It didn't help that I apologized. The offense was there. The rude way I phrased it didn't help. But even if I hadn't, it was laid bare that I hold a view the other person considers disgusting, and it's a view that impacts her greatly. Combined with other differences we'd had, it sealed the end of that relationship. I'm now minus one passionate romantic interest; and, more painfully, minus one friend. Leaving me at... a low number around zero.
It's always been difficult for me to make friends. In first grade, I was pinned down on the floor, and beaten by a group of classmates for sticking to what they thought were preposterous claims. I insisted that the Sun is a star (they believed differently), and that 100 times 100 is 10,000, not 1,000.
It's gotten worse over the years. It's now easy to find people who believe the Sun is a star, and who believe that 100 times 100 is 10,000. But I have chased down some difficult, inconvenient questions about life, and I've arrived at answers which I believe are well-founded and rational, but which most people find completely abhorrent. As a result of those beliefs, I feel I can no longer talk honestly to anyone, except my wife.
(Thank goodness for my wife. If I didn't have her, I couldn't talk with full honesty to literally anyone. Honey, I love you.)
So what are these ominous beliefs? What questions did I pursue, and what abhorrent answers did I find?
The value of life
Many seem to operate on the assumption that all human life is invaluable, and that anyone who thinks otherwise must be a horrible person. I find neither to be the case.I find there are two things that can be valued about human life. One is the ability of each person to experience, to feel. This is a passive trait shared by everyone. The other is the capability of each person to contribute - to improve the experience of others. This is an active trait, of which not everyone has the same amount.
If we're going to value human life, we need to decide we're going to value it either on the basis of each person's ability to feel and experience, or on the basis of each person's capability to contribute, or both.
If we decide we should value life based solely on each individual's ability to feel and experience, then we must take into account what we are currently doing to animals. Animals cannot contribute much. They can contribute bodies for our consumption, and their existence contributes to the entertainment of those who appreciate them. Evidence shows that many animals - of the kinds we torture and consume on an industrial scale - are sentient, and do feel. We use them for meat, regardless. We value their lives based on what they contribute - their dead bodies - and not based on what they experience.
We likewise do not actually value humans based on their ability to feel and experience. If we did, people in the developed world would be doing much more for others around the world who are much worse off. There is action in this regard - there are people who care; but for the most part, they are the exceptions. If we really cared, each individual one of us would recognize that world GDP is $85 trillion (in 2012), and that with 7 billion people in the world, the average income, if redistributed, would be USD 12,143 per person, per year. If you make any more than that, and you really care about poor Africans based merely on their ability to feel and experience, you should be saving and improving their lives wholesale, with every cent you earn above that averaged amount. In most western countries, you could survive on the remainder. It would not be nearly as comfortable, but way more comfortable than the Africans have it, and you would be saving thousands of lives.
But you do not do this. You do not do this because you do not care about those thousands of lives. You do not care for those people based merely on their ability to feel and experience. You care based on other things, such as their impact on your life, and their proximity to you.
My argument is, this is okay. You should not care. It's not your mistake, not your fault, not your guilt, that you are not saving those lives, or not helping as many as you could. I in fact argue the opposite. It is the people who do help - the Bill Gates's of the world - who are likely to be misguided, and could be using their money for purposes more helpful to humanity. Historically, if a people were capable of climbing out of poverty, they did. And if they weren't, no one has been able to help them.
Is this cruel and cold-hearted enough? Ah, hand on to the railing. It gets rougher.
Population
If you concluded, based on the above, that I believe life should be valued, and is actually valued, based on its ability to contribute, and everything else is pretense - you are correct. Even today, as oceans rise due to rising man-made CO2 levels, and as species like the rhino go extinct due to demand in Asia for hokum virility medicine, idealists are trying to convince us that the Earth can support even more people than it already has.Sure, it can. But it's becoming an Earth that is less and less a place anyone will want to live in. Hopeful people argue that population will begin to shrink again once birth control and education are truly available to women on a global scale - and they may be right, for the time being; birth control and education are definitely excellent goals to pursue. But ultimately, evolution favors genes that multiply, not genes that result in educated individuals. I think people who count on birth rates falling on their own are underestimating the capacity of the human race to be stupid. Ultimately, if we allow something, it's going to exist. There are going to be groups of people which are going to stick to a policy of having many children, and will raise their kids to have the same beliefs. Such groups might start out small, but they will reproduce at rates faster than anyone, and their children's children will come to be dominant. Without an intervention, evolution is going to favor those who multiply, and the world is going to approach a Malthusian state. We are already beyond the point where there are so many of us that our effect on the planet is detrimental.
Technological idealists hope science will find ways we can avoid a Malthusian catastrophe, even in the face of rising population. This can work for a while, but it will ultimately be stopped by the laws of Physics. The energy of our Sun is very large, and we can use lots more of it than we do now; but it is finite. Even if we expand outward at the speed of light, in all directions, and utilize other stars, the energy we gain that way increases with time to the power of three, as we occupy more volume. Our population, however, will multiply exponentially. No matter how small the annual growth - if there's any uncontrolled annual growth, the exponential multiplication will exceed the rate at which we gain new space. It will ultimately become necessary for us to decide who gets to live, and who doesn't; who gets to be born, and who doesn't. Otherwise, nature will decide for us, and its decisions will be done through predatory and chaotic behaviors, and will not be in our best interest.
We don't have to go centuries into the future to see that we will eventually need to make population decisions, and enforce them. We already have such decisions in front of us today. We're not making them, and it's costing us in quality of life - in extinctions, in pollution, in overcrowdedness of an increasing number of areas. The Chinese are smart to ruthlessly limit their population growth; for all their other faults, thank goodness they have an authoritarian government with the guts to do that. But what good is that if India is growing at an annual 1.4%? If we want anything to remain of this Earth, we need population control to be global.
The best of all worlds
There's a problem in utilitarianism known as the repugnant conclusion. In a naive and straightforward construction, utilitarianism holds that total utility (the goodness of a particular outcome) is the sum of the individual utility for every person (the sum of everyone's individual outcome). The conclusion that results from this premise is that a very large population, with low but positive individual satisfaction, is a better outcome than a smaller population with very high individual satisfaction. In other words, based on these criteria, a utopia is beaten by dystopia. It's called repugnant, because that's not what most people would intuitively prefer.I argue that the solution to this problem is not to value outcomes based on the sum of individual utilities, but based on the median utility expected to be experienced by a random individual that participates in the outcome. In other words - we should seek to make a world we would want to live in, even if we didn't know who in this world we are going to be. In my assessment, this would be a world with a smaller population than we have currently, but with the quality of the population improved.
Abortion
I agree with pro-lifers that abortion is a form of murder. It's not the same as murder, but it's related.And then, much more importantly, I agree with pro-choice people that abortion should be available to women everywhere, and should be done based on the mother's choice, alone. I am pro-choice.
We must exercise choice of what humans are born, and what humans aren't. If we don't exercise this choice, nature will choose more poorly. As a rule, a child whose own mother doesn't want him in this world should not be in this world. The "natural" outcome, letting the child be born regardless of what the mother wants, is not best. Nature is cruel, harsh, and random.
Abortion is necessary to prevent the birth of people with a known low ability to contribute. The birth of such children is not only a net cost, but it usually means that one or more children will not be born who might have had a much higher contributing capacity. Developmentally disabled children take a lot more effort to maintain, and frequently displace more than one child that could exist and contribute.
Eugenics
People are expensive. A new human, once she exists, comes with rights and wants and entitlements. The amount of resources available to everyone decreases as we add more people. If we want the best outcome for everyone, we must ensure that people we create are not born only for their passive ability to feel and experience, but also for their ability to improve the experience of others. It is our duty to create people who will go out and create; not just sit there, and be maintained, and benefit from others' creations.The reputation of eugenics is now destroyed due to the unethical ways it was administered in the 20th century. Atrocities like mass killings and forced sterilizations became implicitly linked with what is, ultimately, care about the future of humanity - a desire to make decisions that are in our descendants' best interest, and not to leave important aspects of their well-being to an ungoverned process of nature.
Murder
The reason our societies do not permit the killing of already born humans is not because our lives are inherently precious. If lives were precious, we wouldn't have capital punishment, or drone strikes killing tens of innocents in other countries.The reason murder is a crime is because one, it causes damage; the person you killed was likely of benefit to the human race, and you destroyed something vastly more significant than whatever reason you did it for. Secondly, killing of people inflicts pain and suffering on others who remain. Thirdly, no individual participant in society wants to be killed. The vast majority of people don't want it, and our voices together make the law.
Infanticide
Edit:
As of February 23, 2014, I am retracting this opinion. I have experienced what it is to love a person who fits some of the criteria I discussed here. I now believe that, assuming the numbers are manageable, having people who are different than others enriches us more than it costs us. Life where everyone is the same, and no one defies expectations, would be less interesting. I'm deeply sorry for the hurt this opinion has caused to people I care about, as well as to anyone I don't know.
In light of all of the above, I consider it peculiar that we almost never discard individuals who show themselves to be unfit at a young age. In this list of young murderers, only one was executed. Stereotypically, the one that did was black. Others received varying, but more lenient treatments.
Murderous children are rare. Compared to that, children with serious developmental disabilities are relatively common. Most every child who's born like that takes the place of a potential other child, who could exist without the disability. Routinely, we choose to preserve the life of the disabled child, usually at great expense to the family, to public health care, and/or both.
Is this not a choice we make? It is a choice between two worlds: one world in which there's this disabled child, and another world, where we have euthanized it, and instead allowed the parents to create a new functional, contributing human being. Is making this choice not a murder of the potential human being that could be?
I understand people love their disabled child. What they apparently do not like to imagine is the potential love and connection they could feel with another child that would have been healthy. From my anecdotal exposure to a handful of families like that, it seems almost as though a Stockholm syndrome develops. The family members of such children talk about the challenges of raising them - it might be just the difficulty of taking care of a growing, near-incapable person, or it might be the full-fledged tantrums of an autistic child who flings feces, throws furniture at people, and screams so much and so often it makes the neighbors move. Yet, almost in the same breath, these same family members will say how much they love this person, and how their lives wouldn't have been the same without them. They say this, as if in complete disregard to the family member that they otherwise could have. A sister who would walk, and go to school, and find a boyfriend, and get married, and have children. A brother who would be there for you, who would support you, whom you could actually talk to about your life.
Reactions
I suppose you can see why I don't have so many friends.I've tried to explain opinions like the above in discussions on reddit. I've been called such names, so many times, I gave up. Apparently, for wanting us to exercise essential choice in how the future will be like, I am a sociopath. I eventually deleted my account, and I'm no longer commenting.
But what hurts me the most... is that I deeply offended someone I really cared about, and lost what I thought was going to be a lifelong friend.
I do not wish my views to be something other than what I think makes sense. I do wish more people would understand what I have to say. And I wish I had more skill in sharing it... or not to share it.
Showing 11 out of 11 comments, oldest first:
Comment on Aug 26, 2013 at 07:58 by Sunshine
Z zanimanjem berem vse kar napišeš. Marsikaj se tudi meni zdi naravnost grozljivo. Kakšno mnenje se mi zdi enako grozljivo tudi čez dan ali teden, se pa najde tudi kakšna stvar, ki jo prespim in ugotovim, da imaš čisto prav.
Vesela sem, da sta se z ženo našla. In čeprav sem bila na začetku tudi kritična in skeptična, očitno vidva drug drugemu dajeta to kar potrebujeta in se dopolnjujeta tam, kjer je drugi "podhranjen". Po svoje vama zavidam, ker delujeta kot res trden in harmoničen par. No ja, čeprav dejansko nimam vpogleda v trenutke, ko morda letijo krožniki po zraku. :D
Ogromno pišeš o tem kaj misliš, verjameš, razmišljaš, zelo malo pa o svojih čustvih. In vsaj meni zato deluješ precej robotsko, kot en mali buldožer, ki rine v smer, ki jo je za pravo pokazal nek "matematični izračun". :(
Verjetno se me še spomniš iz časov, ko smo imeli več stikov. Bila sem zelo nesentimentalna, razumsko orientirana, cost-benefit driven... Saj deloma sem taka še danes. Vsaj bistveno bolj kot večina okrog mene, a svetlobna leta manj od tebe.
In potem je prišel prvi otrok. Pred rojstvom sem verjela, da bo to vse po vojaško urejeno, skratka tako kot je prav. Spal bo celo noč in v svoji sobi, dojil se bo na 3 ure, kasneje jedel vse po vrsti, igral se bo sam itd. Pa so se začela lomiti pravila, eno po eno... Nato sem ugotovila, da morda ne delam kar je prav, je pa moj otrok zato srečen, čeprav izbire niso vedno logične in smiselne.
Nato je prišel drugi otrok. Tisti, ki bi ga bilo po tvojem potrebno evtanazirati. In bi ga tudi jaz, če bi za to vedela dovolj zgodaj. A nisem vedela. In zdaj je tu in ja, neznansko rada ga imam. In ja, moje življenje je zaradi njega drugačno. Morda celo boljše. Prinesel mi je mnoge nove lekcije. Zaradi njega sem postala močnejša, manj stvari me spravi iz tira, ne obupujem več nad malenkostmi, ker šele zdaj vem kaj so prave težave. Bolj znam ceniti male napredke in počasi se otepam spon večnega tuhtanja, planiranja, pričakovanj in vedno bolj sprejemam to, kar se ima za zgoditi. Ja, vedno bom poskusila storiti vse, da iz danega povlečem maksimum. A če ne bo šlo, bom pomirjena tudi s tem.
Comment on Aug 26, 2013 at 07:58 by Sunshine
Po pravici ti priznam, da me je malo strah za vajinega sinčka. Da boš do njega prestrog, preveč robotski, da boš od njega vedno pričakoval kar je logično ali prav, namesto da bi mu dopuščal da je iracionalen, samosvoj, da počne stvari, ki niso vedno smiselne. Upam, da se motim, saj mi je zaradi moje hudičeve empatije hudo za vsakega otročka, za katerega vidim, da je v stiski.
Moj zadnji življenjski fiasko mi je najbolj nazorno pokazal kako pomembna so čustva in čustvovanje za človekovo srečo, za harmonične odnose, za lepo življenje... Človek, ki samo čuti, ne pa ČUTI, je pravzaprav samo na pol živ. In kdor se ne nauči čutiti (jap, tudi to nam morajo za popotnico dati starši) v prvih par letih življenja, je čustveno pohabljen za vedno. Trust me, vem to iz prve roke! :\
Anyway... ko sem začela s pisanjem, sem mislila da bom malo boljše zadela rdečo nit, pa sem na koncu čisto skrenila. A jebat ga... boš preživel, kajne? Ti kar še naprej piši. Nekateri ti tudi tvoje brutalne iskrenosti ne zamerimo, čeprav se včasih zgrozim, marsikaj odločno zavrnem, zamerim pa ne... ;)
P.S. Pa da ne bo kdo mislil, da je Denis pisal o meni. Zaradi sina s posebnimi potrebami se pravzaprav zgolj naključno vidim v velikem delu tega zapisa, pa sem se odločila napisati "par" vrstic. :)
Comment on Aug 26, 2013 at 08:55 by denisbider
Mislim, da imaš o meni napačno predstavo. Moj blog je javen, Facebook tudi. Pišem abstraktno, in torej hladno, ker sem sramežljiv glede pisanja o samem sebi. Ni me sram klicati pozornosti na ideje, ki se mi zdijo vredne - me je pa sram klicati jo nase; zato ne govorim dosti o čustvih.
Doživljanja okoli povprečja... trenutno sem daleč od tega. :-) Zadnje štiri mesece sem bil zaljubljen v poročeno dekle v Alabami, ki je v meni obudila vsa čustva, ki jih premorem - od najbolj plemenitih do najbolj krutih. Doživel sem vse, od blažene zaljubljenosti do samomorilskih nagnjenj, dokler se ni zadeva zaključila včeraj. Po dolgih mesecih so se vse niti razpletle, in zdaj mi je vse jasno, kot mi ni bilo še o nobeni taki situaciji, nikoli. Hvaležen sem za izkušnjo. Tudi če izid ni tak, kot sem si ga želel - ni mogel biti drugačen.
Ta članek, ki si ga prebrala, je bil del mojega miselnega procesa ob zaključku te avanture. Ko sem to pisal, sem bil mnenja, da se je stvar končala, ker moje misli niso kompatibilne z drugimi. Ampak to ni res. Način, kako si se odzvala, dokazuje, da se je mogoče tudi o občutljivih stvareh, na katere gledamo iz različnih vidikov, razumno pogovoriti. Moja avanturica se je zaključila iz drugega razloga... ampak to je že druga zgodba.
Za najinega otroka te ne rabi skrbeti. Ljubezni in izkušenj bo zanj mnogo. :-)
Veseli me, da je vaša družina srečna!
Comment on Aug 26, 2013 at 08:56 by denisbider
Comment on Aug 26, 2013 at 14:13 by Sunshine
Comment on Aug 26, 2013 at 19:09 by denisbider
Vse skupaj je parabola odnosa med nama. Ona bi zelela ljubimca, ampak ima problem z obcutljivostjo in narcizmom. V pogovoru ne prenese nic neprijetnega, kar bi zmotilo njeno samozavest, in njeno samozavest zmoti veliko stvari. Taksna je, ker prihaja iz zlomljene druzine, kjer so jo starsi zanemarjali in je pretezno sama skrbela za svojega krepko avtisticnega brata. Prav tako od zacetka pubertete nima dejanskih prijateljev, ampak pretezno tipe, ki bi jo radi podrli. Njen moz je popolna copata - sta istih starosti, poznata se od 14. leta, pred kratkim sta se porocila, v letih pred tem pa ga je sedemkrat prevarala, in sedemkrat jo je vzel nazaj. Ona je njegova edina.
Skratka, razvajena je kot princesa. Ona misli, da rabi Joela kot ljubimca, jaz pa mislim, da rabi oceta. Vse to prve tri mesece ni bilo razvidno; ko je postalo razvidno, jaz te disfunkcije nisem vec hotel podpirati, ona pa se je zato umaknila.
Ni, da Jane ne bi spustil do tipkovnice - rad imam, kadar kaj napise. Ponavadi se ji ne mudi izrazati mnenja, meni se pa tudi ne zdi ustrezno pritiskati. Mislim, da bo odgovorila, ampak o tem se razmislja.
Vsekakor je obdobje zadnjih mesecev za najin odnos prineslo izzive in bremena. Izzive sva premostila, in najin odnos je posledicno trdnejsi in boljsi.
Mislim, da se ni smiselno izogibati takim izzivom, samo zato, ker so izzivi. Kot sama pravis, zivljenje brez izzivov je dolgocasno premocrtno. :-) Kadar nam manjka izzivov v zivljenju, zato igramo igre. :-)
Comment on Aug 26, 2013 at 19:53 by Unknown
Zal se ni tako izteklo, ampak nikjer ne pise, da cesa takega ne bova v prihodnosti dozivela. :)
Comment on Aug 26, 2013 at 21:48 by Luka Fürst
Že nekaj let redno spremljam tvoj blog in moram reči, da v njem vedno znova uživam, pa čeprav se nimam navade oglašati in čeprav so moja stališča marsikdaj povsem nasprotna tvojim. Tudi z idejo, da ima življenje (ekonomsko) vrednost, se ne morem poistovetiti ... Vendar pa cenim tvoje logično razmišljanje, kultivirano debatiranje in načenjanje zanimivih tem, o katerih se le redki sprašujejo. Nisem ravno poznavalec blogosfere, a tvoj blog je nesporno najboljši od vseh, kar sem jih kdaj videl.
Zakaj se zdaj oglašam? Samo zato, ker bi te rad prosil, da ne obupaš in da še nadalje vzdržuješ ta blog.
Comment on Aug 27, 2013 at 03:06 by denisbider
zelo sem vesel tvojega komentarja. Hvala. :-)
Comment on Mar 7, 2014 at 06:15 by Unknown
I've enjoyed reading your blog sporadically over the years. you bring a distinct (sometimes harsh) analytical view to a lot of subjects. Having read some of your other posts, I wasn't as shocked with this post as I might have been. I gotta say, while I cannot condone some of your conclusions, I think i understand your points. The problem I have with some of your controversial views is that they are so "logical" To put it bluntly, you seem a bit like Spock to me. It is the conflict of the right/left brain dynamic. Or art vs. Science.
I was really surprised to read your post on "not thinking" and how it brought you happiness. I was surprised because i would have thought "not thinking" would be lost utility to you. While you explained that you focused thinking is better, (I agree), I would've thought the answer would be to train your mind to think with focus, and conquer MORE things mentally as a way to achieve utility, while not wasting time overthinking some things. You surprised me.
I wouldn't say I've learned to not think, but maybe that is just another description of how i've learned to cope with life troubles.
Anyway, just wanted to say, you made me think with this post.
I would hope that you can embrace the "art" in life a little more as you move through life. I hope you understand my meaning.
Lastly, just saw the pictures of your baby. Congratulations!
If you wanted some of your views challenged, welcome to the starting line of a world of seeing things in a different light...ha!
Take Care
Tim gjovik
Comment on Mar 7, 2014 at 08:08 by denisbider
sorry for the frustration with posting. Comments for older posts will not show up until I approve them. Unfortunately, I have to do this because of people who want to spam the blog; they'll mostly submit their crap under specific older posts that contain relevant keywords.
Tim: I was really surprised to read your post on "not thinking" and how it brought you happiness.
Yeah, unfortunately... That only lasted a couple days. After living in the moment for a while, I realized I'm neglecting work because I'm not being concerned about the future. One can coast like that for a while, but not for long.
After I realized that, I haven't been able to recapture that lightness of being since.