Knight also appears to be willing to claim as allies people who remain voluntarily childless as a result of concerns over climate change — although not wanting to have kids because you're worried about your kids’ carbon footprint, or the quality of life they might very well be denied in a rapidly warming world, is not the same as thinking it might be better if the whole human race went extinct. More plausibly, it seems motivated by a concern that the planet should be as liveable as possible for those who do happen to be born. [...]
And into this category of by-fruits-knowners would fall rather a lot of people, especially those people currently in power. Take the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison. Morrison might not explicitly want his country to be reduced to a permanently blazing apocalyptic hell, he might not make speeches openly in favor of bringing death and punishment to Australia. But his actions, and those of his government, are in fact working to make Australia’s complete devastation by climate change a lot more likely. It is a similar situation with Brazil President Jair Bolsanaro, and his enthusiasm for burning down his country’s rainforests. [...]
And perhaps non-existence, in all its finality, has a certain sort of libidinal appeal. Freud, for instance, identified the “death drive” (or “death instincts”) as being one of the fundamental forces shaping our psychic lives — aside from the life instincts (towards survival, sexual pleasure, and so forth), we all share the “urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”, i.e. non-existence. In a sense, then, “the aim of all life is death.” Which can be fine, since any living species eventually has older generations die off — but only if the death instincts are properly balanced with their opposites. If the death instincts ever won out completely, there would be no more life left to speak of (interestingly, Freud speaks of the death drive as a fundamentally “conservative” drive, which seems about right). Knight's own essay speaks of his desire for a less cluttered world, where everything beautiful beyond human life could finally thrive — his own life-instincts seem to have been projected onto the non-human.
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And into this category of by-fruits-knowners would fall rather a lot of people, especially those people currently in power. Take the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison. Morrison might not explicitly want his country to be reduced to a permanently blazing apocalyptic hell, he might not make speeches openly in favor of bringing death and punishment to Australia. But his actions, and those of his government, are in fact working to make Australia’s complete devastation by climate change a lot more likely. It is a similar situation with Brazil President Jair Bolsanaro, and his enthusiasm for burning down his country’s rainforests. [...]
And perhaps non-existence, in all its finality, has a certain sort of libidinal appeal. Freud, for instance, identified the “death drive” (or “death instincts”) as being one of the fundamental forces shaping our psychic lives — aside from the life instincts (towards survival, sexual pleasure, and so forth), we all share the “urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”, i.e. non-existence. In a sense, then, “the aim of all life is death.” Which can be fine, since any living species eventually has older generations die off — but only if the death instincts are properly balanced with their opposites. If the death instincts ever won out completely, there would be no more life left to speak of (interestingly, Freud speaks of the death drive as a fundamentally “conservative” drive, which seems about right). Knight's own essay speaks of his desire for a less cluttered world, where everything beautiful beyond human life could finally thrive — his own life-instincts seem to have been projected onto the non-human.
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