Counter-Currents
Norman Rockwell, Doctor and Doll, 1942.
1,692 words
I’m a blond bimbo girl, in a fantasy world
Dress me up, make it tight, I’m your dolly!
We live in an era of apparently rampant transsexualism. The media insist upon spotlighting various gender-benders and forcing them down the throat of a captive audience, at which point vinegar-drinking moral guardians insist that the captive audience reiterates the lies they have been very authoritatively told in order to signal their communion with the cult of woke. But despite the relentless propagandization and the positioning of transsexuals center stage in the theater of modern politics, they remain an infinitesimally small percentage of the population.
Now, far be it from me to dismiss nonlinearities, such as the relationship between the number and sociopolitical impact of transsexuals, but they sure seem to cause a big stink for such a small group — or at least have a big stink caused on their behalf by other actors. And of course, readers of Counter-Currents are no strangers to the outsized impact a small group of people can have. However, this big stink needs to be explored more deeply (no snickering in the back), because we might unearth something useful to our cause, something that many people may have missed.
Within the mainstream, opposition to unbridled transsexualism comes from two camps. The first, and decisively more steadfast in their opposition, are the so-called “TERFs,” trans-exclusionary radical feminists. The second are mainstream conservatives, who’ve intimated that they’ll soon buckle under the relentless pressure from the prevalent culture (not their base, never their base, that’d be homophobic and has no place in the conservative movement) and embrace transgenderism as a core conservative value. After that, we can expect the TERFs to be cast out into the darkness with the rest of us unbelievers and heretics.
Now, believe it or not, Counter-Currents has a primer on the TERF-transsexual conflict, which I encourage you to read. But the crux of it is this: TERFs seek to exclude male-to-female transsexuals from womanhood because they see them as invaders and appropriators of womanhood, who have no right to womanhood. Returning to Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that one isn’t born, but rather becomes a woman through processes of subjugation of the female to patriarchal society, TERFs reject the male-to-female transsexual as an impostor, as someone who hasn’t been subjected to the process of becoming a woman (distinct from biological female). The classical Marxist analogy here would be working-class bricklayers rejecting the companionship of an angsty rich kid who shows up at their bar wearing flannel and a bitchy scowl. In the story of radical feminism, woman is the perpetual oppressed and man is the perpetual oppressor. Only an infiltrator or a thief of femininity — someone who seeks to fetishize or commodify it — would seek to appropriate it, much as the angsty teenage socialist seeks to appropriate working-class struggle. In the radical feminist worldview, a tranny’s fake tits are nothing but a Che shirt.
The conservative position, such as it is, is that gender identity follows sex identity: chromosomes dictate biological sex which dictates a person’s gender. The exceptions to the rule are a tiny and insignificant proportion of the population, so much so that they’re not worth taking into consideration. To an extent, I can agree with this position. It’s certainly true that transsexualism is statistically insignificant and that a society can take this exception in stride without creating a special conceptual category for transsexuals and transgenders outside of “freaks,” or maybe “shamans.” The problem is, as usual with the conservative position, is that its first principles are so removed from reality that it’s not even wrong.
The conservative would have you believe that traditional Western female gender role is natural to women, or somehow flows naturally from female biological reality. They’ll rattle out statistics about how the wage gap is due to female choices, how nurture comes naturally to females, yadda yadda yadda, all the while admonishing men for not measuring up to female standards. If you ask conservatives, the current dip in fertility and the sexless state of young men is purely their own fault. Women, however, are ultimately good; if it weren’t for those evil Leftists brainwashing them with their postmodern cultur-marxist identity politics, women would be happy to be nurturers and caregivers, although still independent and participating in the workforce. After all, we’ve transcended the era of housewives and we simply love conservative women with big tits in MAGA hats, brandishing guns and spouting libertarian boilerplate.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Graduate School with Heidegger here
The reality, however, is that Simone de Beauvoir is right.
Female gender roles are manufactured by society and imposed upon females, thereby making them women, the second sex. Natural woman isn’t, as the conservative would have you believe, a mother or a loyal wife, nurturing, submissive, and meek. No, she is a rapacious and hypergamous sex demon, consumed by a narcissism rarely seen in men. Absent patriarchal society’s relentless shaping of females into the eusocial category of woman, which here means wife and mother, females become whores, jumping from cock to cock in their quest to secure ever-grander alpha male attention for themselves. A moment’s failure of the patriarchy can bring down a whole kingdom; just ask Macbeth.
A mid-century doll recently came into my possession. Immediately I noticed that the doll, meant to be a woman in traditional Macedonian dress, was soft. Its very shape invited cuddling and gentle handling. Then it hit me. This doll had the same proportions and approximate size and weight ratio to a little girl as a baby. Little girls would hold these dolls and take care of them as if they were babies, clothing them, singing to them. A society that provides little girls dolls that look like babies is a society that trains little girls to be mothers, teaches little girls to aspire to be mothers.
My thoughts then moved to Barbie dolls, given that that’s what little girls played with when I was little. Barbie is plastic and hard. She’s a model, a starlet, a blonde bimbo girl in a fantasy world. Barbie does not have the proportions, texture, softness, or in any way the shape, form, or feel of a baby. Barbie’s limbs do not move the way a baby’s limbs move. Nobody needs to sing Barbie to sleep; she goes to sleep after a good dicking from dickless Ken. Barbie’s hair needs to be relentlessly brushed, Barbie’s clothes have to be incessantly fixed and washed, and of course, more and more new Barbies have to be purchased, all of them plastic and sterile.
That was Barbie. That was twenty years ago. A friend of mine who has young daughters pointed out that today’s dolls make Barbie look like a housewife. The last time I caught a commercial for toy dolls (2004), they were advertising Bratz, who looked like absolute whores. Barbie is not a baby. Bratz are not babies. They are twisted mirrors, intended to excite the little girl’s incipient narcissism, present as a potentiality in every female, and mold it into full-blown self-worship and a quest for self-actualization through whoredom and vulgar materialism.
The conservative is not 100% wrong. There is a nurturing instinct in women, but it has to be nurtured and reinforced. The opposite instinct — the instinct to whoredom and hypergamy — must be violently discouraged (and by violently, I mean beatings). This will to motherhood is reinforced by a doll that trains the little girl for motherhood, which instills in her a love of nurture. Contrast that to the vulgarity of a modern doll, which trains the little girl to aspire to whoredom. Toys and games are methods by which society constructs gender roles. The female gender role has shifted in the past 200 years from wife and mother, to wife and partner, to strahng, independant whaman, and finally to unrepentant whore.
The male gender role has shifted, too, from patriarch, master of the house, vested with authority over his little kingdom by almighty God, to sniveling feminist ally, fed on soy, eventually transitioning to female because there’s no room in modernity for heterosexual white men, even if they are supplicants to the gynocracy. This transgenderism, where the gender roles of Western civilization have transitioned to their modern form, is far more dangerous than the delusions of a handful of mentally ill men in sundresses. But the spotlight is on the lunatics in sundresses because if we stop for a moment and consider what has happened with the gender roles society has constructed for us and our children, we will find that nobody alive has a claim to sanity with regard to gender.
At least the nutcase in a sundress is making the most of his insanity, whereas the Right tries desperately to cleave to biological essentialism. If we are to be better than the conservatives, we must not abdicate our responsibility to create gender roles that will benefit men and women of the white race. Yes, they have to be in accordance with biological reality, or at least not contradict it grievously. No, we don’t have to think them up from whole cloth, we can RETVRN to tradition in at least some respects. But we should nevertheless recognize that what makes a man and what makes a woman, as opposed to what makes males and females, are societal categories. Those of us who aspire to forge a new, vital culture should recognize this fact as we move forward. This should be reflected in our children’s toys, the games they play, the stories we tell them, and the songs we sing to put them to sleep.
You are born female, but you must grow into a mother, a wife, a woman.
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66 comments
Outstanding analysis!
Except for the last two paragraphs, this could be The Onion.
And the only message our basement-dwelling, Call of Valor playing, masturbating, 20-somethings will understand is, “Let the beatings begin!”
Found the feminist
No – you found the guy who knows a lot of munchkins who live off parents, can’t hold a job, find a girlfriend, but see themselves as Viking warrior-kings.
Would you care to deliver specific counter-points to Mr. Jeelvy’s (very accurate) observations and conclusions, or are insults and platitudes the only response you can muster?
I wasn’t insulting; I was describing a number of young men in my area who talk the talk but – despite mentorship by serious, accomplished, middle-aged men who have paid their dues (so to speak) – can’t or won’t walk the walk. To them, our situation is LARP, not existential crisis.
I don’t know if any of this type are high enough level to read Counter-Currents, so maybe my fears about the effect of telling them they should beat women into submission are groundless.
But Jaleevy also claims women in a state of nature are “…hypergamous sex demons,” consumed by narcissism.
Which even might sound appealing, to a certain kind of reader, but I digress.
First, women (& men) have never existed in a state of nature.
Second, it’s culture – which Jaleevy does point out – which rewards or punishes various behaviours, & which, inter-acting with what is innate in man & woman, shapes their characters. I would agree that today’s culture brings out the worst in both sexes, and that strong fathers and older brothers are helpful in combatting its influence on girls, as commenter, “Weave,” notes.
But as for broke-dick boys, like the WNNs (white nationalist nu-males) described above…we still need a way to fix them.
“First, women (& men) have never existed in a state of nature”
This is utter bullshit. Humans operate under instinctual directives just like every other creature on Earth.
And no, I’m not an incel. I’m a middle aged father of 2.
I do generally agree with you that mentioning “beatings” isn’t exactly helpful or tasteful. However, the crux of this article is insightful and truthful.
To your latest reply to me:
To my assertion that people have never lived in a state of nature you reply, “This is utter bullshit.”
From John C. Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government:
“…I assume, as an incontestable fact, that man is so constituted as to be a social being…he has never been found in any state but the social.” (Calhoun is disagreeing with Hume, btw.)
Humans operate under instinctual directives like other creatures except that our behavior is significantly influenced by culture.
I’m glad you’re not an incel.
I mistakenly said Calhoun disagreed with Hume when I meant Hobbes.
You got that right. These sorts of articles are cringe and don’t help at all, but unfortunately the dissident movement itself is too incel to notice.
The idea that humans have never existed in a state of nature is so stupid and historically illiterate i don’t even feel the need to attack it I’m just going to leave it sitting there in all its retarded glory, you also don’t seem to understand the concept of satire or humor and yes your comment is groundless as never once did he claim that young men “should beat women into submission” .
I’m glad our fair maidens have such a strong man to defend their honor from Macedonian Brutes like Mr Jeelvy. *Tips Fedora
As to state of nature, see my reply to “Memebro” on that subject.
As to beating women, why don’t we ask the author if he was joking about that. It sounded sincere to me, but I could be wrong.
(And I apologize to Mr. Jeelvy for repeatedly mangling his name.)
Women, whether they’re wives or daughters, will test your patriarchal resolve until the choice is between abdicating mastery of the house or beating the woman.
You don’t have to enjoy it, but yeah, at some point, beatings may become necessary.
I believe, with all my heart, that both genders need corporal punishment from time to time as children, from their fathers (and sometimes, though less so, from their mothers). I’m of the belief that this is especially true of boys, but to spare the rod with our daughters is to ruin them.
For most girls, corporal punishment from their father (just a few times in their life, rarely, but decisively) will instill just enough understanding of cause->effect or action->consequence, and a healthy respect for the authority of men, that they will be less willful and belligerent as adults.
Obviously there has to be a cultural paradigm in place where the nanny state isn’t always there to come to their rescue when they make poor decisions. Given those circumstances, I think women are naturally going to be more complaint.
I am not an advocate of beating women. I do not take any pleasure inflicting physical punishment on my children in the form of spankings, but I accept that it is my duty as their father.
Just as a state that is unwilling to use force to implement laws will descend into chaos, so will a family if the husband is totally unable to control his wife and parents wield no corporal authority over their children. Notice that the states with the most anti-family (anti-spanking) laws are the ones that most eagerly embrace illicit drug use, Antifa temper tantrums, decadence, and rampant homelessness.
Again, I’m no advocate of “beatings”, but civilization requires enforcement of social norms, sometimes through the threat of physical force. Anything else leads to anarchy and chaos.
This comment sounds like it came straight of Tumblr.
Mr. Jeelvy, from what I gather you are still pretty young, which makes your level of insight all the more amazing. I have a 14 year old daughter who has always had a very sweet instinct for mothering. We still have baby dolls coming out our ears and there were a few years where she would bring them to the grocery and put them in the cart and buckle them in, etc. Last year boys started noticing her and the world changed. I always figured if she had a stable home and very protective dad and big brother she wouldn’t crave male attention so much. I was wrong! And you are 100% correct that is must be “violently discouraged.” We didn’t beat her physically, but I told her in no uncertain terms that if she decided to fool around with boys now, no one of value will want her when she is older, to help create the life she wants. Then I had her big brother outline what he and his friends think of “easy” girls and that was the kill shot. His opinion of her matters a great deal, thank God. I know the fight has just begun, though. A boy telling you you’re beautiful is very powerful stuff.
Here’s hoping you manage to keep your daughter’s chastity intact until marriage. In better times, she’d already have a husband at 14 and her sexual instinct would be directed towards the perpetuation of our people, but we live in this world, so the battle is all that greater.
As for youth and insight, I’ve found that listening to what older men have to say is a good way to develop something resembling wisdom while one is still young.
“Creating new people, by having children, is such a fundamental part of life that it is rarely thought to require a justification. Most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. For most of human history, up until very recently, procreation had been an inevitable consequence of sex rather than the calculated decision to bring new people into existence. Those who do make a premeditated decision to have a child may do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child’s sake. While there are many good people who go to great lengths to protect their children from harm, few of them realise that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring them into existence in the first place. We infrequently contemplate the pain, frustration, disappointment, anxiety, grief and death that await any new born child. We cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be certain that at least some of them are guaranteed to occur. On the other hand, none of this befalls the non-existent. Only those who exist suffer harm.
All things considered, a charmed life is incredibly rare. For every one such life, there are millions of wretched lives. Some people, such as those in impoverished countries, know that their child will be among the unfortunate, yet proceed to create them anyway. Nobody knows, however, that their child will be one of the (comparatively) lucky few. Great suffering could await any person that is brought into existence, and even the most privileged among us could beget a child who might suffer unbearably in any number of ways. They could develop a degenerative disease, be afflicted with mental illness, be maimed, raped, tortured, or murdered brutally. The optimist surely bears the burden of justifying this procreational Ponzi scheme, given that existence confers no net advantage over never being born. It is therefore hard to see how the significant risk of serious harm can ever be justified. Procreators are ultimately playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun, one they aim not at themselves, but at their future offspring. Furthermore, if we count not only the severe harms but also the more routine inconveniences and struggles of daily life, which are seldom considered, we find that the deck is stacked against us to a staggering degree. We are given an infinitesimal amount of time to spend doing the things we enjoy, in a universe where time is an inexhaustible commodity. The sheer scale of such wasted potential is painful to contemplate.
Even the extent to which our desires and goals are fulfilled creates a misleadingly optimistic impression of the quality of our lived experience. This is because we unknowingly practice a form of self censorship in the formulation of our desires and goals. While some of them are never fulfilled due to circumstantial factors, there are many more potential desires that we do not even formulate, because we know that they lie outside the realm of possibility. We know, for instance, that we cannot live for a few hundred years and that we cannot attain a genius level of expertise in all the subjects we are interested in. We therefore set goals that are more realistic, and in so doing we hope to live a life that is, by human standards, a long and fulfilling one, and we hope to gain expertise in some narrowly focused area. Even if our realistic desires are fulfilled, our lives still fall abysmally short of how well they would be going if the formulation of our desires had not been artificially restricted.
Further insight into the poor quality of human life can be gained by considering various features that are thought to be components of a good life and noting what limited quantities of these characterize even the best lives. Knowledge and understanding are widely thought to be goods, and we are often awestruck by how much knowledge and understanding some people have. However, on the spectrum from total ignorance to omniscience, even the cleverest, most educated people are much closer to the unfortunate end of that spectrum. Compared to what we do know and understand, there are innumerable things we do not know and understand. If knowledge is such a good thing and we have so little of it, we are not fairing very well at all. Similarly, we consider longevity to be a good thing, assuming said life is above a minimum quality threshold, and yet even the longest human lives are ultimately fleeting. If longevity is such a good thing, then a life in full vigour lasting a thousand years would be much better than a life of eighty or ninety years, especially when those final years are marred by physical and mental decline. The longest human lives are much closer to one year than to a thousand years, and even more distant from several thousand. Compared against such imaginative standards, we do not fare well at all.
Most of us are oblivious to the heavy preponderance of negativity in our lives, because we have accommodated to the human condition. Our expectations and evaluations are rooted in this baseline, and we therefore fail to notice just how bad things are. Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard. The same is true of knowledge, understanding, moral goodness, and aesthetic appreciation. Similarly, we routinely expect recovery to take longer than injury, and thus we judge the quality of life on that baseline, even though it is an appalling fact of life that the odds are stacked against us as much as they are. Because the negative features I describe are common to all lives (though some lives are considerably more miserable than others), they play very little role in how people assess the quality of their lives. It is true for everybody that the worst pains are more intense than the best pleasures, and that pains often last much longer. We all have to work hard to ward off unpleasantness and seek out positive experiences. Thus, when people judge the quality of their own lives by comparing them to the lives of others, they will neglect to include these universal features in the equation.
It is often suggested that the bad things in life are necessary in order to appreciate the good things, or at least to offer some form of contrast in order to appreciate them fully. In this view, we can only enjoy pleasures as much as we do because we also experience pain. It is said that our achievements are more satisfying if we have to work hard to attain them, and fulfilled desires mean more to us because we know that desires are not always fulfilled. There are many problems with this argument. First of all, these claims are not always true. There is much pain that serves no purpose at all, such as labour pains or the pain caused by terminal diseases. While the pain associated with kidney stones would now lead somebody to seek medical help, such pain served no purpose for most of human history, since there was no treatment available. There are also a few pleasures we can enjoy without having to experience pain. Pleasant tastes, for instance, do not require any experience of pain or unpleasantness. Similarly, many achievements can be satisfying even if they involve less striving, or even none at all. In fact, there may indeed be a particular satisfaction in the ease of attainment. There might be some individual variation. Maybe some people are more capable of enjoying pleasure without having to experience pain, and more capable of taking satisfaction in achievements that come with ease. Second, insofar as the good things in life do require a contrast in order to be fully appreciated, it is not clear that this appreciation requires quite so much bad as there is. We do not require millions of people suffering from chronic pain, infectious diseases and tumours in order to appreciate the good things in life. We could enjoy our achievements without having to work quite so hard to attain them.
To the extent that the bad things in life really are necessary, our lives are much worse than they would be if the bad things were not necessary. There are both real and conceivable beings in which nociceptive (specialized neural) pathways detect and transmit noxious stimuli, resulting in avoidance without being mediated by pain. This is true of plants and simple animal organisms, and it is also true of the reflex arc in more complex animals, such as humans. We can also imagine beings much more rational than ourselves, in which aversive behaviour is mediated by a rational faculty rather than a capacity to feel pain. In such beings, a noxious stimulus would be received but not felt (at least not in the way pain is), and the rational faculty would, as reliably as pain, induce the being to withdraw. It would be much better to be that sort of being than to be our sort of being. Similarly, it would be better to be the sort of being who could appreciate the good things in life without having to experience bad things, and without having to work exceptionally hard to attain the good things. Lives in which there is no gain without pain are much worse than lives in which there could be the same gain without pain.
Upon even casual reflection, there seems something rather absurd about the earnestness of our pursuits. We are born, we live, we suffer along the way, and then we die, obliterated for eternity. It’s hardly surprising that so many people ask what this is all about. Our lives are entirely ephemeral on the cosmic scale, but we need not step back quite that far to see that there seems something futile about our endless strivings, which are not altogether different from a hamster on its wheel. Much of our lives are filled with recurring mundane activities that we wouldn’t choose to waste our time with if they weren’t a necessity. The purpose of these chores is to keep the whole cycle going, whether it be working, shopping, cooking, feeding, defecating, abluting, sleeping, laundering, dishwashing, bill-paying, or tedious engagements with innumerable bureaucracies. Even if these tasks are thought to serve other goals, the attainment of those goals only yields further goals to be pursued. This cycle continues until one dies, but the treadmill is intergenerational because people continue to have children, thereby creating new mill-treaders. This has continued for generations, and will continue indefinitely until humanity meets its inevitable end in extinction, which is the way of all species, and it is hubris to think we will be an exception. It seems like the ultimate exercise in futility, a long and repetitive journey to nowhere.
If we take a sober look at the human condition, unclouded by sentimentality, we see an unpleasant picture. However, there are powerful biological drives against fully recognising how awful our situation is, which explains why so many people are able to put it out of their minds for much of the time. This is a mixed blessing, since those who do not sufficiently feel the weight of the human predicament serve as vectors for its transmission to new generations. It is unlikely that many people will accept the conclusion that coming into existence is always a harm, and it is even less likely that many people will stop having children. It is far more likely that my views will be either ignored or dismissed. Since this response will account for a great deal of suffering between now and the demise of humanity, those who issue it cannot be considered philanthropic. I am by no means implying that everyone who dismisses my arguments is a bad person at heart, but their dismissal does betray a callous indifference to the harm of coming into existence.
Life’s big questions are big in the sense that they are momentous. However, contrary to appearances, they are not big in the sense of being unanswerable. It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable. There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror. Life is bad, but so too is death. Of course, life is not bad in *every* way, and neither is death bad in *every* way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful. Together they form an existential vise, the wretched grip that enforces our predicament, from which there is no escape. Incidentally, few prospective parents consider the aesthetic impact of their potential lineage. How many more producers of excrement and urine, flatulence, sweat, mucus, vomit, blood and tears do we really need? How much more human waste do we need to process? How many more corpses do we need to dispose of? It would be an aesthetic improvement if there were fewer people.” – David Benatar
Dear diary,
Mood: apathetic
Had never heard of David Benetar before. A cursory glance at him online would say to me that he has views which would be very much in line with being born white in contemporary South Africa. In his lifetime he has seen the country being handed over from white to black rule, with the concomitant corruption and white poverty and murder of white farmers that ensued. So his cry for the birth of no children, given his own birth circumstances, makes perfect sense: no new kids, no new kaffirs torturing blanks. I wonder if he actually has children.
A million potential variant existential variants could play into the nihilism above: hatred of his own parents, reacting to his South African circumstances, impotence, wanting to impress the academic community, the death of a child, finding nobody to procreate with, abortion, homosexuality, mental illness, being spoiled and finding non-spoiled life difficult to deal with, being a whining-faced cunt, etc etc. On the face of it what he writes is true and interesting, but even two minutes of thought about it puts it at sub-teenage emo dross level.
“Why is there suffering, pa and ma? Why was I ever even born?”
“Shut up and mow the lawn, little boetie.”
Benatar is Jewish. He does not have any children. Try to deal with his arguments on their own merit instead of trying to psychologise the man.
I personally no longer have an ego investment in the continuation of our species and/or race. I no longer believe the fight is worth winning. People will say I’m giving up, but that implies there’s something to give up on. There isn’t. On a personal level, the world ends for us when we die. It continues to exist once we are gone, as it did before we were born, but it’s not our problem anymore. Nihilism is a word often used in the Dissident Right to describe just about anything that conflicts with their ethno-political goals, and much like the overused “degeneracy” condemnation, it becomes meaningless when used so liberally. Ironically enough, meaninglessness is what nihilism is concerned with. From a cosmic perspective, mankind is indeed ephemeral and insignificant, but I don’t feel this is something we can nonchalantly brush aside like some YOLO-ing millennial. For those of us who are constantly mired in deep thought, it is a source of tremendous angst. Our situation is an appalling one, that we have come to exist in a universe which does not acknowledge, validate or reciprocate us in any way. In this sense, we are all orphans. Our most heartfelt questions and pleas are directed in vain to the entropic churn of a vast abyss. As a species we are alone, but we are also alone in ourselves. We are all confined within a brain and body we did not choose and which will inevitably fail us, sometimes in the most horrific ways imaginable.
A blind and unconditional reverence for one’s culture and ancestors, many of whom lived horrendous lives while obliviously creating more people to share in their misery, is an aspect of ethno-nationalism which is hard to ignore. I would therefore classify the movement as a fertility cult. Those content to remain on the evolutionary treadmill will either turn a blind eye to nature’s cruelty or will try to excuse the inexcusable by appealing to the “eternal wisdom” of nature’s laws. Despite the initial appearance of concern for our people, the white nationalist suddenly develops a stoic appreciation for life’s hardships upon encountering anti-natalism, embracing with enthusiasm the very suffering he was lamenting only moments ago. He then proceeds to wave it all away as acceptable collateral damage in the great quest to fulfil Faustian Man’s destiny, securing dominion over the earth and seeding space with his Hyperborean progeny. Such intergalactic lebensraum fantasies are driven by an egocentric desire to achieve vicarious immortality, a delusion of grandeur if ever there was one.
I no longer partake in the sycophantic veneration of our ancestors and the sacralization of life implicit in such a practice. It is curious, and more than a little convenient, that the ancestors people invoke always happen to be the (supposedly) good ones. We seldom consider that we are all descended from a rapist at some point in our lineage. For those of us who suffer indescribably, our ancestors are worthy of the fiercest contempt. The imperative to pass on one’s cultural heritage is just one of many egotistical baubles that serve as bait to keep us running on the evolutionary treadmill, and can never be sufficient justification for gambling with another’s fate. The margin for error is simply too great. It could be said that procreators worship nature by offering her a child sacrifice. I defy her by denying her this. I am not imposing a harm, nor am I withholding a benefit. No matter how good a hand someone may think they have been dealt in life, it will all be taken away from them with the passage of time. Death, of our loved ones and of ourselves, is a huge problem, but this does not imply that life is good. Society is founded on an implicit pro-natalism, but this unspoken consensus has no serious thought behind it. We are expected to be eternally grateful for a “gift” we never invited. I have no reason to worship my ancestors. On the contrary, I have every reason to curse them.
“I personally no longer have an ego investment in the continuation of our species and/or race. I no longer believe the fight is worth winning.”
Then your commenting here (a WN sight who wants a future for whites) is either based on:
– You do not truly adhere to what you are saying, and can not help encouraging us along (with your commenting in general).
or
– You comment here to discourage the rest of us from trying.
What’s the point?
Something not mentioned here, something of great import to this subject, is that prior to about 1960, women who jumped from cock to cock, or even jumped on only one cock, before long wound up holding a squalling neonate who required, demanded nurturing. Wherever her proclivities, she had to learn to provide that nurturing. I’m skeptical that anything short of that sort of necessity will result in women significantly different than those that we have now.
“Something not mentioned here, something of great import to this subject, is that prior to about 1960, women who jumped from cock to cock, or even jumped on only one cock…”
For millenia, males have been jumping from c*nt to c*nt, leaving bastards galore and, down the road, social chaos and misery in their wake. Now that the pendulum has swung in the other direction, it seems that you don’t like it much.
Last I heard, it took two to engage in sex. Main point: keep that thing in your pants and women won’t have anything to jump onto.
Boys will be boys. Love it or leave it.
One of the greatest statements of our time, bien sur.
Just read Robin Baker “Human Sperm Competition: Copulation, masturbation and infidelity” and try to understand human biology.
Bzzzzztttt.
Most men don’t replicate. Only 10% of men historically ever entered the gene pool of the next generation.
You dont know what you are talking about ya cunt.
In the 20th Century, White men freed women of many of the biological constraints natural to being female.
(I like to point out to shitlibs that a White man invented the modern tampon)
We a now living with the consequences.
There’s a schizo feminist position that the tampon serves to prepare menstruating little girls for getting penetrated, given that it is penis-shaped. Hence the feminist exhortation to let menstrual blood flow freely.
“…she is a rapacious and hypergamous sex demon, consumed by a narcissism rarely seen in men.”
Right, and Rudyard Kipling wasn’t far off either when he wrote:
When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
’Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other’s tale –
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Kipling still gives women points: His poem does come round to saying all women are all ruthlessly maternal. Cut him slack: He died in the 1930s, he couldn’t imagine the hatred even beat chicks in the 1950s had for Mommyism.
Rudyard’s poem needs an update.
what a poor excuse for journalism. Trans people have been around since ancient time, your denial of this and framing as if this is a new thing being forced upon us is wrong. the last paragraph “but you must grow into a..” what was that system that wants a strong regimentation of society? fascism was it? The icing on top is the author of this shit post saying here in the comments that in a better world girls would be getting married to “our people” at age 14? What kind of sick fuck? y’all really are the counter currents, advocating for the age of consent to be 14, and wanting to control her sexual instinct. you reactionaries are really something else
I want it on the record that I’ve never supported anything as asinine as the notion that women can “give consent.”
Beat women. Marry girls at 14. Women can’t give consent. Are you a satire, a la The Onion, or a chuckling troll? Please tell me you are. Otherwise you are a deeply mentally and emotionally troubled misogynist who needs serious help.
Jeelvy’s opinions are in the minority, even within our thing. For starters, the average marriage age in Wester Europe for the last thousand years or so was 25 and 21 respectively for men and women, with a maximum of 26 for gals in 17th cent London. Maybe backward cesspits like Macedonia were different.
Backward, of which the opposite is “progressive”.
Which side are you on, I wonder.
Easy there bucko, that sounds an awful lot like Islamophobia.
“what was that system that wants a strong regimentation of society? fascism was it?” Yup, that one, or communism, which I personally prefer, but so what? Both of these are preferable to your liberalism… also, just because there were trannies before doesn’t mean there
always ought.
Natural woman isn’t, as the conservative would have you believe, a mother or a loyal wife, nurturing, submissive, and meek. No, she is a rapacious and hypergamous sex demon, consumed by a narcissism rarely seen in men. Absent patriarchal society’s relentless shaping of females into the eusocial category of woman, which here means wife and mother, females become whores, jumping from cock to cock in their quest to secure ever-grander alpha male attention for themselves.
Jeelvy here basically regurgitates the “common wisdom” you could find on places like r/incel; and he does it on C-C, no less.
One of the most baffling characteristics of manospheric general dogma ™ is its failure or refusal to account for such basic aspects of human psychology as temperament. (Or at least it entirely doesn’t in the case of women, and only superficially so in males)
Relevant to many things including sexual behavior, people naturally break into slow life-history strategists, and fast life-history strategists temperament-wise. Men and women in the first category tend to pursue only the best sex partners available for rearing the best quality children, in which they invest most of their resources. Their natural impulses lead them towards being responsible dads and aspiring moms, with a mutual focus in obtaining good quality children and investing a lot in their rearing. This requires a lot of prospecting on their part.
The second category is comprised of the “Alpha” cads the manosphere incels are so resentful/admiring towards, and the fast-and-easy women the manosphere gurus promise their betas charges a backdoor (heh) access to. Fast women want the same thing as the “mom”, only they are far more prone to give in to male advances, waging on the fact that once the male had impregnated her, he would feel obliged to take care of his genetic investment.
There’s no need for the guru to even account for the slow life strategist type of female, because his naturally unattractive clientele stands very little chance to*get* a female prone to carefully studying her potential mate anyway. That’s why they present the fast-and-easy type as a universal for all women.
Now, the question is: why the hell would a non-incel C-C writer in his late twenties do the same?
Nothing I’ve mentioned above is some sort of esoterica. Actual evolutionary psychologists (Roosh and Roissy don’t apply) had been accepting the dad/cad, mom/slut dichotomies as innate human reproductive strategies for some time now. Lately, there’s been Ed Dutton and Woodley of Menie popularizing it within our sphere.
I’ve loved a full live, women are very much like this when they exist in a consequence free environment. It’s all about getting whatever they feel they can get with their bodies.
Women are not uniform temperament-wise. Christs, even female cats vary in their reproductive strategy!
Natural woman isn’t, as the conservative would have you believe, a mother or a loyal wife, nurturing, submissive, and meek. No, she is a rapacious and hypergamous sex demon, consumed by a narcissism rarely seen in men. Absent patriarchal society’s relentless shaping of females into the eusocial category of woman, which here means wife and mother, females become whores, jumping from cock to cock in their quest to secure ever-grander alpha male attention for themselves.
Jeelvy here basically regurgitates the “common wisdom” you could find on places like r/incel; and he does it on C-C, no less.
One of the most baffling characteristics of manospheric general dogma ™ is its failure or refusal to account for such basic aspects of human psychology as temperament. (Or at least it entirely doesn’t in the case of women, and only superficially so in males)
Relevant to many things including sexual behavior, people naturally break into slow life-history strategists, and fast life-history strategists temperament-wise. Men and women in the first category tend to pursue only the best sex partners available for rearing the best quality children, in which they invest most of their resources. Their natural impulses lead them towards being responsible dads and aspiring moms, with a mutual focus in obtaining good quality children and investing a lot in their rearing. This requires a lot of prospecting on their part.
The second category is comprised of the “Alpha” cads the manosphere incels are so resentful/admiring towards, and the fast-and-easy women the manosphere gurus promise their betas charges a backdoor (heh) access to. Fast women want the same thing as the “mom”, only they are far more prone to give in to male advances, waging on the fact that once the male had impregnated her, he would feel obliged to take care of his genetic investment.
There’s no need for the guru to even account for the slow life strategist type of female, because his naturally unattractive clientele stands very little chance to*get* a female prone to carefully studying her potential mate anyway. That’s why they present the fast-and-easy type as a universal for all women.
Now, the question is: why the hell would a non-incel C-C writer in his late twenties do the same?
Nothing I’ve mentioned above is some sort of esoterica. Actual evolutionary psychologists (Roosh and Roissy don’t apply) had been accepting the dad/cad, mom/slut dichotomies as innate human reproductive strategies for some time now. Lately, there’s been Ed Dutton and Woodley of Menie popularizing it within our sphere.
Greg Johnson Counter Currents podcast AMA March 2021: “You know, there are lots of people with strong opinions about pair bonding. Sometimes I find myself banning and blocking them at Counter Currents because they’ll write in and say, ‘The problem is all women, they’re all whores,’ and I don’t want to write that, I don’t want to publish that at Counter Currents. It’s too unnuanced, its too sloppy.”
Nick Jeelvy Counter Currents article March 2021: “Absent patriarchal society’s relentless shaping of females into the eusocial category of woman, which here means wife and mother, females become whores, jumping from cock to cock in their quest to secure ever-grander alpha male attention for themselves…There is a nurturing instinct in women, but it has to be nurtured and reinforced. The opposite instinct — the instinct to whoredom and hypergamy — must be violently discouraged (and by violently, I mean beatings).”
Was this article translated from Memri TV? KEK
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh brother Jeelvy, I know the solution to this haram whoredom. We must cut the clitoris off of young girls and stitch the vagina closed! This will prevent their lustful urges. We must also mandate a dress code of trash bag ninja outside the home. Should a women or girl orgasm in our presence (Astaghfiru lillah!) we will stone her to death to prevent any additional whoredom.
Finally, we will marry our daughters off once they turn six. This will curtail the tsunami of Bratz whoredom growing closer and closer to eruption with each passing day a femoid spends outside the w*mb.
To relieve our sexual tension when the girls are bleeding or dead we will dress up little boys and have them “dance” for us. Let’s call then Bacha Bazi. When there are no boys available we will fuck the mouths of newborn donkeys that have yet to grow their teeth.
Muhammed (PBUH) was right about women all along. His scripture will lead us back to the great white society of our ancestors. Who needs Asatru Folk Assembly when Islamic culture is so high IQ? Islam is our final solution to the whoredom and the transsexuality issue. It’s not as if transsexuality is rampant in Muslim countries. Two “birds”, one stone!
Salaam aleikhum, brother. From what I was told when I first started writing for al-Counter-Currents, disagreement with supreme ayatollah Greg Johnson isn’t haram and carries no sentence of takfir, bismillah.
We’re you in Afghanistan in the 1980s?
Get a few drinks in a woman and you see the veil drop and the real creature shows itself.
lol
In better times, she’d already have a husband at 14
The average marriage age for men and women in the Western world was 25 and 21 respectively for the last thousand years. So it’s clear where this guy’s coming from.
>We must cut the clitoris off of young girls and stitch the vagina closed!
While I have no love for Islam, it must be said that this is a native African practice, not a Muslim one. Female circumcision is almost always pushed by the mothers, not the fathers or uncles. I heard there are quite a few specialized surgeons in the UK who offer a professionally done procedure for upper-class girls of African descent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation#History
And yet all this shit posting doesn’t negate the fact that the jungle waggling of the Grammy’s is the role-model for girl’s today.
Some people in the comments seem to refuse acknowledging, that the inter-sexual dynamics have been changing in our current century. While manosphere can be accused of reductionism it goes without saying that operating on chivalrous premise today is a largely losing strategy for western males. Even if one refuses to play jerk in order to woo/score/court women, becoming a gentleman means that the pool of adequate women starts to shrink dangerously.
In order for chivalrous virtues to be upheld, both sexes have to be subjected to the code of appropriate conduct with free-riding becoming too costly in social sense. Otherwise we’re stuck in a social dilemma where incentives to play by the old book are offering more and more diminishing returns.
This is why examining primordial instincts and drives, that both sexes are subjected too, serves primarily for modern males to lose any illusions of a prize they supposedly deserve for playing by the old rules. It is better to make them see ugly biological truth beneath the social architecture, rather than fill their heads with empty promises and send on a collision course with reality, which may turn them into broken maniacs. It’s true that incels among omegas and gammas often use those conclusions to scream at reality and demand “white sharia” to satisfy their demands, but that is the result of their own weakness and inability to confront the challenges of modern crisis. We can’t help them by ordering them to “have sex” as their image of pair-bonding or the madonna/whore complex have already debilitated their prospects.
Lastly, discussing beatings isn’t about promoting spousal abuse, but demonstrating that when push comes to shove, women will expect their men to pass the test or fail it. Whether they do it by committing small offences or insulting your very honor and authority is irrelevant. Are you ready to raise your hand or capitulate when stakes get too high?
Incel is supposed to be an insult, it’s supposed to imply a man is unfit to breed in any situation. But when it describes up to a third of males, it becomes clear that what’s at fault is not those guys, who might be nerdier or weaker than average but certainly not unfit to breed. At that point, we must recognize that society is broken and we need to fix it.
But yeah, subjugating the female id and transforming females into women is a society-wide project, which will have to involve the state and official church. If you wanna call that white sharia, then so be it, it’s white sharia.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough with the terms I used, but when I use the word “incel”, I usually refer to the group of males who turned their state of celibacy into an identity, that caused them to develop entitled attitudes. That’s why I mentioned omegas and gammas as those types are most likely to turn their personal anguish into political statements. And while they’re not entirely at fault for their thinking (as they were often lied to, like many of us), they have no excuse to lash out on people that offer them good advice like Heartiste. It good to remember that manosphere is often criticized from this side of sex wars, since incels often refuse to acknowledge that building your charisma and presence is crucial in improving your odds in game. Their answer often boils down to looks (“chads won the genetic lottery, I’m screwed”) and money (“you can buy attraction as all women are gold-diggers”), that’s also one reason why asian incels are so caustic towards whites.
This brings us to “white sharia” (intentional parenthesis) which is a cry for others to provide women to the sexually-deprived. It’s hard to pretend that when using the term “sharia”, people don’t have totalitarian/tyrannical means in mind. I might be too harsh on the westerners from heretical lands who only knew liberal (dis)order in their lives and have no experience with unified Church tradition of canon law. In our Catholic and Orthodox corners of the world we often take those for granted.
Still, when people propose “sharia” as a remedy, I should assume the intended mimicry (or more likely, a parody) of muslim legal system, translated into “white” terms and practices. It means a monolithic system of theocratic law that regulates the life of entire ummah and its relations with subjugated outsiders. The project you mention cannot (and shouldn’t) be called white sharia unless you plan to lead a quasi-taliban crusade through all stratas of your society combined with toppling of the secular sphere of life. In the end, “white sharia” only conjures an image of dreg mobs demanding to be able to buy a wife (even when no one’s selling, state-issued waifus!) and make it completely illegal for women to be anything beyond human livestock.
If by white sharia we mean creating a society where it is possible for white men to marry and have children at rates which do not doom our race to disappearance, I’m for it.
Of course the state will have to take some action here, at the very least to create an environment where a man, even a comparatively low-status man (say, 31st percentile of attractiveness) can marry and have children. Just as I’m not an economic liberal and don’t expect every man to be a Randian übercapitalist, accepting that the state has some role in finding him a suitable place in economic life, I am not a sexual liberal and do not expect every man to be Chad Thundercock and I accept that the state has some role in finding him a suitable position in sexual life.
This disposition of the state cannot be reduced to “auctioning off women” or “state-issued girlfriends”.
Then I suppose our discussion is mostly about semantics. I believe that both the state and Church should act in harmony (or symphonia in Orthodox terms) to provide legal and social framework to restore traditional gender roles and support family institution. However, as a proponent of subsidiarity I reject the centralized, rigidly vertical model of organization where matters like family are handled by specialized government agencies, without any autonomic institutional network (local governments, church, communities, extended families) at lower levels, that should be handling those tasks in the first place.
This model, while closer to islamic society in social order, still cannot be described as “sharia” unless in derogatory, feminist terms. When we fight to repair and de-stygmatize terms like “racism”, “nationalism”, “whiteness” or “anti-semitism”, we shouldn’t demolish others in the process and create further confusion. Calling for “sharia” is just immature, edgy and damages credibility of the person in question.
Great description of ‘Muslim legal system’. Very erudite indeed.
My husband and I are in our early 60s. Both White Christians. I read your article first, and largely agree with it. Read it to my husband and he 100% agreed with it. While we don’t support Mohammedanism nor its denizens residing in European lands, it is not wrong about women.
Indeed.
**[Then set your face upright for religion in the right state– the nature made by Allah in which He has made men; there is no altering of Allah’s creation; that is the right religion, but most people do not know. (The Romans: 30)]** (The original in Arabic extremely moving.)
Those in the Occident who thought they would construct in their ‘enlightenment’ salons a new form of human being were given a chance to have a go at Divinity. After centuries of intellectual swashbuckling, some of their progeny have now come to the conclusion that their ancestors transgressed.
Moreover, those us who a hundred or so years ago embarked on the ‘modernity’ wagon in the hope that they would re-chisel our faith and traditions according to that ‘modernity’, today, find themselves trapped in a deadly quicksand. Their cherished ‘modernity’ is now orphan in its own birthplace.
Apologies for some typos in the above post.
It’s my theory that the government has pushed women into the work place in order to have a ‘cash crop’ of new workers and taxpayers. I.e., “Why should women just sit home cooking, cleaning and raising kids and not making a taxable income on their work” was the government’s thinking, and I see this as the crux of the problem. And the undergirding of this movement began clear back in the 1920’s with ‘women’s vote’ rallies. I myself never married in early life and never had kids because, as a working woman, I could not afford to have children without a man supporting me, which I never found in time. I view raising kids as a full-time occupation, and a woman should stay home with them for at least their first 10 or 12 years. But everything in our current lifestyle is totally opposed to this ideal. Even with both parents working, and the children in care of some sort, the culture pushes us to buy more things to make the whole family happier — bigger house, better cars, weekend camping toys, tons of sports toys, better furniture, a pool, a foreign vacation, etc., etc. All of which is taxable by some government agency to pay their bills.
I wish us to return to the ideal of the last paragraph: “You are born female, but you must grow into a mother, a wife, a woman.”
And we must return to the softness of dolls and furry stuffed-animal toys to cuddle.
It used to be widely known and understood that the 1350’s abuse and beat their women for various reasons including for the reasons you seem to promote in this article. Apparently this type of domestic violence is rampant in the lgbtq community as well.
Advocating to emulate this behavior appears counterintuitive to the continued mandate this site and others of the same ideological compass advance.
We are supposed to be better.
@Autisticus Spasticus (I somehow couldn’t reply to his comment directly?)
Definitely food for thought. Since ethics, including reproductive ethics, flow from metaphysics, would you care to describe your general worldview which forms the basis for your antinatalist views?
Probably because the chain of replies had become too long. Which of my comments are you responding to? I shall assume the most recent one.
One is hard-pressed to think of anything more controversial than anti-natalism. Not even white nationalism draws such a hostile response from people of all backgrounds as this. I think it represents the final frontier for humanity, and I am profoundly drawn to it, but I know others find it incredibly hard to stomach. I am no stranger to controversy, but no position I have ever taken has ever provoked such visceral rage and disgust as anti-natalism. It is an intolerable view because it rejects the celebration of life that has inspired our most noble endeavours. It goes against the human spirit, or more accurately, billions of years of evolutionary drive. Having children is the most life-affirming thing one can do, and is such an integral part of the human experience that, in the eyes of some, to question the assumed innate goodness of procreation is to become a social pariah.
Various personalities within the Dissident Right have made the occasional reference to anti-natalism, notably Edward Dutton, who uses it when talking about the manifestations of high mutational load in spiteful mutants. I have a high mutational load and I am persuaded by anti-natalism, although I am certainly not a liberal progressive. Dutton uses anti-natalism as a generic label to refer to the childfree, and the term childfree often carries with it hedonistic connotations. He is apparently unaware that, while anti-natalist sentiments have always been expressed by a miniscule minority of people throughout recorded history, in more recent years it has become a fully-fledged philosophy. An exceptionally robust framework for it has been exquisitely crafted by one man, Professor David Benatar at the University of Cape Town. He is very elusive and has only given a handful of interviews over the years, most of them to youtubers who have requested to have him as a guest on their podcasts. His reasons for guarding his private life and not allowing any images of himself to be seen are apparently due to threats that have been made against his life, as his books arguably represent the most controversial worldview that has ever been conceived.
His books are Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence and The Human Predicament. In terms of personal information, not much is known about the man. Although he is not a liberal progressive, having opposed affirmative action, written a book about misandry (The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys) and having made no overt mention of race in any of his work, most people in the Dissident Right who encounter him are dismissive because he has a Jewish name. I can sympathise with this instinctive reaction, having been a great admirer of Kevin MacDonald’s work, but Benatar is one of the rare exceptions to the Jew rule. I see nothing subversive in any of his work, and the only time he makes any reference to his heritage is in the introduction to his first book, where he quotes an old Jewish proverb about the misfortune of being born. Benatar is not the only person who has come to deeply pessimistic (realistic) conclusions about the poor quality of human life and the ultimate futility of existence. Every Cradle is a Grave by Sarah Perry, Keeping Ourselves in the Dark by Colin Feltham, and The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti are other such tomes.
Benatar’s thesis rests upon several asymmetries between the good things and the bad things in life. One is an empirical asymmetry between pleasure and pain, that the worst suffering is more intense than the best pleasure. Some have objected to this because he doesn’t explain exactly how the measurements are being done. “What metrics does Benatar use? He begins with the conclusion that severe pain is more intense than immense pleasure, and that pain is overwhelmingly more prevalent in life, but even if this is true, it does not follow that a being would prefer non-existence.” He responds by asking these people to consider whether they would endure an hour of the worst torture imaginable in exchange for an hour, or even a whole day, of the most sublime pleasures imaginable. People reject the proposition, indicating that suffering is indeed more intense than happiness, even of shorter duration. One might feel tempted to interject that pain only *seems* more intense than pleasure because avoidance of injury is a higher priority for an organism than acquiring benefit. I doubt this. Why would the qualia of pain, at least physical pain, be contingent upon one’s priorities? I see no connection there. Furthermore, if we specify in Benatar’s wager that you will survive the torture, that you will only experience the pain but will not be permanently disfigured, people still decline the offer.
Others have raised the objection that anti-natalism is divorced from the Darwinian origins of morality. They have claimed that it is built on an inverted morality, that it takes the evolutionary mechanisms we use to survive (compassion, empathy, and aversion to suffering) and uses them as the basis to advocate for our self-imposed extinction, which is what these mechanisms evolved to prevent in the first place. I would answer this by reiterating that the focus of anti-natalism is on the *qualia* of pain, which is inherently negative, rather than the instrumental value it has in some circumstances. The function of pain is communicative, alerting you that something is wrong and encouraging you to desist from whatever harmful behaviour, or escape from whatever thing, is causing the pain stimuli, thereby preserving your life and potential lineage. I recoil when I put my hand on a hot surface, but does that mean I am life-affirming? No. It’s an involuntary reaction, one which I have little choice in. Pain will always be bad, with or without instrumental value, since even when it has instrumental value, the intensity of it is often horrendously disproportionate. Its fundamental essence is negative, regardless of the questionable testimony of masochists to the contrary. Suffering is also rendered gratuitous when nothing can be done about the pain, as is often the case for wild animals and has been the case among humans for the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet.
Another asymmetry is an axiological one, which is multifaceted. Positive self-testimony about the quality of one’s life is tainted by the optimism bias, which is evolutionarily hardwired. Many of our positive evaluations are myopic and unreliable because of this phenomenon, which Benatar describes in considerable detail. A rose-tinted worldview is evolutionarily selected for, but it remains a deception. I value the truth for its own sake. I wouldn’t want to be under an illusion, even if it gave me a sense of meaning and purpose, as the illusion of God does for billions of people all over the world. I value authenticity and honesty, even if it shines the light on an unbearable truth. Concurrently, an individual’s testimony that they enjoy their life is irrelevant to the creation of new lives, because people who already exist usually have an interest in continuing that existence, whereas a potential person has not yet acquired any such interest, and therefore the good things in life do not have the same value for the pre-exister as they do for the exister. For this reason, positive self-assessments cannot serve as a justification for creating new lives. It’s really not that difficult to understand, but so many people fail to appreciate the demarcation between *before* existence and *after* coming into it. The value of any life-affirming experience undergoes a major shift between scenarios; it has value for someone in the existence scenario, but it counts for nothing in the pre-existence scenario. Many people, even when they claim to have finally understood, will often relapse and have to be reminded. It is very challenging for them to grasp this, and they often fail to maintain a firm grip, so repetition is required.
Because the optimism bias is so deeply embedded in our primitive hindbrain, the reflexive response when most people encounter anti-natalism is the spiteful non-sequitur “why don’t you just kill yourself?” This indignation is a programmed response, a sign that the hindbrain is entering defence mode, an automatic response whenever our most cherished illusions are threatened. It is not uncommon for them to unleash a tirade of flippant and insensitive remarks that are not rationally informed. This was discussed at length during a podcast with Sam Harris in 2018, which I think is Benatar’s best recorded debate. Sam is very soft spoken, and although he may bring a tepid liberal perspective to many issues, I have applauded his valiant crusade against postmodernist relativism in his book The Moral Landscape. I believe Sam is correct and that his book represents a truly noble effort, in spite of whatever flaws it may have. Despite the sharp distinction Benatar draws between *coming into* existence and *continuing* to exist, Sam reflected on whether the anti-natalist philosophy implies that we should all end our lives, and he coined the term “pro-mortalism” to describe this dilemma. Benatar rejected this with astute reasoning, but I still feel that Sam made a valuable contribution to what is already a spectacularly provocative subject.
Regarding the distinction, Benatar uses the following analogy to help people understand the major difference between *coming into* existence, *continuing* that existence, and *ceasing* to exist. Suppose you buy a ticket to a movie. You spend a good deal of money and have invested a lot in the experience, but after a while it becomes increasingly apparent that the film is a huge disappointment. It might not be so terrible that you choose to leave, given that you have invested a lot in this (the problem of sunk costs), but if you had known that it was going to fall short of your expectations, you never would have bought a ticket in the first place. One slight problem with this analogy is that the movie-goer already exists and therefore has an interest in seeing what they believe will be a good film, unlike a potential person, who has no interest in coming into existence. But it’s still a very helpful analogy, since a lot of people confuse the question of a life worth continuing (of which there are many) with that of a life worth starting (of which there are none). It’s a very important distinction to understand. The central premise is that there’s no net benefit to being born, as encapsulated in Benatar’s maxim “there is no need to create need.” Since the world as it exists is not optimally calibrated for our wellbeing, creating a new life can only ever entail degradation. To have an adequate appreciation of this, I think it is essential to also understand the Problem of Non-God Objects, which is the most ironclad argument that atheists have against the existence of a benevolent deity. Both arguments draw upon the same perfectionist expectations, and I personally believe that perfectionism is a prerequisite for being drawn to anti-natalism.
Benatar makes use of a concept in negative utilitarianism known as the pinprick argument, which states that, due to the axiological asymmetry between pleasure and pain, an idyllic and eternal life of endless pleasure marred by the negativity of only a single pinprick is a comparatively worse option than the neutrality of never coming into existence. In order for coming into existence to be ethically permissible, life would have to be perfect in every conceivable way, and even then it could only ever achieve neutrality in comparison to never coming into existence. There is no conceivable way for coming into existence to be a *better* option than never coming into existence, since pleasure in a world that contains pain merely serves an ameliorative function, while a world consisting of only pleasurable experiences would be something that one could not have been deprived of if one had never come into existence.
The mitigatory function of the good things in life adds a further dimension to the axiological asymmetry. Pleasure is invariably a palliative in that it relieves a discomfort or deprivation, rather than being a good in itself. Since the positive experiences in life only have value in alleviating the default negativity, a satisfied desire is equivalent to the desire having never existed in the first place, as illustrated by the anti-frustrationist moral theory developed by Christoph Fehige and adopted by Peter Singer. Many pleasures also come at great cost, either to oneself or to others. Schopenhauer famously juxtaposed the satiety of a feasting lion with the suffering of its prey being eaten alive. Pleasure is fleeting and requires sacrifice, while suffering is prolonged and intense. Similarly, creation is hard while destruction is easy. Knowledge requires learning and dedication, but ignorance is effortless. In light of this, it cannot plausibly be denied that evil has a serious and inherent advantage in our world. We cannot transcend the dualism of negativity and positivity, as they are fundamentally irreconcilable. Our agonising predicament as sentient creatures is born of these two incongruent forces existing simultaneously. Why there is something rather than nothing is the greatest question. That the something happens to be so disproportionately awful is the greatest tragedy.
In a rare moment of levity, Benatar humorously describes his position on abortion as pro-death, stating his conviction that the moral imperative should in fact be to *prevent* new lives rather than create them. This would preferably be done at the earliest stages of gestation, when the developing cells cannot yet be considered a person in the morally relevant sense. This also helps make the procedure less emotionally traumatic for the prospective parents and the physician. Many people have questioned Benatar as to *who* benefits from not being brought into existence, a barrier in their thought process which he refers to as the non-identity problem. I admit that my cognition had initially come up against this barrier, as I thought that Benatar had committed a fatal flaw here. He says that failing to create new people is not bad because non-existent people will never be deprived of the paltry amount of good in the world, but if we accept that, then it also means that non-existent people are not spared the overwhelming negativity of life. We have not saved anyone, as there is nobody to be a beneficiary of our ethical choice not to procreate. For instance, if I decide not to stab somebody, then that person has (unknowingly) benefitted from my choice to refrain from action. I can point them out specifically as the person who has benefitted from my ethical decision, because they already exist. But if I choose not to procreate, who has benefitted from my inaction? Nobody has. The problem as I saw it was that, while non-existent pleasure for non-existent people was “not bad”, following the same logic, non-existent suffering for non-existent people was “not good.” Benatar was arguing correctly that life is bad, but the notion that a dichotomy exists, that life is bad and therefore the vacuum of space is somehow an abstract good by comparison, is one I found hard to sustain. How could the neutrality of the vacuum of space, devoid of any sentient experience, be equated to an abstract good, even in comparison to the overwhelming badness of life? Neutrality, by its very definition, is the absence of good (or bad) qualities. Life is a net negative, but at least it is a tangible “something”, whereas non-existence is an intangible “nothing.” Something and nothing are the greatest contrast one can imagine, but one has (admittedly mostly negative) qualities while the other is incapable of being evaluated. In this sense, the two are incomparable. Life may be bad, but what’s the alternative? The coin appeared to have only one side. Life seemed to be the only game in town.
In response to the many others who had made the same criticism, Benatar claimed to be talking about “states of affairs” rather than actual persons, but that seemed like a semantic diversion to me. It was still a blatant double standard to apply an experiential mode of argumentation for one scenario (“people who aren’t born aren’t deprived of pleasure”) and an abstract, non-experiential mode for the other scenario (“the absence of suffering is good even if there’s nobody to appreciate it”). But this in turn would imply that we are not justified in our practice of terminating deformed fetuses or providing euthanasia for people who wish to end their lives, since the deformed fetus and the suffering person won’t benefit either. The only people who appear to benefit from this suffering being avoided are ourselves, as we do not have to witness it and feel guilty for allowing it. As such, the motivations for aborting/euthanising cannot be considered philanthropic, but rather self-centered. *We* benefit by preventing the start/continuation of suffering, but that’s it. To bring the deformed child into the world would be evil, but to abort it would not be anything to the child. To allow the suffering person to go on living would be cruel, but to end their life would not be anything to the person. Should we negate those options on such grounds, we would then be left in the uncomfortable position of allowing the deformed fetus to be born, of allowing the suffering person to go on living against their will, which would of course be experientially bad for them. I was determined to circumvent this apparent stalemate, and eventually the solution came to me, but not without repetitive rumination.
Benatar had drawn on an abstract argument and an experiential argument simultaneously in his axiological asymmetry. He had taken an abstract stance on the vacuum of space being neutral (and from this neutral he had implicitly extrapolated a good, which seemed impossible), but then he was taking an experiential stance (“nobody is deprived”) on the absence of pleasure in non-existence. I initially thought that a rule of logic had been violated here. To make use of both abstract and experiential arguments and not apply them consistently is intellectually dishonest. If you are going to take an abstract stance on one scenario (or non-scenario, as that is what non-existence would be), then you are obliged to take an abstract stance on the other. Likewise, if you are going to take an experiential stance, you must stick to that stance for both the scenario (existence) and the non-scenario. Otherwise it is cherry picking, applying certain rules when it suits your argument and disregarding them when it’s inconvenient. Benatar says the absence of suffering can be good even when there’s nobody there to appreciate it, as in the case of a deformed fetus being aborted, where it becomes a default good in comparison to the alternative. My initial retort had been that, if one is going to say that something is good in an abstract (that is, non-experiential) sense, then in order to be consistent, one would have to concede that a lack of happiness in the universe would also constitute an abstract negative. While reconsidering his empirical asymmetry, the solution came to me. Pain and suffering are more intense and enduring than pleasure and happiness, and the anti-natalist could therefore concede that, while the total absence of pleasure in the universe would constitute an abstract bad, one should place higher status on the abstract good of a universe completely devoid of suffering, since suffering is the more intense of the two states. This conclusion is also strengthened by pleasure being a palliative against the default tedium (as opposed to contentment) of existence; if pleasure only has value for those who *already* exist, it cannot be used as a justification for creating new lives. I’m glad I was finally able to resolve this issue in Benatar’s favour, although I still feel that there may be a debate to be had, in the abstract context, regarding aggregate suffering weighed against aggregate pleasure.
I think it’s worth reflecting on some examples of the terrible price that is paid in order to continue the human experiment. There was a time, until relatively recently in the grand scheme of things, when people could find themselves buried alive. Medical historians prefer to downplay this, but there are reliable accounts which prove beyond any doubt that this nightmarish fate did indeed occur more often than is comfortable to admit, and would even befall children. One case I recall concerned a teenage girl in the 1880s who was buried and then exhumed a few days later. Her burial shroud was torn to shreds, there was significant damage to the interior of the casket, her fingernails had ripped away, chunks of her hair had been torn out, and her face was contorted into an expression of unimaginable terror. Although rare, there are also accounts concerning pregnant women being exhumed, wherein they were discovered to have apparently given birth in the confines of the coffin after waking from suspended animation.
Now, one might say that our medical knowledge has improved to the extent that such horrific occurrences are practically inconceivable today, but all who affirm life and partake in its veneration are implicitly endorsing the suffering of prior generations, the unspoken assumption being that what they went through was somehow worth it in order to have reached the point we are at now. As such, the security and improved living conditions of future generations will always be contingent upon the suffering of intermediate generations, and this is never an acceptable price to pay, as there is no need to create those future generations. That girl’s life in the 1880s and my life today are among countless stepping stones that have been laid down to reach a mirage of paradise that lies forever on the horizon. Future generations are perched atop a pyramid of prior generations who suffered indescribably, and the suffering of one generation is not an acceptable price to ensure the existence of the next generation, because the next generation does not yet exist and has no interest in coming into existence. It is, as Benatar has said, a procreational Ponzi scheme. For this reason, sacrifices made for the attainment of a better future, let alone a perfect one, can never be justified. In any case, the world that we live in is imperfect and imperfectable, since for a world to be truly perfect it would have to be flawless from its inception. Any intermediary process of improvement would be incompatible with the definition of perfection.
Many people like to argue that suffering is not inherently bad and can create positive value in one’s life. Benatar uses extreme examples of people living in chronic pain, which, in the view of some, is not intellectually honest. His opponents claim that most of the suffering which people experience is temporary, and that the subsequent decisions that come from suffering are entirely subjective to the person who undergoes the suffering, and that adversity can even help us grow. This is an argument I call “the struggle is the glory”, and it’s not only pitiful and desperate, but downright indecent. In a pathetic attempt to minimise, or perhaps even trivialise the tragedy of suffering, his opponents wind up effectively condoning it, by ascribing it meaning. A good example of this is a story I recall about a woman who had her legs amputated after she nearly died in a bus rollover. She went on to become a successful Paralympian and won a gold medal, which she saw as the silver lining in her tragedy, and for this reason she had no regrets about what happened to her. Are we seriously to believe that she values her gold medal more than her legs? Would she still have boarded that bus if she could have seen her future? Would she have regarded the gold medal as a worthy trade for her legs *before* her irreversible accident? Of course not, and this reveals stoicism for the coping mechanism it is. People only ever embrace suffering when there’s nothing they can do about it. Their ego will not allow them to admit that they’ve suffered a catastrophic loss for no gain. No matter what excuses one makes, it would still be preferable if adversity were not necessary for character development and personal growth, or whatever contrived nonsense the people espousing the “look on the bright side” mantra are driving at. It is very similar to the appalling “life is a test” argument espoused by religious apologists.
“Anti-natalism is like the inadvertent outing of humanity’s closet, all the visceral opposition to it being nothing more than the exposed psyche’s dread at having its secrets revealed”, says Chip Smith, philosophical pessimist and founder of Nine Banded Books. “I’ve observed countless times how people who regard the topic as merely silly become increasingly vituperative as the discussion progresses. When they become aware that the anti-natalist position exists, their brains react instinctively. They undergo a fundamental shift in their cognition, from brain structures that facilitate logic to the older structures that are emotionally charged. At that point, they are absorbing everything the anti-natalist says through the lens of their offence, and nothing generates more obloquy than pessimism.”
Pessimism is by far the most reviled philosophy, and pessimists are by far the most discriminated against group in society. Anyone who identifies consciousness as the source of all horror will be encouraged to throw themselves off a cliff with alacrity by all those still running enthusiastically on the evolutionary treadmill. I used to consider myself a white nationalist, but having seen the sick game of life on earth for what it is, a grotesque carnival of suffering and death, I have embraced anti-natalism and left politics behind. All of our problems are deep and intractable features of life itself, and in any case, a problem solved is a problem caused, as solutions invariably lead to new dilemmas. What is better than a problem overcome? The problem never having existed in the first place, of course, and the same can be said for the satisfaction of all our needs, wants, desires and preferences. It would be better if everything were perfect from the beginning, so nobody would have to suffer the intermediary stages on the arduous path to a hypothetical and ultimately illusory “better world” that never arrives. On the rare occasions when there is improvement, it is incremental and insufficient, arriving too late and at such a cost in human suffering as to disgrace the entire enterprise.
I still support the Dissident Right on many issues and acknowledge the legitimacy of their grievances, but I can no longer condone procreation. My conscience will no longer allow it, because my compassion for our people comes before my desire to see us “win” nature’s absurd gladiatorial tournament. This ferocious desire to win for the sake of winning, for vengeance and justice at any price, no matter how many white lives it costs, is what really motivates the Dissident Right. I came to the conclusion, after many discussions, that white nationalism is not as concerned with the welfare of our people as it claims. I have asked, how can we ethically justify bringing a white child into a world where they are guaranteed to suffer and die? An answer is never provided, and on a few occasions the supposedly pro-white individual became markedly agitated and, in an astonishing reversal of principle, dismissed the suffering of prior (and even current) generations of whites. The welfare of our people ceases to be important for the white nationalist once he realises that it can be used to argue that creating white children is to condemn them to the significant possibility of immeasurable suffering and the absolute certainty of death. We are all ultimately just organic machines, replicating for the sake of replicating, with no genuine autonomy or purpose. We are all crucibles of suffering. Wallowing in our misery is not a choice but rather the default state, as many illnesses, particularly of the mind, are incurable and inescapable. The nearest one can get to “shutting down” one’s brain, short of dying, is to sleep. I could never bring myself to condemn a white child to such an awful fate.
We are not petrified of non-existence before we are born, precisely because there is no “us” to be aware of it. Our suffering arises in being woken from it and knowing we must inevitably return to it. “Nothingness” is a paradox, a word to describe a “something” which is in fact not a thing at all. Our minds are constrained by inherent linguistic and conceptual limitations. We cannot conceive of nothingness, any more than a blind man can imagine colours he has never seen. We are all ultimately destined to go back to the void of nothingness, and our awareness of this is a torment that remains ever present in our subconscious. It would therefore have been better to never have been woken from the nothingness, as we would not then be condemned to the absurdity of living in fear of it. Contrary to what many believe, the finality of death does indeed nullify any purpose we might otherwise convince ourselves that our lives have. Once we accept the accuracy of depressive realism and the validity of pessimism, it can only lead to the conclusion that we have a moral imperative to not create more human beings to suffer the pain and existential angst of consciousness. Once we realise that this whole thing is ultimately pointless, which is arguably the endgame of all knowledge, the sensible decision is to stop feeding the meat grinder. Do not disturb the unborn from their eternal sleep in the blessed calm of non-existence. Only then will this ridiculous Sisyphean nightmare be brought to an end.
I will admit that there remain, at least to my mind, a few minor inconsistencies with Benatar’s philosophy. For instance, I noticed he has a habit of saying “you can’t have a child for that child’s sake”, but it seems equally true that you cannot *not* have a child for that child’s sake. “Non-existent people cannot offer consent to being born” is true, but they also cannot *withhold* consent. I guess he could say that people don’t technically withhold consent to being robbed and murdered either, so maybe it’s silly for me to bring that up. I should point out, though, that while nobody laments all the non-existent people who could be experiencing pleasure, it is also the case that nobody rejoices at all the non-existent people who are not experiencing suffering. When Benatar says that abortion should be carried out at the earliest stages of gestation, when the fetus “cannot be considered a person in the morally relevant sense”, someone could ask how he can advocate for its merciful termination if it can’t yet be considered a person. Benatar would presumably reply that it would likely *become* a person, but isn’t that exactly what anti-abortionists say, that even if it’s just a clump of cells now, it would in all likelihood go on to *become* a person, and therefore it is a retroactive form of murder? Benatar’s argument that it constitutes a pre-emptive form of mercy hinges on looking ahead to a future state just as much as the anti-abortionist’s position does. He also says that life is an imposition, but an imposition on whom? Since a potential person doesn’t exist, being completely hypothetical, his saying that life is imposed on the unborn implies that a person and their life are two separate things, which we know they are not. Unless he believes in souls, but I know he is not a fool. Anyone myopic enough to believe in souls wouldn’t be drawn to this debate in the first place. Perhaps asking whom life is being imposed on is an indication that I lack the cognitive dexterity to fully grasp the non-identity problem, though I have certainly done much better than most.
In conclusion, I think the most salient question to determine whether something is desirable or has value is to ask “would I freely choose this?” Applying this question to my own life, the answer is an emphatic no, but applied to human life more generally, my answer is a more subdued (but still resolute) no. I have said before that the problem for the individual and for humanity at large is that almost everything about the world and how it works is in conflict with our will. Life is more friction than function, and the few positive experiences that keep us from killing ourselves are completely unintentional by-products. In a universe so macabre and merciless, it is surely a miracle that they exist at all. It is only too easy for us to envisage an idyllic scenario in which we exist in a somewhat recognizable form but are not crude organic machines as we are in our present reality. So much of our misery is exacerbated by our ability to imagine a world infinitely better than the one in which we are doomed to remain. We can see it in our mind’s eye, but we can never get there, and it torments us to the end of our days. I don’t think the vast majority of anti-natalists truly want nothingness. I think they want that perfect world, the one we should have had.
This theory is justifiably ignored, dismissed, and scorned, and though I cannot grapple with your entire manifesto, point by point, momentarily, it shouldn’t be necessary. The problem with your analyses is that it depends on the postulates that pain is greater than pleasure by default, it’s not, that existence is negative by default, it’s not, that those that do not already exist don’t possess interests, they do, and that the forced suffering of some for the benefit of others cannot be moral, and even it’s rejection immoral, they can. You realize that the only good feelings some people get all day is in reading these articles and comments sections, right? So, and especially if you think they’ll be inconsequential, why are you making these comments? You just made the world a slightly even darker place. You can die if you like, but don’t try and make us, by your own philosophy, once you fix yourself, the rest shouldn’t agitate you. It’s no more possible to know life won’t be worth it than that it will, one outcome may be more likely than the other, but the other is better, why is the former more worthy of consideration? It may be Russian roulette, but Russian roulette is fun, and laying in oblivion is boring, at least most people did, do, and will think so.
Russian roulette is fun? I doubt you’d play it yourself, and I very much doubt you’d say that if you were one of the poor bastards buried alive. You illustrate perfectly the white nationalist’s indifference to that which he professes to care about most of all.
Well your assumptions about me are pretty much wrong, starting with that I’m a White Nationalist, though I sympathize with Nationalists, and I’m guessing you do too, since you used to be one. I sympathize with you too, actually, more than you realize, because I’m that kind of perfectionist too. I just ultimately don’t agree, can’t bury that hope for something better alive just yet I guess, but that just makes me wish you would have children and pass on those values even more, because it makes the world more bearable. I hope you change your mind, I just can’t argue right now.
Hi A. S., sorry for the delay, due to regular “media fasts” I am consciously limiting my internet time. To be frank I cannot muster the time and energy to respond to each and every point you made. Why not ask Greg to publish an article in full? As you say, antinatalism is certainly a most controversial topic, especially here, and a proper essay could do the topic more justice than a comment hidden somewhere on this site.
I would like to add one point to A. M.’s (justified imho) presuppositional counter-arguments, though. You referenced Darwinism, which is a kind of monist materialist metaphysics applied to life. Like its materialist foundation, Darwinism is a flawed and tautological ideology, hence any and all ethics based on it are inherently suspicious (incl. much of EvoPsy).
Reading some of your other comments on this site I also think you’re a bit too glib in dismissing Christianity, which actually has much stronger foundational metaphysics than most modern “thinkers” assume (hence e. g. the hateful silence towards contemporary Thomists like Edward Feser).
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