A Conversation With HamsterFueledRocket

I've been having a nice dialogue with HFR on my YouTube page, but the format is far too limiting for an interesting talk. Hopefully he'll accept my invitation to move the conversation over this way. Here's what we have so far...

HFR: Wow, you must be a sad, depressed character. Imagine the only creatures lucky enough to have developed consciousness using it to decide that consciousness is immoral and must be eradicated! My friend, you may not be greatful for having a chance at life but many people, all around the world are. If you really don't see a point to it you can always kill yourself , but don't go telling other people that creating life or having families is immoral.

Jim: Firstly, creating life is first and foremost a selfish act, especially considering there is no 'pre-life' from which anyone is waiting to be delivered. Secondly, some people ARE more or less happy to be alive, although self assessment in such an area is often understandably skewed. Even so, many others are thoroughly UNhappy, and when we procreate, we take the risk that our offspring might be one of those. Thirdly, everybody dies. Birth carries with it an automatic death sentence.

HFR: First,being concerned with your self interest, or selfishness, is not immoral. I direct you to a book entitled "The Virtue of Selfishness" by the late and great Ayn Rand. Second, yes there is a risk at unhappiness in life, but thats what makes success and pleasure have a meaning, you wouldn't play a game where everyone won every time. Third, yes we will all die, but without mortality life is meaningless.

Jim: Self interest at the expense of others IS immoral in most peoples' books. As far as your game analogy, what gives anyone the right to play a game of life and death with people who never agreed to the rules beforehand? In procreation's case, we're playing a game of Russian roulette with each new life, only the chamber's fully loaded. Finally, your statement that life without mortality is meaningless is, in my eyes, an unsupported euphemism, and might surprise those waiting for an eternal heaven.

HFR: Your philosophy is anti-life, anti-consciousness, anti-humanity. I suggest you leave your computer for a while and pursue your own personal happiness. Get back to me after you have fallen in love, seen a smile on a child's face and found a purpose in life. Then see if you still want humanity to end.

Jim: My philosophy is anti-suffering, and anti-death. I have loved, and do love, and have witnessed the birth of my two children. I don't want to see humanity end, but the fact is that it does, continuously...one precious life at a time. Look at what you've said. Fall in love. Do things that will make me happy. In short, pursue MY personal happiness. Can you see how all these are selfish pursuits used as a justification for continuing a process that includes suffering and ends in death?

HFR: Don't you see the beauty in duality? If we all lived forever in a permanent state of happiness, how could we know what happiness was? Why would we appreciate life, if we knew it couldn't end? Why would we enjoy pleasure if we never felt pain? Conscious life is the most beautiful thing in the universe, and the only thing that can even appreciate beauty. How can you wish for it to end permanently?

Jim: I don't see the beauty in genocide, or pancreatic cancer, or starvation, or torture, or depression, or emphysema, or rape, or any number of aspects of this experiential 'duality' you speak of. In fact, many people live their whole lives experiencing mostly the negative pole of your 'duality'. Seeking to cast suffering in a positive light is understandable given the circumstances, but simplistic, and ultimately dreadful. Can you not see that? It's simply a way to rationalize the way things are.

Continued (hopefully) in the comments section...

UPDATE: I'd just like to add that it's great to be back discussing this very important subject. I sort of got derailed for a while, trying to sort out my thoughts on religion on another blog, getting involved with trolls and flamewars et al (although I DID also meet some frightfully nice people along the way). Hopefully I'm done with all that for a while. Lately, I've been getting some really heartfelt responses via YouTube and my Wordpress blog (antinatalism.info), and I'm feeling the urgency again. You are, by and large, a very encouraging bunch of people, and I appreciate your various thoughtful approaches. Thanks much!

Apologies...

...for not keeping up with the blog much, of late. I guess this is as good a time as any to announce that I've got a book in the works, to be published by Nine-Banded Books. I'll try and keep you up to date as things progress. Take care, one and all. Oh, and there was something else I wanted to say...what was it? Oh, yeah! Don't procreate!

UPDATE: And a timely update, it is...hehehe! Anyway, I thought I'd offer a very short teaser. Here it is...


Hope is my enemy. She is a succubus who descends upon sleeping humankind, whispering in their collective ear that there IS a future. A bright future, as a matter of fact; as long as we persevere in extending our essences through the lives of our children, and through their children. She is a liar, a snakeoil salesman bartering chimera for generative fluid, which she sucks out of us before casting our withered husks onto the fire. And so we fall, row upon row like seasons of corn, but not until we relinquish our seed into her exploitive hands. For in the end, we all die, and only Hope lives on. And we rot, sometimes mourned for a season, but presently forgotten. Ultimately, and like it or not, we are the future's dirt. THIS is the state of affairs we choose to subject our children to.


This is the reality I chose to bring MY children into.

Happy Father's Day to Me

Actually, it's a bittersweet day for this father. My older daughter moved to Los Angeles yesterday. She's landed a job as administrative liaison for the special education department of an L.A. Highschool. Straight out of college just last week, too! (allow a father his bragging rights). Do I wish she had never been born? Yes. No. Maybe. This is the problem in dealing with the question after you've already done the deed. Of course I love her, and have cherished her presence in my life, and to say I wish she'd never existed seems harsh even to me. But ask me the question a different way. Am I glad my third child, the one who was never conceived, was never brought into existence? My answer is an unequivocal 'YES!', and the difference between my two answers sums up all I've written about on this blog.

Is the Door to Negative Bliss Painted Green?

I see that Marilyn Chambers has recently passed on (man, I don't keep up with the news for shit!). The woman who singlehandedly(sic) kept several major tissue manufacturers afloat during the 1970's recession, and who also answered the perennial conundrum of 'How much wood...?' in her own, singular (or should I say, multiple) fashion. RIP, babycakes. You finally achieved that final 56/100% you were shooting for. And if there IS an afterlife, I'm sure everybody's really happy to see you!

On a Crowded Street

I was thinking the other night about how some of us feel hemmed in at times. Attacked- not so much from any specific corner; just pressed at from the atmospheric pressure, I guess. Sometimes it feels like smothering. Anyway, I wrote this to make myself feel a little better. I was thinking about psychological escape hatches at the time...

On a Crowded Street

It can fade to white noise, this tumult
of ten thousand pointed feet. Centered

in the gravity well of the mass,
the boiling oil of fixed attention

pours down upon the escalade. Nix
in the midst of numbers, in between

the clamorers and heedless idle-
sanctuary! A portal set in

the drifting stone, clandestine adit
beckoning to the keyholder who

is truly lost beyond hiding, far
from home, awake in the middle of

a nightmare. Whichever way one turns,
whatever square yard one happens to

occupy, hegira extends his
grasp. Offer your hand. Accept the gift.

Tragedy

A few hours ago, a 15 year old boy was hit by a train a block from the local high school. The body was still on the tracks when my daughter and her mother passed through. Of course, such catastrophes in their thousand permutations will be repeated every few seconds on this planet. I mention this fact not to minimize the horror of this particular incident, but to heighten the reader's awareness of the universality of tragedy both in essence, and in the concomitant reverberations that will assuredly fan out and engulf those who love and care. Even now I await with dread the release of the child's name for fear that I knew him, or that my daughter knew him. But why should that matter? I know for a fact that for several people today, the sun has fallen from the sky, and may never return. That is enough, and too much.

To the parents and others with close emotional ties, I'm sorry. I wish I could make it better, but I can't. The best I can offer is my belief that he is now at peace. He's returned to where he came from, as all of us do, eventually. It may seem that his life was unfairly cut short; but remember, that's only from our perspective. For the child, all worry, all fear and pain have ceased to exist. He sleeps the most pleasant of all sleeps, untroubled by bad dreams, schedules, and anxiety about the future. His peace is pure, and will last forever.

Rest in peace, young man. I hope your short sojourn here was relatively pleasant.

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