“Put Down The Dice” Antinatalism PSA

The next headline could be about

Your daughter

Your son

As the victim

Or the perpetrator.

Stop gambling with the welfare of others.

Stop bringing children into the world.

Be Antinatalist.

EFILant Seals

I.

Elephant seals are the largest of all pinnipeds. Once a year, they arrive at the breeding beach to fight.

II.

The five thousand pound males engage in bluster, intimidation, and brutal combat. They violently tear at each other’s chest shields, often until both combatants are drenched in crimson blood.

III.

The victor of the clash will then stake their claim. His prize: the sexual domination of up to fifty female seals.

IV.

But his reign will not truly begin until the female seals make land and birth the pups that have been gestating since the previous year’s mating season. The stretch of sand where they choose to lay will determine which Beachmaster to whom they will submit procreative fealty.

V.

The pups are born. Seagulls devour placentas. The babies scream. The mothers bark. The bulls bellow. This is the elephant seal’s life. It has been this way for millions of years.

VI.

The mother seal’s milk provides an ample food source for her child. Though for every pound the weanling gains, his mother loses two. The males, too, are losing mass; a result of the three month fast undergone to be battle ready.

VII.

Eventually, the Beachmasters and other bulls slip back into the sea, followed by the females, and at last by the newest members of the species. They will endure a life of subsistence survival in the oceanic wastes, killing and consuming to avoid their own deaths.

VIII.

This cycle will continue indefinitely. Animals born for no other reason than to pass down their genetic code, a code that creates monsters.

IX.

The female elephant seal is pregnant for most of her life. The male elephant seal is locked in a primal war against members of his own kind. Females typically endure for twenty years. Males for just over a decade.

X.

As generations live and die, each seal will know these constants: Stress, Discomfort, Ferocity, Suffering. They will harm, and be harmed in turn. All until the genome no longer proves successful.

Wasted agony, like so much snot blown forth from a proboscis.

Last Glacial Maximum

Peter Wessel Zappfe wrote eloquently on the plight of the prehistoric Irish Elk, whose species, in a traditional interpretation of the data, was lost to extinction by the burden of their resplendently overgrown antlers. As sexual selection continuously elected for grander, heavier, and more ludicrously robust crowns of spreading horns, the elk, over generations, lost his mobility, his grace, and at last, his basic function. This ornament, in Zapffe’s vivid description, kept him pinioned to the earth, powerful neck muscles left hopelessly inadequate to do so much as lift his muzzle from the fallen leaves. A tool born for sparring and defense became the instrument of his buckling demise. A phenotypical element, the most distinct and characteristic of his very being, developed in evolution’s mad rush as the elk’s salvation, would in time manifest his crucifixion.

Thus elaborated, Zapffe compares these prisoner conditions of the mighty undulate to the prisoner conditions of the self-aware human mind. To those humans who can or cannot help but to endure the full capacity of their abstract consciousness, to stare unblinkingly at the baseline conditions of themselves and of other carriers of sentience, the curse of doing so is leveling. It is to recognize the futility of individual existence, with all of its constant, eternal deprivations, and multiply and harshen that self-sampled experience by several quintillion. It is to be mentally rent and torn, parted and quartered, dragged through the streets and piked by the masses.

Zapffe speaks of methods that human beings use to blindfold themselves to the horror, to shorn their prongs so that they are not left starving and immobilized. A very few of us, however, through some deterministic means, are unable to make this sacrifice. For to burn the fundamental element of our function would be less like the shedding of decorative antlers, and more akin to a sabre-tooth cat pulling out their two scimitar teeth. In this instance, the removal of the distinguishing component does not lead to a duller yet still continued life; it leads to a crushing ennui, an intellectual betrayal, a treacherous lie that can never be comfortably maintained. If her dentition were to be altered, then Smilodon would die.

Once one recognizes that they possess killing jaws, and that theirs are merely one set of a near infinite armory of biological weapons put to use each fraction of a second across this planet, the efilist conclusion is inevitable. Five hundred million years worth of evidence exists within the paleontological record, showcasing a five hundred million year rogue’s gallery of monsters. The immutable rule of consumption, reproduction, addiction and parasitism is as clear and interpretable as the most immaculate bed of untouched fossil bones.

Why bring more fawns, kittens, and human babies into this war zone of genetic proteins, where they will become merciless destroyers or be mercilessly destroyed? Why not instead take deep consideration as to how we, apes with incomparable power, may disjoin this primordial cycle?     

To return to the story of our Ice Age herbivore, the dramatic, symbolically perfect end previously outlined likely did not bear out in actuality. The great cervine, to take the classic view of his demise, was, as his headgear grew and grew, perhaps merely not able to feed as efficiently, thus damaging his overall health and lowering the odds of his breeding. Or maybe his bounding step was slowed just enough so that the soaring spears of Homo sapiens bands more often found purchase in his and his family’s flesh. More modern extrapolations regarding contemporaneous geological circumstances point to climatic changes being the arrow to the heart of the species.

And thus Megaloceros giganteus (or as Zapffe more poetically coined them, Cervus giganticus) was no more. In an era referred to as the Last Glacial Maximum, a time in which a vast majority of Europe was confined under miles of intractable ice, the impressive deers’ population collapsed and, a short time later, the last individual rasped his final, hot breath.

We live in a proverbial Last Glacial Maximum, in which the suffering of the world is at its superlative. May we confront this permafrost reality with honesty and integrity, and do what we can to thaw it.

I am an efilist because I am the deer, I am the tiger, I am the missile loosing ape.

I am an efilist because we are all frozen under ice.