TRANSCRIPT
I’ve recently been thinking about the subject of asexual reproduction in humans. I have a bachelor’s degree in biology, biology being the study of life. We most certainly learned in biology that asexual reproduction in human beings is impossible. Or is it?
In my opinion, metaphorically, it is possible. Even more than possible, it’s real. It’s widespread. It’s perhaps the best way to reproduce entirely. Well, I think of myself as an example. I don’t have any physical children. I haven’t passed on my actual DNA to anyone. And yet, in a strange way, I am reproducing. Not in the way that some plants can reproduce asexually. They don’t pass along their genes to each other, or certain even lizards or sponges. Things like this can bud off and do parthenogenesis and create reproductions of themselves asexually.
For me, it’s through the sharing of ideas, of truth, passing along powerful ideas that others can use for their own benefit. I also think of people in the world who may be dead long before I was ever even born, who passed along their ideas to me. People who, in a way, parented me, raised me. I became part of them, or part of them became some big part of me through their ideas, mostly through their writing or their music.
Even I think of Bach. He’s been dead since the 1700s, yet his music became suffused inside of me, deep in my soul. He reproduced. Yeah, I think in real life how many—he had like 10 kids or something like that, 10 physical kids through sexual reproduction. But asexually, he reproduced himself, parts of his psyche, his soul into me. And here I come to do my best to do the same thing.
This thing that they taught us in biology, academic biology, it is impossible. And so many people say, “You must pass on your DNA. You must create physical offspring.” Certainly, my parents said that when I was very young. My grandparents passed on the family name, passed on your physical traits. Keep us alive forever. This very, uh, quote narcissistic idea that their physical being had to stay alive, as if their physical being had some intrinsic worth. In a way, I think it really doesn’t. I think much, much more valuable are our ideas. And that’s what I want to pass along. That’s what I want others to inherit from me. And also to take these ideas of mine, to crunch the numbers within my ideas and find what’s best in them and develop them, evolve them, and pass them along to others.
Now, what’s interesting for me is that I think a big part of why life has allowed me to put so much energy into developing my ideas and sharing these ideas is that I didn’t reproduce sexually. Had I reproduced sexually, I don’t think I’d be having the energy to do this, the time to do this. I’d be focused on changing diapers and saving money for my kids’ college and putting food on the table and running out and having a conventional job and paying a conventional rent, a conventional lease, and taking conventional vacations and doing conventionally enriching things for my child. And that would be my obligation.
I thought many times if I had had children, this would be the end of my wild and free life as I know it. Now, many times when I’m out hitchhiking in very distant and random places in the world, people find out that I’m 51 years old and say, “But aren’t you going to have children? Who’s going to take care of you when you get old? Aren’t you following the dictums of what we are supposed to do as individuals in this species? This is what life endows us to do: have children.” And I say, “Well, if I had children, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’d be back at home working really hard, probably at some company that paid me enough money to support some lifestyle that maybe I don’t really even believe in.” Instead, I am much, much more poor and much, much, much more free to develop myself, to grow, to think.
Also, this is really important: to think outside the box. I think when people have children, physical children, when they actually sexually reproduce, they need to create a nest for their children. A nest within society, a domesticated nest where they are much more part of the culture, much more part of the fabric of a group of other parents like them, other people who think like them. And I think a lot of times it’s like taking scissors and snipping off their radical sides, their ability to really evolve in wild directions, way, way, way outside of the norm, way outside of what regular society considers acceptable to consider.
I’ve seen this with other people who didn’t have children, who spent a lot of time living within, really gaining the ability to gain a perspective on what is going on. Another thing I’ve seen is when people reproduce sexually, make children in this crazy modern world, this world where what will their children’s future be in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years? I think a lot of people, deep down, they feel guilt. They’re like, whether they admit it or not, they say, “Uh-oh, what have I done? And is it fair that I’ve brought this child into this world?” And sometimes those thoughts can be overwhelming, and so they don’t want to think about it. And often they simply don’t think about it. They shut it down. As they say, denial. Denial is not just a river in Africa.
And I think by not reproducing sexually, I don’t carry that guilt. I still carry the fear. I carry the sadness. I know a lot of young people, and I like them, care about them, nurture them, love them even. I really wonder what their futures are, and yet I don’t have to feel like I’m responsible for having created them because I’m not. Instead, I can try to figure out solutions, first of all for how to live myself in this crazy world, but also how to create a roadmap for others that maybe, maybe if I work really hard by self-reflecting and really take a deep breath and have the courage to press record on my camera, I can share and share some of these ideas. Share about maybe taking some distance from our crazy families of origin, individuating. That means, in my case, in other people’s cases, breaking away, if only psychically, taking some real distance from the norms we were brought up to believe as true but often really weren’t. And instead, to think for ourselves, to think as self-contained units in a wild way about who we are, who we really are on the inside, where we’re going, what matters to us, what we want to share with others.
And so I come here to do this little moment of asexual reproduction and to share some potentially new ideas.
[Music]