Anti-natalism is the philosophical belief that procreation is unethical because it’s impossible to for any unborn child to consent to it, and also because life is so full of horrors that it’s essentially unfair to confer it upon anyone. There’s also the ecological angle: that humans are terrible for the planet and all other living things. Overall, anti-natalists present the argument that there’s no reason to keep the human race going, besides sentimentality.
In his new documentary, I Wish You Were Never Born, Jack Boswell explores the arguments of the hardcore anti-natalists. Boswell speaks to believers in London (including a young guy who got a vasectomy) and across the US (including one guy who has big Gilbert Gottfried vibes) in his eye-opening film, which you can watch online for free, right now.
We spoke to Boswell to better understand this strange philosophy.
VICE: What are the origins of anti-natalism?
Jack Boswell: The guy that’s credited with coining the word is David Benatar. He’s a South African academic and philosophy professor and considered the grandfather of it, though I think the ideas behind it go back way further. Benatar is an interesting figure—we approached him to do an interview, but there’s no pictures of him online, and he doesn’t do anything with visuals in it. He only does audio things with his voice, because I think it’s such an out-there belief that he doesn’t want people knowing what he looks like. That’s my understanding of it. He wrote this book called Better Never to Have Been, which is the anti-natalist text that people like to cite. So he’s the one that’s credited with it, but it really is something that’s just spread online. Reddit helped it sort of explode in the public consciousness.
So it really popped off in the past five or ten years?
Yeah. Raphael Samuel is the guy who threatened to sue his parents in 2019. That got attention across the mainstream media. It just put a spotlight on it; helped fan the flames of anti-natalism online and people find it as a movement.
Is their argument that everyone should stop having kids, and then humans will just die out? Or is it that we should have fewer kids?
The purest sense would be, we should all stop having kids because it’s unethical, because you can’t consent to being born. Broadly speaking, life has more suffering in it than joy, would be their argument, and there’s nothing lost by not bringing someone into the world. I think their argument is, if you bring someone into the world, they might have good experiences, they might have bad experiences, but if they’re not brought into the world at all, they’re not missing out on anything. So why put them through it?
So what was your personal viewpoint going into the doc? And then having made it, having spoken to all those people, how did your view change?
I’m not an anti-natalist, but I do find it a compelling philosophy and thought experiment, and it’s quite hard to argue with once you get into it. What drew me to it is it’s both highly illogical and logical at the same time. Like that fact that you can’t ask someone for their consent to bring them into the world. On the one hand, you go, that’s absolutely insane. But on the other hand, you go, well, actually, yeah, that sort of has some truth to it. And in broader conversations around consent in the world, we’re all aware that it’s such an important thing. So it both makes perfect sense and no sense at the same time, and really, that tension at the heart of it really struck me as an interesting thing to explore.
Listening to their arguments while editing the documentary, it did take a toll on me a little bit, and I certainly did take it to heart a bit more, but that has eased off since I finished it. When I was in the midst of it, whenever I would go through something crappy, I’d be like, “Ah, man, this could have been avoided if I just wasn’t here.”
Do you think it’s a belief that could actually take hold and therefore change the world?
I mean, ‘no’ would be the short answer. I can’t see how you could ever convince enough people to not have kids. They will be the first people to admit that. The reactions they get—I followed them around at Speakers’ Corner, when they debate people—it’s just visceral. The most common response they get is, ‘Why don’t you kill yourself?’ That’s what most anti-natalists are told. So I don’t think they have a hope in hell of convincing people to do it, but the internet has certainly helped it spread. And there are a few people I’ve shown it to who said, “Oh, this is something that I felt, but I didn’t know how to word it.”
What was your biggest takeaway from making this doc?
I think once I got past the sort of intense editing period, where I did get a little bit consumed by all of the ideas, it actually left me feeling more positive about the world. I don’t have kids at the moment. I might do—I’m not with anyone, so it’s not really on the cards—but it just makes me feel like, I am here, whether I chose to be or not, so I may as well make the most of it. And I guess where anti-natalists would interject in that is by saying, “Don’t carry on. Don’t have kids.” Les, who I interviewed, he has bumper stickers that say something like, “Live long and die out,” because he wants to dispel the idea that you should kill yourself, or that you should kill other people. Live a long, healthy, happy life and then don’t put anyone else through it.
You can watch ‘I Wish You Were Never Born’ for free at iwishyouwereneverborn.com and on YouTube.
Follow Nick Thompson on X @niche_t_
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