Is Antinatalism a death cult?

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CW: Suicide, genocide

Last Saturday, a young antinatalist named Guy Edward Bartkus parked a car laden with explosives in front of the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California. Setting off a powerful homemade bomb that shook the whole neighborhood, he didn’t succeed in killing anyone but himself–though the blast did injure four others. And despite devastating a good chunk of the clinic building, his attack didn’t harm the clinic’s stored embryos. But he did accomplish two of his primary goals: ending his own life and getting his particular brand of antinatalism in the news for several days.

Antinatalism is a sort of catch-all term for a variety of closely related ideologies, based upon the premise that life is so full of suffering that it is better not to be born, making the act of giving birth “unethical, harmful, or otherwise unjustifiable,” as the description for the antinatalism subreddit puts it.

But antinatalism, so defined, has inspired a host of other more radical ideological offshoots–including promortalism, which argues that it is better to end an existing life early than to live it out, and Efilism (“life” backwards), a more extreme sort of promortalism founded by a hateful, spiteful Youtube “philosopher” who openly fantasizes about murdering people, ranging from individual pregnant women to the entire human race. (For more on his whole deal, see my last post.)

Bartkus claimed allegiance to both of these more radical offshoots of pronatalism in a brief manifesto that he left online to be discovered after his death. “[B]asically, I’m a promortalist,” he wrote, saying that his “end goal [was] for the truth (Efilism) to win, and once it does, we can finally begin the process of sterilizing this planet of the disease of life.”

Bartkus’ act of terrorism has caused widespread consternation in the antinatalist community. The head moderator of the antinatalism subreddit–by far the largest such forum online–quickly posted a message for the subreddit’s 232,000 subscribers, and (perhaps more to the point) for any journalists and other outsiders who happened to stop by in the wake of the bombing, insisting that “[t]he philosophy we represent is explicitly one of non-violence. We believe it is up to each individual to make their own reproductive decisions.”

In another posting, a prolific contributor to the subreddit reported that the Efilism subreddit had been “NUKED” by Reddit itself. “To those who complained that this sub is too strict and censors too much, well, now you know why,” wrote PitifulEar3303,

Also, antinatalism is VOLUNTARY birth prevention; it is NOT efilism or promortalism

Similar to extinctionism, sure, but NOT through coercion or force and especially NOT with violence.

The FBI is probably monitoring social media for these keywords now, so think twice before you say whatever is on your mind.

While the point of PitifulEar3303’s posting was to disassociate antinatalism, or at least the subreddit’s version of it, from Efilism and promortalism, it inadvertently revealed that the three supposedly distinct ideologies are in fact deeply intertwined in practice, and that many in the subreddit do in fact subscribe to these more radical beliefs. Why warn people not to say “whatever is on [their] mind” unless you know that some people have truly vile things on their mind?

The plain fact is that the antinatalism subreddit presents a highly sanitized version of the ideology, which is much messier and darker than, I suspect, the mods and many other antinatalists would like to admit, either to themselves or to the world. The mods of the subreddit make clear what sort of talk they don’t allow, with their rules (posted in the sidebar) outright banning, among other things, posts promoting violence and eugenics. Because otherwise, I suspect, there would be an embarrassing abundance of both of these kinds of posts.

The mods have also banned talk of what’s called “the big red button,” a thought experiment involving an imaginary button with the power to instantly wipe out all life on earth–largely, I suspect, because whenever the topic came up in the past too many people said they would push the button, fantasizing about inflicting instant genocide upon all humans and animals without warning and without consent.

The notion of consent also goes out the window whenever those on the subreddit talk about involuntary sterilization, which many support enthusiastically. Sometimes the talk is about the involuntary sterilization of every “breeder” on earth; both comments and some informal polls suggest how popular this coercive and frankly genocidal notion is among Reddit’s antinatalists. Here are some of the responses to a post in the subreddit asking “[i]f you were given an option to sterilize [the] entire human species, would you do it?” The first two are the most popular comments in the thread; note the number of upvotes each got.

And here are a few polls.

These are, of course, unscientific polls, and other polls and comments suggest that a good portion of the subreddit (whether a minority or a majority is not clear) believes that involuntary sterilization is a repugnant assault on individual bodily autonomy. And it’s good that they believe this. But the point is that no one in a purportedly progressive movement should support the forced sterilization of the entire human race.

Or of a portion of it. Oftentimes when the subject of preventing people from having children comes up it is in reference to a particular subset of humanity particularly despised by many Reddit antinatalists–parents who are poor, disabled, or mentally ill.

Some want to stop people with “bad genes” from passing them on.

Some are particularly incensed that those with dwarfism are “allowed” to have kids.

It’s no wonder the mods have banned talk of eugenics, because otherwise many in the subreddit would keep outing themselves as eugenicists.

These people aren’t just “bad apples” on the fringes of antinatalism. From all indications, they make up a significant minority of the movement, as the comments and polls above would seem to suggest. The Efilism subreddit, before its banning, had more than 10,000 subscribers, and if you search the archives of the antinatalism subreddit itself you will find more than a little sympathy for the ideology and the truly terrible man who came up with it, YouTuber Gary “Inmendham” Mosher.

Here’s a quick reminder of just who these commenters are praising.

But the real issue isn’t the exact number of Efilists who regularly post in the antinatalism subreddit. It’s that there is a poisonous logic at the very heart of antinatalism–even in the sanitized versions of the ideology–that pushes people towards these radical ideologies. For some steeped in the ideology this radicalization is virtually inevitable.

Antinatalism is driven by one basic idea: that it is “Better Never to Have Been,” as the preeminent antinatalist philosopher David Benatar put it in the title of the book that essentially launched the movement. Those who are born will inevitably suffer; those imaginary souls who remain in a state of nonexistence won’t. This simple idea leads to the conclusion that the only way to stop suffering on planet earth is to convince every single person that they should never have children, which would quickly lead to the extinction of all humankind after all these non-parents die. This would be a “passive” extinction.

But it quickly dawns on the vast majority of antinatalists that this plan will never work. You will never be able to convince everyone in the world to become an antinatalist. This leads some antinatalists to rein in their ambitions, hoping instead to reduce if not end suffering by convincing at least a small portion of their fellow humans to stop breeding.

It leads other antinatalists to look into what are euphemistically called “active” solutions–like forced sterilization, as we’ve seen above. Or, if they are feeling more impatient, some sort of human-created catastrophe that will kill us all. (This has the advantage of also killing off all of the planet’s animals–who like us suffer from being born.) Gary Mosher likes to fantasize about nuclear armageddon, crashing meteors into the Earth or somehow sending our poor planet spinning into the sun. Most active-style antinatalists, if they move beyond the “big red button” thought experiment, stick with the nuclear fantasy.

These active-style antinatalists generally don’t think twice about the ethics of murdering eight billion people, because one of the other side-effects of the “better never to have been” ideology is to convince many of its adherents that life has so little value, if any, that ending it is no big deal. We’re all going to die; it’s just a question of whether it happens sooner or later, and if it happens sooner that will mean less suffering, at least if there’s no one left on earth to mourn the dead.

Of course, if you believe, as antinatalists do, that life is basically worthless, or even less than worthless, the question naturally arises: why don’t you just kill yourself? This is a question that antinatalists often ask themselves, and more than a few end up concluding that there is no good reason for their lives to continue. The mods of the antinatalism subreddit are well aware that too much thinking about the supposed worthlessness of existence can lead to despair.

Steeping yourself in a subculture so preoccupied with death, and hostile to life, can indeed lead some vulnerable people to very dark places, and it should probably come as no surprise to learn that several antinatalists have taken their own lives. Promortalist philosopher Jiwoon Hwang, whose writings are generally highly regarded by antinatalists, published an article called “Why it is Always Better to Cease to Exist” in the summer of 2018; several months later he “caught the bus,” to use a crude euphemism popular in antinatalist circles.

In his manifesto, clinic bomber Bartkus wrote that what had finally pushed him “over the edge” to commit his suicide bombing was the death of his friend Sophie, another antinatalist, in what he said was a murder-suicide pact with her boyfriend.

But this belief in the worthlessness of life is not all that is poisonous about antinatalist ideology. If it is better not to exist then the act of bringing someone into existence through birth becomes deeply suspect. The moderators of the antinatalism subreddit, as I mentioned, regard “procreation as unethical, harmful, or otherwise unjustifiable.” Other antinatalists go far beyond this, defining procreation as equivalent to murder. A year before his death, Hwang self-published a small book with the title “Procreation is Murder,” in which he wrote:

Even if we choose not to call it a murder, it’s because it’s [a] more heinous crime … than murder. Murder only make[s] death happen a few decades earlier [for] somebody who was condemned to death by procreation; whereas procreation condemns [a] nonexistent person to life and death. … The consequence of every procreation is fatal and tragic. Every maternity ward is a crematorium.

This belief is common among antinatalists and on the antinatalist subreddit.

Like the idea that abortion is murder, the idea that procreation is murder is frankly a dangerous one. If you’re an antiabortion activist convinced that doctors are literally murdering babies at the behest of evil pregnant women, you may also conclude that you need to stop this supposed holocaust by any means necessary–even if this means bombing abortion clinics or shooting down doctors. If you’re an antinatalist convinced that mothers are effectively murdering their children by giving birth to them, you may also come to believe that anything and everything is permissible in the fight against the “breeders,” even bombing a fertility clinic.

The fact that the antinatalist community indoctrinates its members to believe that neither their lives or the lives of others are frankly worth a damn only serves to make this sort of violence more likely. If a growing number of young people, young men especially, feel that they have nothing to live for, that they have a chance to stop “murder” by preventing births, and that any lives they take in the process don’t really matter anyway, the result is going to be a lot more incidents like the one we saw last weekend in Palm Spring. And some of them are likely to be a lot more deadly.

Is the antinatalist movement a death cult? “Cult” is a strong and specific word, and I’m not sure it completely fits in this instance. But antinatalism is certainly a pro-death philosophy, and like some other toxic philosophies it already has a real-world body count–one which will undoubtedly grow in the months and years to come.

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