Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Video released on 17 May 2019. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (64 minutes, with video). The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn's home page: Glenn-Campbell.com
This transcript was created two years later on 19 May 2019. It is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. This transcript has not been checked against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs and removing repetitive words.
One of the biggest problems of philosophy is antinatalism,or the philosophy that it is improper to have children, to have babies. Antinatalism is a problem that we have to deal with because if this philosophy takes over, well, we just don't have a human race anymore. So on this video I'm going to talk about antinatalism: what it is, what its position is, and I'm going to try to address it.
So antinatalism runs the gamut from what I call “mild” or “pragmatic” antinatalism, which is just an opinion that children are good, that the human race should survive, but it shouldn't be me that does it, because I just don't have the money to have children or the risk is too high. That's the mild form of antinatalism. The extreme form of antinatalism says that having children is actually immoral, that it’s a crime to have children, because you're bringing a life into the world that can only suffer pain, and that pain wouldn't happen if you didn't bring this life about.
So how do we address this? First of all, I basically agree with antinatalism. That's how I felt all most of my life, that it is improper to have children because you're bringing a huge risk into the world that didn't have to happen.
It's akin to driving drunk. You know, if you knowingly drive drunk and you kill somebody, well, you have committed a crime. And you've also committed the crime simply by driving drunk, even if you don't kill anybody, because you're taking an unnecessary risk. And think of how risky childbearing is. Raising children is every bit as dangerous as drunk driving, so how can we throw drunk drivers in jail and not throw parents in jail?
Just think about the birth defects alone, just the things that can happen up including birth. You know, thousands of different defects can occur, so you're really lucky if the child comes out okay, because there's a huge percentage that do not. So it's just drunk driving all over again. It's taking an unnecessary risk.
And then you have the risks that can happen after the child is born—you know, childhood leukemia. There can be all sorts of things that can go wrong during childhood that also would not happen if you did not have a baby. So taking that all together, and you think about this rationally, as you would any other kind of investment, you would say this is not a good idea.
But it's something we got to do because we need babies if intelligent people don't have babies then humanity will still make babies, because there's a plenty of unintelligent people, plenty of animalistic people who are just driven by their urges, who will have babies. So the problem is not just maintaining the human race but maintaining the best aspects of the human race, which means preserving the intelligent people as well as the stupid people.
So how do we deal with this this antinatalist problem? Well, nature has a solution, because nature is going to kill off all the antinatalists, guaranteed, because if you're not going to have children, then you have no one to pass your antinatalist views on to. So they're gonna die off. The only way antinatalists can survive is if they recruit new members from other belief systems.
So nature's going to take care of the hardcore antinatalists. The problem is that you're going to take out a lot of intelligent people as well, people who are not hardcore, but they're just softcore, who are just pragmatic antinatalists. But in terms of whether there's a dilemma here I don't think that there is, because you believe in antinatalism you're gonna die off. The only people who are going to survive are those who believe that life is worth living.
I want to illustrate this with an example from history. I'm going to take this little diversion into religious history, and I guarantee it will come back to antinatalism.
In the 19th century, the middle of 1800s, it seemed like everybody was inventing a new religion. There was a lot of religious revivalism, a religious fervor, and lots of religious groups came about then vanished. I want to talk about three of these groups in particular. One of them is the Mormons, who you've heard of, the Church of Latter-Day Saints. And another is the Christian Scientists, who are still around. You've heard of the Christian Science Monitor, the newspaper: that was started by the Christian Scientists.
And the Shakers. Now, you may not have heard of the Shakers. There aren't many of them left, but at the time at the middle of the 1800s, these three groups all had about the same number of members—three or four thousand members—all believing in Jesus Christ but taking a different path on how to worship him. They had differing philosophies, and more importantly, they had differing philosophies on procreation.
The Shakers were antinatalist. They believed that no one should marry, no one should have sex. You shouldn't have babies, because they were all preparing for the Second Coming of Christ, which they were sure was going to happen any day now. To their credit, they had a lot of equality among the sexes. Men and women were equal in this religion, and many of the leaders, including the one who brought them to America, were women. So it was an admirable of faith at the time, but they believed in celibacy, and they wouldn't have any children.
The Mormons, on the other hand, they did believe in procreation. It was part of their tenets that they're going to procreate as much as they could. And they had multiple marriages. They had polygamy at the time.
So what happened? Who won? Well, the Shakers right now have about two members left, two members still alive, and the Mormons have some 16 million members—not all of them born, some of them converted—but they were very successful in terms of numbers as a religion.
So that's what happens to antinatalists. They just die off, and the people who believe that life, at least the human species, is worth continuing, those are the people who are going to live and take over the earth.
Oh, and what about the Christian Scientists? There are about a hundred thousand Christian Scientists left, which is not their peak. They've declined quite a bit. They also had a philosophical angle. They believed in procreation, but they also did not believe in modern medicine. They were not allowed to see modern doctors, because they believed that the only way to cure illness was prayer—which is fine in the middle of the 19th Century when medicine sucked anyway and there's nothing you could do about people dying, but now in the modern age, to not be able to take your child to a doctor, that's a legal problem if not an ethical problem.
So the point is, what happens to antinatalists is they become extinct. They are evolutionary dead. So those hardcore guys, they can do what they want.
It's very hard to argue with an antinatalist. I tried, and it just doesn't work. If you argue that, well, if no one has any babies then the human race is going to expire, they say, “okay, that's fine. Humans are just another species, and they're not worth any more than all the million other species on the planet that humans have exterminated. The great whales are just as valuable as a human is. A tiny mouse is just as valid, so good riddance to humanity. Not having babies is a nice painless way to get rid of the human race.”
So that's kind of a conversation ender right there, but I can't argue with them. I can't say that their position is logically wrong. It's actually the position of making babies which is kind of suspect, and it's something that, for no other word, you need faith.
Arguing with an antinatalist is kind of like arguing with a suicidal person. I don't know if you've ever tried to do that, but if they're sitting on a ledge, and they're about to jump, and you try to convince them not to do it, and you try to use logic, they're not gonna go for it, because any logical point that you raise, they're gonna have a counter-argument. You could talk about all the joys of life, and they're gonna bring up all the miseries of life.
And after arguing with a suicidal person for a while, one of two things is going to happen. Either you're gonna get out there on the ledge with them, having been convinced of their arguments, or number two, suicide is going to be irrelevant, because you're gonna murder them before they get a chance to kill themselves—that's how frustrating their logic is.
So it's the same thing when you try to argue with an antinatalist. If they say that the human race is worthless and deserves to die, well, let them have their belief. They're not going to be watching this video, and they're not going to be carrying you on into the next generation, because they are an evolutionary dead end.
Why do you have children? How do you defeat this antinatalist position? It basically comes down to faith. I know that's a horrible thing. I'm not a religious person. I think that's a cop-out when you say, “well, you just have to believe,” but that's really the only way you can address the hardcore antinatalist issue is you have to believe that humanity is worth saving.
So personally over my life, I've accumulated some wisdom, and as I grow older in life and realize I'm going to die, a lot of my energy is focused on trying to pass this wisdom on to others and this only works if there are actually others you can pass this wisdom on to. If there's no one in future generations, no one intelligent in future generations, then my life right now would be kind of pointless, because there's no one to transfer my knowledge to.
So that's where my faith comes [in]. My faith comes from, well, I just believe in my heart that humans are worthwhile. They're worth saving. They are probably worth more than any other species on earth, and I want them to continue. I want them to continue for a greater good but also for my own relatively selfish reasons of having some sort of audience for whatever I produce during my life. I want people to remember me, and if there's no one to remember me, it's like I didn't really exist at all.
So that kind of deals with the hardcore antinatalist position. Then we're left with the pragmatic antinatalism that I just can't afford it. I can't take the risks involved in parenthood personally. I might not live long enough to see a child into adulthood, and all these are pragmatic. They aren't saying that humanity is worthless. They're just saying that it's really difficult to be a parent in the modern age.
Okay, those pragmatic issues are something we can deal with. We can negotiate. We can talk about them. We could look for ways that we can increase our birth rates—for example among people like us, as opposed to birth rates among people we don't agree with. We can think about ways to band together so we can distribute risk, so that all this burden of raising a child doesn't fall on just one or two people, that it falls on a community which can take the risks.
Look at birth defects. Maybe 10 percent of the babies born have some kind of congenital defect. That's absolutely devastating if you're an individual or you're a couple raising this child. It is not devastating for a larger community that has vowed to take care of these situations on a communal basis. If you have ten thousand adults raising several thousand children, they can afford to take the risk of bringing children into the world, because they have more resources—kind of an insurance plan to take care of the children that don't work out very well.
So we can talk about that now. We can set aside the antinatalists—they're not going to live anyway.—and we can just talk about how do we deal with the pragmatic problems of intelligent people raising children without breaking the bank.
[main talk is concluded.]
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So let's go look at our cameras. I'm running four cameras on this. I'm running four cameras on this shoot. There's one… two… three… and four cameras right over there. I think I got enough cameras.
