plague-ridden can hope for healing, but what do you do when you have everything you could realistically want and you don't enjoy it?
Part of it also is that huge chunks of our lives no longer have tangible, close-time reward. We train for fifteen years before we can hope to get any value of that training for ourselves. It's only natural to long for respite, and the gap between longing for respite and longing for death is not so large.
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It sounds to me like they’re people who realized all the nasty anti-life implications of modern left ideology, didn’t realize it was all a big joke for status signaling points and actually started taking it seriously.
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