While the italian newspaper “La Repubblica” devotes concerned pages to “right-wing culture”, the progressive tour company continues to consider Cosa Nostra (the reference is intentional) any space for the dissemination of ideas. Thus at the Turin Book Fair, after the fibrillation due to the presence of Alain De Benoist, the noisy protest against a minister, Eugenia Roccella, guilty of the most unforgivable of sins, heresy, took place. She is in fact a feminist opposed to abortion, pardon Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy, intangible para religious dogma of the fuchsia and rainbow parish.
Miss Schlein’s reaction was intolerable, as she supported the protesting squad, legitimizing the leftist claim to silence any dissenting voice to the hegemony of the Empire of Good. Just the miserable reaction of the head of the Democratic Party shows the impotence and the absence of solid arguments of a world whose main occupation is to close the spaces of freedom by any means, including direct attack. Elly Schlein is the icon, the physical representation of the sterility of thought and life that is eroding society like swarms of termites. You perfectly express the nihilistic thought that we have represented with regard to the anti-natalist ideology.
It’s worth looking into the topic in order to provide dialectical weapons for the debate. The extreme tip of a gloomy, mortuary system of ideas is the South African philosopher David Benatar, for whom the extinction of the human species would be desirable. Since life is pain, being born is anything but a good thing: theories that earned Benatar celebratory articles in the mainstream press and international fame. Human beings should be careful not to generate “new sentient beings”. He claims the absolute right to have an abortion and not to procreate. Up above they call it “reproductive health,” the usual Orwellian inversion of the words. The novelty of Benatar consists in another reversal: giving birth to a new life would be a selfish gesture, the worst that can be committed. Better to spare the unborn child the suffering of existence. A position that seems extreme and it is not, since the pessimism that corrodes the soul by deleting the future is one of the constants of today’s dominant thought. Horror of the dark past, distrust in the future, withdrawal to the moment, a desperate carpe diem without the lucid acceptance of Horace’s fate.
Benatar is not alone. The suicidal breviary conquers followers and becomes “culture”. Award-winning Chilean Lina Meruane deems it “irresponsible” to have children. In the essay Against children you write: “children, far from being the biological shields (???) of the human being, are part of the consumerist and contaminating excess that is doing away with the planet”. For her part, the French-Swiss psychoanalyst and economist Corinne Maier in No kids, 40 reasons not to have children, expresses similar concepts, assuring that “every child born in developed countries is an ecological disaster for the entire planet”. The argument is laughable: the propensity to consume is much greater in subjects without family ties. Maier, who is a mother, says she repents and, in contradiction with herself, regrets the choice: “if I hadn’t had them, I could have traveled the world with the money from my books”. So much for environmentalism: one less polluter and one more inconsistent. Without forgetting the children, who get the clear message that they are not a gift, but an annoying burden.
Another nonsensical argument is “the child is an objective ally of capitalism” and motherhood allows its reproduction. Exactly the opposite happens, because only those who have no children can be the perfect user/employee of social networks, digital platforms and fashionable consumption: mothers and fathers have other priorities; the immediate reality prevents them from becoming digital slaves and compulsive consumers. Furthermore, it is above all those who have no family who can accept miserable and precarious working conditions, which devalue dignity to the full advantage of capitalism, execrated in words, supported in deeds.
Antinatalism is so imbued with inhumanity and icy selfishness that it does not realize that the sacrifices and renunciations it abhors are made out of love, the only feeling that makes life beautiful and desirable. A further contradiction is the immigrationism in favor of the ethnic replacement of Western populations with masses from other geographical and ethnic areas. They promote falling birth rates, but only that of our peoples. For Meruane, mass immigration “solves the problem by making room for many people squeezed in other places in the geography”. Pure bad faith: either you are against population growth or you are not: extinction only applies to white peoples. Aged, we are cared for in recent years by foreign populations: a subtle form of domination, the last before the final toll.
Let’s face it: the “intersectional” progressives are supremacists of the most beautiful water: for them, those who have children are part of a backward social and cultural stratum. The mothers would have no “conscience” even if they “claim to have done everything of their own free will”. On the contrary, “with their decisions to have children they have influenced the current socio-economic model” since “being busy [in the maternal role] is precisely what prevents them from thinking critically about their situation and from doing something” (Meruane ). Even crazier is the thesis that “having children transforms a woman into an extreme nationalist who delivers meat to the homeland and to capital. “
This type of argument dehumanizes mothers and delivers them to the status of inferior beings, collaborators of the “heteropatriracal” system; fuels the mad agenda of the war of the sexes that has replaced class struggle, much to the delight of dividend-ruling capitalism.
Antinatalism becomes a weapon in the attack against fathers and, in general, against men (they prefer to say males, to animalize the “enemy”). This turn is perfectly pro-capitalist and neo-bourgeois, as it prevents a common front against domination, but also – in the style of the most inhumane CEOs and “human resources” executives – welcomes the mechanism of reproduction of the system whereby if a woman wants to achieve professional success is better than having no children; having them shows that she lacks self-awareness and ambition. Being free coincides with the absence of children. Antinatalism has traits of revolting meanness, combined with an authentic will of apartheid against children and adolescents, a further form of senility of our society. Lina Meruane is outraged that “the baby next door interrupts my sleep, the minors upstairs are kicking my roof and my day job”. Corinne Maier ensures that “the innocence of the child, as St. Augustine already said, depends on the weakness of his body, not on his intentions. The child is like a dog: if he were two or three times bigger he would be a wild animal, your worst enemy. “ The speaker is the mother… The distinguished scholar goes so far as to ask for the establishment of child-free neighborhoods, as happens in Florida, and that the railways “put on sale no-kid tickets.” A child, laments the repentant successful mother, “costs a fortune. It is one of the most expensive purchases that an average consumer can afford in life. From a monetary point of view, it is more expensive than a late-model luxury car or an apartment in Paris. And the worst part is that the total cost threatens to increase over time.”
Typical arguments of the worst individualistic, post-bourgeois, consumerist, egocentric subculture: pure distillation of the ultimate liberalism/libertarianism, plus the will not to assume responsibility: an insidious variant of the Peter Pan syndrome. Generations that don’t want to grow, disinterested in the future, closed in on themselves. Anti-natalism is the best ally of the transition from neoliberalism to digital capitalism which creates an a-society of isolated individuals without ties of belonging and affection, consigned to consumption, the only source of happiness. It is also the starting point of a social conflict that legitimizes the “ethical” division between those who have no children and those who have, justifying the reproduction… of exploitation. The wages that were previously intended for social reproduction through the family are the same ones that now allow solitary people to accumulate a certain amount of income, while families are condemned to a life of debt.
Also for this reason, the anti-capitalist professions of those who are its best “objective” ally (the term is Marxist) are ridiculous. We must have children and grandchildren for the same reason our fathers had them: not just to reproduce, but to face our destiny as finite but transcendent beings with ethical guarantees. For those who have children, the idea of dying before them, knowing that they are adults and independent, is a reason for serenity. It is also a form of preparation and acceptance of the end, experienced by all previous generations. The anti-human currents can only be defeated by putting the primary but urgent needs of every child, unique as well as universal, before their frenetic pursuit of destruction disguised as progress. The suicidal breviary counts parents who regret having had children because of “climate change”. Whether the statistics are true or not (often the question, its form, predetermine the answer) it is a fact that there are movements, such as Birth Strike (birth strike) a community of women who give up motherhood so that new human beings do not participate in the imminent “collapse of civilization”. Very certain collapse in the event of extinction of the human species, but the argument, who knows why, does not take hold. In a study published in the climate magazine Change, some interviewees declare that they are sorry for having given birth to children “for environmental reasons.”, a percentage that is increasing among the youngest: the anti-human catastrophic propaganda attracts converts also due to the absence of a contradictory. The studies of ecological circles have no doubts: the greatest reduction in the carbon footprint is not having progeny, since people and human activity would be the main cause of global warming.
Suicidal trumpeters of the anti-human oligarchies. Generalized pessimism with respect to the present and the future is also contradictory. The short circuit concerns the inability to grasp the reasons for the crisis in the estrangement from natural human values – such as life and its transmission – in the exclusion of spiritual principles from the existential horizon, in the violent, individualistic, predatory social and economic system, inhuman. The inability to fight for real change, promoted by living, vital generations capable of antagonism, not opaque figurines terrified by the narrative of climate catastrophism, by responsibilities, by the refusal of children to the point of deeming the interruption of the cycle of life desirable . When the wise point to the moon, the fool looks at the finger. The moon is life and man; the finger the difficulties. No generation has ever thought of solving problems by abolishing life. To none, however, the suicide of the species had been proposed by the dominant culture. Western man dies because he is driven to hate himself. He believes in a handful of psychotic misanthropes who, in the end, want the world to themselves. Soon they will rule over nothing. The desert grows; woe to him who hides deserts within himself, warned Zarathustra.