The Case Against Efilism

On this webpage, I am specifically critiquing the Efilist philosophy that was created by (Gary) Inmendham, not necessarily what any random Efilist believes. Although, most of these arguments and criticisms will apply to most Efilists in general.

See: Efilism by Blithering Genius, the prequel to this essay.

Efilism will never win, because it is self-defeating, intrinsically contradictory, and diametrically opposed to the Universe itself.

• Efilism is biologically self-defeating because altruism never wins against selfishness in Evolution.
• Efilism is psychologically self-defeating because it is incompatible with normal psychological desires.
• Efilism is ethically self-defeating because it argues that it is immoral to have children without their prior consent, but it also argues that it is ethical to euthanize people without their consent.
  Efilism also fails to recognize that it makes more sense to kill people who don’t want to live than to kill people who do want to live.
• Efilism is physically self-defeating because the end of Life would never be the complete uninhabitability of the Earth, but rather “we have to travel across the galaxy to locations X, Y, and Z to eradicate the life on those planetary bodies as well! And then we must eradicate all the life at galactic locations A, B, C, D, E, F G, H, …. and so on…”

Moreover, Efilism fails to recognize and understand the Philosophical Abyss. Hypothetically, someone could create a more rational offshoot of Efilism that understands the Abyss and why no belief system is uniquely rational. But every Efilist has failed to do that so far, in large part since they’re not able to listen to or understand Blithering Genius’s objections. Accepting life and rejecting life both require crossing the is-ought gap, so neither is more reasonable than the other. Both choices can be equally rational, but the point is that neither one is uniquely rational. Every human is free to make whichever choice they want. He can give arguments for accepting life or give arguments for rejecting it. Both positions can potentially be equally rational since there is no foundation for value.

Regardless of whether someone accepts Efilism or not, the following facts will remain true for every living being since none of them are normative statements. You were created by evolution. Your ancestors created their descendants because they were designed to reproduce. You are designed to reproduce. Your body was naturally selected over thousands of generations of evolution to have and raise as many children as possible. Hence, you are effectively a reproducing machine, whether you accept it or not. You can choose to embrace that, or you can choose to detest it. That is Lucifer’s Question.

Related: What is Morality? - Blithering Genius.

Related: The Case Against Moral Realism - Blithering Genius.

Pre-Reading: Motivation - Blithering Genius.

There are several problems with claiming that pain is “intrinsically bad” and pleasure is “intrinsically good”:

• “bad” and “well-being” are both subjective. Not everybody agrees with negative utilitarianism. For instance, some people would argue that average utilitarianism is better than negative utilitarianism. Since well-being is subjective, so is Utilitarianism, and so is everyone’s morals. The reason why there’s so many different forms of utilitarianism is precisely because well-being is subjective.
• Pain and pleasure are transient experiences (they only exist in the moment), so it doesn’t make sense to insist that we should add them all over time, especially when we don’t even have objective units for measuring those experiences.
• Pain is necessary to drive motivation. We wouldn’t do anything in this world if we didn’t have to endure at least a little bit of pain to do all the various things that we do.
• The Positive and Negative Hedonic Treadmills conclude that even if you do experience a lot of pain or pleasure, then you’d eventually get used to it, and it wouldn’t matter to you anymore.

• Even if we should add up pain and pleasure over time, they would balance out anyway.

  “Mathematically, we can model pain and pleasure (the hedonic dimension) as the first derivative of motivation as a function of time. Let’s use M to denote motivation and P to denote the first derivative of M. When M increases, P is positive, which corresponds to pain. When M decreases, P is negative, which corresponds to pleasure. If we assume that your life begins and ends with M = 0, then the integral of P over your lifetime is zero. In other words, total pain + total pleasure = zero.” – Blithering Genius, in Motivation

• Although a lot of happiness surveys may show that people are “happier” when they have better material conditions (e.g. they make a decent living in a first-world country), they are unreliable:
  • These surveys don’t define “happiness” to the people who answer them. Happiness is subjective, so what one person considers happiness may not be the same as how other people define it.
  • Nor do they have a philosophy of emotions to back them up.
  • Nor do they consider whether we should have a hedonist theory/philosophy of value either.
  • The self-reported nature of these studies also introduces another source of unreliability.

Even if I accepted hedonism, I would still have to reject David Pearce’s reasoning that the pleasure versus pain axis is the ultimate value. All values are instrumental, so it’s impossible for there to be a single ultimate value. For example, having supreme knowledge is one of the most important values since it affects all the reasoning and conclusions that we ultimately make, including hedonism (potentially).

Relevant: Cupcakes, Nails and Mouse Brains.

Hedonism is not self-evident. But even if we assume the validity of hedonism, it’s far from obvious that farm animals suffer more than wild animals, as vegans contend. It’s true that most farm animals live in enclosed spaces and are often denied the full range of behaviors that wild animals have. But farm animals are also fed on a regular basis and protected from parasites, predators, dehydration, heat, cold, etc to a greater extent than wild animals. Most wild animals die young from predation, disease, or hunger. Whereas most farm animals die young in a slaughterhouse, and they even have rather humane deaths in some countries. It’s not clear how one is supposed to be objectively better than the other.

Related: Gwern’s Taxonomy of Pain.

Also See: Consciousness Thought Experiments.

Many Efilists believe in Demographic Transition Theory. Inmendham has repeatedly advocated many times that educating people in developing countries and raising living standards in the rest of the world will lead to a long-term decline in global fertility rates. Unfortunately for their movement, he is completely wrong about this, as it could only be a temporary decline at most.

The religious fundamentalists and other people with the highest fertility rates will out-compete the rest of the entire world, and the genes and memes that caused child-free people to choose not to have children will die out. The end result is that the genes that caused higher fertility rates will become more populous, and this will cause the world population to skyrocket once more until it crashes against the carrying capacity ceiling. The world population will not max out at 11-12 billion people. And if it does, that will only be because the world population reached the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Read More: Population Dynamics and Demographic Transition Theory FAQs.

If Efilism ever grew big enough into a sizable activist movement (say millions of self-identified Efilists) and/or they ever dared to destroy the Earth, then it would be easy to get mass public support to arrest and execute all the Efilists before they have any time to act. Governments all over the world could pass legislation declaring Efilists to be enemies of the State, and sentence all the Efilists to death. It’s weird how Efilists talk with others on public forums like r/Efilism about their plans to destroy the Earth, as if there isn’t anyone listening in on them who would be keen to stop them in their tracks and punish them. They haven’t thought the effects of their activism through all the way.

Natalists could also rationalize eliminating all of them. The Efilists have already said that they would skin literally everybody alive if it was necessary to destroy the Earth and if they had the means to do it, so the Natalists could justify killing all the Efilists for “Self-Defense”. Most Efilists also hate their lives and would rather be dead instead of alive anyway. So, if the Natalists (who want to live) managed to kill all the Efilists before the Efilists could kill the Natalists, then the deaths of the Efilists could be further rationalized as having done a favor for most of them. After all, doesn’t it make more sense to kill/euthanize people who don’t want to live than to kill people who do want to live? Just because they hate their lives, that shouldn’t mean that people who enjoy their lives shouldn’t have to have theirs end as well.

I’m all for supporting truly free speech, and I think that more discussion about Efilism as a philosophy should be encouraged, but I have to draw the line when Efilists are trying to recruit people to do harmful, illegal, and threatening activity.

• In Inmendham’s and Amanda Sukenick’s Own Words.
• Efilists believe that it’s justifiable to do whatever is necessary to destroy the Earth.
• This Efilist wants to deliberately pollute the Earth as much as possible.

Inmendham has spoken innumerous times about how he wants to kill people, how he’s okay with violating people’s autonomy, and how he would destroy the Earth if he had the power to do it.

• ’We really do need to kill parents’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’I have no ethical problem with every poor person who has a kid, being shot in the head’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’If I could run him over myself “accidentally”, I wouldn’t mind the pleasure of it’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’If I didn’t have complete control over my anger, there would be some dead people’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’Yes, I would vote for you being put in the proper camp’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’You don’t wanna kill for contempt alone, it’s so much more than that’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’Just kill the fuckers’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’I think the world would be a better place if you were fucking killed’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’If I can kill one guy to stop the birth of a thousand babies, I’m killing him’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’You can do the most horrific act possible as long as it reduces overall suffering’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’Nothing has a right to life’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’All I have to do is violate their autonomy to accomplish the task’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’Sometimes you need to have a war … to prevent much greater horror in the future’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’What would you do to have the exit? … I would do it just as crude as I have to’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’We can mandate tomorrow and change the world’ – Gary Inmendham. The Red Button
• ’I am not opposed to nuking it’ – Gary Inmendham
• ’It’s too bad that New Jersey outlawed the death penalty… I was hoping to die by lethal injection’ – Gary Inmendham

Efilists and Anti-Natalists are about as ignorant about the world as most other humans. Since they’ve rejected life and are only focused on destroying it, they don’t care much at all about developing a good understanding of the world. I will list the following as examples of this, but the reader should keep in mind that some of these bullets are just critiques or observations about the philosophy, community, and their related beliefs, not necessarily arguments against anything:

• They aren’t interested in understanding epistemology and critical thinking skills. They are only interested in destroying the Earth and humanity.
  • They raise some valid and important epistemic topics when they persuade people towards Efilism (e.g. atheism, materialism, determinism, evolutionary psychology, fallacies, etc).
  • However, they don’t care to understand epistemology that exposes the falsehood of their beliefs and their irrationality (e.g. the subject-object dichotomy, free will, belief networks, the Abyss for truth/knowledge, axiology, amoralism, the phenocentric theory of biological purpose, Sapir-Whorf Theory, etc). In some cases, they never thought, heard of, or considered these questions and topics before. In other cases, they have heard of these topics, and they simply refused to understand or and make rational arguments against them.
• Many of them don’t have any interest in thinking about philosophy beyond negative utilitarian ethics, leftist/communist ideas. The end result is massive ignorance.
• They fail to recognize the performative contradiction in valuing the absence of value. There is no foundation for value at all.
• They believe in altruism, but most of them fail to recognize that altruism will eventually lose as evolution takes its course.
• Many of them believe in objective morality, but this is easy to debunk.
• Many of them mistakenly believe that reason is the basis for said objective morality, but this is also debunked since morality depends on subjective values, not sound reasoning.
• Most of them assume altruism to be self-evident, but it isn’t. And neither is negative hedonism.
• Hard-core Efilists claim to be against suffering, and yet they’re willing to cause any amount of suffering that they believe is necessary just to kill everyone and destroy the Earth.
• Most of them are Leftists, Communists, and/or Anarcho-Communists. They are clueless about economics, and they fail to recognize that Georgism is the best solution to most of the world’s main economic problems.
• For many of them, they would have hardly any identity or personality left if they couldn’t define themselves as being atheist, vegan, efilist/anti-natalist/pro-mortalist/VHEMT, etc.
• They tried a prescriptivist attempt to put an “antinatalism” entry into English dictionaries, without understanding that dictionaries are supposed to be descriptivist, non-partisan, and based on corpus data.
  • Note: Antinatalism did eventually make it into many modern English dictionaries a few years after they first attempted their activist project, but that was only because the increase in online and published material talking about antinatalism finally satisfied the lexicographers’ standards for what can and cannot be included in their dictionaries.
• They incorrectly predicted that the COVID-19 lockdowns would cause a baby boom, when in fact it actually caused a sharp decline in the population growth rate.
• Efilists have high hopes that fewer humans will be born in the future, but they fail to realize that maladaptive behaviors don’t last forever. Birth control is the real reason why human populations and population growth rates have been declining, but they don’t understand this.
• They believe that more Efilists will keep being born for the same reason why gay people keep being born even though both lead to reproductive demise, but this is also wrong to an extent since Efilism and Anti-Natalism are memetic diseases that are destined to decline in popularity.
• Many Efilists believe that Inmendham’s Forcebit Theory of Physics is right, but it has absolutely no scientific basis. There are plenty of YouTube videos and channels that are dedicated to disproving Inmendham’s Physics and showing why he has no idea what he’s talking about:
  • Basic calculus contradicts Inmendham’s theory, instead of backing it up.
  • Mindless Marbles: Debunking Draft Science Videos
  • Stephen Brough: Debunking Draft Science Videos
• Many Efilists believe that Inmendham is a master debater, but he clearly isn’t. He doesn’t watch his opponents response videos in their entirety, nor does he address the actual arguments being made by his opponents. He just throws ad hominem after ad hominem, analogy after analogy, blathers on while “disagreeing to agree”, and he gets hung up on terminology. And this is ultimately to the detriment of their movement since they have no counter-arguments against these arguments. Since they only care to listen to Inmendham’s babbling without watching the original videos that he responds to, they’re obliviously unaware to all the valid counter-arguments against Efilism out there.

As soon as someone wholeheartedly rejects life, there is no reason to explore the rest of philosophy. This is one of the biggest reasons why I personally reject Efilism. If someone does learn about Efilism, it shouldn’t be the end of their philosophical exploration. If anything, it should be just the beginning. Knowledge ought to be one of the ultimate values, since knowledge is necessary to conclude Efilism. Even if someone is inclined to accept Efilism upon being introduced to it, how can they know for sure that they’re right if Philosophical Abyss could lead virtually anyone to believe in potentially anything?

• Essay: The Rhetoric of Exploitation.
• Video: The Art of Propaganda.
• Video: Analysis of Inmendham’s Rhetoric.
• Video: Explaining Value to Inmendham.
• Video: Explaining Subjectivity to Inmendham.

In spite of all my criticisms against Efilism and the refusal of Efilists to question their moral assumptions, I can at least respect Efilism for being a notable attempt to create a worldview based on (negative) utilitarianism and (negative) hedonism that is more rational than mainstream humanist culture.