The Rise of the Philosophical Terrorists

I suspect that when an IVF clinic in California was bombed, the assumption of most people would have been that it was Christian fundamentalists. Actually, the attacker was radically un-Christian.

Guy Edward Bartkus opposed human life. He was not just an anti-natalist, who opposed children being born, but a “pro-mortalist”, who believed in destroying humanity. 

Bartkus was not just misanthropic. He took inspiration from the anti-natalist belief that giving birth is essentially cruel. In Better Never To Have Been, the South African philosopher David Benatar makes the argument that it is better not to have children than to have children, because the non-existent do not suffer by not existing whereas human life necessarily entails death (as well as the potential for varying degrees of physical and mental suffering).

Bartkus was deeply bitter about the fact that he had not “consented” to life. He wanted to reject his own “addiction” to existence. “Efilism”, of which he was an advocate, extended the anti-natalist critique of life. On the premise that existence entails suffering while non-existence does not, efilism holds that it is ethical to kill. This follows the argument that the philosopher Ninian Smart made with reference to negative utilitarianism (which, to be clear, he did not endorse):

Suppose that a ruler controls a weapon capable of instantly and painlessly destroying the human race. Now it is empirically certain that there would be some suffering before all those alive on any proposed destruction day were to die in the natural course of events. Consequently the use of the weapon is bound to diminish suffering, and would be the ruler’s duty on NU grounds.

“Efilism” has attracted an increasing number of advocates online, with a dedicated subreddit recently being shut down. (Frankly, it would have been better never to have been.)

Guy Edward Bartkus

Bartkus’ words and deeds, as the far-sighted internet historian Katherine Dee observes, are similar in form to those of other mass shooters. In her essay “The Nihilism of Mass Shooters”, Dee reflected:

The perpetrators of mass shootings are simply the most visible and violent emblems and exponents of our nihilism. Not always, but often, they are the ones who cannot see the value of civilization or society or even life itself. They are suffocating under the weight of what they view as the purposelessness of it all.

Recently, this could also be observed in the crimewave of the “Zizians”, an offshoot of the extremely online “rationalist community”. The Zizians have been responsible for a series of murders in the USA. They also took their cold utilitarianism to extremist lengths by way of animal rights — describing humanity as “flesh-eating monsters” — while incorporating a kind of revolutionary transgenderism. 

It would be a mistake to reduce these phenomena to their ideas alone. As Dee writes, Bartkus admitted to suffering some sort of psychological breakdown as a result of the death of his best friend. The Zizians, meanwhile — and especially their leader Jack “Ziz” LaSota — have delusions of grandeur, and bitterness as a result of their perceived mistreatment in the tech circles they have orbited. But a state of misery and self-importance provides fertile grounds for misanthropic and apocalyptic ideas.

An information hazard, wrote the philosopher Nick Bostrom, is “a risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm”. Most obviously, this could entail instructions for creating bombs or pathogens. But Bostrom also considers “idea hazards”: ideas which, if disseminated, “[create] a risk, even without a data-rich detailed specification”. It is true, for example, that it is not obvious that being alive is good for someone. It is true that human beings inflict unimaginable pain on other animals. But the knowledge of these facts can lead people — above all psychologically fragile people — to destructive and self-destructive conclusions. When people are deeply analytical, and especially when they are also distressed for one reason or another, they can embrace the sort of dark conclusions that motivate these philosophical terrorists.

The misanthropic tendencies at the core of these phenomena have special salience in an age where human exceptionalism is under threat from artificial intelligence. The rationalist circles that the Zizians emerged from have had a long involvement in AI research — obsessing over its potential for good and ill. 

This is no coincidence. If — and as a technological amateur, I must emphasise if — AI supplants human capacities, up to the point where it might even be a threat to human life in toto, the value of existence becomes not just the stuff of intellectual thumb-sucking but an urgent cultural dilemma. 

I have less than no desire to give an ounce credit to these philosophical terrorists, with their unhinged ideas and psychological pathologies, but there is no doubt that they are underlining the need to uphold and enrich the sense of the value of human life. 

In their bizarre destructive actions, they are revolting against their supposed commitment to utilitarianism — rejecting abstract logic in favour of the impassioned and the sensational. Human life can’t just have value in philosophical and sociological terms (in the terms, for example, of glassy-eyed techno-optimist pro-natalism). It must have value in poetic terms. At the risk of sounding sentimental, it isn’t logic that shields our minds from nihilism — it is beauty, and humour, and love.