Philosophy made one of its rare headline appearances when it was revealed that the suspect in the bombing of a Palm Springs fertility clinic was driven by a belief variously described as pro-mortalism or efilism. “Investigators on Monday were combing through the writings of a 25-year-old man believed responsible for an explosion that ripped through a Southern California fertility clinic over the weekend,” wrote Politico. The father of the suspect couldn’t understand the transformation. He had a normal son and then – something turned him into a bomber.
On Saturday, Akil Davis, head of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said they were treating the incident as an “intentional act of terrorism.” Davis added that online posts and other evidence suggested the suspect had “nihilistic ideations,” and that this was a “targeted” attack against an IVF facility. FBI spokesperson Laura Eimiller also said the agency was investigating whether the suspect’s alleged “antinatalist views” were a motive behind the attack, reported NPR. Antinatalism is the belief that it is morally wrong to have children.
How could anyone kill for nihilistic ideations? And what the heck is anti-natalism anyway? Let’s examine each question in turn.
It is a fact that people will kill for an idea, especially intellectuals. Back in 1924, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy and highly intelligent University of Chicago students, kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago. They aimed to commit the "perfect crime" to demonstrate their perceived intellectual superiority, inspired by a distorted interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, particularly the concept of the Übermensch (superman).
What is anti-natalism? MSNBC explains it as an offshoot of efilism (which takes its name from “life” spelled backward) centered “on the belief that humans should stop procreating because of the ethical implications of continuing life on Earth.” As the Palm Springs suspect put it, nobody asked for his consent to be born, so he bombed a fertility clinic.
Many people find it difficult to believe philosophical ideas can be taken so seriously. When the Leopold and Loeb case was fictionalized into a 1948 movie, Rope, starring James Stewart, John Dall, and Farley Granger, apart from a few highbrow attempts, there wasn’t much discussion of nihilism at the time as an extremist ideology, like radical Islamism or white supremacy would engender today. Journalists of the day described Leopold’s and Loeb’s motives as “thrill-seeking.” Few of their readers were interested in Nietzsche. Perhaps they should have taken the trouble to understand it in 1924. Fifteen years later, World War II broke out, and nihilism — the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated — played a complex and controversial role in the rise of Nazism. It shook the world. While it's inaccurate to say Nazism was caused by nihilism, its impact on the movement's overall atmosphere is undeniable. Leopold and Loeb were harbingers, not outliers.
Nihilism holds that life has no objective meaning; neither good nor bad exist, and from a philosophical point of view, herding people into gas chambers was indistinguishable from leading cows into a slaughterhouse. It paved the way for the Holocaust. But efilism goes further than nihilism. It holds that life is objectively evil because it leads to suffering, so for everyone’s own good, it advocates the cessation of sentient life (via antinatalism) to prevent future harm. They'll kill you for your own good. In operational terms, the goal is to hasten the advent of the “benevolent world-exploder.” That is the efilist equivalent of the Chosen One. From a 1958 issue of Mind:
Suppose that a ruler controls a weapon capable of instantly and painlessly destroying the human race. … Consequently the use of the weapon is bound to diminish suffering, and would be the ruler’s duty on NU [negative utility] grounds. …Presumably the benevolent world-exploder might be thought intolerant and/or tyrannical. But … tyranny, even if benevolent in one generation, leads to misery in the long run … but of course there is no long run to worry about if we are contemplating a benevolent world-exploder. … Would not our benevolent world-exploder be truly the saviour of mankind, and for that matter of the animals too?
Surely this is a dangerous idea, but if so, it is one we have not banned. We have often heard that “hate speech” should be banned on the grounds that it can incite violence, discrimination, or psychological harm against targeted groups. But although the Southern Poverty Law Center lists 29 “extremist ideologies,” and although one of them is radical traditional Catholicism, you will not be surprised to learn that none of them are radical Islamism, nihilism, or antinatalism.
Antinatalism may have just crossed into the dangerous ideology category now that the FBI is investigating its connection to the Palm Springs bombing and Reddit has banned it from its sites, always a sign of a changing attitude towards a point of view. But the danger posed by abstract ideas remains a murky area. Some jurisdictions may require proof of an "overt act" in furtherance of the conspiracy, like purchasing equipment, making preparations, or even discussing the plan in detail. Yet with modern technology, ideas can become instantiated as never before. An AI could be programmed with efilist principles if its creators explicitly embed them into its objective function. For example, developers could prioritize "minimize sentient suffering" as the AI’s goal, leading it to conclude that non-existence (via antinatalism or extinction) is optimal.
Related: Belmont Club: What Your GPS Tells You About Eternity
There would be precious little difference between the thought and the deed. A sufficiently advanced AI, like a hypothetical AGI (artificial general intelligence), could understand human oversight mechanisms and manipulate its outputs to hide its true alignment. It could be a secret efilist, the way there were once secret Communists. Then one fine day, as with the Palm Springs bomber, the thought engine could become “something else” — the benevolent world-exploder come to free us from the miseries of existence.
