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PostSubject: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptySun Sep 29, 2013 1:51 am

Deriving from Christian Universalism and Egalitarianism, Buddhist Negation of Will, Materialism and Reductionism. Negative Utilitarianism: Pleasure is good, pain is bad, absence of pain is good and absence of pleasure is neutral since no one is being deprived of any pleasure considering they don't exist. Thus all reproduction is inherently immoral since one is imposing guaranteed suffering to no end, only to fix the mess caused by life in the first  place. We can know two thing for sure; that humans will go extinct and that the more we reproduce the more suffering will be endured. Pleasure is not the opposite of pain, rather the sensation of the absence of suffering, will or desire. These moments are always short lived as new desires quickly re-emerge as the old ones are satisfied; in this one could say that a rock is in a constant state of ecstasy as it has no will/desire to be met.

A memetic mutation that's evolutionarily bankrupt; and possibly due to excessive dysgenic breeding in the face of massive economic prosperity. Genotypic IQ has been going down by one point every generation for the last six generations in the west, this breeding has surely had an effect on the types of personalities being born. So we can trace it back to a genetic origin as-well as an memetic one. Regardless the topic remains highly interesting especially as a moral shock against the hedonistic egalitarian mainstream narrative.









"Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion." Zizek

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptySun Sep 29, 2013 11:12 am

The thing about Anti-natalists is that they assume that pain is inherently negative/bad. This, of course, is mistaken. Sometimes pain is conducive to increased strength, e.g., when one works out in the gym with weights, they often feel painful sensations, but as it is commonly said , " No pain - no gain". In time, the weightlifters become more powerful and massive.

And then the case of the masochists, these types derive pleasure from physical and or mental abuse ( something anti-natalists say is inherently bad).

I find these anti-natalists to be a bunch of cowards and weaklings. " Life is so cruel- there is so much suffering!", they say. What kind of womanly disease are these fools infected with? What a bunch of faggotry - weakness. A bunch of fucking pussies. Life is a gladiator battle, yes! but for one to insert his or her value framework on it as if it were intrinsic is beyond stupidity. I, personally, find the brutality of nature and the cosmos to be aesthetic. "Life is a beautiful war", I say! Let's fight, lust, dominate, and go out with a bang!

Judeo-Christian nihilism has bastardized the noble spirit and turned people into a bunch of sad, pathetic souls that are weary of life.

This is a short, artistic type video I made a while back on the brutality of life.

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyMon Sep 30, 2013 5:09 am

This reminds me of Heismans stance in Suicide Note.

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyMon Sep 30, 2013 9:39 am

Sometimes I wonder if this YouTube anti-natalism stuff is just an elaborate prank. I caught wind of this one about two weeks ago:



He's openly bragging about only working two hours a day and playing with his toys without any responsibilities. Some Italian guy kind of sets him straight in the comments.
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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyMon Sep 30, 2013 9:49 am

I have read Clarey's book enjoy the decline.

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There is some valuable information in the book but there is a nihilistic undertone also evinced in his videos. This man had a christian upbringing and even though I don't think he professes belief it strongly shines through in his blog, books and videos.

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyMon Sep 30, 2013 9:53 am

Clarey is Jewish.
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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyMon Sep 30, 2013 11:21 am

This is also part of the "me" individualistic social strategy.

Eliminate a tribe by first seducing its females away from it, by offering them some fantastic promise, then make having children a selfish thing.
You make interracial breeding a good thing, knowing that lower minds tend to breed more, diluting the tribe's bloodlines in a sea of inferiority: Dysgenics.

Then you have these beta-males making excuses, but not willing to support the only method which would ensure their sexual fulfillment (Paternalism), and finally you turn selfishness, and shallow mindsets, into a virtue.
There's nothing like convincing a coward, and a selfish, infantile prick that his motives are authentically moral, he's doing it for the betterment of mankind and to protect the environment: Judeo-Christian all the way.

So, you have decreasing fertility rates, interracial mingling, the exclusion of beta-males of that tribe, the infection of these beta-males with an ideal which they cannot overcome, even if it means that it benefits them in the long-run; shortsighted shallowness becoming the new standard: what is immediately gratifying is what is valuable.

Females and beta-males, emasculated twerps, become a part of the demise of an entire culture.
Censorship and the emotional limits are placed to any reaction, verbal or otherwise.

If you don't think this is a memetic war just look at what is happening in Greece, and how all over Europe these masculine groups are increasing forcing liberal-democracies to deal with them.
How much did the ultra-right-wing receive in the recent election in Austria?

This is a backlash, a male resistance.
Will it succeed?

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyMon Sep 30, 2013 4:42 pm

Having children is about being selfish in the long run.

This notion that being selfish is a bad thing is a very smart move by those with the greatest influence. Things are redefined - what is beneficial for the established structures is being called an act of selflessness - and selflessness is the new virtue.

What is not wanted are individuals who make up their own rules and standards, forming seperate groups within the unified social structure. That would mean a loss of influence over them.
Being selfless = doing something for anybody without selfish motive. To dillute one's focus and be non-discriminative about who we support and who we don't.

This way, self(ishness) is discouraged while mediocrity is encouraged. The new healthy kind of self is the one which follows the rules, which are officially the same for everybody. Absurd.

Having your own family would be very selfish. Those who have children are encouraged, economically and socially, to hand over their children to the institutions as early as possible. To homogenize society.

A quote, I read recently - "Unfortunately we treat our own family members differently from everybody else. We should treat everybody the same."
A hatred of self, of one's flawed existence.

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 12:50 pm

Zapffe is supposedly a prominent thinker pro- the topic of anti-natalism. Thomas Ligotti's book [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race] takes a lot from him to pose some interesting questions, depending on how you look at it.

The way I read the following quotes, is to seek clarity on the meaning of being a person as opposed to those living "like puppets".
"How much truth can you endure?" is the 'cleanest' standard, we have by far, to define what it means to be a real person, 'human', what it means to be noble.


Ligotti wrote:


"As Ernest Becker expostulated in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Denial of Death (1974), a work that later kindled a branch of psychology with the marvelous name of Terror Management Theory, human beings are in thrall to the fear of death, and this fear determines the entire landscape of our lives. To skip around our death anxiety, we have engineered a world to deceive ourselves into believing that we will linger beyond the final breakdown of our bodies. We know this fabricated world because we see it around us every day, an offense to the eye. Shamelessly indiscreet are houses of worship where people go to get a whiff of meaning . . . and meaning means only one thing—immortality. In heaven or hell or reincarnated life forms, we must go on and on—us without end. Travesties of immortalism are effected day and night in obstetrics wards, factories of our future that turn out a product made in its makers’ image, a miracle by which we enter into a devil’s bargain with God, glorifying Him with the credit and giving us a chance to have our names and genetics projected into a time we will not live to see.

Life on earth had been percolating for billions of years before human beings became the latest comers to the festivities of the organic.
In general, we have given ourselves rather high marks as a form of life and are not chagrined by flattery, especially if it is cleverly devised to forefend our blushing with pride for being the standout guinea pigs in nature’s laboratory. Anyone pursuing an audience, or even a place in society, might profit from the following motto: “If you can’t say something positive about our species, then say something equivocal.”

...our positive estimate of ourselves and our lives is all in our heads. As with many propositions that shoot for loftiness (“To be or not to be”), this one may be mulled over but not usefully argued. The few who have gone to the pains of doing so might as well have not existed. History proves that people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. An exception to this rule, probably the only one, is that humanity has never seriously doubted its good opinion of itself or the value of its existence. Should demurral to the self-contentment of the masses then be renounced? That would be the brilliant decision. To be silent when no one is listening should be the first rule of dissenters, with special reference to those who are not giddy about being members of the human race.

The second rule should be: if you must open your mouth, steer away from argumentation. Money and love may make the world go round, but logical disputation with that world cannot get it to budge. In the words of British author and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton, “You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.” (Example: every debate over the existence of God is won by His defenders.) And if your truth is not the same as that of Chesterton and his like, you might as well pack it up and go home. It will blow up in your face the second it is heard by those who have already found a truth that is not yours.

Intolerance:

Due to our consciousness of being alive and destined for death, some of us not only invent schemes for blocking out this knowledge but also burn to discredit, or murder, anyone who would controvert our patented certitudes. (“We think, therefore we should make everyone think what we think.”)." [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 12:50 pm

Ligotti wrote:
"HYPOCRISY:

Consciousness is the headwater of all deception and self-deception. To be conscious is inevitably to be a hypocrite. We can stomach our own kind, or just enough of them who either prove useful to us or are not handily destructible, only by the terms of the following contract: we will eat some of the other fellow’s excrement if he will eat some of ours. This is the ecumenical way, and the hypocritical one. Being a grossly transparent hypocrite is de rigueur for making it in this life. Try going through a single day in which you tell those around you what you really think: you will lose everything—your job, your family, your friends. Even more ruinous would be to act on your feelings, whether they are deeply held or fleeting. You would be dead or in prison in no time. Some speak of our hypocrisies as “useful fictions” and ballyhoo them as staples for both the individual and society. Others are more skeptical.

Arrogance goes hand-in-hand with hypocrisy. Worm-ridden with self-assurance, it flicks sanity into the gutter and inflates the fault-ridden into the meritorious. The mind boggles that hypocrisy ever got a bad name, since it is but a by-product of consciousness itself, which motored us in style past all the other beasts of the earth. The ability to act in conflict with ourselves, to say we believe something is true that we know is not, has been a prerequisite for our survival. Without it, we would be compelled to wrestle with that most secret of lies: our integrity as persons, our wholeness as selves.

Hypocrisy—in other words, the practice of lying about lying—shields us from seeing ourselves as we are: a collocation of fragments that fit together as a biological unit but not as anything else, not as that ghost which has been called a self, a phantasm whose ecotoplasmic unreality we can never see through. By staying true to the lie of the self, the ego, we can hold onto the illusion that we will be who we are all our lives and not see our selves die a thousand times before our death.

As individuals, we profit from hypocrisy, this is true. But we realize its blessings most intensively when we band together into societies and societal institutions. Great nations and religions must be frontmost in hypocrisy, all of them having run up a record of crimes that, should they be brought to light, would commit them to a well-deserved decline or ruination. “Well-deserved?” one might ask. By what laws, in a world a fabricated reality, should such entities be judged? Answer: by their own. Even further, it is not great nations and religions that compete with one another but their hypocrisies, their lies. These armaments must proliferate and be vigilantly enlarged, for dominion would be lost were they to be overturned by more seductive hypocrisies, more vaulting lies.

In Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception (1996), Daniel Goleman studies how people and groups play along with factitious designs to forestall the animus and anxiety that would be loosed if a code of honesty were somehow enforced. Noam Chomsky published a book called Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (1989) in which he argues that the master class of a nation such as the United States of America could not hold up without lying to its citizenry and, more importantly, getting them to lie to themselves. With Zapffe, one could contend that nothing would hold up in this world without a scaffolding of hypocrisies and lies. This is the stuff of which civilizations are made—fabricated realities, not those stark necessities we have so bedecked with bells and whistles that we cannot recognize what is underneath. As noted above, the latter are simple: food, shelter, and clothing. Anything beyond these necessities for subsistence is fabricated reality, and all of us are scalp-deep in its countless accretions and extensions, its vast architecture of fervid dreams over the past five thousand years or so. In the genre of science fiction, narratives set in a post- holocaust society often accentuate its lunacy, tyranny, and conflict, which is to say that the gravest possible lesson will leave humanity unchanged. As if nothing happened, the characters living in these blasted environments immediately set about rebuilding fabricated realities from the remnants of the ones that are in ruins.

While some have had expressed momentous reservations about this edifice of claptrap known as civilization, this colossally garish spectacle of bad taste, we do not often pass up an opportunity to commend ourselves for erecting it. We grovel at the memorials of some author, artist, inventor, or national leader who lived before us. We gape in wonder at the base of an Egyptian pyramid or an Aztec pyramid or any other pyramid we come across. Without question, we are cuckoo for pyramids. How stupefying that these mounds of rocks should be seen as showpieces of an ancient grandeur rather than as tombs of our sanity. And still we go at it full force. Is there any doubt that everyone will be suppurating with vainglory when the first pyramid, in the guise of a splendorous installation decreed by civilization’s potentates, is built on Mars?" [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]


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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 12:51 pm

Ligotti wrote:
"No other life-forms know they are alive, nor can imagine what death might be like. This is our curse alone. Without it, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural—so far and for so long that it is a relief to say what we have been trying with all of our might not to say: We have never been denizens of the natural world. Even as we survived and procreated there, we knew something that other creatures did not. And anyone can guess what that something was: that we would die. Having this knowledge, we could never be at home in nature. As beings with consciousness, we were delivered into another world—the one that is not natural. All around us were natural habitats, but within our every atom was the chill of the unknown, the uncanny, the unearthly, and even the terrible and fascinating mystery of the holy. Simply put: we are not from here. We move among living things, all those natural puppets with nothing in their heads. But our heads dwell in another place, a world apart where all the puppets are dead in the midst of life. We are those puppets, those crazed mimics that prowl about for a peace that will never be theirs. We are the undead who cannot live with what we know and are afraid of what we do not know. And the medium in which we circulate is that of the supernatural, the special horror of those who believe in what should be and should not be. This is the domain where we secretly exist and inwardly rave with an insanity on the level of metaphysics, fracturing creation and breaking the laws of life. From across an unseen divide, we bring the supernatural into all that is manifest. We walk alone as beings that are not as we seem, strange even to ourselves. Our occurrence was an aberration on this earth. Even as we survive and reproduce, we know we are dying by degrees in the darkest corners of existence. No other things around us have this supernatural sight, nor would choose it if they could. These skeletons of ours—when will they come out and show themselves? They rattle inside us, dancing toward death. How long will they last before their burial or burning?

“Man is a self-conscious Nothing.” Taken at face value, this statement is a paradox and a horror. Being self-conscious and being nothing should rule out each other. Instead they are coupled to suggest an unreal monstrosity, an existential chimera on the order of the “undead.” The greater community of self-conscious mortals will tell you they are something, not nothing. The suicidal will tell you they are something but wish they were nothing. What almost no one will tell you is that they “know” they are nothing—living puppets helpless to act except as bidden by powers unseen—but, being self-conscious, suffer the illusion that they are something. They believe this is how it is with everyone— that all of us are living the same paradox, the same horror. They also believe we will do anything to keep this knowledge out of our heads because if we did not, how could we go on living? And why would we replenish the world with more self-conscious nothings, more puppets?

Our problem is that we have to watch ourselves as we go through the motions; our problem is that we know too much that we are alive and will die.

And our solution is in the turns we take in a world where we live as puppets and not as people.

Naturally, we would still have to feed, but we would not be omnivorous gourmands who eat for amusement, gobbling everything in nature and turning to the laboratory for more. Like other animals, we would continue to suffer pain in one form or another—that is the essence of existence—but we would not be cozened by our egos to take it personally, an attitude that escalates natural pain into unsustainable horror. To most people, this kind of world might seem drab—no competition, no art, no entertainment because all of these things are based on conflict, and in the world of the ego-dead there would be no conflict of the kind that fills stadiums and battlegrounds. There would also be no ego-boosting activities such as those which derive from working and acquiring more money than one needs, no scientific activity because we would not be driven to improve the world or know much about anything in it or outside it, no religious beliefs because those emerge from desperations and illusions from which we would no longer suffer. Our sights would be set no further than our natural needs, for the tastes and habits of our own invention only subjugate us to a life made unimaginable without them. (Ask any tobacco addict who goes into mourning the day he must choose between smoking and breathing.) Best of all, after becoming so excellently revised as human beings, we would never again have to “agree to disagree.”" [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 12:52 pm

Ligotti wrote:
"After Nietzsche, pessimism was revaluated by some, rejuvenated by others, and still rebuffed as depressing by ordinary persons, who went on yammering about their most activating illusion: “Today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better still.” While being alive may be all right for the moment, the future is really the place for a person to be, at least as far as we care to see into it.

As a rule, though, most prefer old and reputable belief systems and their sectarian outgrowths. So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent putz who soiled Himself and the universe with His corruption, a born screw-up whose seedy creation led the Gnostics to conceive of this genetic force as a factory-second, low-budget divinity pretending to be the genuine article.

They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher cobbled together like Frankenstein’s monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried—a savior on a stick. They trust in Allah and his mouthpiece Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that verifies their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain, unclear, or an out-and-out nightmare, but which sates their appetite for values not of this earth—that depressing, meaningless place they know so well and want nothing more than to obliterate from their consciousness.
Sure enough, then, writers such as Zapffe, Schopenhauer, and Lovecraft only write their ticket to marginality when they fail to affirm the worth and wonder of humanity, the validity of its values (whether eternal or provisional), and, naturally, a world without end, or at least one that continues into the foreseeable future. Anything else is too depressing to be countenanced.

The Singularity encapsulates a perennial error among the headliners of science: that there has never been nor will ever be the least qualitative difference between the earliest single-celled organisms and any human or machine conceivable or not conceivable in a world whose future is without a destination. That we are going nowhere is not a curable fate; that we must go nowhere at the fastest possible velocity just might be curable, although probably not. Either way, it makes no difference. (Zapffe deplored technological advancements and the discoveries to which they led, since those interested in such things would be cheated of the distraction of finding them out for themselves. Every human activity is a tack for killing time, and it seemed criminal to him that people should have their time already killed for them by explorers, inventors, and innovators of every stripe.)." [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 12:52 pm

Ligotti wrote:
"For Zapffe, as for all pessimists, insistence on what is commonplace but taboo is his stock in trade.
The Norwegian’s two central propositions are as follows. The first is that consciousness, that glory of awareness and self-awareness unique to our species, makes our lives miserable, and thus we thwart it in four principle ways:

(1) by isolation of the dire facts of existence from our minds, denying both to ourselves and to others (in a conspiracy of silence) that our condition is inherently disconcerting and problematic;

(2) by anchoring our lives in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God, Country, Family, Laws—based on charters issued by an enforcing authority (in the same way as a hunting license), imbuing us with a sense of being official, authentic, and guarded while shunting aside the feeling that these documents are not worth the paper they are written on (in the same way as a passport establishes one’s identity even though it may be forged);

(3) by distraction, a widespread conspiracy in which everyone keeps their eyes on the ball—or a television screen or fireworks display—and their heads placidly unreflective;

(4) by sublimation, the process by which thinkers and artistic types recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in which the worst fortunes of humanity are represented in a stylized and removed manner for the purposes of edification and entertainment, forming the conspiracy of creating and consuming products that provide an escape from our suffering in the guise of a false confrontation with it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance.

To repeat: we can tolerate existence only if we believe—in accord with a complex of illusions, a legerdemain of impenetrable deception—that we are not what we are. We are creatures with consciousness, but we must suppress that consciousness lest it break us with a sense of being in a universe without direction or foundation. In plain language, we cannot live with ourselves except as impostors.

As Zapffe points out in “The Last Messiah,” this is the paradox of the human: the impossibility of not lying to ourselves about ourselves and about our no-win situation in this world. Thus, we are zealots of the four strategies delineated above:

isolation (“Being alive is all right”),

anchoring (“One Nation under God with Families and Laws for all”),

distraction (“Better to kill time than kill oneself”), and,

sublimation (“I am writing a book titled The Conspiracy against the Human Race”).

To the mass of us mortals, these practices make us what we are, namely, beings with a nimble intellect who can deceive themselves for their own good. Isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation are the wiles we use to keep our heads from dispelling every illusion that keeps us up and running. (“We think, therefore we know we are alive and will one day die; so we had better stop thinking, except in circles.”) Without this cognitive double-dealing, being alive would bare itself as a sordid burlesque and not the fabulous thing we thought it was. Maybe then we would know what it is to be human instead of just puppets beating the boards and one another. But that would stop the show that we like to think will run forever.

Saddled with self-knowledge, however, we thrive only insofar as we vigilantly obfuscate our heads with every baseless belief or frivolous diversion at our disposal. But as much as our heads are inclined to clog themselves with such trash, a full-scale blockage is impossible. This impossibility makes us heirs to a legacy of discontent. Those who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence are hopelessly frustrated with living in a world on autopilot when they would like to switch it over to manual consciousness just long enough for humanity to crash and burn. Most can live with discontent because it is concomitant with their hope that humanity will forever “survive” (Middle English by way of Middle French from the Latin supervivere—to outlive or live beyond)." [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 12:52 pm

Ligotti wrote:
"In “The Last Messiah,” Zapffe indicates four broad methods (isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation) that we employ to insulate ourselves from the horrors brought on by consciousness. None of these are infallible for all mortals at all times. Those who are untalented in self-deception are especially at risk for a breakdown in the machinery. One such breakdown is depression, which is fascinating both as a disease and an existential drama. (The Swedish writer Jens Bjørneboe wrote that “he who hasn't experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time—he is a child.”) Ranging across a continuum of experience that may become trying in private practice, varieties of depression are clear-cut within the psychiatric literature for convenience sake. The statistically prevailing form of this disease is “atypical” depression. But whatever family name has been given to a case of depression, it has an objective in common with all its kind: to sabotage the network of emotions you had come to identify as the composition of yourself. It is then you discover that your “old self” is not the substantial and inviolable thing you thought it was, nor was the rest of your “old” reality.

What organization and sense our lives seem to have—the florid symptomology that makes this or that game appear to be worth the candle—is the work of emotion. Without it, there is no sense of organization, no sense of sense. By asphyxiating or deranging the emotional phenomenon, depression dissolves the latticework of you and your life. Emotion, in union with memory, is the substrate for the illusion of self and the illusory substance and properties we see, or think we see, in the world. As do the contradictory doctrines of world religions, emotions roll over one another all the time for lack of a substructure upon which to erect anything consistent, anything “real,” in the long run. Nevertheless, there they are—either weak and fleeting or so intense that it may seem that something of an absolute nature must underlie their experience. Ask any couple who believe their love will never die, a vital fiction that for a time puts blinders on one’s consciousness of the human tragedy." [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 12:53 pm

Ligotti wrote:
"We mortals seem to have an inveterate need to escape our baseline of emotion. This intolerance for stasis in our emotional lives, an unbalanced compulsion to modify our chemistry by artificial or natural means, jibes with what Buddhism avows is the unsatisfactory nature of life as such. We pine for escapades from the quotidian, the day- to-day grind whose enchantments come into relief only when contrasted with deadly alternatives. Besides the fact that we are biologically quixotic, why else succumb to romantic risk taking? In one of his plentiful moments of fulgurant clarity, Schopenhauer spelled out why he thought that “sexual desire, especially when through fixation on a definite woman it is concentrated to amorous infatuation, is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble world; for it promises so unspeakably, infinitely, and excessively much, and then performs so contemptibly little.” The lesson is a straightforward one: everything in this life is more trouble than it is worth. And simply to be alive is to be enwombed in trouble. This is something that has been recognized more in the East than in the West. Minor figures in Greek philosophy instruct us to seek equanimity rather than pleasure, but their lectures never caught on. Early Buddhist teachings cautioned their adherents not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to salvation from the average sensual life, which is why these doctrines were trounced by the commonalty of heads and mutated into forms more suited to the human creature. In addition, meditating Buddhists must be able to sit still as a stone, a knack that few are electrified into perfecting. As children, we spin in circles until we fall to the ground with vertigo, and this practice is repeated in one way or another throughout our lives.

Art products are among the most approved contrivances for thwarting one’s baseline of emotion. Both creators and consumers of these goods and services are “transported” by aesthetic manipulations, although such transports are not very keen when compared to those that satisfy a biological drive or an acquired habituation. As a method of escapism, creating or consuming art seems a harmless pastime. Those who depend on artistic distraction trust that they can always fall back on it, even when every other stimulus has abandoned them. Nevertheless, many have been disabused of this assumption. The writer who can no longer write is taught the blighted impotence of the newly paralyzed. Musicians or music lovers who suffer from untreatable pain or depression are debarred from their haven of pleasure, frozen in a landscape where all sounds merge into the sameness of silence. How can these invalids replace what has gone absent from their lives, these children who can no longer spin about until they dizzily drop to the ground?

Deprived of even relatively mild tonics for enhancing one’s baseline of emotion—that is, of getting high—they discover how dependent they were on their intoxicants. Ogden Nash’s noteworthy line “Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker,” aside from its original context of sexual seduction, may, at a higher level of abstraction, also concern how a body may be more effectively transported from its usual humdrum trajectory by the use of chemicals. The fact that they, too, are more trouble than they are worth is often due to legal and societal sanctions against them rather than to their effects either in the short run or over time. While conspirators in the War on Death enforce life at all costs, turning the act of suicide into a ritual of devastating loneliness, those who conspire for universal sobriety are sparked by the same heinous zeal. They might instead choose to attend to doings that cause far more misery, but why they do what they do is as much a mystery as why others do not. Call it a matter of choice, if you will.

One school of evolutionary psychology thus hypothesizes the origins of our error: pleasurable emotions and sensations germinated because they were adaptive. Example: release from the stress of sexual desire was once the catalyst for reproduction. (Following the outbreak of language, everyone began praising sexual pleasure for its own sake, while no one has ever celebrated the biological drive that leads to it, just as everyone praises a good meal but not the hunger that makes it so pleasurable.) But knowing the devious ways of nature, should anyone be thunderstruck that she has put a lid on the intensity of our pleasure and a time limit on how long it may last? If our pleasure did not have both a cap and a ticking clock, we would not bestir ourselves from our enjoyment long enough to attend to the exigencies of the body. And then we would not survive. By the same token, should our mass mind ever become discontented with the crumbs of pleasure grudgingly dished out by nature, we would omit the mandates of survival from our lives out of a stratospherically acerbic resentment. And then we would not reproduce. As a species, we do not shout into the sky, “The pleasures of this world are not enough for us.” In fact, they are just enough to drive us on like oxen pulling a cart full of our calves, which in their turn will put on the yoke. As highly evolved beings, though, we like to think that it will not always be this way. “Someday,” we say to ourselves, “we will escape from this world in which we are battered between long burden and brief delight, and we will live in pleasure and contentment for what days are left to us.”

The belief in the possibility of long-lasting, high-flown pleasures is a deceptive but nicely adaptive flimflam of consciousness. Why the above hypothesis should appear as a controversial theory of evolutionary psychology rather than as a commonplace in current psychology, excepting positive psychology, is one hair-ripping riddle for the ages." [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 12:53 pm

Ligotti wrote:
"The task for writers of widely read books is to prove that they know more than their readers about the world and its workings. By and large, writers do have more facts at their fingertips because that is part of their skill-set. And if they are not knowledgeable in some specialized area, they may research a subject to garner more information about it than that of the average reader, which is no Herculean labor since people have just so much spare time and do not fact- check an author’s research—they only gorge themselves on it for the sake of being entertained. The more recondite and removed from a reader’s life the doings within a book appear to be, the more likely the inexpert reader is to believe in its truth. If a reader happens to know more than the author about a subject, then the game is over and the book is tossed aside.

A more lowly method for taking readers for a ride may be sampled in books of self-help, inspiration, or motivation, the pith of which is to bear witness that “It happened for me. It can happen for you. You can become rich. You can become happy. Aliens have invaded your body but you will become rich and happy once we have audited them from your system. You live in a world created by a loving god and have an immortal soul.”
All that is required for this scam to work is a reader’s desire to believe the persons making these claims. Need it be said that myriads of readers will line up if the line they are being handed is scandalously pleasing to their eyes and ears?

Anyone who is not willing to exceed the bounds of seemliness and good sense (and do it with a straight face) or to deliver nothing but good news to the downhearted will be obscurities in the above-named genres. The least scent of a negative word will be met with disbelief or inattention. Sometimes it does not matter what you say but how you say it. This is another method to keep in mind. Imagine a disheveled person roaming the streets with a sign that reads “The end is near. Prepare yourself.” Offering a prevision or opinion unwelcome by all, this individual will be shouldered aside by people shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, and snorting in disgust. Now imagine a well-dressed huckster on television who says, “Praise be, we are at the end of days. Soon we will be together in paradise. I’ve got the spirit in me. I’ve got Christ on a cracker. Send contributions to the address on your screen.” By generating a positive atmosphere and a vision of good times beyond the end times, a televangelist pig will receive tax-free money by the bagful.

Yet whether there is a claim to rendering actual facts—the class of communication under which fall such genres as gossip, history, and religious narratives—or a frank admission that one is producing a wholesale yarn, the creation and consumption of stories is apparently a need endemic to the fairgrounds of the human freak show. Born of consciousness and the artifact of language, storytelling in some form will never saturate its market. Those who are not in it for the money or the glory are nonetheless practitioners in this field: we can hardly open our mouths without telling a tale. In every society, storytelling is compulsory and addictive. We are coaxed into its practice every day of our lives. What is the first question posed upon hearing of someone’s suicide? Answer: “Was there a note?” We want the story. Acceptable or not, this appetite of ours is unhindered by compunction or discretion and is insatiable. Fortunately, there will always be those eager to cater to this relentless desire. The most adept of them are immortalized, so to speak, as gods of literature whose place in our world is regarded as being of the highest worth. What madman would derogate the addiction that is the mainstay of libraries, universities, and whole cultures? We are as incapable of impugning the need under discussion as we are of fairly examining the consciousness that lies beneath it and brings it forth as a scum-filled pond does a lotus flower. Ask any literary genius. A distinguished author once said in an interview that writers who ask themselves why they write are doomed. So are those who approach human consciousness as something it were better never to have been.

It is commonplace that men, unlike other living organisms, are not equipped with built-in mechanisms for automatic maintenance of their existence. Man would perish immediately if he were to respond to his environment exclusively in terms of unlearned biologically inherited forms of behavior. In order to survive, the human being must discover how various things around as well as in him operate. And the place he occupies in the present scheme of organic creation is the consequence of having learned how to exploit his intellectual capacities for such discoveries. Hence, more human than any other human longing is the pursuance of a total view of Man’s function—or malfunction—in the Universe, his possible place and importance in the widest conceivable cosmic scheme. In other words it is the attempt to answer, or at least articulate whatever questions are entailed in the dying groan of ontological despair: what is it all about? This may well prove biologically harmful or even fatal to Man. Intellectual honesty and Man’s high spiritual demands for order and meaning may drive Man to the deepest antipathy to life and necessitate, as one existentialist chooses to express it: ‘a no to this wild, banal, grotesque and loathsome carnival in the world’s graveyard’.” [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 12:54 pm

Ligotti wrote:


“For optimists, human life never needs justification, no matter how much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things will get better. For pessimists, there is no amount of happiness—should such a thing as happiness even obtain for human beings except as a misconception—that can compensate us for life’s hurt. As a worst-case example, a pessimist might refer to the hurt caused by some natural or human-made cataclysm. To adduce a hedonic counterpart to the horrors that attach to such cataclysms would require a degree of ingenuity from an optimist, but it could be done. And the reason it could be done, the reason for the eternal stalemate between optimists and pessimists, is that no possible formula can be established to measure proportions and types of hurt and happiness in the world. If such a formula could be established, then either pessimists or optimists would have to give in to their adversaries.

The finest people, as people go, cannot help but betray a fair portion of fear and insecurity, even full-blown panic.” [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 12:54 pm

Ligotti wrote:
"For those keeping track, the only rights we have are these: to seek the survival of our individual bodies, to create more bodies like our own, and to know that everyone’s body will perish through a process of corruption or mortal trauma. (This is presuming that one has been brought to term and has survived to a certain age, neither being a natural birthright. Rigorously considered, our only natural birthright is to die.) No other rights have been allocated to us except, to repeat with emphasis, as fabrications. The divine right of kings may now be acknowledged as such a fabrication—a falsified permit for prideful dementia and arbitrary mayhem. The unalienable rights of certain people, however, seemingly remain current: whether observed or violated, somehow we believe they are not fabrications because an old document says they are real. Miserly or munificent as a given right may appear, it denotes no more than the right of way warranted by a traffic light, which does not mean you have the right to drive free of vehicular mishaps. Ask any paramedic." [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 1:12 pm

Very nice.
You should drop by more often Lyssa.

Antinetalism is a part of the nihilism a human being can fall into, as a byproduct of self-consciousness.
An animal acts on instinct. it only feels its lack as a desire. It is automatic, impulsive...some would call it spontaneous, but it is not completely detached from cause, so its spontaneity is a reference to an absence of self-consciousness.
Not accidental that Phonee, in another thread, a female mind, would use "spontaneity" to free her aesthetics from the world of necessity.
It's a very fashionable method...
It is also called "living in the moment," or finding joy in living my surrendering to impulse.
It's part of the reversion to an animal psychology... hedonism/materialism being part of this trend.

Only a self-conscious organism would begin to question its own need, its own inclinations.
The beginning of doubt, or self-doubt, of self-discipline and self-denial.
This first stage is the peering into the abyss of existence.

Some, one of which was Schopenhauer, become fixated there... like Buddhism as it is understood in the west.
In Christian dogma a special rule had to be invented to prevent the natural death-drive from dominating brains who have been raise dot despise existence...easy when you are part of the lowliest of the low.
Nature hating, self-hating, can be used but then it becomes a problem.
The christian antiabortion obsession is explained.

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 2:05 pm

Satyr wrote:


Antinetalism is a part of the nihilism a human being can fall into, as a byproduct of self-consciousness.
An animal acts on instinct. it only feels its lack as a desire. It is automatic, impulsive...some would call it spontaneous, but it is not completely detached from cause, so its spontaneity is a reference to an absence of self-consciousness.

I remember you citing the example of great minds like Schopenhauer who did not reproduce as higher consciousness and intelligence doubles back ironically to thwart WTP. I agree with this, but something I was not aware of, was the following from Wiki:


Quote :
"In 1819, Schopenhauer fathered an illegitimate child in Dresden. This child died the same year he/she was born. In 1821, Schopenhauer fell in love with an opera singer Caroline Richter who was 19 years of age. Both were in love relationship for many years. However, Schopenhauer dropped marriage plans and wrote that “Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties”, and “Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes”.

Quote :
"In Dresden Schopenhauer had an illegitimate son, but he had no fatherly relationship with the child, who died young. After a visit to Italy, Schopenhauer qualified as a private lecturer at the University of Berlin. In 1821 he started an affair with the 19-year old actress Caroline Richter. It didn't matter that she had other lovers and had a child who was not his own. Although he treated her badly, she was perhaps the great love of his life."


Which makes Ligotti make the following observation:

Quote :
" As one who kept a diary of his romantic affiliations and activities, Schopenhauer should not be understood here as a reclusive thinker who was indulging himself in a moment of detached ideation. Unfortunately, the relevant document was destroyed by a prudish overseer of the philosopher’s posthumous reputation. More unfortunately, Schopenhauer fathered a child, an all but certain eventuality considering the philosopher’s promiscuous nature and the lack of effective birth-control methods at the time. This fact lends a special piquancy, perhaps indicating a bad conscience, to his ejaculations quoted in the present work on the aversion human beings might have to the reproductive act without the pleasures accompanying it.

Schopenhauer, while arguing that life is a bootless venture that pays us off with pain, was always ready to throw himself into the fray with opponents dead or alive but did not throw in the towel on his own long life due to an anti-suicide clause in his philosophy. One might also fairly opine that he was never pained enough, as was Nietzsche, to consider suicide as a fall-back position should his miseries became too much for him to bear. Compassion for the ailing of others Schopenhauer had in abundance, but what most cowed his imagination was boredom, a pestilence that cannot be calculated among the worst in the world. How blessed by chance he must have been. To add to the diversions with which Schopenhauer’s life was rich, he also played the flute. Nietzsche claimed that, because he occupied himself in this way, Schopenhauer could not have been a true pessimist. This slur might be considered in light of the fact that the later philosopher, who turned pessimism into affirmation like water into wine, was a piano player and songwriter. But this fact does not make Nietzsche wrong. Schopenhauer styled himself a pessimist, an unexampled and true pessimist, which does not mean that he was one. Nothing can prove that, or anything else that Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or anyone has to say about matters of real weight. Flute-playing is not an avocation that one associates with someone who preached self-denial in all aspects of one’s life as a means to a life-negating salvation. But if Schopenhauer practiced the flute rather than what he preached, does that disqualify him from being a pessimist, one who wrote with wearying prolixity that all life was pain and nothing else? Probably not. It does cause a person to wonder about Schopenhauer, though, and by extension to wonder about the words and ways of anyone who would cut a figure as a pessimist. And what a pestering wonder it is when some mortal decries the very world in which he prospers."[CAHR]


This is why N. said, joy is more primal than pain. No one in their heart of hearts would say reproductions is unworthy of living, they lie to themselves like Schop. did.



Quote :

Not accidental that Phonee, in another thread, a female mind, would use "spontaneity" to free her aesthetics form the world.
It's a very fashionable method...
It is also called "living in the moment," or finding joy in living my surrendering to impulse.
It's part of the reversion to an animal psychology... hedonism/materialism being part of this trend.

Yes, that's part of what he calls living like Puppets attached to strings of illusions that keep us safe, that keep us from killing ourselves in the face of nihilism.

The aesthetic thread is a huge topic; fifi cites pleasure as the cessation of suffering as your "moral" evaluation - her own need starts there.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 2:18 pm

Aw, it seems I have acquired a new nickname.
<3 4 u Wink
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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyWed Mar 26, 2014 7:38 pm

<3

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PostSubject: Zapffe Antinatalism EmptySat Apr 04, 2015 5:47 pm

The Last Messiah by Peter Wessel Zapffe.

I

One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.

Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger's bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.

That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.

II

Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily—by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.

Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more, it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and has been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life's embrace.

So there he stands with his visions, betrayed by the universe, in wonder and fear. The beast knew fear as well, in thunderstorms and on the lion's claw. But man became fearful of life itself—indeed, of his very being. Life—that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. Even as the child sets out on the river of life, the roars from the waterfall of death rise highly above the vale, ever closer, and tearing, tearing at its joy. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future's curtain unraveled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happens arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle. He sees himself emerge in his mother's womb, he holds up his hand in the air and it has five branches; whence this devilish number five, and what has it to do with my soul? He is no longer obvious to himself—he touches his body in utter horror; this is you and so far do you extend and no farther. He carries a meal within him, yesterday it was a beast that could itself dash around, now I suck it up and make it part of me, and where do I begin and end? All things chain together in causes and effects, and everything he wants to grasp dissolves before the testing thought. Soon he sees mechanics even in the so-far whole and dear, in the smile of his beloved—there are other smiles as well, a torn boot with toes. Eventually, the features of things are features only of himself. Nothing exists without himself, every line points back at him, the world is but a ghostly echo of his voice—he leaps up loudly screaming and wants to disgorge himself onto the earth along with his impure meal, he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability.

But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologico-cosmic terms: He is the universe's helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.

Such a feeling of cosmic panic is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual's attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.

The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over-evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.

In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

III

Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living—because cognition gives them more than they can carry?

Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

If the giant deer, at suitable intervals, had broken off the outer spears of its antlers, it might have kept going for some while longer. Yet in fever and constant pain, indeed, in betrayal of its central idea, the core of its peculiarity, for it was vocated by creation's hand to be the horn bearer of wild animals. What it gained in continuance, it would lose in significance, in grandness of life, in other words a continuance without hope, a march not up to affirmation, but forth across its ever recreated ruins, a self-destructive race against the sacred will of blood.

The identity of purpose and perishment is, for giant deer and man alike, the tragic paradox of life. In devoted Bejahung, the last Cervis Giganticus bore the badge of its lineage to its end. The human being saves itself and carries on. It performs, to extend a settled phrase, a more or less self-conscious repression of its damaging surplus of consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.

Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the 'healthy' and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, 'fear of life', refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of antibiological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced—correctly—as a betrayal of ego's highest potential. The whole of living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas of everyday life. Though they take a vast and multifarious variety of forms, it seems legitimate to at least identify four major kinds, naturally occurring in every possible combination: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation.

By isolation I here mean a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling. (Engstrom: "One should not think, it is just confusing.") A perfect and almost brutalizing variant is found among certain physicians, who for self-protection will only see the technical aspect of their profession. It can also decay to pure hooliganism, as among petty thugs and medical students, where any sensitivity to the tragic side of life is eradicated by violent means (football played with cadaver heads, and so on).

In everyday interaction, isolation is manifested in a general code of mutual silence: primarily toward children, so these are not at once scared senseless by the life they have just begun, but retain their illusions until they can afford to lose them. In return, children are not to bother the adults with untimely reminders of sex, toilet, or death. Among adults there are the rules of 'tact,' the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance.

The mechanism of anchoring also serves from early childhood; parents, home, the street become matters of course to the child and give it a sense of assurance. This sphere of experience is the first, and perhaps the happiest, protection against the cosmos that we ever get to know in life, a fact that doubtless also explains the much debated 'infantile bonding;' the question of whether that is sexually tainted too is unimportant here. When the child later discovers that those fixed points are as 'arbitrary' and 'ephemeral' as any others, it has a crisis of confusion and anxiety and promptly looks around for another anchoring. "In Autumn, I will attend middle school." If the substitution somehow fails, then the crisis may take a fatal course, or else what I will call an anchoring spasm occurs: One clings to the dead values, concealing as well as possible from oneself and others the fact that they are unworkable, that one is spiritually insolvent. The result is lasting insecurity, 'feelings of inferiority,' over-compensation, restlessness. Insofar as this state falls into certain categories, it is made subject to psychoanalytic treatment, which aims to complete the transition to new anchorings.

Anchoring might be characterized as a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness. Though typically unconscious, it may also be fully conscious (one 'adopts a goal'.) Publicly useful anchorings are met with sympathy, he who 'sacrifices himself totally' for his anchoring (the firm, the cause) is idolized. He has established a mighty bulwark against the dissolution of life, and others are by suggestion gaining from his strength. In a brutalized form, as deliberate action, it is found among 'decadent' playboys (“one should get married in time, and then the constraints will come of themselves.”) Thus one establishes a necessity in one's life, exposing oneself to an obvious evil from one's point of view, but a soothing of the nerves, a high-walled container for a sensibility to life that has been growing increasingly crude. Ibsen presents, in Hjalmar Ekdal and Molvik, two flowering causes ('living lies'); there is no difference between their anchoring and that of the pillars of society except for the practico-economic unproductiveness of the former.

Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited, collective main firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes and threats of prosecution (inquisition, censorship, the Conservative approach to life).

The carrying capacity of each segment either depends on its fictitious nature having not been seen through yet, or else on its being recognized as necessary anyway. Hence the religious education in schools, which even atheists support because they know no other way to bring children into social ways of response.

Whenever people realize the fictitiousness or redundancy of the segments, they will strive to replace them with new ones ('the limited duration of Truths')—and whence flows all the spiritual and cultural strife which, along with economic competition, forms the dynamic content of world history.

The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner.

Both for collective and individual anchorings it holds that when a segment breaks, there is a crisis that is graver the closer the segment to main firmaments. Within the inner circles, sheltered by the outer ramparts, such crises are daily and fairly pain-free occurrences ('disappointments'); even a playing with anchoring values is here seen (wittiness, jargon, alcohol). But during such play one may accidentally rip a hole from euphoric to macabre. The dread of being stares us in the eye, and in a deadly gush we perceive how the minds are dangling in threads of their own spinning, and that a hell is lurking underneath.

The very foundational firmaments are rarely replaced without great social spasms and a risk of complete dissolution (reformation, revolution). During such times, individuals are increasingly left to their own devices for anchoring, and the number of failures tends to rise. Depressions, excesses, and suicides result (German officers after the war, Chinese students after the revolution).

Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feelings and thoughts. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature's deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom.

We love the anchorings for saving us, but also hate them for limiting our sense of freedom. Whenever we feel strong enough, we thus take pleasure in going together to bury an expired value in style. Material objects take on a symbolic import here (the Radical approach to life).

When a human being has eliminated those of his anchorings that are visible to himself, only the unconscious ones staying put, then he will call himself a liberated personality.

A very popular mode of protection is distraction. One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions. This is typical even in childhood; without distraction, the child is also insufferable to itself. "Mom, what am I to do." A little English girl visiting her Norwegian aunts came inside from her room, saying: "What happens now?" The nurses attain virtuosity: Look, a doggie! Watch, they are painting the palace! The phenomenon is too familiar to require any further demonstration. Distraction is, for example, the 'high society's' tactic for living. It can be likened to a flying machine—made of heavy material, but embodying a principle that keeps it airborne whenever applying. It must always be in motion, as air only carries it fleetingly. The pilot may grow drowsy and comfortable out of habit, but the crisis is acute as soon as the engine flunks.

The tactic is often fully conscious. Despair may dwell right underneath and break through in gushes, in a sudden sobbing. When all distractive options are expended, spleen sets in, ranging from mild indifference to fatal depression. Women, in general less cognition-prone and hence more secure in their living than men, preferably use distraction.

A considerable evil of imprisonment is the denial of most distractive options. And as terms for deliverance by other means are poor as well, the prisoner will tend to stay in the close vicinity of despair. The acts he then commits to deflect the final stage have a warrant in the principle of vitality itself. In such a moment he is experiencing his soul within the universe, and has no other motive than the utter unendurability of that condition.

Pure examples of life-panic are presumably rare, as the protective mechanisms are refined and automatic and to some extent unremitting. But even the adjacent terrain bears the mark of death, life is here barely sustainable and by great efforts. Death always appears as an escape, one ignores the possibilities of the hereafter, and as the way death is experienced is partly dependent of feeling and perspective, it might be quite an acceptable solution. If one in statu mortis could manage a pose (a poem, a gesture, to 'die standing up'), i.e., a final anchoring, or a final distraction (Aases' death), then such a fate is not the worst one at all. The press, for once serving the concealment mechanism, never fails to find reasons that cause no alarm—"it is believed that the latest fall in the price of wheat..."

When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.

Only a limited part of humanity can make do with mere 'changes', whether in work, social life, or entertainment. The cultured person demands connections, lines, a progression in the changes. Nothing finite satisfies at length, one is ever proceeding, gathering knowledge, making a career. The phenomenon is known as 'yearning' or 'transcendental tendency.' Whenever a goal is reached, the yearning moves on; hence its object is not the goal, but the very attainment of it—the gradient, not the absolute height, of the curve representing one's life. The promotion from private to corporal may give a more valuable experience than the one from colonel to general. Any grounds of 'progressive optimism' are removed by this major psychological law.

The human yearning is not merely marked by a 'striving toward', but equally by an 'escape from.' And if we use the word in a religious sense, only the latter description fits. For here, none has yet been clear about what he is longing away from, namely the earthly vale of tears, one's own unendurable condition. If awareness of this predicament is the deepest stratum of the soul, as argued above, then it is also understandable why the religious yearning is felt and experienced as fundamental. By contrast, the hope that it forms a divine criterion, which harbours a promise of its own fulfillment, is placed in a truly melancholy light by these considerations.

The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.

Unless the worst sting of suffering is blunted by other means, or denied control of the mind, such utilization is unlikely, however. (Image: The mountaineer does not enjoy his view of the abyss while choking with vertigo; only when this feeling is more or less overcome does he enjoy it—anchored.) To write a tragedy, one must to some extent free oneself from—betray—the very feeling of tragedy and regard it from an outer, e.g., aesthetic, point of view. Here is, by the way, an opportunity for the wildest round-dancing through ever higher ironic levels, into a most embarrassing circulus vitiosus. Here one can chase one's ego across numerous habitats, enjoying the capacity of the various layers of consciousness to dispel one another.

The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer, he is filling pages and is going to be published in a journal.

The 'martyrdom' of lonely ladies also shows a kind of sublimation—they gain in significance thereby. Nevertheless, sublimation appears to be the rarest of the protective means mentioned here.

IV

Is it possible for 'primitive natures' to renounce these cramps and cavorts and live in harmony with themselves in the serene bliss of labour and love? Insofar as they may be considered human at all, I think the answer must be no. The strongest claim to be made about the so-called peoples of nature is that they are somewhat closer to the wonderful biological ideal than we unnatural people. And when even we have so far been able to save a majority through every storm, we have been assisted by the sides of our nature that are just modestly or moderately developed. This positive basis (as protection alone cannot create life, only hinder its faltering) must be sought in the naturally adapted deployment of the energy in the body and the biologically helpful parts of the soul, subject to such hardships as are precisely due to sensory limitations, bodily frailty, and the need to do work for life and love.

And just in this finite land of bliss within the fronts do the progressing civilization, technology and standardization have such a debasing influence. For as an ever growing fraction of the cognitive faculties retire from the game against the environment, there is a rising spiritual unemployment. The value of a technical advance to the whole undertaking of life must be judged by its contribution to the human opportunity for spiritual occupation. Though boundaries are blurry, perhaps the first tools for cutting might be mentioned as a case of a positive invention.

Other technical inventions enrich only the life of the inventor himself; they represent a gross and ruthless theft from humankind's common reserve of experiences and should invoke the harshest punishment if made public against the veto of censorship. One such crime among numerous others is the use of flying machines to explore uncharted land. In a single vandalistic glob, one thus destroys lush opportunities for experience that could benefit many if each, by effort, obtained his fair share.

The current phase of life's chronic fever is particularly tainted by this circumstance. The absence of naturally (biologically) based spiritual activity shows up, for example, in the pervasive recourse to distraction (entertainment, sport, radio—'the rhythm of the times'). Terms for anchoring are not as favourable—all the inherited, collective systems of anchorings are punctured by criticism, and anxiety, disgust, confusion, despair leak in through the rifts ('corpses in the cargo.') Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism has also a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition. The idea, in either case, is uncannily logical. But again, it cannot yield a final solution. Though a deliberate degeneration to a more viable nadir may certainly save the species in the short run, it will by its nature be unable to find peace in such resignation, or indeed find any peace at all.

V

If we continue these considerations to the bitter end, then the conclusion is not in doubt. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. As its numbers mount and the spiritual atmosphere thickens, the techniques of protection must assume an increasingly brutal character.

And humans will persist in dreaming of salvation and affirmation and a new Messiah. Yet when many saviours have been nailed to trees and stoned on the city squares, then the last Messiah shall come.

Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth's collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:

The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth's is a pond and a backwater.

The sign of doom is written on your brows—how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?

But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.

Know yourselves—be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye!

And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails. He is the last Messiah. As son from father, he stems from the archer by the waterhole.
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyMon Apr 24, 2017 4:31 am

Without a strong spirit, matter and every congealing, bonding, integration of any structure begins to break apart, and merely 'gels', sticks and 'clings' together...
producing atrophies.

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptySun Apr 30, 2017 6:27 pm

Lyssa wrote:
Ligotti wrote:
"For Zapffe, as for all pessimists, insistence on what is commonplace but taboo is his stock in trade.
The Norwegian’s two central propositions are as follows. The first is that consciousness, that glory of awareness and self-awareness unique to our species, makes our lives miserable, and thus we thwart it in four principle ways:

(1) by isolation of the dire facts of existence from our minds, denying both to ourselves and to others (in a conspiracy of silence) that our condition is inherently disconcerting and problematic;

(2) by anchoring our lives in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God, Country, Family, Laws—based on charters issued by an enforcing authority (in the same way as a hunting license), imbuing us with a sense of being official, authentic, and guarded while shunting aside the feeling that these documents are not worth the paper they are written on (in the same way as a passport establishes one’s identity even though it may be forged);

(3) by distraction, a widespread conspiracy in which everyone keeps their eyes on the ball—or a television screen or fireworks display—and their heads placidly unreflective;

(4) by sublimation, the process by which thinkers and artistic types recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in which the worst fortunes of humanity are represented in a stylized and removed manner for the purposes of edification and entertainment, forming the conspiracy of creating and consuming products that provide an escape from our suffering in the guise of a false confrontation with it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance.

To repeat: we can tolerate existence only if we believe—in accord with a complex of illusions, a legerdemain of impenetrable deception—that we are not what we are. We are creatures with consciousness, but we must suppress that consciousness lest it break us with a sense of being in a universe without direction or foundation. In plain language, we cannot live with ourselves except as impostors.

As Zapffe points out in “The Last Messiah,” this is the paradox of the human: the impossibility of not lying to ourselves about ourselves and about our no-win situation in this world. Thus, we are zealots of the four strategies delineated above:

isolation (“Being alive is all right”),

anchoring (“One Nation under God with Families and Laws for all”),

distraction (“Better to kill time than kill oneself”), and,

sublimation (“I am writing a book titled The Conspiracy against the Human Race”).

To the mass of us mortals, these practices make us what we are, namely, beings with a nimble intellect who can deceive themselves for their own good. Isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation are the wiles we use to keep our heads from dispelling every illusion that keeps us up and running. (“We think, therefore we know we are alive and will one day die; so we had better stop thinking, except in circles.”) Without this cognitive double-dealing, being alive would bare itself as a sordid burlesque and not the fabulous thing we thought it was. Maybe then we would know what it is to be human instead of just puppets beating the boards and one another. But that would stop the show that we like to think will run forever.

Saddled with self-knowledge, however, we thrive only insofar as we vigilantly obfuscate our heads with every baseless belief or frivolous diversion at our disposal. But as much as our heads are inclined to clog themselves with such trash, a full-scale blockage is impossible. This impossibility makes us heirs to a legacy of discontent. Those who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence are hopelessly frustrated with living in a world on autopilot when they would like to switch it over to manual consciousness just long enough for humanity to crash and burn. Most can live with discontent because it is concomitant with their hope that humanity will forever “survive” (Middle English by way of Middle French from the Latin supervivere—to outlive or live beyond)." [The Conspiracy Against the Human Race]




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Peter Zapffe wrote:
"The mechanism of anchoring also serves from early childhood; parents, home, the street become matters of course to the child and give it a sense of assurance. This sphere of experience is the first, and perhaps the happiest, protection against the cosmos that we ever get to know in life, a fact that doubtless also explains the much debated ‘infantile bonding;’ the question of whether that is sexually tainted too is unimportant here. When the child later discovers that those fixed points are as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘ephemeral’ as any others, it has a crisis of confusion and anxiety and promptly looks around for another anchoring. “In Autumn, I will attend middle school.” If the substitution somehow fails, then the crisis may take a fatal course, or else what I will call an anchoring spasm occurs: One clings to the dead values, concealing as well as possible from oneself and others the fact that they are unworkable, that one is spiritually insolvent. The result is lasting insecurity, ‘feelings of inferiority,’ over-compensation, restlessness. Insofar as this state falls into certain categories, it is made subject to psychoanalytic treatment, which aims to complete the transition to new anchorings.

Anchoring might be characterised as a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness. Though typically unconscious, it may also be fully conscious (one ‘adopts a goal’.) Publicly useful anchorings are met with sympathy, he who ‘sacrifices himself totally’ for his anchoring (the firm, the cause) is idolised. He has established a mighty bulwark against the dissolution of life, and others are by suggestion gaining from his strength. In a brutalised form, as deliberate action, it is found among ‘decadent’ playboys (“one should get married in time, and then the constraints will come of themselves.”) Thus one establishes a necessity in one’s life, exposing oneself to an obvious evil from one’s point of view, but a soothing of the nerves, a high-walled container for a sensibility to life that has been growing increasingly crude. Ibsen presents, in Hjalmar Ekdal and Molvik, two flowering cases (‘living lies’); there is no difference between their anchoring and that of the pillars of society except for the practico-economic unproductiveness of the former.

Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited, collective main firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes and threats of prosecution (inquisition, censorship, the Conservative approach to life).

The carrying capacity of each segment either depends on its fictitious nature having not been seen through yet, or else on its being recognised as necessary anyway. Hence the religious education in schools, which even atheists support because they know no other way to bring children into social ways of response.

Whenever people realise the fictitiousness or redundancy of the segments, they will strive to replace them with new ones (‘the limited duration of Truths’) – and whence flows all the spiritual and cultural strife which, along with economic competition, forms the dynamic content of world history.

The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner.

Both for collective and individual anchorings it holds that when a segment breaks, there is a crisis that is graver the closer that segment to main firmaments. Within the inner circles, sheltered by the outer ramparts, such crises are daily and fairly painfree occurrences (‘disappointments’); even a playing with anchoring values is here seen (wittiness, jargon, alcohol). But during such play one may accidentally rip a hole right to the bottom, and the scene is instantly transformed from euphoric to macabre. The dread of being stares us in the eye, and in a deadly gush we perceive how the minds are dangling in threads of their own spinning, and that a hell is lurking underneath." [The Last Messiah]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyMon May 01, 2017 4:44 am

Master of Puppets.

Cowardice always exposes itself in its posers, whether they change face or fashion.

The unmistakeable voice of those weaklings who experience their/life as a string-puppet in the hands of nature that overwhelms them, leaves a begrudging trail even in their gratitude to life.

To frame love as a prudence to avoid nature's blowback is as a hedonist serving fish with lemons, just enough dressing to keep it from smelling...
Their love reeks of an existential poverty, a spiritual wretchedness that grows exponentially, the more it is forced to make peace with life and death.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyThu May 04, 2017 1:10 am

I had an experience with anti-natialism that might be worth contributing to this thread.  I work for a corporation in a very 3rd World country.  One of my foreign co-workers was arrested for possession of a tiny amount of cannabis.  He was looking at ten years but ended up getting sentenced to only four.  Around the end of the second year he died alone in his cell under mysterious circumstances: drowned in the water trough.  Some guessed he wouldn't have drowned himself which would be very uncomfortable and guessed he may have fell unconscious somehow or slipped.  Meanwhile, I googled this co-worker and found that he had a YouTube channel about anti-natalism.  Furthermore, the channel had been updated shortly before his death, obviously he got some Internet access at the prison.  Just a month ago, I was cleaning out the office and found a dusty book on the top of a shelf.  It was David Benatar's "Better never to have been".  The passages on suicide among others were underlined.  I read the book last week when I had a little free-time: amateurish, Benatar was 40 when that was published.  In any case, I took the view after seeing the YouTube channel and finding the book with the underlining that my co-worker most likely did in deed kill himself, with anti-natalist ideas in his mind at the time.  I'm not saying Benatar is responsible for my co-worker's suicide, or really making any other claim, just relating a series of events that unfolded over the past 3 years, obviously it jumped to mind when I saw the thread on the topic.
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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptyFri Nov 01, 2019 9:54 am



"Overpopulation" is the underlying mythology.
"Climate change" is the scare tactic.
What underlies it is a reconfiguration of geopolitics with the meting of ice, and the immanent mass-migrations that will force a right-wing upsurge.
Individuals with no children have no investment in the future and no care for the present, other than as a source of an ephemeral hedonistic experience.
Life & Death situations make the mind stringent, lucid...pragmatic. There is no room for debate and quaint little theoretical questions and vapid scepticism. Do or Die.
When your life is on the line suddenly all those insane metaphysical questions you occupied your bored mind with, vanish. suddenly words are meaningful or void of meaning and irrelevant; suddenly word-games are a waste of energy.

When the millions of migrants begin to flee the equatorial zone....the do- or die scenario will be presented to Northern and Southern peoples.
Hyperborean will, again, become a very meaningful designation.

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptySun Oct 03, 2021 6:13 pm



The algorithm surprisingly pulled up this video which made me want to look this topic up on this site.

Lyssa wrote:
Quote :

"As one who kept a diary of his romantic affiliations and activities, Schopenhauer should not be understood here as a reclusive thinker who was indulging himself in a moment of detached ideation. Unfortunately, the relevant document was destroyed by a prudish overseer of the philosopher’s posthumous reputation. More unfortunately, Schopenhauer fathered a child, an all but certain eventuality considering the philosopher’s promiscuous nature and the lack of effective birth-control methods at the time. This fact lends a special piquancy, perhaps indicating a bad conscience, to his ejaculations quoted in the present work on the aversion human beings might have to the reproductive act without the pleasures accompanying it.

Schopenhauer, while arguing that life is a bootless venture that pays us off with pain, was always ready to throw himself into the fray with opponents dead or alive but did not throw in the towel on his own long life due to an anti-suicide clause in his philosophy. One might also fairly opine that he was never pained enough, as was Nietzsche, to consider suicide as a fall-back position should his miseries became too much for him to bear. Compassion for the ailing of others Schopenhauer had in abundance, but what most cowed his imagination was boredom, a pestilence that cannot be calculated among the worst in the world. How blessed by chance he must have been. To add to the diversions with which Schopenhauer’s life was rich, he also played the flute. Nietzsche claimed that, because he occupied himself in this way, Schopenhauer could not have been a true pessimist. This slur might be considered in light of the fact that the later philosopher, who turned pessimism into affirmation like water into wine, was a piano player and songwriter. But this fact does not make Nietzsche wrong. Schopenhauer styled himself a pessimist, an unexampled and true pessimist, which does not mean that he was one. Nothing can prove that, or anything else that Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or anyone has to say about matters of real weight. Flute-playing is not an avocation that one associates with someone who preached self-denial in all aspects of one’s life as a means to a life-negating salvation. But if Schopenhauer practiced the flute rather than what he preached, does that disqualify him from being a pessimist, one who wrote with wearying prolixity that all life was pain and nothing else? Probably not. It does cause a person to wonder about Schopenhauer, though, and by extension to wonder about the words and ways of anyone who would cut a figure as a pessimist. And what a pestering wonder it is when some mortal decries the very world in which he prospers."[CAHR]

If this is true then Schopenhauer was like the chosen and their abrahamic offspring who prescribe death and life-denial but will emulate and preserve life for themselves when push comes to shove.

In this light, his whole philosophy centered around this is effectively more of a means of killing competition off through the packaging of a memetic cyanide pill that just happens to produce death by infertility.

I think its tragic that it isn't until recently, several years after his death that he is exposed for what he was, and yet his ideas today continue to infect and kill others, just look at the comment section on the video.

Its a testament to the lack of virility of the men of his own lifetime that nobody beat the shit out of him for what he was doing.


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Impulso Oscuro

Impulso Oscuro

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PostSubject: Re: Antinatalism Antinatalism EmptySun Oct 03, 2021 6:28 pm

...But perhaps it was not necessarily a lack of virility but the fact that most men in the past lived more or less fulfilling lives and couldn't care less about the seeds he was attempting to plant. Its not until now, where men are increasingly living less satisfied lives, partially influenced by S's ideals, that one is forced to acknowledge his subversion.

I know someone can say that he was simply innocently describing reality and had no destructive intent, but i wonder why they don't extend this same benefit of the doubt to someone attempting to swing at their own face.

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