Pro-Death Philosophy Spills Out Into the Real World

Internet Philosophy and Its Consequences

On Saturday, a Palm Springs fertility clinic was bombed. One person died and four were injured.

People were quick to speculate. The United States has a history of bombings at abortion clinics, and some thought perhaps this was a case of Christian Nationalist terrorism. This wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility, though many Christians, even those who oppose abortion, support IVF, and many of them know someone who has undergone fertility treatments. As Christianity Today reported last year:

Earlier this year, Pew Research Center found that 42 percent of Americans have used fertility treatments such as IVF or know someone who has, up from 33 percent in 2018.

In survey breakouts provided to CT, white evangelicals were as likely as Americans overall to say they or someone they know had used fertility treatments. Well over 40 percent of white evangelicals, white mainline Christians, and Catholics agreed, compared to just 26 percent of Black Protestants.

Still, it seemed possible. Some sects of Christianity oppose IVF, and the bombings looked similar enough that it at least called to mind an association.

It turns out the truth was much stranger. Guy Edward Bartkus, the suspect behind the bombings, was an efilist. Efilism is a strange offshoot of nihilism, an ideology that was cooked up in the early days of the internet, and a particularly bleak way of looking at the world.

Let’s take a closer look at efilism and adjacent philosophies.

At the root of elifism is nihilism.

We might start by offering a provisional definition of nihilism: it is the belief that life is not worth living. Already, this is contestable. As it turns out, nihilism as a concept has been proven quite fluid. Nolan Gertz documents many different senses of ‘nihilism’ in his book Nihilism, published by MIT Press. While the term originates in the eighteenth, Gertz traces similar ideas back to Socrates and Plato. But the stable core of nihilism is that somehow the world does not align with our values; it is deeply unsatisfactory.

In his excellent book on Nietzsche and nihilism, Bernard Reginster speaks of the ‘unrealizability’ of our highest values in the world. Reginster also maps out two possible responses to nihilism: disorientation, in which we accept that no values at all could be realized in the world, and despair, in which we rage against this fact. (Nietzsche despairs, I think, and then seeks to overcome nihilism through the project of revaluation.)

But there are many nihilists who don’t end up blowing up IVF clinics. There is something to the particular genealogy of elifism that makes this outcome a little less surprising. Over at

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, Katherine Dee quickly traces how elifism developed, beginning with antinatalism.

In 2006 the South African philosopher David Benatar published Better Never to Have Been, arguing that existence itself is harm, because, according to him, the absence of pain is always good while the absence of pleasure matters only to someone forced to miss it. His book supplied the term antinatalism and the asymmetrical equation that sustains it: any new birth inevitably adds suffering to the ledger.

Benatar’s argument drifted onto early YouTube—in a swamp of heterodox debating, particularly centered around New Atheism—where a user called DerivedEnergy posted a two-part “Defense of Antinatalism,” inviting other YouTubers to debate him, back when people made reply videos.

Here is that initial video, for the curious:

I call antinatalism a form of nihilism because it holds that our value of suffering-minization cannot be realized in the world. Since suffering is bad and, inevitably, new lives add to total suffering, life is bad. Life isn't worth living anymore.

Dee continues her history:

More radical voices soon arrived.

To make a long story short—too short, in fact, there’s a documentary worth of story in this—Gary Mosher, an irascible vlogger and erstwhile amateur physicist best known as Inmendham, ended up coining efilism—“life” spelled backwards—during this period to insist that every sentient organism is a factory for pain and ought to be snuffed out.

A rebuttal video, In the Name of Efilism, shows where the logic—or rather, illogic—of efilism leads: if speed is the paramount good, lining people up at a trench can outrank painstaking hospice care. Mosher himself acknowledges he would finish the job “as crude as I have to… I really don’t care about aesthetic crapola,” even musing that a handful of continental-shelf nuclear detonations might suffice.

Efilism, then, isn’t simply the belief that life is bad or not worth living. It is the belief that life ought not to exist.