Efilism is a philosophical and ethical view that emphasizes and focuses on the metaphysical negativity of life as the ultimate cause of suffering. Manifestations of efilism or utterly efilistic approaches have previously been presented by many philosophers of existential pessimism, such as Peter Wessel Zapffe, Philip Mainlander, Emil Cioran, and partly in works of Arthur Schopenhauer. Nowadays popularised among others by internet philosopher of the Inmendham channel on YouTube. Philosophical pessimism states, that existence has no absolute value or purpose. Life is a state of constant dissatisfaction, and the goals in it are to satisfy the constantly emerging needs. The most vivid and ethically significant effect of this state of affairs is the existence of suffering experienced by living beings in billions of different ways. Indeed, all the goodness of life can be reduced to the absence of suffering and the pressure of unfulfilled desires, concluding that there is nothing metaphysically good in life itself. All pleasure and fulfillment come down to a momentary lack of harm or a reduction in suffering already felt.
In recent times, efilism is often derived from promortalism and anti-natalism with which it has much in common. In practice, efilism appears to be an extension of anti-natalist views, with an emphasis on the ultimate erasure of all life as the sole goal. Probably the most recognizable propagator of anti-natalism, David Benatar, in one of the interviews, when asked about efilism, replied that he did not even see the need to distinguish such a term because his view of anti-natalism is identical with efilism—life extinctionist view. Indeed, the approach of a large number of anti-natalists is efilistic.
In addition to the philosophical dimension that life is a metaphysically negative state that does not allow for the ultimate and complete satisfaction of needs and implies the existence of desires and suffering, the ethical dimension of efilism focuses on the theoretical and practical possibilities of eliminating the existence of suffering and needs by eliminating all life along with the potential of it. The ethical goal of efilists should be the extinction of life by the cessation of reproduction (voluntary or by making it impossible), or the physical termination of life on earth globally, the same is true for humans, animals, biological life in space, as well as all potentially nonbiological sentient beings.
It is not even a new idea, as it was postulated by, for example, Saint Augustine (who saw it as a way to end human torment by reaching God’s kingdom) or a Berlin philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, who was writing about cosmic euthanasia and the destruction of the universe to prevent the misery of life. In practice, the stated purpose of efilism is not only to bring about the extinction of all sentient life, but also to take steps to prevent its re-emergence on earth or other parts of the universe. The continuous or permanent sterilization of the cosmos is seen as a victory over useless suffering and the life that makes it possible.
Indeed, efilism underlines the objective observation that all living beings, including sentient beings, are the byproduct of pointless reactions. chemical and biological evolution. A few billion years ago, life appeared on earth, 500 million years ago, the development of the nervous system made it possible to feel pain. a powerful tool fueling naturally aimless survival. An increasingly diverse biosphere had developed from the beginning of the Phanerozoic, and without civilization, it would have naturally existed for about half a billion years before the planet’s surface became too hot and dry with the sun reaching its red giant phase. During this period, sentient beings acquire new needs and desires, the result and purpose of which is to escape from the sufferings associated with not being satisfied, continuing the vicious cycle of survival and reproduction, paid for by misery and torment. All that to eventually die, usually a painful death by predators or sickness. On billions of earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, life can continue to arise and develop. Contrary to the first impression, it is not a beautiful orangery of the exotic possibilities of the universe, designed to arouse admiration and delight. Nature, either of earth or of all its countless versions realized in the depths of space, mechanically and brutally creates a display of the most elaborate hells that only the abyss of the sadistic imagination of an intelligent mind can surpass in cruelty. The only thing that can stop this abominable absurdity from developing is, somewhat tragically, an intelligent mind as well.
The minds of animals with advanced nervous systems are programmed to experience suffering and scarcity more intensely and more often than pleasure and gratification. And the gratifications attainable are always by nature short-lasting and impermanent. Natural selection mechanisms ensure that the needs are met at the minimum level. sufficient to deliver the next generation of the species into the world. This is usually possible for a small percentage of individuals, the rest of which die, most often in a brutal and painful way, before being able to reproduce. The part of the species that can pass on the genes has the dubious privilege of experiencing further stress and suffering during the aging and death process, usually caused by being eaten alive, torn apart, or diseased. Hunger, thirst, constant exposure to threats, parasites, and unfavorable climatic conditions only add to the practical range of possible torments.
Human life is inherently no different from that of other animals, we are driven by similar, just more sophisticated, motives and needs. The metaphysical negativity and redundancy of life cannot be eliminated even by transhumanistic visions of paradises and technological miracles in the prosperity of future civilizations. On the contrary, the creation of successive lives creates an immeasurable potential for the existence of further tortures and atrocities which, even if existing among those who are satisfied with their lives, should and have to be eliminated. The ultimate futility of the endless pursuit of needs is a pillar of efilism, as are the more general currents of existential pessimism. The ethical consequences of this state of affairs imply that extinction is the only process by which sentient beings can ultimately avoid the possibility of suffering in their eventually tragically useless existence.
Efilism seems to encompass a spectrum of ideas for the practical realization of extinction on a global scale, which include such concepts as the systematic, multi-generational emptying of the world by stopping reproduction or the destruction of life by means of violence. It should be noted that the goal is never mindless destruction or causing harm. Efilism seems to be a view rooted in negative utilitarianism, thus an ethical trend that puts the minimization of suffering as the only or the main priority. In fact, efilism is, in a sense, its final conclusion. The goal of any action leading to the extinction of societies, species, and biospheres, as well as the possible sterilization of the cosmos, is always to minimize suffering, to stop the senseless and nightmarish emergence and spread of suffering, imposed by the existence of sentient minds. In practice, as always in negative utilitarianism, the reduction of suffering is, therefore, the highest priority.
The practical execution of such an operation arouses great controversy, as humanity at the present level of development seems incapable of ending all life bent under the burden of suffering. One can speculate, although at the current level of development these are very well or potentially very well established speculations, that technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, biotechnology and finally superintelligence—in the form of artificial intelligence or neuromorphic, as a result of transhumanism- will participate in the sterilization of life on earth. From a utilitarian point of view, all (all not necessary to further reduction of suffering) life on earth should be somehow exterminated, and an attainable goal may also be to destroy the potential for life as well as to prevent the emergence and development of sentient life on other planets. For the latter purpose, swarms of super-intelligent machines euthanizing life and making the cosmos uninhabitable should suffice.
The tragedy of life manifests itself not only in everyday pains, diseases, old age, or injustice. Despite life’s obvious suboptimality, societies have not yet recorded such a high level of prosperity. Yet still, exploitation, persecution, and torture, even despite being widely recognized as evil, are common in most parts of the world. For tens of thousands of years, people have suffered, and even one of the documented examples, such as the suffering of Hisashi Ouchi, Junko Furuta or Sylvia Likens bring to mind the city of Omelas. Human suffering is only a fraction of the suffering of farm animals subjected to barbaric treatment and imprisoned in—literally, torture and extermination camps.
Even this amount of suffering probably disappears compared to the suffering inflicted and experienced by nature itself. Nature’s anthropomorphization should be none other than a degenerate evil demiurge forcing chemical machines to copy themselves under evolutionary pressure until they die. Survival of one is paid for by the death of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of other sentient creatures, rarely not in torment. All that hellish race of living beings serve only one purpose: their minds, devoid of evolutionarily useless full rationality, are to desire to duplicate the genetic code of the organism, and the whole cycle should be repeated indefinitely.
In fact, even without human intervention, the advanced global biosphere, covered with metaphorical forests of mold and swarms of multicellular vermin, is already halfway through its existence. In less than a billion years. eyeblink in a cosmic timescale. the earth would be a barren wasteland scorched by the sun swelling in its deathly contractions. By this time, the amount of suffering would have multiplied, leaving behind most of the pain of life that exists to this day, of which approximately 100% is already dead. While the amount of suffering and failure will multiply, the amount of complete fulfillment will remain the same. it will NOT exist. Indeed, it is doubtful that any escape from desires is even logically possible without giving up existence, although minimizing desires in the form of pointless technological nirvana may theoretically be feasible.
It should be noted here that I do not see a logical reason for preventing an efilist from rejecting pure metaphysical pessimism, from recognizing that certain elements of life have a positive value and that happiness, for example, understood differently from the state of non-suffering and non-fulfillment, has a value in itself. I do not consider such a view to be logical, but in my opinion, it is compatible with the desire to end all life.
Not only the obvious metaphysical negativity of existence driven by a gradient of dissatisfaction may be the determining factor in accepting efilism. The very awareness of how tragic and almost infinitely sadistic the future of life can turn out to be, in which there is a logical and, seemingly, the physical possibility of the emergence of superintelligence and simulations. in which sentient beings will experience unimaginable and impossible to end tortures. simulations of the worst hells and the cruelest torment of a quadrillion times carried out on the quintillions of beings is not an unreal abstraction. On the contrary, they can be so real that even a speck of their reality would disturb the psychological health of anyone who could imagine them with sufficient vividness for even a fraction of a second.
Imagine a closed room in which your body has an artificially heightened sense of pain, and in which a sadistic being slowly, allowing you to stay aware in overwhelming terror, burns you and tears you apart, tears off scraps of burned skin piece by piece, pierces your eyes and slides acid-covered blades into Your flesh through all of your body openings. In speaking of unimaginable suffering, I do not mean distant screams of condemned, but bodies plunged in bursting despair, which cannot die and cannot escape for eternity. Even the very existence of the risk that something like this will happen to just one being, and even at the cost of eternal fulfillment and paradise for the rest of the cosmos, if the alternative is non-existence, is unthinkable for me to take.
No matter how far we delve into apparent abstractions in our predictions, and how we evaluate superintelligence, future sociology, or transhumanism, efilism will no doubt only become more common if, I believe, it is a rational view firmly grounded in reality and to prevent harm is a universal value. Efilism, whose etymology is the word “life” read backward, is another link in the chain of reason, which painstakingly recognizes life as something unequivocally tragic and negative. Life is not even making it metaphysically possible to experience some complete and stable, eternal fulfillment, all satisfaction has its source in reduced or prevented suffering and dissatisfaction. Thomas Ligotti in his “Conspiracy Against the Human Race” describes life as “malignantly useless”, which I think conveys the nature of that horror of existence in a devastatingly meaningful way.
Efilism, therefore, claims that lack of suffering, along with phenomena that leads to suffering has a value. Any sentient life, biological, virtual or technological, with all its baggage of dissatisfaction, realized and potential pain, despair and suffering is not worth enduring and continuing, and that ultimately the most cost-effective solution is to eliminate it for eternity, or as long as possible, from the Universe.
EFILism, its assumptions and implications
Efilism is a philosophical and ethical view that emphasizes and focuses on the metaphysical negativity of life as the ultimate cause of suffering. Manifestations of efilism or utterly efilistic approaches have previously been presented by many philosophers of existential pessimism, such as Peter Wessel Zapffe, Philip Mainlander, Emil Cioran, and partly in works of Arthur Schopenhauer. Nowadays popularised among others by internet philosopher of the Inmendham channel on YouTube. Philosophical pessimism states, that existence has no absolute value or purpose. Life is a state of constant dissatisfaction, and the goals in it are to satisfy the constantly emerging needs. The most vivid and ethically significant effect of this state of affairs is the existence of suffering experienced by living beings in billions of different ways. Indeed, all the goodness of life can be reduced to the absence of suffering and the pressure of unfulfilled desires, concluding that there is nothing metaphysically good in life itself. All pleasure and fulfillment come down to a momentary lack of harm or a reduction in suffering already felt.
In recent times, efilism is often derived from promortalism and anti-natalism with which it has much in common. In practice, efilism appears to be an extension of anti-natalist views, with an emphasis on the ultimate erasure of all life as the sole goal. Probably the most recognizable propagator of anti-natalism, David Benatar, in one of the interviews, when asked about efilism, replied that he did not even see the need to distinguish such a term because his view of anti-natalism is identical with efilism—life extinctionist view. Indeed, the approach of a large number of anti-natalists is efilistic.
In addition to the philosophical dimension that life is a metaphysically negative state that does not allow for the ultimate and complete satisfaction of needs and implies the existence of desires and suffering, the ethical dimension of efilism focuses on the theoretical and practical possibilities of eliminating the existence of suffering and needs by eliminating all life along with the potential of it. The ethical goal of efilists should be the extinction of life by the cessation of reproduction (voluntary or by making it impossible), or the physical termination of life on earth globally, the same is true for humans, animals, biological life in space, as well as all potentially nonbiological sentient beings.
It is not even a new idea, as it was postulated by, for example, Saint Augustine (who saw it as a way to end human torment by reaching God’s kingdom) or a Berlin philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, who was writing about cosmic euthanasia and the destruction of the universe to prevent the misery of life. In practice, the stated purpose of efilism is not only to bring about the extinction of all sentient life, but also to take steps to prevent its re-emergence on earth or other parts of the universe. The continuous or permanent sterilization of the cosmos is seen as a victory over useless suffering and the life that makes it possible.
Indeed, efilism underlines the objective observation that all living beings, including sentient beings, are the byproduct of pointless reactions. chemical and biological evolution. A few billion years ago, life appeared on earth, 500 million years ago, the development of the nervous system made it possible to feel pain. a powerful tool fueling naturally aimless survival. An increasingly diverse biosphere had developed from the beginning of the Phanerozoic, and without civilization, it would have naturally existed for about half a billion years before the planet’s surface became too hot and dry with the sun reaching its red giant phase. During this period, sentient beings acquire new needs and desires, the result and purpose of which is to escape from the sufferings associated with not being satisfied, continuing the vicious cycle of survival and reproduction, paid for by misery and torment. All that to eventually die, usually a painful death by predators or sickness.
On billions of earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, life can continue to arise and develop. Contrary to the first impression, it is not a beautiful orangery of the exotic possibilities of the universe, designed to arouse admiration and delight. Nature, either of earth or of all its countless versions realized in the depths of space, mechanically and brutally creates a display of the most elaborate hells that only the abyss of the sadistic imagination of an intelligent mind can surpass in cruelty. The only thing that can stop this abominable absurdity from developing is, somewhat tragically, an intelligent mind as well.
The minds of animals with advanced nervous systems are programmed to experience suffering and scarcity more intensely and more often than pleasure and gratification. And the gratifications attainable are always by nature short-lasting and impermanent. Natural selection mechanisms ensure that the needs are met at the minimum level. sufficient to deliver the next generation of the species into the world. This is usually possible for a small percentage of individuals, the rest of which die, most often in a brutal and painful way, before being able to reproduce. The part of the species that can pass on the genes has the dubious privilege of experiencing further stress and suffering during the aging and death process, usually caused by being eaten alive, torn apart, or diseased. Hunger, thirst, constant exposure to threats, parasites, and unfavorable climatic conditions only add to the practical range of possible torments.
Human life is inherently no different from that of other animals, we are driven by similar, just more sophisticated, motives and needs. The metaphysical negativity and redundancy of life cannot be eliminated even by transhumanistic visions of paradises and technological miracles in the prosperity of future civilizations. On the contrary, the creation of successive lives creates an immeasurable potential for the existence of further tortures and atrocities which, even if existing among those who are satisfied with their lives, should and have to be eliminated. The ultimate futility of the endless pursuit of needs is a pillar of efilism, as are the more general currents of existential pessimism. The ethical consequences of this state of affairs imply that extinction is the only process by which sentient beings can ultimately avoid the possibility of suffering in their eventually tragically useless existence.
Efilism seems to encompass a spectrum of ideas for the practical realization of extinction on a global scale, which include such concepts as the systematic, multi-generational emptying of the world by stopping reproduction or the destruction of life by means of violence. It should be noted that the goal is never mindless destruction or causing harm. Efilism seems to be a view rooted in negative utilitarianism, thus an ethical trend that puts the minimization of suffering as the only or the main priority. In fact, efilism is, in a sense, its final conclusion. The goal of any action leading to the extinction of societies, species, and biospheres, as well as the possible sterilization of the cosmos, is always to minimize suffering, to stop the senseless and nightmarish emergence and spread of suffering, imposed by the existence of sentient minds. In practice, as always in negative utilitarianism, the reduction of suffering is, therefore, the highest priority.
The practical execution of such an operation arouses great controversy, as humanity at the present level of development seems incapable of ending all life bent under the burden of suffering. One can speculate, although at the current level of development these are very well or potentially very well established speculations, that technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, biotechnology and finally superintelligence—in the form of artificial intelligence or neuromorphic, as a result of transhumanism- will participate in the sterilization of life on earth. From a utilitarian point of view, all (all not necessary to further reduction of suffering) life on earth should be somehow exterminated, and an attainable goal may also be to destroy the potential for life as well as to prevent the emergence and development of sentient life on other planets. For the latter purpose, swarms of super-intelligent machines euthanizing life and making the cosmos uninhabitable should suffice.
The tragedy of life manifests itself not only in everyday pains, diseases, old age, or injustice. Despite life’s obvious suboptimality, societies have not yet recorded such a high level of prosperity. Yet still, exploitation, persecution, and torture, even despite being widely recognized as evil, are common in most parts of the world. For tens of thousands of years, people have suffered, and even one of the documented examples, such as the suffering of Hisashi Ouchi, Junko Furuta or Sylvia Likens bring to mind the city of Omelas. Human suffering is only a fraction of the suffering of farm animals subjected to barbaric treatment and imprisoned in—literally, torture and extermination camps.
Even this amount of suffering probably disappears compared to the suffering inflicted and experienced by nature itself. Nature’s anthropomorphization should be none other than a degenerate evil demiurge forcing chemical machines to copy themselves under evolutionary pressure until they die. Survival of one is paid for by the death of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of other sentient creatures, rarely not in torment. All that hellish race of living beings serve only one purpose: their minds, devoid of evolutionarily useless full rationality, are to desire to duplicate the genetic code of the organism, and the whole cycle should be repeated indefinitely.
In fact, even without human intervention, the advanced global biosphere, covered with metaphorical forests of mold and swarms of multicellular vermin, is already halfway through its existence. In less than a billion years. eyeblink in a cosmic timescale. the earth would be a barren wasteland scorched by the sun swelling in its deathly contractions. By this time, the amount of suffering would have multiplied, leaving behind most of the pain of life that exists to this day, of which approximately 100% is already dead. While the amount of suffering and failure will multiply, the amount of complete fulfillment will remain the same. it will NOT exist. Indeed, it is doubtful that any escape from desires is even logically possible without giving up existence, although minimizing desires in the form of pointless technological nirvana may theoretically be feasible.
It should be noted here that I do not see a logical reason for preventing an efilist from rejecting pure metaphysical pessimism, from recognizing that certain elements of life have a positive value and that happiness, for example, understood differently from the state of non-suffering and non-fulfillment, has a value in itself. I do not consider such a view to be logical, but in my opinion, it is compatible with the desire to end all life.
Not only the obvious metaphysical negativity of existence driven by a gradient of dissatisfaction may be the determining factor in accepting efilism. The very awareness of how tragic and almost infinitely sadistic the future of life can turn out to be, in which there is a logical and, seemingly, the physical possibility of the emergence of superintelligence and simulations. in which sentient beings will experience unimaginable and impossible to end tortures. simulations of the worst hells and the cruelest torment of a quadrillion times carried out on the quintillions of beings is not an unreal abstraction. On the contrary, they can be so real that even a speck of their reality would disturb the psychological health of anyone who could imagine them with sufficient vividness for even a fraction of a second.
Imagine a closed room in which your body has an artificially heightened sense of pain, and in which a sadistic being slowly, allowing you to stay aware in overwhelming terror, burns you and tears you apart, tears off scraps of burned skin piece by piece, pierces your eyes and slides acid-covered blades into Your flesh through all of your body openings. In speaking of unimaginable suffering, I do not mean distant screams of condemned, but bodies plunged in bursting despair, which cannot die and cannot escape for eternity. Even the very existence of the risk that something like this will happen to just one being, and even at the cost of eternal fulfillment and paradise for the rest of the cosmos, if the alternative is non-existence, is unthinkable for me to take.
No matter how far we delve into apparent abstractions in our predictions, and how we evaluate superintelligence, future sociology, or transhumanism, efilism will no doubt only become more common if, I believe, it is a rational view firmly grounded in reality and to prevent harm is a universal value. Efilism, whose etymology is the word “life” read backward, is another link in the chain of reason, which painstakingly recognizes life as something unequivocally tragic and negative. Life is not even making it metaphysically possible to experience some complete and stable, eternal fulfillment, all satisfaction has its source in reduced or prevented suffering and dissatisfaction. Thomas Ligotti in his “Conspiracy Against the Human Race” describes life as “malignantly useless”, which I think conveys the nature of that horror of existence in a devastatingly meaningful way.
Efilism, therefore, claims that lack of suffering, along with phenomena that leads to suffering has a value. Any sentient life, biological, virtual or technological, with all its baggage of dissatisfaction, realized and potential pain, despair and suffering is not worth enduring and continuing, and that ultimately the most cost-effective solution is to eliminate it for eternity, or as long as possible, from the Universe.