A concerned citizen of the world is committed and ready to take some radical actions to change his life aiming to improve the world, whether his means to sacrifice love, happiness, or immortality.
A lot of people consider me a Nazi, a Chinese dictator or a combination of both when I bring to them my point of view over this matter. A nazi communist from outside space that came here to destroy everything that is good and noble with his dangerous idea. I consider myself as an activist. I have a cause. There are feminists, vegetarians, vegans, antifascists, environmental groups, sexual rights NGOs and many other kinds of activists, all of them with a purpose, all of them with a concrete demand. They are a group, a very passive one though, with a cause and a shared conscience. There are too many people on earth. They think this is the main problem and we are firmly committed to solve it. No, not a killing massacre.
VHEMT (The voluntary human extinction movement) is a pacifist group of people which imagines a better future for the world without the human race in it. Their volunteers acknowledge the bad impact that human beings have on earth and how our specie is threatening the more vulnerable ones, leading some of them to extinction, condemning the whole system to collapse. The objective of the volunteers is to create conscience through their own actions. They want mankind to disappear. And no, this is not a suicidal club.
Their slogan is “May we live long and die out”. The extinction could be accomplished if we stop procreate. Here is where I come in. VHEMT have a second type of “members” called the sympathizers. I am one of them. The volunteers and the sympathizers agree that this is not the right time to bring more people into the world. The first ones want a complete human extinction. I would be happy with just 2/3 less population. Human beings have the same rights as the other species, we deserve to live and maybe someday collaborate to save the planet.
We have achieved very high life standards, we can provide our children a good environment to grow up in, we multiply and live longer than never before. We conquered almost every single piece of land to settle down, proving ourselves to be world’s administrators, as the holy word says: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
God never saw it coming, he was just so wrong when he said that. Why stop now? Why doubt today from the Lord’s will? Why after everything that we have achieved and why precisely when life seems longer and better? Maybe because of that reason precisely. Our achievements, our welfare, our high birth numbers and our low death rates are taking the world to a crisis. We live longer, we reproduce faster, and the space isn’t getting any bigger. The cost of keeping us all alive with the level of comfort that we have means a big fatigue to the planet. In 2012 while all the presidents from all the powerful nations gathered for Rio +20 in Rio de Janeiro, sniffing each other asses in cocktails, avoiding to take any meaningful decision and talking about the importance of making the poor less poor, Uruguay’s President, José Pepe Mújica, came with an unbelievable speech for a president. He asked to these world leaders, with big plans to provide everybody in the world the same ideal of wealth that western society has, how would be the world if all the people from India got the chance to have the same amount of cars that German families have. How much air would be left for us to breath? Is really the Earth able to supply to all of us the same amount of resources?
I think in a similar way. Maybe a bit more radical. The problem is not always how a product is made, or which material it is used. Sometimes, it is about the quantity. I go and see an African tribe. They don’t have a lot of members, maybe 14. Four men of them go to a hunt journey. It is a very slow process. They hide for days until an antelope approaches enough. Then they attack with an arrow. They don’t plan to kill it right away. That is not their method. The antelope has an arrow in its body and bleeds. The men track him, slowly, until they find the animal exhausted and weak. That can last hours, or days. They kill it, and use every single part of the body. The whole family feeds from it for 2 weeks before the men go again on another hunting trip. 14 people for 2 weeks from just one animal! Now I am in Bolivia, in a small island. They have very fertile soil all over the island but they just use half of it to grow up crops. They use that half of island for seven years, then they start to use the other half, to let the land rest. What a failure for modern economy. No optimization at all. Yes, it is a matter of politics, and consumption economics, but how I see it, everything could be solved by stop breeding, by being less. If we are less we use less. It is simple. If we were not so many, it wouldn’t make any sense to overload the land and then fill it with chemicals to grow faster and bigger crops.
It is an idea that has been in my mind since I remember. I find awful to bring new people, to make them and give them the resources that as a parent I would be able to provide. Are not the orphanages already full of people needing some protection? I have had always the image of a party. In the table there are drinks and food. You are hosting it. You are in a room with some friends. They want to have a beer and to eat something. You don’t allow them to do so. Instead, you call new people. They come, and eat in front of them what they were needing. Of course it is not a very precise analogy. The real situation is worst. You are making new people. At the moment that you decide to make a new person you are denying this resources to someone that already needs them, to create someone that at that very same moment doesn’t need anything. Why? To have the illusion of living forever?
I am 35. My girlfriend is 32. We have been living together for 5 years and she is having a crisis right now as the time passing by makes her realize that, something that I explained to her the very first day that we met years ago, is turning into a very complicated and involving reality that affects her now.
I refuse to conceive a child.
It has not been very easy for her to understand, or to believe that the man that she loves and that she wants to spend her whole life with doesn’t want to share the same future that she wants. Having a family, the whole experience of being pregnant, she considers it as a cycle that she needs to live, she wants to be a mother, bear a child, see her body change, breed a new life, a life that came from both of us, a living testament of our love maybe. But I consider such action these days as a crime, and my conscience will torture me everyday if I accept to do so.
VHEMT is not for everyone, and I like that they know that. You don’t see demonstrations or flyers, and actually most of the people that get to the movement are because they already had these ideas and that’s how they find it. It is not a popular idea, and actually I believe that it is very hard to persuade someone if they haven’t already felt something similar. The voluntary part is very important, that’s why I cannot agree with the China’s one child policy. Because it is not voluntary, and because it is One child. Voluntary and no child for me please.
I don’t hate kids. And I understand why people really want to have them, beyond the religious reasons. I am pro adoption. I’m for it, but my girlfriend doesn’t want to. It won’t fulfill her. I don’t know even if I am able to have a kid. I don’t know if I am infertile, but I kind of want to be. When I am in the bed, laying down, and i’m using the laptop I’m used to put it over my crouch (is not that i’m searching for any erotic sensation with the warm battery, but because there it is at a perfect distance for me to use the keyboard and to see the screen). My sister saw me once doing it and said to me:
-Stop doing that! I want to be an aunt some day!
-Pardon? – I said.
-When you put the laptop that way you might get infertile.
I don’t know if that’s true, sounds like not, but what a wonderful thing if it is.
If you want to join, well, you are already in. There’s no club card or weekly meetings, just don’t reproduce. Do you already have kids? Don’t worry, and don’t kill them. They are the future; they might help to make this change. If you want to go even more hardcore there is the Church of Euthanasia, where it is actually encouraged to kill yourself to save the planet, sodomy as is a non-reproductive sex and cannibalism, for those stubborn people that just can’t say no to meat (they are talking about meat of already dead people, they are not violent either, they don’t encourage to kill for meat).
I don’t know how life is going to be without kids. All my friends predict for me a hard lonely elder life full with regrets. But I don’t think so. I am just concern about my girlfriend. I want to make her happy, to give her a happy life, but not against something that I truly believe. So far I’ll just keep using my laptop on my crouch.
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