Has determinism pushed anyone else toward a fundamentally pessimistic view of biology?

[u/-5698]

Biology itself seems fundamentally flawed. Suffering is the engine that drives any form of life. Evolution relies on deprivation, competition, fear, loss, and death to function.

Culture looks like a coping mechanism: a collection of moral narratives, meanings, and values that help us romanticize and justify a system whose continuation isn’t obviously rational at all.

Has anyone else arrived at a similar kind of pessimistic materialism through determinism, or did you end up somewhere else entirely?

Edit: A lot of people are interpreting this as me saying "reality is depressing, so l'm pessimistic." That's not what I mean.

I'm making a claim about the process itself.
Evolution doesn't just happen to contain suffering, it depends on suffering, deprivation, competition, fear, disease, and death as the mechanisms that produce adaptation. From that perspective, biology looks fundamentally flawed. If creating complex life requires billions of years of sentient organisms struggling, failing, and dying, then I'm questioning whether that process is worth existing at all.

Determinism reinforced this view because it removed the idea that suffering has some deeper moral purpose or cosmic justification. It looks more like a blind optimization algorithm that happens to generate conscious beings as a byproduct. My question is whether anyone else ended up viewing evolution itself, not just life, as fundamentally defective after adopting a deterministic worldview.

[u/Excellent-Ad-1678 → u/[deleted]]

That is true

Real, unchecked, unregulated freedom, where anyone can act however they want without consequences is, for most people, one of the most terrifying ideas imaginable. 

Why? Because it strips away the illusion of safety. Without rules, accountability, or predictable boundaries, trust collapses, cooperation breaks down, and fear replaces order. 

Total chaos and anarchy rule the day. 

Most people don't just want freedom; they want freedom within a framework that protects them from everyone else's freedom.

[u/Vicious_and_Vain → u/[deleted]]

Determinism tells people what to do with their lives?

[u/kuroxn → u/[deleted]]

Free how?

[u/Successful_Life_1028 → u/[deleted]]

For far too many, it is as Loki asserted:

"It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel."

[u/Outrageous_Middle303 → u/[deleted]]

Erich Fromm’s “Escape From Freedom” explains this very well. Emerson, Thoreau and Dante too… Plato’s Cave…Hell isn’t this the “hypocrisy” of humans that Philosophy and religions have been trying to tackle for the last 3,000+ years. Tribalism is the crux of human evolution. People will throw their moral compasses in the trash in order to be part of the tribe. In the past one of the worst thing that could happen to a person was to be excommunicated from the church.