After the Narrative: The Anti-Natalist Revolution

This is not a defense or critique of anti-natalism, simply just a look at things to come.

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There have been many philosophical events that have retrospectively had the label ‘revolution’ assigned to them. Such events — which is I shall soon list — are defined as revolutions in the sense that their arrival entails a fundamental shift in our understanding of what it means to exist. The difference between a revolution and simply a new concept is that a revolution cannot be ignored. Inherent within philosophical revolutions is an unavoidable tectonic movement of thought. One can — and many have — disagreed with such revolutions, but they cannot ignore their implications altogether. To do so would be so callous and ignorant as to border on being scared, even horrified of the revolution’s full implications. (Many, for instance, are still a tad frightened of Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

The most notable philosophical revolutions are:

The Copernican Revolution - Read: We are not the center of the universe.

The Kantian Revolution - Read: We are not the center of our immediate reality.

The Nietzschean Revolution - Read: The death of God decenters us from an existence that has a ‘grand’ justification.

The Freudian Revolution - Read: We are not the center of our own minds.

In addition to these, some have posited that post-Freud there has been a schizo-revolution, or a Deleuzo-Guattarian (DG) revolution, wherein not only are we not the center of our minds, the very (post) structural foundations of our process of thought are decentered into the inherently schizophrenic workings of modern society.

My own additions would be twofold:

The Nihilist revolution - Read: Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. (Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound)

The Landian revolution - Read: The machinic unconscious (Intelligence) ‘found’ post-Freud & Deleuzo-Guattarian revolutions decenters us so thoroughly as to relegate/subjugate us to the position of corporeal slaves.

In terms of any linearity or progression (a notion man is experientally trapped within), Copernican through Nietzsche decenters us from our physical reality in terms of priveleged position and following this, meaning/purpose. This realization leaves us to our own devices as singular subjects, yet, the Freudian revolution entails that we don’t really understand ourselves as subjects at all and are primarily — mix Freud with Darwin — at the whim of if not Determinism, then at the very least a multitude of minor determinisms (genetics, society, culture, history, childhood, etc.)

Herein we are left as rootless, unconsciously determined subjects that are, at this juncture, left to the hedonistic-mercy of Foucauldian individualism, wilfully-ignorant historic returning (the same thing), or Stirnarian egoism. Yet, as per Deleuze and Guattari, the world unto which we, as intelligence individual agencies, find ourselves within is itself full with other agencies and our own faculties of reason falter before the ever accelerating Pynchonian schizophrenia we call ‘modernity’. From here we find the Landian revolution, a seemingly nefarious machinic intelligence hellbent on simply bolstering its own cosmically cold hegemony (read: Capitalismism). This is to say, post Deleuze and Guattari and Land, we are Ligottian meat puppets, the ‘strings’ of which are attached to the mechanisms of Capitalism (true AI). (I’m not going into this here, listen to this for an intro.

This all leaves us with the nihilist revolution, wherein we accept the inherent meaningless/decentering/purposelessness/subjugation of the prior revolutions as is, and, as per Brassier, understand it as a speculative opportunity. Each of these, however, still abides by a presupposition. Each abides by an axiom often conflated for narrative, but is the false justification for narrative itself. The ultimate axiom here is life. But not just life in itself, but life’s own built in presupposition that it, life, is good. Life attempts to justify itself by merely being itself. Even the nihilistic revolution is reliant on life’s inherent self-justification to bolster its claims. Any speculative opportunity is implicitly declaring that whatever makes that opportunity possible (life/being alive) is itself a priori justified over its alternative.

What follows the nihilistic revolution, then, is the Anti-Natalist revolution. This is the philosophical, cultural, and societal revolution that is right around the corner, and — as per euthanasia technology’s increasing popularity — is already starting to (paradoxically) empirically exist. This anti-natalist revolution immediately holds a multitude of inherent contradictions. Not least the question as to how anti-natalism can/will even exist if the very point of anti-natalism is to justify/declare a form of action wherein anti-natalism couldn’t exist. Which is to say, how can any anti-natalist revolution/event be — or at least exist for a prolonged period of time — if its very aims are to not exist? To get to an understanding of what the anti-natalist revolution might look like, first I need to talk about meaning, narrative, and nihilism.

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Nihilism, as defined by Britannica, is a philosophy that denies the existence of genuine moral truths and asserts the ultimate meaninglessness of life or of the universe. I would put forth that in common, everyday parlance — a place that the term nihilism has well-and-truly infiltrated — the meaning of ‘nihilism’ is condensed down to ‘life is meaningless’. Whether or not the masses of people stating, declaring, and even defending the term have investigated the reality of this statement is besides the point. ‘Nihilism’ (life is meaningless) is understood and, largely, accepted as the state of things. And yet…people go on?

People continue to do things, feel things, undertake actions, make plans, etc. So such is the case that many people would hastily or intuitively agree that life is meaningless, there is no God, and that any micro-meaningful structure such as nation, society, race, or even politics is understood as conditioned by the experience of humans. Nihilism has come to have a co-existent relationship with firstly destruction (God is dead) and secondly deconstruction (society is ‘made up’). So, the answer as to why people go on is — paradoxically — because there is still meaning, it just has sufficiently been deconstructed as to destroy it yet.

For instance, anything social or national can quickly be deconstructed into language games, relational contexts, and an apparently fragile chain of signifiers. Equally, anything that we consider to be biological or Darwinian (mating, defense, relations, etc) can also very easily be deconstructed by way of saying ‘It’s just an evolutionary urge!’ etc. So, there is still meaning persay, we just refuse to accept it as real meaning. This in itself spins an extra layer onto what the definition of nihilism actually is. From this we can see it has little to do within meanings writ small, because human beings constantly find meaning in quite literally everything they do, this is easily defendable by the fact that if an action was meaningless we wouldn’t be able to understand it at all. Of course, one could be quick to quip that the understanding of said meanings is once again a chain of signifiers that has no ultimate core. And so, what nihilism actually means is the belief that human life has no justifying meaning.

For instance, God — as he or that which is the very justifying root of everything — was the clearest example of meaning that in itself is/was justification. Human don’t just want meaning, they want cosmically sovereign meaning. Meaning which is without any human fingerprint, meaning that is intertwined into existence in such a way that it becomes irrevocably apparent that there is something larger/bigger/more important than us, and as such we have a reason to be. But not just a reason to be, a reason for being. Justifying meaning — and thus purpose — gives human beings a vector.

If it is such, then, that the meaning of nihilism is in truth related to a priori meaning that cannot be destroyed or deconstructed, that which from its position as always already gives us a priori a trajectory of purpose and meaning, it is such that the nihilist revolution is simultaneously a narrative revolution in the other direction. When nihilism finally arises to an unavoidable degree, it is that narrative can only be held onto in a deconstructive sense. One may have their reasons and purposes, but one — as per their position as humans existing during/after the nihilist revolution — impicitly understands that at any moment such reasons or purposes could be done away with for the fact of their inherent lack of any justification. Post-nihilist revolution, then, any ‘meaning’ is at most only ever relational meaning attached to a structure of symbolic context. But there is no soverign, justifying meaning ever again.

As it stands today in 2024, the post-DG consumerist trinkets are still just about enough of a delicate veil atop the nihilist revolution that they manage to assuage the implicit understanding of its becoming. This is not going to last long. It is already widely apparent that masses of people are becoming bored to the point of aggressive madness with mere entertainment as their primary mode of existential appeasement. Simultaneously, however, it is also widely apparent that as per Oswald Spengler’s notion of ‘Second Religiosity’, any attempt to ‘go back’ either crumbles under the weight of its own conscious decision (that is, one cannot consciously create a cyclic state or religion), or, more simply, becomes commodified in a sense indistinguishable from anything found within the Deleuzo-Guattarian revolution.

We cannot go back prior to any philosophical revolution. Each acts as such a thorough intellectual tectonic shift that pre-revolution retrieval is defacto impossible. To drag anything prior to a certain revolution into a latter revolutionary state is only ever to lie about reality or transform the thing brought forward to the point of unrecognizability. We can no longer even pretend. Likewise, our present situation is now inherently tied to our future situation as the speculative opportunity itself. The age of narrative is over.

As Sarah Perry very personably writes at the end of her book Every Cradle is a Grave-

Our evolutionary history ensures that we think in stories. Stories are so central to our thinking that it is hard to think about them…Here is the problem, if it is a problem: I am not in a story.
Living outside of any story—living without hope for the future, without the belief that one is part of a narrative—is confusing. It’s hard to get anything done when nothing has a point. For any not-immediately-pleasurable action (or inaction) I contemplate—getting up in the morning, vacuuming, answering the phone—there is no readily-available answer to the ever-present question in my mind: “why?” At least, there is no long-term “why.” Do I wish I were in a story again? Ultimately, no.

Culturally, socially, and existentially the modern world acts as it exists in an eternal epilogue. The narrative is over, there will never again be an answer to the question of ‘Why?’ other than ‘Just because…’, which is really no answer at all. The death of God was the beginning of the end of the narrative. But paradoxically, our current position in an eternal epilogue is in truth no narrative at all. If parallel lines meet at infinity, then an eternal narrative has nothing to say. Of course, this makes no sense, but how could it? It’s an attempt at narrative when the narrative is genuinely over. The ‘speculative opportunity’ of nihilism mentioned by Brassier is itself an oxymoron. One that for many is only just beginning to posit the final question - Is it worth it to be at all?

This brings us to the final revolution, the Anti-Natalist revolution. The definition of anti-natalism, as per the name, is often understood primarily in relation to the act of having children. With anti-natalists arguing that one shouldn’t have children and that doing so is an immoral act. This in itself isn’t actually a very good definition at all, because it’s merely a definition that focuses on a second-order effect arising from the main definition. Which is to say, if you define anti-natalism as a philosophical position arguing against having children, then the only matter at hand is why that argument is being posited in the first place. This would be much like understanding utilitarianism as a singular action-toward-happiness as opposed to the logic of why happiness is good. As such, the definition of anti-natalism, at root, is the philosophical position that existence/existing is bad, and that it would be, as per the title of David Benatar’s seminal book be Better Never to Have Been. Am I writing this to defend anti-natalism or Benatar? No. Do I see the future of philosophy as being in constant dialogue with anti-natalism? Strangely, yes.

Why is that strange? Well, simply put, the logic would follow that sufficient anti-natalist momentum would swiftly die out due to the fact its primary principle is that it’s better not to exist. That is, anti-natalists aren’t going to be having any children, so there isn’t much in the way of lineage where biology is concerned. With that said, ideas don’t cling to familial or biological bonds, and so any notion that anti-natalism is just going to go away under the weight of its own welcomed death drive is misplaced.

We’re only just getting to grips with the Nietzschean revoltion; we’re only just coming to terms with the fact God is dead (whether one believes in him or not) and what that means for the world. Of course, the Nietzschean revolution leads swiftly into the others, and so as we finally come to grips with God’s death, we shall enter into a global Turin moment, where culture itself collapses and begins to hug the horse’s neck. Except, the narrative is over — There is no horse to hug, there is no friendly priest to come help us back onto our feet, there’s just the cold, hard empty concrete that goes on indefintely without rhyme or reason.

Much like the beginnings of the Nietzschean revolution, the dawn of widespread anti-natalism is first finding its feet with a fall back to empiricism and reason. Much like how the first ‘death of God(ers)’ utilized reason, materialism, and historicity to deconstruct (and then destroy) God, unknowing anti-natalists are utilizing economic reason, hedonic materialism, and post-narrative sovereignty as a means to justify their (non)-choice.

It might appear quaint and ‘logical’ now, but the notion that one makes a choice about bringing a child into the world based on the state of the world itself is not, at root, a political or social decision, it’s one pertaining to suffering. If it was the case that historically — it goes without saying that both religion and lack of contraception alter this reality vastly — people chose to bring children in the world against the state of said world, most people would have attempted to avoid doing so. The age of conscious procreation is the birth of natal-critique. We are entering the age where existence itself is up for question. Hence why I call the anti-natalist revolution the final revolution, for it seeks to question the experience unto which all revolutions can even be.

If it follows then that the anti-natalist decision is really one pertaining not specifically to procreation but the suffering said procreated being will possibly experience, we need ask the question — in a world where anti-natalism is on the rise — has suffering increased? I would hazard a quick, lazy, and emphatic No! Suffering in a multitude of material senses: Home comforts, medical, nutrition, pain-relief, contraception, etc. has decreased drastically, likewise there are a multitude of methods and means to ease mental and traumatic suffering that have never before xisted. So I would put forth any one of these cases: Suffering hasn’t increased, there is less suffering, or there is less suffering but we’re far worse at dealing with it. Personally I think that the universe abides by a law of cosmic equilibrium, and so try as hard as we might, someone or something has to pay the price, which is to say we suffer about the same amount. The question following this, then, is the important one - What has changed — if there isn’t necessarily more suffering — for there to be a distinct rise in anti-natalist sentiment?

I believe I have already answered, or at least gestured toward the answer to this question. For it’s not that anything has changed inherent within the meaningful narrative of human life, it’s that that very narrative has run out and (post-death of God) we exist within the aforementioned eternal epilogue, as per Ligotti-

“There is nothing to do and there is nowhere to go.

There is nothing to be and there is no-one to know.”

Now, in a prior historical state that had a priori justified attachments to meaning, such a statementwould be deemed as radically free to the point of heresy. But, as per Ligotti’s own temperament, such ‘nothing’ and ‘nowhere’ is itself the basis of existence. The speculative opportunity of nihilism immediately eats its non-self. So why is anti-natalism on the rise? Because suffering remains a constant in a world where meaning has fully succumb to entropy, and no self-asserted (and thus easily self-destroyed) meaning has the ability to negate the purposeless of suffering. Suffering is negative, meaningless is neutral.

What will this anti-natalist revolution look like? Well, it won’t be ‘revolutionary’ in the political sense often attached to the term. None of the aforementioned revolutions were like that. They existed and arose as revealed truth, such truth that utilized common means to infiltrate culture. Philosophical revolutions don’t intrude on their own terms, but mutate accepted structures as a means for vindication. Anti-natalism will only be an existential issue at the end, first it will be financial, political, academic, biological, social, consumable, and then existential (in that order).

There is no longer any answer to the question ‘Why?’, and in time for ‘Why exist?’. ‘Just because…’, ‘It feels good.’ and even ‘It’s interesting.’ will only hold for so long. But critique knows no bounds, and the time will come when the final and first frontier is questioned in the most placid and asisine way possible. Culture doesn’t stop and each iteration of forward-movement begets multiple knock-on effects. As per Virilio, You invent the plane, you invent the plane crash. As such, you invent the suicide booth, you invent the social legitimization of suicide, you invent the discussion forums, you invent the questioning, you invent the acceptance, you invent the popularity, you invent the banal everyday reality of existence itself critiqued.

What do I think this anti-natalist future will look like? I would mention diminishing birth rates, but that’s easy as it’s already happening. Next up is medicalized euthanasia. Then euthanasia home kits signed off by 5 doctors, then 3, then your local GP. Perhaps in more liberal cities one will be able to go to the pharmacy and buy a suicide kit if they bring a note. Throughout all this will be further books on the question of bringing life into the world, then further reasons as to why one shouldn’t. Then eventual acceptance. Finally the ‘decision’, much like how being an atheist is no longer a ‘thing’, will be no decision at all. There will be — as per the medical establishment — a legitimized new term for those who have come to understand they simply do not want to exist.

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