u/platotheman69

I’m just interested in this. I personally consider myself a Marxist because I think capitalism is a major source of suffering and if we can eradicate that, it’s easier for the people who already exist and will inevitably be brought into existence. As well as supporting environmental policies and animal rights. Marxists tend to dislike anti natlaism because they think it’s just ‘life bad not capitalism’ or think it’s linked to Thomas Malthus.
Interestingly there’s a philosopher called Philip mainlander who was an anti natalist socialist who argued that after a socialist revolution workers find out that life itself is the cause of suffering not just exploitation and so after the revolution they chose to go exctinct. Food for thought

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When I first heard about anti natalism and the idea behind it to save suffering, I thought most people who thought critically would be on board with it. The more digging I did it turns out almost everyone I see views it negatively. And instead of actually engaging with the philosophy or about the empathy for the child, it’s all just baseless shouting of it being eugenics and white supremacy. While anyone who knows what anti natalism actually is knows this is nonsense, and I don’t care massively how people see me, it just makes me so so sad that me being empathetic and wanting to help people who are suffering just as I am, means I get called an eugenicist even from people who I perceive as otherwise rational, it makes me feel like I might be supporting something wrong even though I know I’m not and I just feel so bad that I’m given this awful label.

How do you deal with the allegations?

I’ve always never been religious, and I’ve found it quite interesting, the most fascinating part about religion to me is, how can people believe in that nonsense? I mean, there is not only no evidence for any religion, but also, if we believe in god and all these crazy stories, then there’s basically nothing stopping someone from believing in magic or in unicorns or in any other made up rubbish. Faith, the idea we can just believe in anything we want without evidence, is very dangerous. If that’s the case, why can’t I just say Andrew Wakefield was all correct, maybe even Andrew Wakefield is god, you can show me proof that everything he said was nonsense, but it’s my belief and you can’t take it away from me.

But eventually I found out why people do believe in religion. It’s because of indoctrination and because all life is just suffering and that’s it.
On indoctrination, as a kid until I think quite late I genuinely believed in Santa and the tooth fairy. And I always think, how on earth was I that stupid? And it’s because when an authority figure teaches you something from a very early age, no matter how ridiculous or crazy it is, we believe it because we trust those authority figures. So that’s why we get extremist political views passed down, people believing in the tooth fairy, and, people believing in whatever god you grew up to be told to believe.

And, the reason people cling to god or turn to faith, is because all life is just suffering and mostly nothing else. People don’t want to accept that life is volatile, can always turn to the worst and you may never escape suffering so it’s easier to think it’s all gods plan and gods out there looking after you. In times of deep pain and distress I’ve considered joining a religion to cope with the pain, but when I released it’s all nonsense I realised I can’t believe in it. For people who can, I’m actually quite proud because at least you are coping with life somehow, even if it’s none sense. It is true, religion is the opioid of the masses.

I’m open to see if people agree or disagree with me, I’d like to know!

I’m asking mainly because I feel very strongly about loneliness and also so I can help my society if there are reasons people feel like societies can be bad places to make friends.

I’m someone who struggles significantly with making friends and talking to people. I have 0 friends on my course, I don’t get on very well with my flat mates, so my only lifeline is societies. As soon as I joined university I got involved with one society and basically just decided I would go to every single event they had because I literally had nothing else to do and I knew if I was consistent I’d be well known and make friends that way. It worked quite well, I’m now an exec, I’m quite well liked and I even got a romantic partner there at some point which I never expected to happen at all. I don’t really get involved with any other societies since I already go to every social for one so it would be hard to juggle with any others, and I feel like it’s too late to integrate into any others.

When people talk about loneliness I always wonder why they don’t try to get involved In societies. At least at my university there are like 100 so you would be bound to have one that would be your interest, and as long as you made an effort to attend most socials you’d probably stand out. Some common things I hear that I can definitely understand though is ‘cliques’ or feeling like they are exclusionary, which I can understand if they didn’t make an effort to try to include new people and regulars just stayed together, I find some societies hard to get involved with if they don’t really make it clear when and where their socials are and only post about it the day before so I hardly see it, and maybe if someone is shy it would be difficult to attend events especially if they don’t know anyone there.

I’d like to hear your thoughts.

In a lot of political spaces online, there are jokes about people who are extremely against any form of socialism and left wing ideas, and because they’ve never actually read a page of Karl marx, they don’t even understand the difference between personal and private property and don’t understand anything that socialists actually argue for, so they come up with a lot of quite funny and quite annoying criticisms of socialism.

I think this is the exact same with most people who are extremely against anti natalism, because 99% of the time whenever someone makes an argument against anti natalism it’s usually something David Benatar has an entire chapter on, and if they actually read the fucking book they’d understand the point anti Natalists are trying to make, but instead of reading his book to see what he’s arguing, they just jump to ‘having kids = evil’ and nothing else.

For example, the two most common things I hear people say is either ‘then why is killing wrong’ and ‘but life is so good’ like PLEASE JUST READ HIS BOOK MAN HE COVERS ALL THIS do you seriously think that we are arguing for killing people or denying that there is anything good in life😭😭😭

I think the worst example of this is when people try to say that anti natalism is misogynistic because it means we want to force women to have abortions and we’re anti pro choice. NO WE ARE NOT, IF YOU SPENT HALF AN HOUR TO READ HIS CHAPTER ON ABORTION YOU WOULD NOT THINK THIS. In his pro death chapter he literally says he isn’t for enforced abortions, and actually uses the idea of a world where we enforced the pro death view to argue against people who are pro life, because if pro life people can put their view into policy, then so could pro death people, and obviously a pro life person would not like this, so it’s better to meet in the middle and be pro choice because forcing anyone on either side is bad. Yet people just want to say nope anti natalism is when parents bad and misogynistic and pro capitalism and pro colonialism. PLEASE READ HIS BOOK FOR GODS SAKE.