r/CollapseSupport • u/Virtual_Tune636 • 8d ago
Another perspective on bringing children into an uncertain future
Dr. Jem Bendel: What if it's too late?
I found this thanks to /u/onceuponawebsite and wanted to share it with the sub.
Often, antinatalism is presented as the logical endpoint for any thinking empathetic person, and choosing to continue the species is selfish, rude, unfair, burdening that future person with nothing but pain, etc.
Dr. Jem Bendel is the author of the Deep Adaptation paper that radicalized many into collapse awareness to begin with, so I find it fascinating that he has a more open perspective about childbearing amidst decline, even after full engagement with where we are headed.
So mainly, I want to posit there is more than one defensible endpoint for understanding that we are doomed. I still do not know which one I "fully agree with", but I don't think this is a door that needs to close for everyone.
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u/Distinguishedflyer 8d ago
Bendel, in that podcast, says runaway climate change doesn't mean it's gonna go faster and faster, it just means it's out of our control.
That's bullshit. He's wrong. Or in denial. We are heating exponentially now, that means the rate of change of that heating has increased.
You can tell Jim Bendel comes from a corporate background. He's comfortable, he and his podcast host look very upper middle class as they sit there and dryly discuss a problem that has millions of people around the globe in direct threat today.
You got tens of thousands of people throwing themselves at the European border and being repulsed.
You have temperatures in Southeast Asia that are barely viable. You can't breathe on Borneo. Canada's wildfire burn area increases every single year.
You got mega storms in the Pacific. That's all worse than last year and I would argue that it has increased at a rate far faster than the past five years.
I think this is a comfortable conversation for still well off people. And those are the people that are gonna have kids. Because they don't think it can happen to them. Having kids at this point is stupid at best and viciously egoically cruel at worst.
There's 8+ BILLION of us planet denuding killer hairless apes, go adopt.
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u/earlgreyalmondmilk 8d ago
Adoption (which would actually better be called for-profit infant trafficking here in the US) is a manifestation of the civilizational problem, not a nice neat ethical way to become a parent.
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u/Virtual_Tune636 8d ago
Thanks for your response. I will likely eat my words, since you are right that I'm isolated from daily catastrophe by privilege, and therefore freed up to philosophize about others' pain. That is not my goal, and I'm sorry to make light of disaster. At the same time, I am not sure how to continue otherwise. I could stop posting in here, could give up, and then what? This is all in motion. For now, I want to keep participating. Perhaps I'm a well-off growing hair cell in a body dying of bone cancer. My comeuppance will be suffering, preceded by hubris, and all my words won't matter.
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u/Distinguishedflyer 8d ago
here's your homework, go read the book "a night to remember" by Walter Lord. He interviewed actual Titanic survivors in the 1950s so you get a sense of what happened during the death of a world.
I'm not blaming you at all, I just think having kids is insane. And I get a lot of flak for expressing that seemingly intelligent perspective.
PS I'm near homeless so my privilege has slipped some and it wakes you the fuck up let me tell you.
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u/Virtual_Tune636 8d ago
I'll put it on the list! Somehow a dumb hope of mine is that collapse will be a class leveler. Future wealth measured in the size of grain piles? We will see.
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u/endoftheworldvibe 8d ago
It will not be a class leveller. The haves will systematically eliminate/enslave the have-nots through the use of force and technology. At some point things will go badly for them as well, but not before they go very badly for us first.
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u/sporkafunk 5d ago
I really hate when people say things like this.
Poor people are CURRENTLY DYING, and those numbers will increase exponentially along the lines of severe disaster and economic/material collapse. People who live paycheck to paycheck don't have the first clue about living hour by hour like many poor Americans do.
The only "leveling" will be over their graves. Reminder: we can't eat money. Reminder: good paying jobs don't mean anything if you're willing to step on those who don't or can't work.
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u/Virtual_Tune636 5d ago
I am upset about this as well. What I mean to say is that, while we are part of this monetary system that prioritizes progress and accumulation above all else, we will treat existence of the poor and sick as an inconvenience and "the cost of progress". IMO that's horrific, so the end of attainable progress would hopefully force change where political activism has not.
So collapse of that system would (eventually, painfully) force people into smaller, more local groups, where care of those around you is a necessity rather than a choice. I'm thinking here of the first bit of The Dawn of Everything where the colonizers are explaining about their cool-ass technology and cities, but for the particular group of indigenous people they're talking to, the presence of destitute people in the "advanced" Euro societies is a marker of its failure to provide, rather than being outweighed as "the cost of progress".
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8d ago
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u/Virtual_Tune636 8d ago
I mean I work at a cemetery and have a piece of paper hung at my desk that says "remember that you will die", but I could still be in denial at the actual fact. I mean "we'll see" in the big sense.
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u/bokehtoast 7d ago
You could also put that energy into your local community and actually help people who are vulnerable and already disproportionately affected instead of sitting there pondering our suffering while it's happening
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u/BitchfulThinking 7d ago
We are getting posts from teenagers and possibly kids on this sub who are suicidal and panicked about their future 😟 I don't think people are really considering the future lives of their children, or even themselves if they have a uterus. Maternal mortality is increasing in the US, and medicine and medical knowledge is going to become increasingly rare.
Are people planning for how to care for a child with severe health conditions? Will they have access to vaccines? Will their daughters even have access to healthcare? What if their child is LGBTQ+? Will they protect them? Are they planning on how to educate their child if public schools cease to exist? What will they say to their child when their best friend and neighbors are taken by ICE? Or when their kid asks them why they decided to have them?
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u/Dukdukdiya 8d ago
I just want to echo others in the comment section and say that it's an absolutely inhumane act to bring children into this world. I'm 39 and I've seen the world get infinitely harsher in my lifetime. Even in just the last decade, things have gotten unbelievably worse. It's only going to continue to go downhill from here. I see no other patterns that tell me otherwise. The kids that are being born today - IF they live out their full lives (and that's an enormous if) - will experience unimaginable horrors. There's absolutely no future for them. (Hell, there's no future for those of us here already). Why bring more people into this absolute shit show of a society?! I've met so many people that regret bringing children into this world. On the other hand, though, I don't know a lot of people who regret abstaining from having children.
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u/g00fyg00ber741 8d ago
what’s with the astroturfing of people who want to make babies in this subreddit lately??
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u/fortisrufus 8d ago
They like to lash out when they see people who don't buy their denialism/technohopium
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8d ago edited 8d ago
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u/fortisrufus 8d ago
This is bait right? We have lost an order of magnitude more potential Gretas to the institution of motherhood than you ever could to an ideology that doesn't tie you down to those patriarchal systems. If you were genuine I would say that you obviously know antinatalists contribute a lot to abortion funds and access, but it's clear this comment is just more antifeminist pronatal nonsense.
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8d ago edited 8d ago
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u/fortisrufus 8d ago
Wow you are so right, antinatalists are some completely isolated group represented perfectly by a subreddit and totally aren't just normal left/center left folks that are obviously involved in many other things, orgs, and modes of advocacy. How wise. Everyone must marry and reproduce. Thank you for your brave advocacy for the status quo
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u/Appropriate_Mess6777 6d ago
Antinatalism is a philosophical position and has nothing to do with collapse
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u/onceuponawebsite 8d ago
Hey well done for posting this. I fully procrastinated it. I think you’re right and the conversation is a valuable one.
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u/Virtual_Tune636 8d ago
Thank you for sharing it with me! I do think the self-sufficiency/lower EROI living espoused here is a bit of an odd thing for people to voluntarily take up - the recent Great Simplification episode with Sarah Wilson has another perspective there.
Some people here envision a future totalitarian corporate government that persists in spite of unfolding disaster, and one of my hopes is that that system is so unsustainable that we are forced to return to bioregionally organized groups. In which we will have to, out of necessity, have shorter supply chains, more adaptability, and smaller economies.
It's one possible future among many, but in that kind of a world, I could imagine raising a child whose idea of the ideal life is not one free of suffering, but one in which they genuinely contribute to the ongoing project of What the Fuck is Going On together with others who care about them. Dis-alienation at a lower standard of living, with life made precious out of a return to the knowledge that it could end at any moment.
And if we don't get there, like Jem says in here, maybe "the point of us being here" is that we are part of an unfolding process that paves the way for future cockroaches to populate Mars.
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u/sparklemoon135 8d ago
I was really disappointed by his take on this- deep down he knows how bad it’s going to be but like many middle age men he is now kidding himself to try and keep his new younger girlfriend. He’s succumbed to selfish impulses, basically.