I had said…

I wouldn’t have bothered to comment again, but you have misrepresented me, so I must interject. My plans to end my life are necessitated by the fact that my illness is incurable and worsening. There is no reason for me to suffer longer than is necessary to set my affairs in order. It is not my intent to insult you or anyone else here, but I should like to convey a few things to you, Cesar, about suicide, the situation our people find themselves in, and the predicament of all sentient life on this planet.

Although analytic philosophers have said much about suicide, their focus has been almost exclusively on the question of whether suicide is ever morally permissible, as distinct from whether there is ever something stronger to be said in its favour. Moreover, most (but not all) such philosophical writing considers this question within the context of terminal disease or unbearable and intractable suffering. For some, these are the only bases for suicide that are even worthy of discussion. Others are prepared to extend the discussion to a limited range of other cases, such as those involving irreversible loss of dignity. Suicide on any other grounds, according to this view, must surely be wrong. I take this view to be mistaken. We cannot preclude the possibility that somebody’s life may become unacceptably burdensome to him even though his death is not already imminent and he is not suffering the most extreme and intractable physical pain or irreversible loss of dignity.

Suicide has been criticized as a cowardly act. The idea is that the person who kills himself lacks the courage to face life’s burdens and is “taking the easy way out.” Courage, on this view, requires standing one’s ground in the face of life’s adversities and bearing them with fortitude. I would deny that accepting life’s burdens is always courageous. This will seem odd to you, given your obsession with soldierly virtues and your belief that an unswerving, fearless response to adversity is always courageous. More sophisticated accounts of courage, however, recognize that a steely response may be a failing. This is what lies behind the adage that sometimes “discretion is the better part of valour.” In a more sophisticated view, too much bravado ceases to be courageous and becomes foolishness. Once we recognize that courage should not be confused with its simulacra, the possibility arises that some of life’s burdens may be so great, and the point of bearing them so tenuous, that enduring them further is not courageous at all and may even be stupid.

Moreover, I think there is something absurd about the earnestness of our pursuits. We take ourselves very seriously, but when we step back, we wonder what it is all about. The step back need not be all the way to the cosmos. One does not need much distance to see that there is something futile about our endless strivings, which are not altogether different from a hamster on its wheel. Much of our lives are filled with recurring mundane activities, the purpose of which is to keep the whole cycle going. Working, shopping, cooking, feeding, urinating, defecating, abluting, laundering, dishwashing, bill-paying, and various engagements with insufferable bureaucracies. Even if these mundane activities are thought to serve other goals, the attainment of those goals only yields further goals to be pursued. There is plenty of scope for questioning the significance of even the broader goals of one’s life. This cycle continues until one dies, but the treadmill is intergenerational because people tend to reproduce, thereby creating new mill-treaders. This has continued for generations and will continue until humanity eventually goes the way of all species, that of extinction. It seems like a long, repetitive journey to nowhere.

You might suggest that the bad things in life are necessary in order to appreciate the good things, or at least to appreciate them fully. On this view, we can only enjoy pleasures because we also experience pain. Similarly, our achievements are more satisfying if we have to work hard to attain them, and fulfilled desires mean more to us because we know that desires are not always fulfilled. There are many problems with this argument. To the extent that the bad things in life really are necessary, our lives are worse than they would be if the bad things were not necessary. There are both real and conceivable beings in which nociceptive (that is, specialized neural) pathways detect and transmit noxious stimuli, resulting in avoidance without being mediated by pain. This is true of plants and simple animal organisms, and it is also true of the reflex arc in more complex animals, such as humans. We can also imagine beings much more rational than ourselves, in which nociception and aversive behaviour were mediated by a rational faculty rather than a capacity to feel pain. In such beings, a noxious stimulus would be received but not felt (at least not in the way pain is), and the rational faculty would, as reliably as pain, induce the being to withdraw. It would be much better to be that sort of being than to be our sort of being. It would similarly be better to be the sort of being who can appreciate the good things in life without having to experience bad things and without having to work hard to attain good things. Lives in which there is “no gain without pain” are much worse than lives in which there could be “the same gain without pain.”

I understand that you and most others will not take to heart the conclusion that coming into existence is always a harm. It is even less likely that many people will stop having children. By contrast, it is quite likely that my views will be ignored or reflexively dismissed. As this response will account for a great deal of suffering between now and the demise of our people, it cannot plausibly be thought of as philanthropic. That is not to say that it is motivated by any malice, but it does result from a self-deceptive indifference to the harm of coming into existence. Consider also the predicament of our fellow animals. Confronted with the awful spectacle of billions of animals being eaten, often alive, by predators, humans typically do not attempt to propose any cosmic meaning to those lives. Indeed, both the monotheistic and the evolutionary response is to say that the purpose of animals is to be eaten by others higher up the food chain.

The optimist’s impatience with and condemnation of the pessimist often has a smug macho tone to it, although men have no monopoly on this. There is a scorn for the perceived weakness of the pessimist, who should instead “grin and bear it.” This view is defective for the same reason that macho views about other kinds of suffering are defective. It is an indifference to (or an inappropriate denial of) suffering, whether one’s own or that of others. Presumably you would not take this attitude regarding the millions of Hellstormed Germans, at least not at first. But you would take that stance as soon as I used their suffering to argue that creating more white children is morally indefensible, at which point they would become expendable to you. This is what I mean when I say you don’t really care about our people.

In short, life is bad, but so too is death. Of course, life is not bad in every way. Neither is death bad in every way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful. Together, they constitute an existential vise; the wretched grip that enforces our predicament. There is no net benefit to coming into existence, and thus coming into existence is never worth its costs.

I don’t object to your Turner Diaries fantasies, Cesar, but I have gone beyond your 10 step program. Compassion is a weakness and a vestigial remnant of Christianity, yes, but what about compassion for our own people? As I said, I don’t think they really matter for you. What matters for you is “victory” at any price, no matter how many white people have to die in order to get you there. I do not accept that the guaranteed suffering and inevitable death of any of our people is worth it just so we can continue the senseless cycle that evolution has set in motion.