Stop it.
When I helped run the the “Vegan Circlejerk” Reddit community we were always firmly anti-utilitarian. Utilitarianism is a nonsensical, murderous, carceral, western philosophy that espouses using impossible math to come to conclusions. The wrong way to approach the world is to attempt to do equations and decide on your approach based on nonsense regardless of your intent for the “greater good.” We and the communities I’ve helped moderate have always believed in doing the right thing. Acting in accordance with your belief will bring you the result you want.
After my crew and I stepped down from Reddit, that community was steered towards antinatalism. I am personally against this and want to have this community come to consensus against it as well. I have no right to tell other people what to do with their bodies. For some I believe this philosophy is a way to control women’s bodies and set impossible standards. For others I believe it to be an expression of frustration and depression. Neither of these are in the spirit of abolitionist veganism and it will never become a prerequisite for it. Additionally the antinatalist philosophy is exclusionary to people who already have had kids which, when you get to my age, is most people. The admin of lemmy.vg is the same person who brought this philosophy to the subreddit, I would hope that recent events would encourage them to remove this link. To be clear if you decide having children is not for you that is great. I also came to this conclusion. I also don’t believe everyone who promotes people coming to their own decision is a bad person or doing the wrong thing if that includes not having children. It is when we demand people do not that it becomes problematic.
By extension these other utilitarian adjacent philosophies can be found within our movement and it is time to formally denounce it. The point of veganism and leftism is to promote life, not rally against it. The point of veganism is to elevate all life to the consideration that is supposed to be enjoyed by humans. The point of leftism is to ensure that all humans are elevated to that status too and protect each other. When we adopt philosophies that are anti-life, anti-birth, anti-woman, anti-human we lose touch with this and it is the seed from which ur-fascist thought grows.
What happened in Palm Springs is a tragedy. They were not bringing the fight to capital which oppresses us all, it brought the fight to people we are in solidarity with against capital. It was not bringing the fight to the soldiers of the settler regime, it attacked the entrapped. It was essentially a murder suicide from a depressed person who needed solidarity and community. Our vegan communities are doing a disservice promoting misanthropy to our comrades.
Please if you agree or disagree leave your statement in the comments. Thanks.
Antinatalism is also often, when I’ve seen it, incredibly racist and has a poor understanding of sociology and demographics. They’re the sort of people that think the population is going to keep increasing exponentially, forever. In part because capitalism has taught them that, because infinite economic growth requires infinite growth of the proletariat. But sociological study has definitively shown that’s not the case. Countries/regions go through a demographic transition and end up with a shrinking population. Wealthier, developed countries have already gone through this transition, and you see these armchair philosophers from those countries talk about antinatalism when the reality is they often believe it’s a problem only in developing countries. That it’s due to religion, or culture or some other inherent “problem”. The reality is that access to modern medicine, birth control, condoms, abortion, decreased infant and child mortality are all contributing factors to the transition, and that developing countries got access to all these things much later due to factors like colonialism. Current estimates have the population peaking at around 10.5 billion, with a very small chance of reaching 13 billion. Meanwhile, have some random reddit comments I found that prove my point with some inherently racist paternalism:
Tap for spoiler (cw racism)
https://www.reddit.com/r/sociology/comments/7s7ysf/why_the_world_population_wont_exceed_11_billion/