An Unabridged Conversation with an Efilist

My conversation with Amanda Sukenick

I’m Katherine Dee. I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every post. I’m an Internet ethnographer and reporter. This newsletter is filled with interviews, takes on current events, a sporadic advice column, Craigslist-style missed connections, Internet culture explainers, streams, a book club, predictions and forecasts… There’s a lot of stuff. Help me feel better than my comrades-in-Substack through a donation:

There was only so much I could fit in my PirateWires article about efilism. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to check it out here. What follows is my conversation with Amanda Sukenick, the second most prominent efilist. Amanda also asked me to include a brief clarifying note to my PirateWires article—the genesis of her username, ‘Oldphan’ is Phantom of the Opera.

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Katherine: When did you first become interested in antinatalism?

Amanda: I would say that I’ve been interested in some version of antinatalism since early childhood, but I wouldn’t actually come to find people talking about the idea, or truly have an introduction to more formal antinatalist thinking until 2010, when I first discovered people talking about it on YouTube.

As a kid, I never wanted children—being pregnant, childbirth, raising children—these things always horrified me for as long as I can remember. I wanted to choose myself and have the freedom to be myself for my entire life, rather than eventually create an entirely new human being. I wasn’t able to articulate any of this as an ethical position yet, but the idea that there might be something wrong with procreation, seemed obvious to me.

I’ve talked a lot about this in other interviews that I’ve done, but I noticed very early on that many of the characters that I loved and that obsessed my childhood seemed to be making a kind of negative commentary about procreation.

The Phantom of the Opera, who was my great and beloved childhood hero, frequently lamented the tragedy of his birth, and the horror of his existence. Frankenstein’s Monster, seemed to me to be an obvious allegory for the harm of procreation – it was obvious to me that Dr. Frankenstein should not have played God, and should not have taken risks with his monsters’ sentient welfare. It shocks me even to this day, that more people don’t seems to see the inherent antinatalism within these classic stories – it’s there as clear as day.

I remember trying to talk to people about these observations as a young kid, but such ideas are not particularly welcome, let alone encouraged in young children, let alone in little girls. Frankly, as an ever fattening, dyscalculic, gender queer little weirdo, obsessed with monsters and horror and deformity – I had already picked enough battles in my day-to-day life, and was ill prepared as a child to go to battle for antinatalist thinking on top of everything else. So, I did my best to simply ignore those feelings, to forget those thoughts, and I really didn’t think about anything resembling antinatalism for many years.

Katherine: How have your own experiences of suffering and identity informed your philosophy?

Amanda: Though I had a very happy childhood, and grew up in a very loving home, the idea that life could become incredibly awful, and that horrible realities existed for both humans and animals, was never far from my mind.

My mother’s side of the family is Armenian, and my father’s side was Jewish – so I had stories of genocide on both sides of my family, and this had a tremendous impact on how I saw the realities of the world. I was often plagued by a reoccurring dream about a museum of war, which contained truths about reality so unspeakable, that a strong gust of horror would blow anyone out the front door who dared to ever try to enter.

I would say all of this gave me everything necessary to question the ethics of bringing new lives into the world, and built a strong foundation in my mind against the idea that life should be perpetuated.

Katherine: You’ve called yourself “an antinatalist activist” who nevertheless enjoys life. What experiences first pushed you toward antinatalism and later toward efilism?

Amanda: A bad life, or bad personal experiences are not at all required for someone to find their way towards becoming an antinatalist or efilist activist or philosopher – one simply needs to understand that sentience produces suffering, that suffering is an inevitability of creating new lives, and that the lives we create will not be us – what we as individuals may come to accept or even love about life, may be absolutely intolerable to this new person. Why impose such a circumstance? What joys could possibly be worth taking these entirely unnecessary risks with another person’s suffering?

Understanding that by procreating, we selfishly place innocent, unsuspecting sentient creatures in harm’s way, and that maybe we should not only not do that ourselves, but try to convince others to also not commit the same actions, is all that is required to push someone towards becoming an antinatalist and or efilist activist – an understanding that creating life risks intolerable harm to the one being created, and a fundamental principle that human beings should find acceptable means of stopping it.

Katherine: Before philosophy, your YouTube presence revolved around toy reviews. Why did you make the switch?

Amanda: I still love all the same things that I always have, toys included, and if time allowed, I would still quite happily make videos about action figures along with everything that I do now, and I occasionally sometimes do.

My original channel, Dragonballtoys was an essential personal step for me in breaking out of my shell, showing myself, getting comfortable with what a ham I am – my background is in 2D art, drawing, sculpting and making prints - making YT videos in which I often dressed up as anime characters, and the experience of building an audience around my channel, allowed me to truly embrace my love of performance, shock, and showmanship for the first time.

I eventually switched to antinatalist content, because ethical issues like antinatalism, the right to die and animal rights were the subjects that I had been longing for and looking for my entire life, and once found, dedicating myself to those ideas became absolutely irresistible.

Katherine: In simple terms, how would you distinguish antinatalism from efilism? From efilism and promortalism?

Amanda: ‘Simple terms’ is a tall order. There is too much nuance here that should not be glossed over or ignored, but I’ll do my best.

Though there is much overlap, I think there are actually 4 individual positions here that we need to unpack and understand – Benatarian antinatalism, efilism, promortalism and antinatalism proper – the last one being what I would consider to be a far broader, conglomerate spectrum of iterations of the same idea, that have existed long before Professor Benatar got to it in 2006, and that have developed over the last nearly 20 years since and beyond.

First off, anti-procreation in a myriad of forms, has an incredibly long history. It seems that the idea has been with humanity in some form or another since very ancient times, and though I won’t detail all of that here, some excellent work has been done over the years to chart and detail that exceptionally fascinating history.

Though there had been academic developments around ideas resembling antinatalism since the mid 1970’s, Benatarian antinatalism was the very first, fully articulated iteration of academic antinatalism. Professor Benatar, (Along with Belgian author, Théophile de Giraud the same year.) coined the term antinatalism in his seminal, 2006 book, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, and in addition to his famous axiological asymmetry argument, his book offered several other tremendously important additions to the way the idea had previously been articulated as well. Chiefly, Benatar’s antinatalism was sentiocentric, meaning that in addition to a concern for the existence and perpetuation of human life, it also extends to all sentient creatures.

Perhaps only a year after the release of Better Never to Have Been, antinatalism found its way on to the internet, and up until 2011, various individuals were producing all kinds of material around the subject – some with knowledge of Benatar and the relevant terminology, and some without.

Inmendham, first started making videos on YT in 2007, and traces of his then unnamed, non-academic, pre-efilist iteration of antinatalism, can be found in some of his earliest videos. Like Benatarian antinatalism, Inmendham’s antinatalism, or what would grow by 2011 to become efilism, is also sentiocentric, encompassing a concern for all of sentient creatures under its considerations.

As far as I know, promortalism, as a philosophical term, was coined by David Benatar in Better Never to Have Been, to describe a type of extinctionism. In chapter 6, he described what he calls ‘phased extinction’, which could be brought about by either ‘dying extinction’ – meaning an extinction in which a species gradually dies out, or through ‘killing extinction’ or ‘Pro-mortalism’, meaning that a species is brought to extinction through killing until none are left. He also briefly talks about how these two methods could ‘overlap’.

If we for the time being, stick with this 2006, Benatarian usage of the term ‘promortalism’, then efilism is clearly visible within Benatarian extinctionism, because the means of extinction that efilism generally advocates for, can essentially be expressed by this ‘overlap.’

Through a collective act of gradual non-procreation, human beings could simply die out. Things become greatly complicated, and the door to this Benatarian style promortalism opens, if the sentiocentrism of any one form of antinatalism, like efilism, dictates that human beings have a duty before their own imminent extinction, to put an end to the existence of other sentient creatures.

Unlike humans, other sentient creatures – factory farmed animals, wild animals and liminal animals, cannot be convinced not to procreate – human beings would need to consider it their responsibility to prevent the further existence of those animals, and an efilist would say that if necessary, even ending the lives of those animals before the one animal capable of preventing their continued existence is gone, would be justifiable. The notion that those animals must not be allowed to be left all alone and in harm’s way, is the guiding efilist principle behind such actions.

David Benatar, rejects promortalist intervention into the lives of non-human animals, particularly wild animals, as their existence is both not the ‘fault’ of human beings, and because he believes that though creating new lives is a harm, so too is ending lives - though there are rare instances, particularly regarding early abortion, where it might be acceptable to do so.

So the real difference between Benatarian antinatalism and efilism, you could say, is a kind of epicureanism applied to a sense of human responsibility towards the last remaining animals before human extinction – it’s a kind of epistemological disagreement, one could say. Ultimately, Benatarian antinatalism ends up with roughly the same conclusion as VHEMT, (The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement – an older, pre-Benatarian form of activist antinatalism.) – that the animals should be allowed to inherit the earth after human extinction, because human beings don’t have the right to interfere, unless their lives are of our making, like factory farmed animals.

Regardless, though Benatar himself rejects these interventionist, promortalist notions into the rest of sentience, it is not difficult at all to see how a Benatarian antinatalist could agree with him on nearly everything else, but still come to reach efilist, ‘promortalist’ killing-extinction like conclusions based off of the things he says in BNTHB alone, and due to only very slight disagreements. All it would take is for that Benatarian AN to possess a competing axiological perspective, and this could easily occur, and completely independently of the existence or influence of efilism.

This is made all the more obvious by the fact that Benatarian antinatalism is ‘theory-neutral’, meaning that it has no overarching axiology behind it, and can be interpretable through any number of normative positions. If someone is coming to Benatarian antinatalism through a negative utilitarian lens, it’s not hard at all to see how that individual could agree with him on just about everything, yet still disagree with him that the lives of other sentient creatures should not be ended to ensure the end of suffering.

For reasons that I still don’t fully understand, the term pro-mortalism gradually began to take on all kinds of very different meanings. This seems to have begun in 2012, when R. Mcgregor & E. Sullivan-Bissett wrote an academic paper using the term to pertain to suicide, leaving out the extinctionist implications entirely. “Death is good for the one who dies.” Seems to be how pro-mortalism was then defined, but later, the philosopher Christopher Belshaw, when he appeared on The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast in 2021, defined it even more broadly as, ‘For death.’ Meaning that, the term could apply to abortion, capital punishment, murder, suicide, euthanasia, hospice, the right to die – literally any circumstance in which death might be preferable to living.

As time has gone on, promortalism, particularly as a position championing suicide, has been embraced by many antinatalists and efilist the world over. All of this seems to have come to a head around 2017, in large part due to both a paper and the actions by a young South Korean man named Jiwoon Hwang. Jiwoon was a dear friend - a brilliant young man, who showed tremendous promise as a budding philosopher. He wrote a now infamous paper called, Why it is always better to cease to exist, which defended the idea that antinatalism entails promortalism, and that suicide was the rational conclusion to antinatalism. He sadly followed this conclusion through with a horrific botched suicide attempt that left him a vegetable for months, before finally succumbing to his injuries – a tragic loss to all that loved him, and one that I still can’t come to make any sense out of.

But Jiwoon became a hero of sorts for many suicidal AN’s, and promortalism nonetheless found its way to becoming a sort of identity and pseudo-philosophy all it’s own. While there are some perfectly reasonably questions mixed into what pro-mortalism is, and while some reasonable debate regarding its connection to antinatalism exists, in general, it’s an incredibly incoherent position – there are no promortalist philosophers, (The closest that exists being Thomas Ligotti.) and what one promortalist believes next to another is often purely based on what that individual promortalist believes it to mean. In other words, they just make this shit up as they go along.

Promortalism has claimed the lives of so many friends of mine, and I think out of everything, some twisted half understanding of promortalism, may have been the primary force that guided Bartkus towards his actions.

Inmendham to the best of my knowledge has never adopted the term promortalism, and though access to euthanasia and the right to die are part and parcel of Inmendhamian philosophy, Gary¹ and efilism do not advocate suicide – quite the contrary in fact. If a human being is a vessel for a certain understanding about life, then they should live as long as they can to speak to and try to inspire the same understanding in others. In other words, one has to be alive in order to be an effective efilist activist, and I think this side of efilism greatly repels a great deal of people who are otherwise attracted to it – they want efilism to give them license to just give up, and efilism absolutely does not do that.

Finally, Antinatalism proper, is, Benatarianism, Efilism, VHEMT, Child free, Aponism—which is a version of antinatalism so new, that even I had never heard of it before all of this business with Bartkus began.

Anatalism, Manicheanism, Abolitionist Vitalism, Ahumanism, VEXAN, Athkneovism, BAAN (Benevolent Artificial Anti-Natalism), Anti-AI-Natalism, neo-Malthusianism, Transhumanist soft AN, Vegantinatalism, and so on – it’s all of these things, with all of its conflicts, it’s internal wars – it’s a non-stagnant, ever evolving thing, that no one version of its self can encompass.

Katherine: You’ve said that if all suffering could truly end, you’d condone “any means necessary.” Critics say that opens the door to violence. Where is your moral red line?