Self-loathing is one of the symptoms of being a leftist. Specifically, a self-loathing that causes one to wish for the extinction of the human race. Case in point: the voluntary human extinction movement (VHEMT), an organization that, true to its name, calls for humans to voluntarily work toward our eventual extinction.
Most leftists don’t come out and say that they long for the day when humanity will be wiped off the face of the earth. Many of their policies, however, reveal that longing: abortion, same-sex marriage, and economic policies that will cause society to revert back to the time when humans struggled to survive, to name just three. At least VHEMT has the intellectual honesty to be up front about their objective. Well, intellectually honest up to a point. The organization isn’t calling for its members to get the ball rolling and off themselves. Instead, VHEMT wants humans to pledge to stop having babies.
[To be clear, they shouldn’t call for their members to off themselves. In no way, shape, or form do I believe that humans should commit suicide, regardless of their idiotic beliefs.]
According to the group’s website:
VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It’s a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We’re not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.
We don’t carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.
Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth’s ecology.
As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens… us.
Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.
When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth’s biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature’s “experiments” have done throughout the eons.
It’s going to take all of us going.
Adequately unpacking the contradictions within VHEMT’s statement would take a series of articles. For now, I’ll just make a few brief comments.
Overgeneralizing, to be sure, Western civilization can be divided into two main camps: those who believe that humans are created by God and those who believe that humans evolved within a random universe that doesn’t have a game plan.
For those who believe that humans are created by God, the idea of voluntary human extinction is in direct rebellion to our Creator. One of God’s first commands was to procreate and populate the earth. Children are called blessings throughout the Bible. This also applies to theistic evolutionists.
For non-theistic evolutionists, the idea of voluntary human extinction shouldn’t make any sense. Within their worldview, human technology is part of evolution. If other species can’t keep up and adapt, who cares? However, the VHEMT calls human flourishing “callous exploitation and wholesale destruction.”
Under what objective standard is VHEMT making that claim? Humans are part of the system, and the system will adapt and change, right? Humans will thrive, as will the species best suited to live in the new environment. In fact, isn’t this how we supposedly get new species? An argument can be made that VHEMT is denying future species the right to evolve into existence.
No matter your basic worldview, voluntary human extinction is not only silly, but contradictory and wrong.
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