zazen

Correct (humans are flawed) - but I said the core flaw in this system is such and such. Feudalism was corrupt too but we don't say "what to do, all systems are corrupt anyway" or ''humans are corrupt bro'' like its a discovery LOL. That's exactly why system design matters. If humans are corruptible (they obviously are) - then the entire point of building political and economic systems is to structure incentives so that corruption is costly and punishable rather than profitable or in the US's case legally mandated. Your asking why blame capitalism for human nature? I'm saying that this specific arrangement of capitalism weaponizes and mandates the worst of human nature. The system is deliberately restructured to make capital accumulation the supreme logic, overriding all other values - and it will legally punish anyone who resists. You can have the most ethical, principled person in the world - like a Buddha. Put them in a C-suite with fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, and they either extract wealth or get fired and replaced by someone who will. This is a legal, structural requirement - corruption is literally the operating system. In a better system, labor checks capital, the state checks both. Media checks the state - citizens check the media. Different power centers check each other. This is also why in multi-polarity we have powers checking one another - and today we have China checking the US telling it to pipe down or it'll nuke its military industrial complex with rare earth controls. This is why the US is trying to secure the realm by preying on weaker players now (Venezuela, talks of Nigeria now lol). What we have now is: capital checks capital (it doesn't), the state is captured by capital (so it can't check anything), media is owned by capital (so it justifies the status quo), and citizens are too divided and propagandized to check any of it. Check ya self before ya wreck yourself.

Dubai somehow manages to have 1st world facilities and luxuries whilst hosting a labour force at almost 3rd world rates, whilst having the stability (politically, economically, and geographically) that the developing world and now even the “developed” world lacks. This is one reason the quality of life for the price is unmatched - ethics aside. For example people get the facilities and luxuries of the 1st world, including safety that is increasingly absent in the 1st world, whilst also having access to a cheaper labour force for every day services - as if you were in a less developed country with that sort of buying power. Say you have elderly parents that need care for example. In the UK it costs anywhere from £5-£7k a month for a full time carer or £60-£85k yearly. In Dubai you can get that service for £2-£3k. Cleaning, cooking or a driver also at way lower rates. If you’re running a business it’s 0% income tax and 9% corporate tax on anything over 100k (first 100k is tax free). So imagine the cost - benefit analysis going through people’s heads. Your making money, saving a lot of it, getting 1st world facilities and infrastructure (not institutions which are lacking), and getting creature comforts and the possibility of buying back time (cooking, cleaning) at much lower cost. It’s also an international city (like what Westerners are used to), isn’t as foreign as Asia, or far away from anywhere - within 8hrs of Africa, Asia, Middle East, Europe. 15hrs to Merica ain’t too bad either. You also don’t have to get involved any polarized politics because it’s not a democracy. Just focus on your life (health, work, spirituality and social) and enjoy watching the Western world of politics from afar. Property is also better value for money and appreciating as a asset better than already developed mature markets. Hmm I wonder why so many people are moving there lol. They have become better in labour laws from what I know - not like what it used to be. The air quality is one of the worst in the world too and summers are ovens - but you can just go Europe then with all the tax free savings you make. Also, quite a bit of dark money and sugar baby type shit going on - nothing new if your from any major city like London, NY or LA though.

@Breakingthewall Those mystics are the flowers of their respective traditions. The issue is that Westerners (not all jeez -don’t @ me) belittle or demote the religious or cultural soil they grew from. It’s one thing to criticize the dogmatism of religion, another to say that religion itself is rigid and silly beyond repair and must be left to the dustbin of history as a stage blue relic. Stage blue (and others) aren’t about form but orientation. The form of religion doesn’t just belong in stage blue but can have a stage blue orientation - which is dogmatic. There can be stage orange, green and yellow religious practitioners and mystics. I think the error is that Westerners secularise these mystics and saints into the “enlightened individual” who became liberated from the backward religious dogma and culture all around them. They’re trapped in their own historical narrative of rebellion (against the Church etc) and project it. They see eastern saint's radiating love and light - then jump to conclude the only way they could get that way was through rejection of the path and cultural soil that led them there. For example - did Sadhguru reject and shed his own cultural soil, language and metaphysics? Or is it possible that it in fact aided him, as it does others who he teaches it too? The shift in perspective is that Rumi wasn’t a rebel against Islam but was Islam’s flowering. Just like with the others. Maybe the error is we mistake transcendence within the form of religion for rebellion against it - because we can’t imagine total devotion within a religious framework leading to awakening. I think we need to separate awakening from understanding. For example - all kinds of people from different backgrounds and religions have had awakenings or are awakened - yet that doesn’t mean they understand it at the same level as say how Leo Gura does. This is where I appreciate the West’s approach to spirituality. We could say it’s a scientific one and that it using a technical / neutral language is what allows it to be a sort of lingua franca of spirituality for everyone. Eckhart Tolle did this really well by using words that purposely had no historic baggage or conflations ie presence instead of God. But that doesn’t and shouldn’t erase the localised expression of the spiritual through various cultures, traditions and religions. Those are like local dialects and accents that bring richness to life and allow people to engage with the spiritual in their own way, in their own tongue. We could say that’s the art of religion. I’ve seen some videos on meta-modernism that goes into meta-modern religion. There could be a world where both scientific (neutral) and artful (culturally colourful religious) spirituality co-exist as complementary to each other. Let’s say we all got enlightened one day - what would we do anyway? Before enlightenment chop wood carry water, after enlightenment chop wood carry water. People will still live and want to express and share awakening in various forms, traditions and religions. But it will be done at a different level “from above”. Then the next generations slowly become less enlightened and make the same mistakes of the religions of old - introducing dogmatism and fundamentalism - and the cycle begins again where later generations mock the old religions for being “untrue” lol

Me being smart includes me ignoring his biases and learning from any other insights he has that are interesting - which he does. But for sure he definitely has as pro-Islam bias. He's actually a revert - so if he was jealous of Western civilization he would have remained a non-Muslim and been a Western supremacist instead lol. Expansion happened yes, just like with all empires at the time. Conflating empire with religion is a issue, though religion/ideaology is co-opted and used as a pre-text. For example today, liberalism has spread / is still trying to be with democracy bombs in the Middle East. Does that say anything about liberalism itself or make it inherently bad? No. Also, on average if you take a look you'll find that Islam spread much more through exchange and trade than just simple wars of conquest, compared to Christianity. The point of the video is this. The West metaphysically uprooted itself due to greater emphasis on science, rationality etc. They then mined for spiritual meaning and transcendent significance in other cultures and traditions, then proclaim to know the ''deeper spiritual truth'' of those cultures and traditions better than its own people. Spiritual appropriation and arrogance. That then gets re-enforced via Spiral dynamics that ranks them as higher up because they have approached religion ''from above'' - cementing their own sense of supremacy and righteousness. The West believe in evolution yet can't extend that logic of evolution to religion itself - that religion can't evolve or operate from and at a higher place. Even if it does, it proclaims that only Westerners seem to know how because they are higher up the linear ladder of development. As if stage yellow religious people didn't or couldn't have existed before. Western spiritualists and liberal types also mock religion despite it being the foundational pivot and orientation which introduced the very same values they hold today. Its like a child ridiculing their parents and thinking that their independence from them means some sort of enlightenment. They don't have to deny their heritage, they can just keep evolving within it or even from it if they want whilst shedding the religious shell - but no need to deny the roots and soil they grew from. Ironically, they went looking for roots elsewhere due to the emptiness. The Western mind universalized its own arc of development, moral logic, and metaphysical assumptions and claim them to be universal - including the path and aesthetic itself. Stage green is only green if it looks like Western stage green - with pride flags waving around, debates about whether chicks can have dicks, gender neutral bathrooms etc. They must also de-construct everything without constructing anything to ground and help them feel a sense of rooted belonging. The world must go down this same path of nihilism just like the West apparently or its still ''behind''. This is retarded. Not only was much of the worlds land colonised, then its politics and global institutions, but now even development and spirituality is colonised lol. That's what Shahid is pointing to. And he's not entirely wrong. The West dismantled its own Christian metaphysic through rationalism and materialism and instead of evolving that tradition they discarded it. The void left them spiritually disoriented but intellectually confident enough to go extract from other traditions and teach its adherents about it better than they ever knew. They broke their own spiritual ladder, built a new one from everyone else’s wood, then insist everyone climb it to reach where they already stand as if their standing in the highest place ahead of everyone else. Spiral dynamics says to transcend and include - but what I see is exclusion and amputation of religion without any appreciation for it. It's like a civilization orphaning itself and being proud about it. Silly willy. Just see - Sadiq Khan is mayor of London and now Zohran Mamdani of New York. Muslims governing the two financial hearts of the Western world. Are these cities going to be Sharia hell holes that aren’t inclusive? Or is it that there is nuance among Muslims in that they can also be developed and practice the religion at higher level? You don’t want to offer that nuance though and instead have this caricature that every Muslim must be like the Taliban who are practicing the “real Islam”. Yeah, just like how Neocons are practicing the “real liberalism”.

If the core flaw in the system is that capital controls the state rather than the state disciplining and checking the excess parasitic nature of capital - then what it will take to invert that dynamic is a state that has the capacity to act with authority to do so. But the West are culturally opposed to such a thing due to various cultural reflexes of distrust of the state and notions of liberty and slipper slope of authoritarianism. Yet, the citizens liberties are being trampled upon by a capital class that has soft-couped the state and colonized its own. How is the West going to wrestle the control capital has over the state, out of their hands? All these economic problems that get papered over with patch work solutions by right or left politics will never resolve the underlying issue which is structural. The economic problems have to be fixed at the political level, and that needs be fixed first at a cultural level. Because the political solution is something the culture is opposed to. And even if it weren't - the West is culturally divided and distrustful of the ''other'' side that they would never work together to create that structural change in the first place - because they would also never trust the ''other'' side to control that level of state power which could be exercised upon them, imposing a vision of America they culturally disagree on. Ya'll cooked basically. The system has to up end it self and be built from the bottom. The three pivot points that structurally allowed capital to dick-tate things to the state were the un-pegging from the gold standard (that fictionalized the economy), re-defining law so that companies had a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value (short term profits for the few over anything else), and the citizens united act basically let money speak louder than the people only distorting and capturing politics even more.

True, it's not that their equivalent but that they are on a continuum. Their different degrees of the same phenomenon - different in degree but not in kind. I think the best word to describe it is that there is distinction within consciousness, but not separateness. Consciousness and sentience are distinct but not separate. Sentience is in and of consciousness just like a wave is in and of the ocean - the wave is in the domain of and of the same substance as the ocean. From that view, sentience is never added or imported into consciousness as something separate. And if nothing new is being added from outside, then anti-natalism has no foundation - because anti-natalism requires separateness, and idealism denies separateness. That idea of separateness only works within a materialist paradigm. Idealism acknowledges distinction but not separateness. Materialism acknowledges everything as separate to each other - different materials coming together to be configured. In this case humans are made as if on a factory assembly line being configured like Lego. The logic follows that if separateness is the case, then anti-natalists can argue something was added to reality (rather than emerging from it) - a new ''sentient being'' ie baby. Then they can make an argument against adding that new consciousness that will suffer and that didn't consent to that suffering. Anti-natalism hinges on that gap and separation existing - which idealism dissolves because it claims consciousness as a continuity. In idealism or a non-materialist worldview - everything only ever comes out of consciousness, rather than gets added and thrown in from somewhere else outside it. If consciousness is primary and fundamental then birth isn't creation of a new consciousness but a transformation of existing consciousness. In that paradigm nothing new (a sentient being) is being brought into reality from the outside, but is emerging out of consciousness itself. Concioussness is just individualising or localising itself into a particular form, like the ocean forming a wave. In the same way then - sentience is just consciousness configuring itself to such a degree as to become sentient and ultimately aware of itself. Ice, water and steam are all water in kind, though they differ in form. There’s no clean break or gap between consciousness and sentience in which we can say that something new was added to consciousness from the outside - there was no addition to consciousness only transformation. Again using the ocean/wave analogy: Materialist view: Each wave is a NEW entity that gets ADDED to the ocean. Before the wave, there was just ocean. After the wave, there's ocean PLUS wave. Idealist view: The wave IS ocean. It's not added TO the ocean, it arises FROM the ocean. It's ocean expressing itself in wave form. No addition occurred - just transformation. Your trying to have it both ways which mixes a materialist ontology with a idealist one which then causes some incoherence - "everything is ocean (consciousness is primary)'' but waves are genuinely new separate things that get added (sentient beings emerge as new entities)" or ''everything is consciousness, BUT new sentient beings emerge as genuinely new separate entities that can then be morally wronged." But if everything is ocean, waves aren't separate entities - they're temporary forms the ocean takes.We (sentient beings) don't arrive from somewhere else into this universe/consciousness. We arise out of it - like apples on a apple tree. The apple tree doesn't "create" the apple as something separate from itself. The apple IS the tree, expressing itself in fruit form. Similarly, parents don't "create" consciousness as something separate. The child IS consciousness, expressing itself in human form. Humans can decide to participate in that impulse or not. Creation is happening within consciousness and emerges - but creation isn't happening externally and then getting added to consciousness or reality as something separate.

@Twentyfirst @Jodistrict speaking of Bolsen and Muslims liberating I don’t think Comrade Zohran will achieve much unless structural changes happen ie the dynamic being flipped from capital controlling the state to the state controlling (disciplining) capital. Until then all these left vs right solutions just paper over issues that need to be resolved at a deeper level. Can’t have social welfare programmes if the programmers (controllers) of money aren’t incentivised. A lot of it comes down to financial sovereignty and who controls and directs credit flows. Obama 2.0 unless structural changes happen. Short term relief will be there but perverse incentives undo all those gains over time. Why would developers build more homes if they can’t raise rents to keep in line with inflation - that will cut into profit margins? Capital is mobile and will just go elsewhere to seek better returns which are hard enough to get these days. That means even less housing being built, supply side squeeze, which means price goes up. Liberals celebrated when Mayor of London Sadiq Khan got in and it’s only gotten worse under him too - due to larger dynamics at hand. He’s blamed instead - just as Zohran could be blamed for not meeting expectations. But a lot is out of their hands as they are at the mercy of capital to fund their aspirations and “solutions”.

Not sure if you were also asking whether anti-realist views can exist within an idealist world? In which case yes, but belief being able to exist is different from it being true. Subjective anti-natalist views can exist within existence but that doesn’t make their universal claims about existence true. Just like someone can believe in Santa, without it being true. As for idealism (non-materialist worldview) and anti-natalism being incompatible or not - they just don’t resonate with each other at the ontological level of how they view existence. Anti-natalism assumes creation as causation - that you can “bring a being into existence” who previously wasn’t. That idea only makes sense in materialism, where matter precedes consciousness. But in idealism, consciousness is fundamental and eternal. No one “creates” a conscious being - consciousness already is and simply manifests through different forms. There’s no non-being to violate or new entity to “impose” existence upon. So the antinatalist’s moral claim - “it’s wrong to force life into being” - loses its metaphysical ground. From idealisms pov it’s like saying the ocean is morally wrong for making waves That’s why I said it’s not about their worldview being bad as much as it is about being untrue - unless seen from a purely materialist paradigm. But it doesn’t reflect how reality operates in an idealist paradigm. Their ethics depend on the metaphysics of materialism - which see’s a world of separate agents manufacturing life as if in a factory. Once the premise changes, the conclusion evaporates with it. In other words: the idealist paradigm (that conciousness is primary) is at odds with the materialist paradigm on which anti-natalism depends. The foundational premise from which all assumptions are made is materialist. If the paradigm is widened to include a spiritual metaphysics then the old one is no longer coherent. The premise changes, and along with it the assumptions and the conclusions. The conclusion of the material paradigm is that life is a non-consensually imposed net negative on a new life - therefore anti-natalism makes the correct conclusion that life is best not perpetuated.

I agree - it's fine as a personal intuition and choice they make, but where I challenge it on is that they take a subjective moral intuition and turn it into a universal claim about reality. They believe their subjective anti-realist view is actually a objective view of reality - by taking something which is particular, relative, and subjective and making it objective, absolute, and universal. The claim isn't that ''giving birth for me is wrong'' - its that ''giving birth itself is wrong''. It's the same error dogmatic religious people make - even if they don't impose their views on others, from within their moral paradigm they view others as sinning because their actions aren't in line with their universal truth and moral law. It's in the name itself - anti-natalist (against, birth) - that's a moral position against the act of birth itself, claimed as a universal wrong. So it's not just a personal preference based on case by case circumstance that may be relatively true for a certain individual - its a philosophy believing it describes a absolute truth about existence. Yeah - no doubt even non-materialists care about suffering, they just contextualize it differently. For the materialist, suffering is unredeemable except by its elimination. The moral logic is that if life produces suffering, the ethical ideal is to stop life. They treat suffering as ultimate because there’s nothing beyond it - no larger field (meta-physic/physical) in which pain and joy have meaning or can be redeemed by higher goods beyond measure like love, awareness, beauty etc. It makes sense why the logical endpoint of the materialist paradigm would lead to minimizing ''potential'' lives because life is (mainly) suffering, so fewer beings = less suffering. Anti-natalism emerges from that, as I mentioned - they do have coherence within the materialist paradigm. Non-materialists can still care about suffering and choose to not give birth - but it won't be for the same reasons ie based upon consent violation or from the view that life is suffering and inherently bad - a universal claim and verdict of existence. One can still view the value of life, the inherent beauty and goodness - whilst still deciding not to procreate based upon the relative truth that their circumstances would most likely cause more suffering for the child than not - including for the parent themselves. It's simply a assessment on your circumstances not being viable - not a verdict that life itself is a cosmic mistake. Note also how they usually talk of suffering and not just pain. Suffering is the experience of pain, experience implies someone who experiences ( a sufferer ), which implies a consciousness that suffers - which undermines the materialist paradigm itself. A moral intuition and value judgment of suffering being a bad that should be minimised (instead of also contextualised) comes from a consciousness being there in the first place. The anti-natalists own capacity to contemplate existence, make moral judgments or value life enough to want to prevent suffering and philosophize about it - point to something beyond just the material. Even for spiritual anti-natalists (who are opposed to natalism yet still believe in the spiritual) - they simply haven't gone full circle to the point of understanding a metaphysics (spiritual reality) within which suffering can be redeemed by states that are themselves spiritual and beyond any material measure. The issue is less of their worldview being bad or good and more about it being untrue. It essentially boils down to a materialist vs anti-materialist debate because its from that premises that follows all the assumptions and views being made. That's the foundation. Doesn't actualized.org and Leo etc already cover how the materialist worldview is untrue? Like that thread where someone shared Bernardo Kastrup and Alex O'Connor discussing materialism and idealism on the philosophy sub-forum. Eternity can't be imposed on that which is already eternal - consciousness. This is why each paradigm approaches this so differently. Without a spiritual lens, anti-natalisms logic is hard to refute, because it’s made inside a materialist worldview where we should minimize suffering. Trying to debate that from their paradigm is already a loss because we've conceded to their paradigm and all the assumptions that follow it (which are then coherent) - instead of debating the paradigm itself. If we include a metaphysical dimension - soul, evolution of consciousness, divine play etc - the logic dissolves. If life is the universe experiencing itself, then birth isn't a imposition but a participation. Deciding not to participate is a choice - but it isn't a condemnation of life itself being bad. It can be bad from a relative sense, but not a absolute sense from which we then make existential universal claims about life. Anti-natalists mistake suffering in life, for the the nature of life. From a materialist view it makes sense that life is imposed upon a being because life looks like a product made in a assembly line - two physical meat suits rubbing each other and bang (big or small lol) - a new consciousness appears that needs to suffer a life it didn't consent to. It makes sense if the universe is a dead machine (mechanistic) and that consciousness is a by product / side effect of biology and matter rather than its source. But from a metaphysical view there only ever is Consciousness or a Being that is eternal, only shifting in form. In that paradigm we aren't condemning a life to exist and suffer forever because it already was existing - just in different form- as the formless. From that paradigm its not a question of a new being, being created from thin air - Being already is the case, existence already is the case and is eternal - it isn't imposed but only unfolds. The ocean and wave metaphor (Alan Watts) is useful: the ocean doesn’t ask the wave if it wants to exist, the wave is the ocean expressing itself and was never separate to begin with. Violation can still happen between forms (waves), but never to Being (ocean) itself. At a metaphysical level - Being can't be violated, because nothing stands outside it to harm or destroy it. The ocean isn't damaged by one wave smashing another. Ethical dynamics (consent, violations etc) emerge in the relative sense within the domain of forms - between waves, not in the absolute sense of violating Being itself. When the wave rises, it doesn’t violate anything - it just fulfills what it already is, the impulse of the ocean / life / Being. The burden of proof is on the antinatalists to show that the inherent impulse of life is not to be and that life is solely material. Everything says otherwise - including the antinatalists themselves who are standing as a being - living, breathing and not ceasing to be themselves. The impulse of life is to be and Being wants to be. That's why most people oppose the notion of anti-natalism that makes universal claims about life as a net negative of little to no value. On some level most people feel it to be off. Anti-natalism is moral intuition that’s right but incompletely applied to life because its stripped of a larger metaphysical context within which to make sense of suffering. Whether people can articulate it or not - the same thing in people that responds to art, love and beauty is the same thing that rejects anti-natalisms universal claims about life being net negative. Anti-natalists themselves are living proof of the thing they condemn. They are a life passionately arguing that life shouldn't continue to exist through natalism - while demonstrating through that very passion that life finds meaning, purpose, and value in its own expression.

Related:

Going further into this. The consent argument can logically be dismantled. But the argument for life having more suffering and pain than pleasure is trickier. We can weigh things up to conclude (based upon conditions) that certain lives will suffer more than they will experience pleasure. Which is why I said the coherence is there “if coming at it from a purely materialist view”. But the deeper experiences of life aren’t quantifiable, but are instead qualitative and transcendent - which includes them transcending the measurement of the balance sheet on which we are trying to weight up life as a net negative or positive. Love, meaning, beauty and presence transcend the entire calculus and binary of pain / pleasure - they include yet transcend them. Like a mother going through motherhood with sleepless nights and all it entails - there’s pain and discomfort, but immense meaning and love at the same time that transcends it all. Quality is denser than quantity - we can quantitatively count the same number of gold and silver coins - yet the gold coins weigh more than the silver. Quantity measures the surface, is horizontal. Quality is of depth, vertical. The anti-natalist is applying a mathematical logic to a realm that is fundamentally alogical. The fact that those transcendent states are alogical makes them even harder to logically discuss and convince an anti-natalist of them - or of the asymmetrical value in them against the more measurable moments of suffering. It’s basically the calculator vs the poet - asking someone to weight the soul on a scale built for bricks. The cold calculus of suffering is logically coherent but existentially hollow - because it fails to account for the very things that make life worth living, even despite the calculator showing we suffer more on paper. It’s almost impossible to logically convey the value of that which is beyond logic - but that is of value that trumps logic altogether. That is the domain of the master and the mystics - who use mechanisms to bring us to an experience of life, that shows us life definitely isn’t just mechanistic. That it isn’t simply physical matter, but that a meta-physical reality exists. I can never point directly to the value of life, or logically explain it. That’s where art, music, poetry step in - or the experience of love, beauty and presence. Love, presence and meaning don’t erase suffering, pain or loss but instead redeem them. Anti-natalists are the accountants of existence using a sterile weighing scale. The lovers of life or even those who have experienced love just once - know life transcends the scale altogether. Logic coldly asks why? Love asks why not? “Metaphysical syllables riddled by the invisible”

@zurew Separate responsibility from consent. We can do our best to create good conditions for current and future life on earth - without any violation of consent for that future life occurring - which is an impossibility to begin with. We can be responsible for creating conditions, but can’t be guilty for violating consent of a being or subject that doesn’t yet exist. Otherwise how are you making all your decisions day to day - which are violating trillions of future lives consents? Was your own birth a violation of consent? Or just morally irresponsible because you’ll suffer and die one day? If it’s a violation of consent, who violated it? If it’s irresponsibility - then you’re admitting the question depends on conditions, not a universal moral law which anti-natalists depends on. Anti-natalism needs the “consent violation” framing to maintain their universal ethic of non-consensual birth being bad, thus procreation itself being bad. Without it, they’re just saying “be a good parent if you have kids” which isn’t a revolutionary position - it’s common sense and just being responsible. If someone finds life to be hard, and that them having kids would compound that suffering and be passed onto the kids - then don’t have them. That’s responsible and fair - but it isn’t about violating consent. These are distinct from each other. Once the consent argument flops the next one is that life itself is more bad than good. This is where anti-natalism can actually have some coherence - if one comes at it from a purely materialist view - hence the thread is even called “a solution for ending materialist human suffering”. But most humans intuit the metaphysical (soul) beyond just the physical (material) - which is why most people don’t overreact to their experience of suffering with nihilistic philosophies and a negative universal claims about life itself. Something in us wants to live, despite suffering and outside of just biology -something beyond matter, that seems to matter enough to enough people to keep on living. People are still out there creating and risking the heartbreak of love, and contextualizing the inevitability of death in various ways to deal with it. There’s a metaphysical pulse running through the physical - that if we don’t numb ourselves to and sever ourselves from - help us have a appropriate relationship to suffering. Often it makes life even more beautiful. I shared the part I used for AI and said it’s from Chat GPT. Go back to my older posts or topics before AI was even a thing to see that I don’t just write and explore things in such a shallow manner, or that I’m incapable of depth without AI. Feel free to use AI yourself and bring clarity to the subject.

You haven’t engaged any of the points but instead moved the goalpost because I keep playing whack a mole by shutting down your points. You haven’t even responded to Basman making the same point about consent and responsibility being distinct. Anti-natalism can’t survive on its own logic, because it keeps borrowing the language of life to argue against life. They talk about ethics while denying the subject that makes ethics possible, talk about consent while erasing the being that can consent, and talk about compassion while annihilating the context where compassion has meaning. It’s the terminal stage of a disenchanted, disillusioned and metaphysically displaced culture. How sad. I don’t even say this as a dig - I am Western and in the West myself. You still haven’t answered how you live day to day life and make decisions - haven’t you made multiple consent violations of future non existent people before breakfast this morning? Your logic is only for the prophets who can forsee the future and teleport in some multi-verse to seek consent of the non-existent. Maybe you are a prophet and ahead of us - maybe when we’re all prophets at stage turquoise we’ll take up this logic and incorporate it into our own laws. If this logic was sound, coherent and most of all applicable - we’d see it codified into law and practiced. From Chat GPT: Zurew’s logic doesn’t appear anywhere in real-world legal or medical ethics, because it’s philosophically incoherent and legally unusable. Let’s break that down with examples: ⚖️ 1. Criminal Law (Rape and Consent) In criminal law, consent is strictly present and relational — between existing persons capable of giving or denying it. Example: In a rape case, if a victim is unconscious, the act is considered non-consensual because the person exists and has rights that persist during unconsciousness. However, no court recognizes “future consent violations.” You can’t be charged with “violating the consent of a person who doesn’t exist yet.” That’s why paying someone to commit a rape is punished under conspiracy or solicitation, not as “violating the future victim’s consent.” The law distinguishes between intent and violation — exactly what Zurew blurs. 🏥 2. Medical Ethics Medical ethics operates on informed consent, again requiring an existing, identifiable patient who can understand and agree. Example: Performing a medical procedure on an unconscious patient is only ethical if prior consent was given (e.g. a DNR form) or if the situation is life-threatening and consent is presumed. No medical system treats a future person as a moral subject whose consent can be violated. That’s why doctors don’t need “consent from future generations” to perform life-saving research — they’re judged by current professional duty, not speculative future consent. So in both criminal and medical ethics, Zurew’s logic fails completely. It doesn’t map onto any framework because consent presupposes subjecthood, and subjecthood presupposes existence. If his logic were real, you’d have absurd results like: Doctors being guilty of “violating the consent of future patients” by discovering antibiotics. Parents being guilty of “pre-consensual harm” for conceiving children. That’s why no legal or medical code uses it — it’s philosophically fanciful and legally unusable.” I’m only this cheeky and blunt because you called my comment stupid, weird and claimed me to be butt hurt. Next time you’ll think twice about being naughty and rude. Naughty zurew.

“Whether you call it consent violation or moral responsibility doesn’t matter” - of course it matters. The rhetorical position of antinatalism rests on framing procreation as a consent violation. That’s what elevates a personal choice into a moral emergency and totalizing ethic. Strip away the consent language and what are we left with? “You’re subjecting someone to experiences including negative ones and mortality” Yeah - that’s called existence lol you’ve discovered the human condition. If that’s framed as consent violation then suddenly we’re not just describing reality - but making parenthood analogous to assault. We’re weaponizing liberal individualist frameworks (autonomy, consent) and extending them into metaphysical absurdity (demanding consent from the non-existent). Your collapsing the distinction to maintain your narrative - which depends on treating potential people as right bearing individuals whose consent can be violated. @Basman Related to your comment and to Zurew bringing up how I tie in an unrelated topic when it’s very much is related. These stage green philosophies aren’t errors due to compassion or their original intent that is sincere and valid - it’s that they’re taking what are situational individual choices and universalizing them into a cosmic ethic. Why can’t lifestyle choices remain as such? Why do they need to become moral crusades and isms? The wider point about this phenemona emerging in the West is that these moral overextensions keep emerging in the context of a culture trying to re-soul itself through moral absolutism - because for a long time it submerged itself in rational scientific materialism that metaphysically unmoored it. They are symptoms of what happens when you have a correct moral intuition (suffering is bad) but no metaphysical container for it (no understanding of suffering’s role in growth, or a transcendent meaning that contextualizes earthly pain, or spiritual framework that grounds existence as fundamentally good despite its difficulties). So that moral impulse - which in a traditional framework would be tempered by wisdom, cosmology or initiation into life - instead becomes absolute. It eats itself. “Suffering is bad” becomes “therefore existence is bad” becomes “therefore reproduction is unethical.” This is the West’s particular pathology: we rejected a transcendent metaphysics, kept the moral sensitivity, and now that sensitivity has nowhere to go but into increasingly totalizing, life negating philosophies that we call progress. Spiral Dynamics assumes a linear, universal trajectory of development that’s actually Western centric in both its aesthetic and milestones. It interprets progress through the lens of the Western psyche: material mastery (Orange), then moral overreach and empathy (Green), then synthesis of the tensions and contradictions in the below stages (Yellow). Other cultures with a spiritual or metaphysical anchor already resolved these tensions without collapsing into nihilism. Spiral Dynamics can’t see that because it reads history through a Western teleology and developmental arc, where everyone else looks like a “lower stage” for not following. It universalizes the Western developmental arc - as if that trajectory is the natural path for all humans. Every other culture is measured against this Western timeline and implicitly cast as “behind in development” rather than “differently developed”. The West lost its metaphysical grounding and then tried to reconstruct it through psychology - then mistake its own rediscovery of balance as “the next stage of evolution.” It’s civilizational amnesia posturing as progress. As if these colour coded values never existed before and only “came online” in Ken Wilber’s terms - in recent history. How does stage green or yellow values only come online recently - as if they never existed before lol. It’s called spiral dynamics yet approached as if it’s ladder dynamics in some linear manner. Concern for the environment and marginalized is a recent evolution? Tell that to Jains who’ve been practicing radical non-harm for 2,500 years, or indigenous cultures with sophisticated ecological wisdom embedded in their cosmologies, or mystics who experienced universal divine love. Tell that to every traditional culture that understood humans as embedded in - not separate from - the web of life. Apparently none of that counts because it was wrapped in “mythic” or “magic” worldviews. It only becomes a real developmental stage when white Western baby boomers discovered empathy after dropping acid lol. The model literally takes Western culture’s temporary pathological detour through mechanistic rationalism and calls it a necessary path of evolution for the entire globe. It treats these values as novelties that “emerged” rather than a recovery from lost and found. I’m not saying spiral dynamics is junk - just that “the map is not the territory” - and this map doesn’t map onto the territory of reality so cleanly and neatly in the way we think it does.

No it isnt. So in a hypothetical where there is no chance of any suffering at all and there is guaranteed pure bliss , you are telling me that these people would still be against having children? @zurew Didn’t you already discuss how anti-natalism isn’t about consent with somethingfunny? If you reject the anti-natalist view of “non-consent to being born” because “you can’t ask a non-being”, yet insist you can violate the consent of a non-being that doesn’t yet exist in the future - that’s self-refuting. On your rape example - an unconscious person still exists as a subject with bodily autonomy - they have a continuing identity and rights that persist through unconsciousness. Even a corpse has rights despite no capacity for consent because ethics is relational - it arises from continuity between beings who exist or have existed. The dead still exist in relation - through memory and continuity. The non-existent exist in abstraction -without relation or continuity. Assaulting someone in a coma is still rape - because consent is temporarily inaccessible, not ontologically impossible. Latent rights belong to existing subjects whose capacity to exercise them is currently dormant - their rights persist because their being and subject hood persists. Potential rights, on the other hand, refer to non-existent or not-yet-subject entities - possible persons. You can’t wrong a non-subject or one who hasn’t existed as one - only prepare conditions that may later affect one ie be irresponsible but not “violate” consent when no subject exists to grant it or not. A living subject has intrinsic rights (active). A dead person has derivative rights (symbolic/relational). A non-existent has no rights, because they’ve never entered relation or continuity. On your latest example - you’re mixing up intent and violation. Just because one act leads to another doesn’t mean they’re the same act or carry the same kind of guilt. Paying someone to commit rape is wrong for the intent - the rape itself is wrong for violating consent when it happens. Determinism doesn’t erase that difference - it explains how one led to the other. Mixing up cause and morality is like blaming gravity for murder because it pulled the bullet down. Honest question - how do you live day to day by your logic? Every meal, car ride or consumer choice would be a “violation of future consent” from someone not yet born but guaranteed to exist. You’d need prophetic knowledge of every potential consequence before acting. Also - you think our brains grew this large because we ate grass and nuts and not all the other nutrients derived from non-vegan sources?

I already wrote “Someone who is unconscious still exists as a subject with right to bodily autonomy. Their capacity for consent exists even when they’re not currently exercising it - and that anyone overriding it makes it unethical to begin with.” I also covered how moral responsibility still applies to actions that foreseeably affect a future subject. You’re responsible for what those cells will become, but you can’t “violate consent” of what doesn’t yet exist just as Basman is pointing out to you also. Your mistaking the intention to cause harm for the act of violating consent. Paying someone today to commit a future rape is morally evil because it expresses premeditated intent and complicity, not because it “violates future consent.” Consent can’t be violated until there’s a consenting subject - what exists now is your corrupt intention, not the act itself. The moral wrongness lies in planning harm, not in breaching an imaginary contract with a being who doesn’t yet exist. Your just doubling down, collapsing categories and trying to strawman me because your logic is incoherent and your Saturday night live performance of gotcha flopped.

@zurew For the third time - your conflating moral responsibility with consent. Consent applies between subjects that already exist and can willfully agree. Responsibility applies to outcomes you set in motion that will affect beings once they come into existence. You’re trying to discuss temporal consent which is incoherent, compared to temporal ethics (ethics across time) which deals with how our present actions affect future beings or states of the world. Temporal ethics is real but about responsibility and foresight - consent is bounded to subjects that exist and are capable of consent in the present. If we pollute a river that causes future harm - it’s an act of irresponsibility, not non-consensuality - because no one was present to grant it or not. —————— Your rape example proves my point. There’s no such thing as retroactive consent - only retroactive acceptance (forgivness), evaluation or interpretation after the fact. You’re trying to use temporal consent (how the person feels after waking up) to judge temporal ethics (the morality of the act when it was performed). Someone who is unconscious still exists as a subject with right to bodily autonomy. Their capacity for consent exists even when they’re not currently exercising it - and that anyone overriding it makes it unethical to begin with. The act was unethical the moment it began because it was done without consent. The subsequent reaction can bring about forgiveness or trauma - but it can’t retroactively change the immoral nature of the initial choice. Consent is the necessary condition that must be present before the act, not a lucky outcome that might appear after. To have the same action (sex with an unconscious person) either be morally good or evil based on a random dice roll of the victim's subsequent feelings and their consent - is a dangerous foundation for ethics, which is why it’s legally useless. If someone says afterward “I guess it was fine” or “I changed my mind” that doesn’t legally transform a non-consensual act into a consensual one. Likewise, if someone later says “I regret it” that alone doesn’t make a consensual act rape - there has to be evidence that consent was absent at the time. Law deals in objective facts and consent being present, not later feelings. Your claiming that consent can be violated before the capacity for consent exists, as long as that capacity will eventually exist lol. That leads to all kinds of absurdities, stoopid. I can be a ass don’t make me show it:

On the heroin point - you assumed an implication that wasn’t there - didn’t know I had to spell out an obvious nuance as a caveat. Consent is a concept that applies to relationships between existing and capable beings in the present. It can’t apply to those incapable of it or not existing to exercise it. By your logic, every present act would violate the “future consent” of beings who will one day exist - filling a gas tank would become a consent violation against future generations affected by climate change. That logic collapses into paralysis: how could we act at all if every future consequence counted as a consent violation from beings who don’t yet exist? What you’re actually describing isn’t consent but responsibility. If you create a being, you’re responsible for their welfare. That’s why using heroin while pregnant is wrong - not because of “violated consent,” but because it harms someone’s well being. Likewise, if you create a being under good conditions where they can flourish, you’ve fulfilled your responsibility. You’re conflating moral responsibility with consent. And as for calling things stupid - by your own logic, you’re presently violating the future consent of your kids not to look stupid on a forum for trying to word salad your way through a flopped gotcha.

Obviously not lol what a stretch. You’re conflating consent with moral responsibility. My point was that there’s “no possibility of consent or its violation before sentience” - not that this grants license for harm. The absence of consent doesn’t create permission - it simply means the concept of consent doesn’t yet apply.

What’s the premise of anti-natalism? Is it basically that life is suffering and that it’s unethical to bring a life into this world of suffering that it is unable to consent to? Like what Emerald and somethingfunny are discussing above - let’s say we live in a post-scarcity society of abundance due to technological breakthroughs. Does anti-natalism still apply or not? Suffering may be reduced on a material level, but that doesn’t guarantee psychological well being which we may suffer from a lack of despite material wealth. It also doesn’t solve the consent problem because we still can’t get consent from a non-being ticking off a box: to be or not to be? So then it’s not about the conditions of life but about life itself - it’s a metaphysical claim about life which believes that suffering in any form, invalidates the value of existence itself. There’s a difference between a metaphysical claim and a circumstantial lifestyle choice being made based upon conditions.

So consent only comes into question once there’s sentience? If consent doesn’t apply before sentience, then it certainly doesn’t apply before existence. But anti-natalism talks about beings that don’t yet exist at all, not ones that haven’t yet developed consciousness. If there’s no sentience, there’s no subject - and if there’s no subject, there’s no possibility of consent or its violation. Agreed. It's difficult for many people to get by on their own let alone support a family, if they can even partner up with someone to begin with. The problem comes when suffering is taken and universalized as a moral stance in the form of a philosophy in order to cope with that suffering. People feel a need to identity their stance and choices as ''positions''. They journey from identifying as childless - which sounds negative (because less implies lack), then it becomes childfree (which sounds more noble because ''freedom''), but then that sound selfish so it must go the next step and become a ethical concern that shows how much you care - anti-natalism. Lifestyle choices are elevated into ''identities'' and moral philosophies as a compensation for being metaphysically displaced and uprooted from any sort of transcendent identity or belonging - that a mechanised, scientifically rational, materialist culture stripped from them. That's why we have all kinds of subgroups propping up and peoples identities tied to them. It's not simply ''I don't want to have children due to my personal circumstance not being viable'' instead its ''having children is unethical due to lack of consent and introducing them to a life of suffering they have no say in'' and subjecting this moral standard onto others who fall short of it. The philosophy itself is self-negating and self-terminating if adopted at scale and if it were to be a universal ethic or truth. But it’s just a circumstantial choice in a persons life.

If it’s so obviously wrong then point it out. Again - did the non-being consent to not being? Epistemology presupposes existence. If epistemology is about how we know - there must be a knower to know in the first place. We can’t know how a non-existent subject knows or consents, or claim we know about what their preference is - to be or not to be? Which is why consent is reserved for those existing and capable of it. For example, even in existence - we don’t demand consent from babies because they aren’t capable yet. The logic simply goes: suffering is bad, thus to end suffering we eliminate the sufferer. A conversation can be had about suffering, but that’s different to consent.

I don't even feel like spending my energy arguing with you after reading this bro-science. So our big beautiful brains that are energy hungry developed over millions of years by eating grass and nuts? The building blocks of which can't be obtained from a vegan diet deficient in choline, DHA etc. We can live as vegans but didn't evolve from it. We went from butcher to bhudda. Vegans can maintain our current brains only with meticulous planning and supplementation - even then, some nutrients can't be supplemented due to bioavailability. A lot of issues and sup-optimal intake of nutrients takes years to show up as they chip away at our vitality. To do this in one life time is fair, but across generations it could have consequences unless some breakthroughs happen. Forget that side of the discussion and answer this then: Can non-existence be consented to and chosen? There's nobody to be asked. Consent is a relationship between two beings with the capacity for it - not between being and non being. Ethics apply within the realm of existence.

@Something Funny But did they consent to non-existence? Did they consent to non-being? There’s no subject to consent with or not to being with. Existence is its own consent. Being is the universe saying yes to itself. Stage green philosophies are philosophies of empathy that ultimately self terminate. A overcorrection to a Western arc of development that made life mechanical through scientific rationalism and disenchanted life, literally questioned the value of life itself - because science demands questioning everything. Now stage green new age philosophies try to re-enchant life with BEing again - but over correct into philosophies that make being itself an impossibility. A non-vegan diet grew our brains big enough to even platform enough conciousness to contemplate eating non-vegan to begin with. Voluntarily going vegan and depriving the brain of certain nutrients on a long enough time horizon may devolve our brains - shrinking the very vessel for conciousness and “compassion”. Anti-natalism voluntarily extincts the vessel (body) for being to even BE. The issue with both is they deny suffering, rather than sacrilize it. Something religions and much of the world still does - that liberal progressives mock as backward yet suffer for and over correct for. This then becomes the benchmark for “development” but it’s actually Western civilizations self therapy for going down a rabbit hole detour of materialism that much of the world hasn’t. De-colonize spiral dynamics - that takes Western stage green which is a remedy for the Wests own de-souling, and imposes that linear model of development on the world that hasn’t yet de-souled itself and thus doesn’t need to go down the same route to be considered “higher” up the spiral catching up with the Wets that is always “ahead”. Anti-natalists be like - but you’ve suffered rite? Why inflict the possibility of it on a non-being? But did you die? Yes, as we all will. But I lived too. I was a user called Zazen dropping bombass golden nuggets on a forum once - because I studied, and I Zazen’d, and I was alive to even Zazen and be concious in the first place. Something funny, something profound, something with suffering too.

Structural changes and financialization are distorting our economies which is also distorting our politics - feedback loop into each other. We will need a cultural revolution before we can have a political revolution that can handle all the changes coming our way that make our old models obsolete for the new world which de-values our labour (physical plane - automation), our intelligence (mental plane - AI, quantum computing) and our energy (energetic plane - fusion, nuclear etc). With the triad of labour, intelligence and energy / matter - once all three become abundant, scarcity economics as we know it dies. The issue is, just like with financialization - abundance is accrued to oligarchic elites. Which is why we’ll need a cultural-political revolution that subordinates capital to the state - so that it can serve the public rather than the few. Otherwise we’re in for techno feudalism. In a structural sense the West has maintained this dynamic through its “evolution”. Every major technological leap (railroads, oil, internet, AI) has been captured by private oligarchies first, then regulated too late. The logic is: monopolize, financialize, securitize, and drip the benefits down. China’s model with all its faults, is built differently. It treats breakthroughs as national assets, integrated into long term social planning. When China gains efficiency - it tends to invest it downward into infrastructure, housing, education, or production capacity. In the West, efficiency gains get hoovered up to the top to shareholders and speculative capital.