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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7844 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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I want to follow up on the earlier discussion about anti-natalism and natalism. I find it interesting that some people see anti-natalism as being a leftist phenomenon. I feel that this is true if you limit your understanding of leftism to stereotypical Redditors. However, historically speaking, philosophical pessimism, deep skepticism about the value of life, and doubt about the value of reproduction as anything other than an animal instinct are, I think, far from left-oriented. If you think about some of the most famous people who have held such views, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Michel Houellebecq... well, these are certainly not leftists by any common definition of leftist. And then there is Nietzsche who, even though in his writings he constantly insisted on the value of healthy virile life, did not leave any offspring even though, despite his various health problems, he probably would not have found it that hard to get married and have kids if he had really wanted to.

I do not think that being dubious of natalism is a right-wing phenomenon, but I also certainly do not think that it is inherently a left-wing phenomenon.

Can’t speak fully to the others, but Ligotti is very leftist.

Q: Does it irritate you to hear that some people consider you a nihilist?

A: I would call myself a pessimist. At one time I thought it simply inaccurate for anyone to call me a nihilist, since the dictionary definition of nihilist applies to me in very few of its aspects. The term nihilist is more apt in connection with someone like Nietzsche, for whom I have no use at all. Nietzsche also considered himself a type of pessimist, but after he ceased to admire Schopenhauer he modified the term pessimism so that it carried almost none of its original meaning. These days I don’t mind being called a nihilist, because what people usually mean by this word is someone who is anti-life, and that definition fits me just fine, at least in principle. In practical terms, I have all kinds of values that are not in accord with nihilism.For example, I politically self-identify as a socialist. I want everyone to be as comfortable as they can be while they’re waiting to die. Unfortunately, the major part of Western civilization consists of capitalists, whom I regard as unadulterated savages. As long as we have to live in this world, what could be more sensible than to want yourself and others to suffer as little as possible? This will never happen because too many people are unadulterated savages. They’re brutal and inhuman.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110716140816/http://www.thedamnedinterviews.com/2011/01/author-thomas-ligotti/

Ah, sorry. That's on me, then, for assuming that Ligotti was not a leftist based on a very shallow knowledge of him.

That said, I don't know if he is more of a leftist in the typical modern highly online sense of the word, or if he is a socialist in the same way that H.P. Lovecraft supported some flavors of socialism and supported FDR while having extremely right-wing social attitudes even by the standards of his era. Lovecraft favored a sort of technocratic socialism that would ensure his own kind of people a decent living while keeping out the people whom he found undesirable. Not surprising given that he spent much of his adult life in poverty during the Great Depression as a random kid from a broken-down family who probably felt himself to be an aristocrat at heart and had a viscerally racist reaction to pretty much everyone other than people whose stock was from North-West Europe.

But Ligotti is not Lovecraft, and I should not let their surface-level similarities make me assume things about Ligotti.

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