Notes on an Anti-Natalist

"One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under the cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind. Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger's bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive. That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole. Peter Wessel Zappfe (The Last Messiah, 1933). _________________________________________________________________ A preponderance of black bile muddying the earth. Autumnal blood. This is the disease Hippocrates surely would have diagnosed in homo economicus were he around today. Men go mad as a herd, the old saying goes, but they only come to their senses one by one. Too late, too late. Were it a matter of Melancholy on a grand scale Zappfe's anti-natalist apocalypse might come to pass. In highly westernized industrial societies we flirt with zero population growth as it is. Yet still, that nagging doubt. The virtue of that child you didn't have vs. the little monsters of homo economicus - Justin Bieber and Will Smith's little brats for instance. No, Zappfe and his followers are deluded to believe that mankind would ever voluntarily excuse itself from the earth. I remind myself when I become entranced with the arguments of Zappfe or Ligotti that Christendom has seen this before with the Encratites, of whom Hippolytus estimated them as being more cynics than Christians. Narrow is the way.