Talking about the pessimistic conditions of the world we live in is hard to do so in itself: Our lives are filled with small moments of meaning-finding, and there is a lot of good in the world, but to critique the prevailing trend of philosophical pessimism is a hard task in itself. Nonetheless, I will attempt to formulate a healthy and life-affirming critique of authors like Benatar and Ligotti in this blogpost and uncover the psychological and historical reasons why pessimism has traveled into the false equivalency of Nietzche misunderstandings, and why internet subculture has played a big role in doing so.

Modern pessimistic philosophy has never seen worse spokespeople for its validity than the anti-natalists, David Benatar and Thomas Ligotti. The fetishization of Dystopia, the ignoring of finding meaning is common in the works of these men, which is contrary to the authors that they idolize so much (Nietzsche railed against nihilism, and thought that it was a stage that man had to overcome, for one notable example). They willfully misunderstand the books that they take their diatribes and polemics from, and unreasonably think that because life has its problems, that means that it’s useless to construct a yay-saying philosophy out of the seemed inherent meaningless of life, even though the authors they supposedly took from did. The anti-natalists also embody the most baseline Wikipedia-skimming interpretation of Nietzsche: That nothing matters, and that from a literal standpoint, God is dead.

It is clear that their roots have a modern processor in the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement started in 1991 by an activist named Les Knight, who, after taking part of the 1970s deep ecology culture, realized foolishly that the only way humankind can redeem itself is by voluntary extinction. His arguments already have inherent flaws, as 1: Humankind cannot be dissuaded to stopping reproduction, as some religions even make it necessary to reproduce, and sexual desire being a common aspect in all humans (except the asexuals/aromantic community, who avoid sex/romantic attraction as a preference) in some way or form. 2: it immediately takes a subconsciously (whether Knight admits it or not) Puritan approach to solving world problems, stopping sex in favor of a utopian apocalyptic collapse politics and pessimism on steroids. It also uses the fetishization of post-apocaly...

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