TRANSCRIPT
I would like to share a conundrum that I have. Something that I can’t figure out in my mind. It’s the idea that most people should not have children. Most people really are not fit to be parents. Most people are really bad parents. Some people are absolutely terrible parents. Yet should governments, should authorities step in in some way and stop people from having children? Stop some people? Say, “You are not going to be a good enough parent,” or “You’ve already proven that you’re a terrible parent. You should not have children. We are going to stop you from doing it.”
And then I think about an essay that I wrote some time ago. I’ll link to it in the description box about a program in England, if my memory is correct, that actually paid people to get sterilized or paid people to take some sort of pill that made them sterilized. I can’t remember what it was, but basically gave people money to not have children. And oh, this got criticized so harshly. This is eugenics! This is unfair! This is unfairly treating the economically disadvantaged, etc., etc., etc. It really bothered people.
So this comes down to my conundrum. My conundrum is that I believe it’s a wonderful gift if most people never have children. They really do a gift for the world. They contribute to nature. They don’t contribute to overpopulation, over-exploitation of the planet. It’s obvious that there’s way too many people, but more so, way too many unconscious people, traumatized people, unloved people, people who don’t really contribute much of anything except contributing harm, destruction, more use of resources. So one could say, yeah, it might be a real contribution if they don’t have children. And I even say myself, I didn’t have children. I didn’t feel ready to. I had another focus in my life. I felt like it’s a gift that I didn’t have children.
But what about people who go on having more and more and more and more children? Some people have so many children when it’s pretty obvious, even after one child, that they’re not doing a very good job parenting or even doing a terrible job parenting. Now the question is, should someone, should a government, some authoritative agency step in and stop them from having children in any way? And that’s where my conundrum is. I mean, people need a license to drive a car. People need a license to become a therapist. Often you have to register and fill out all sorts of forms just to adopt a dog or a cat that otherwise, if you don’t adopt it, might actually just be put to death. But you don’t need a license to have a child.
Well, how do I deal with this? How do I reconcile it? And I don’t know, but at least I just want to bring it up and talk about it. Some of the reasons I don’t support the idea of the government or authority stepping into people’s lives is, of course, they’re going to misuse the power. They’re going to harm certain ethnic groups. They’re going to harm certain religious groups. They’re going to harm certain people who are already disenfranchised. They are going to unfairly wield their power. That’s what people in power do. They end up protecting themselves. They protect their own kind. They get richer. They harm the poor people. That seems to be pretty much how the world operates, and I don’t like that. I don’t see that as fair at all.
But what should we do? And then I think, you know, I’m defining this as a human problem. That we humans have a responsibility to figure out our own species, to figure out our problems, to figure out how we need to have fewer children for the betterment of our planet. And then I realized, I don’t think humanity as it is has any ability to do that. Most people on an individual level don’t have an ability to do it, let alone on a bigger mass level, on a society level, on a cultural level.
And I guess how I reconcile it in a way is pretty simple. That if we don’t solve this problem on our own as a species, as humanity, nature is going to solve it for us. Nature is more powerful than us. Nature is smarter than us. We think we’re so tough. We think we’re so strong. We think we’re so clever. We think we know how to beat nature. Well, we’re wrong. And I don’t know how nature is going to stop us, but somehow one day it is. And if we don’t figure it out, if we don’t figure out how to correct our behavior, somehow it’s going to happen. Maybe we’re going to become sterile as a species. Maybe there’s going to be massive wildfires worse than anything we can imagine now. Maybe the poisons in the environment are going to make us so screwed up that we can’t have kids. Maybe there are going to be plagues that are far worse than the coronavirus pandemic. But someday, and mark my words, it’s gonna happen. Someday in 10 years, in 20 years, in 50 years, 100 years. I think by 100 years it will already have happened. But by that point, what I think is going to happen is we are going to see a massive crash in the human population, probably because of nature. By then, it’ll probably be too late for us at some level.
So that’s why my hope is, at some level, we as a species in some just respectful way can figure out how to do it for ourselves.