Scientists Prove Anti-Natalists are Narcissistic Psychopaths

We explore recent studies finding high rates of dark triad personality traits like narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism among antinatalists. We argue antinatalism correlates more with these pathological traits than with depression. We discuss how the inability of narcissists to genuinely consider other perspectives makes them project their negative worldview. We also touch on how child support laws may select against dark triad traits in the population.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] the, the core personality traits that appear to be associated with antinatalism are generally dark triad personality traits, but specifically antagonistic narcissism, psychopathic meanness, psychopathic disinhibition, and antagonistic Machiavellianism.

And then the other article that looked into this found. Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy were the primary traits that predicted antinatalist belief systems and then secondarily was depression. But you often found them together.

Simone Collins: Yeah, and the difference is that we had thought that depression was first and foremost the big correlatory factor.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. You needed to be a narcissistic psychopath. And if you are a narcissistic psychopath and depressed, you're likely to be an antinatalist. You're a

Simone Collins: sad narcissistic

Malcolm Collins: psychopath. Like the level of narcissistic sociopathy that would deny life to another person. Who would want to [00:01:00] live just because you personally would prefer to kill yourself, but don't want to take the responsibility of killing yourself. To me, it's just this insane level of sociopathy.

These studies helped me understand why we have such trouble getting through to the antinatalist community with logical arguments. Because it was never based on logic to begin with. It was always a psychiatric condition.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Known. Just sad. They're

Simone Collins: being beautiful. But,

Malcolm Collins: I love you to death, Simone, and I am excited to be doing this episode because I always love, I mean, great

Simone Collins: thing we love shitting all over people and who doesn't hold

Malcolm Collins: on. The great thing about the prenatal movement and and being seen as sort of its leaders is the an, an antithesis of us, the antinatalists movement.

It's just so like, every time I dig deeper, it somehow is worse than I could have conceived it was. It's somehow [00:02:00] crazier than I could have conceived it was. And it's somehow more just like, transparently, and obviously the bad guys, in sort of this conflicting Like, like, it's like You know, I don't feel like there's been a fight in a long time where there were, like, obvious bad guys and good guys since, like, World War II and fighting the Nazis.

You know, people sort of almost reminisce about these old times where there was a very obvious good guy side and a very obvious bad guy side. And the antinatalist movement, you know, they, they're like, well, we have to keep humans alive so we can kill all life on the planet too. But let's let's go into like how they came up again recently for us, right?

Is I was having to do an audit of how different terms do and how our movement is doing in different search results. And the audit was actually kind of depressing for me in many ways. And that I'll look up something like demographic collapse and when I'm doing it in like an incognito browser, everything's like, this is why demographic collapse isn't a problem at all.

[00:03:00] Demographic collapse, fake science.

Simone Collins: Everything's okay here situation normal.

Malcolm Collins: Actually, I should do some screenshots of this because I know, I know in like Two years when it's just so obvious that this is an issue. Everyone's going to say no one was ever saying that everyone always knew this was an issue.

How dare like, it was funny. We had a reporter over from France at our house yesterday. And she goes, what do you think of all these you know, researchers at universities who are saying you guys are fake science and that you guys are making all this up. And I'm like, I love that they're saying this.

Please put them on record because the more of them you put on record, the better I'm going to look in a few years when it turns out that we were 100 percent correct. And right now I'm like not even predicting this future data. It's like my scary predictions are just what's in the data right now. And they're not looking year to year at how bad things have gotten.

But anyway, antinatalists are different, right? Like, they're not deniers that this is a problem. A lot of antinatalists know how bad fertility rates have gotten. They just think it's a morally good thing for people who

Simone Collins: want to learn more. Yeah, it cheers them up, which [00:04:00] means a lot, because they're often very depressed.

Malcolm Collins: But we can talk about that, because there's statistics on this now. So this is something I hadn't thought to do, was to actually look up the statistics that correlated with antinatalism. And my naive thought from reading the antinatalist post is that depression would be the primary correlating psychological condition with antinatalism.

And

Simone Collins: my naive thought actually, like we, we had a debate with leading antinatalists of at least one faction, John and Lawrence Anton in London. And they were incredibly like, it was clear that they were in it because they were Deeply, deeply, philosophically, intellectually concerned negative utilitarians.

Like we ate in a vegan restaurant for dinner. You're

Malcolm Collins: autistic and you're bad at reading people. That is not why they were in it. No. No. And we can get into this more, but I think that you just believe whatever anyone tells you if they're being affable and kind. Yep. They were being affable and they told you something.

And so you believed it because you're not [00:05:00] very good at reading people. It was a good vegan

Simone Collins: restaurant we went to though. It was

Malcolm Collins: a great vegan restaurant. But anyway so everybody knows, you know, and we've done episodes on this if people want to go into it more the psychological trait that is really overwhelmingly overrepresented in the pronatalist movement is autism.

This is where the, the joke in the pronatalist movement of the greater replacement theory comes from. That the autists are going to replace everyone else. But I'd also say it's not just autism that is overwhelmingly seen in the pronatalist movement. Transcribed there's two other traits that I've noticed really, really big in the pronatalist movement.

Oh my God. One is general high mood, like general happiness. Most of the pronatalists we know are like, I'd say bubbly people, maybe even

Simone Collins: a little Yeah, you're right. Low anxiety, low neuroticism, relatively speaking, from a type of person who often you would expect to be high neuroticism. Like at the natalism conference, a lot of like really big intellectual speakers and, and, and thinkers, like, you know, [00:06:00] high caliber, high caliber people were there.

And yet they, the ones who had kids were like pretty chill for that. No,

Malcolm Collins: it's a very low neuroticism movement and I'd say very high pro sociality. Like natural prosociality. So I'd say high autism, low neuroticism, a bit higher than normal prosociality. And yo