“However, efilism's claim that all life, human and non-human, should be ceased is a hubris I am not convinced humans have a right to exert. While the cessation of suffering humans cause is already manipulated in a way that could come under an efilist rubric, these 'management' tools usually come in the form of culling populations of nonhumans to redress an imagined environmental balance most usually caused by humans in the first place. Domestic efilism such a neutering rescue animals is necessary, especially when rescuing can involve the speciesism of feeding one slaughtered animal to sustain another, and neutering humans is the logical way to prevent the perpetuation of this practice as well”

—  Patricia MacCormack

Embracing Death, p. 153
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

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Patricia MacCormack10
Australian Scholar

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“The continuation of diachrony in perceptions of life and death spreads across a form of antinatalism essentially co-opted from a kind of Western fetishism of Buddhism, namely efilism. Coming etymologically from the reverse of 'life', efilism claims it is better never to have been. Efilist philosophers such as David Benatar hinge their arguments on basic binaries of pleasure and pain which roughly correlate to good and bad and extend to a vindication of life and death. Efilism has a vague correspondence with utilitarianism but emphasizes the suffering of life over utilitarianism's greater good. Both are absolute in their perception of the capacity to evaluate which is which, making both dependent on economic measure of value as an either/or, and to an extent both on (anthropocentric) determinism. Efilism's redeeming feature is that it promotes antinatalism, and often veganism, in its aspirations to a reduction in suffering, and this attitude promises potentials for opening the world through the cessation of the human.”

Patricia MacCormack Australian Scholar

Embracing Death, pp. 152-153
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

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“Let us consider first the view that it is always wrong to take an innocent human life. We may call this the “sanctity of life” view. People who take this view oppose abortion and euthanasia. They do not usually, however, oppose the killing of nonhuman animals—so perhaps it would be more accurate to describe this view as the “sanctity of human life” view. The belief that human life, and only human life, is sacrosanct is a form of speciesism.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 1: All Animals Are Equal

“Human extinction is still a sparse, loose idea advocated by sometimes opposing groups. Most obviously, there is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), the Church of Euthanasia and efilism. VHEMT is somewhat divided between those who wish the human race to cease population in order to eradicate human overpopulation and its exhaustion and destruction of the earth, and those who also choose not to breed but see an apocalyptic horizon and operate under an 'every man for himself' attitude of imminent hedonism 'for tomorrow we die."”

Patricia MacCormack Australian Scholar

Ahumanism subscribes to no singular human extinction group, but clearly the message of the former sector of the group is more in keeping with the affirmative benefits of human death.
Embracing Death, p. 143
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

Pentti Linkola photo

“The chief cause for the impending collapse of the world - the cause sufficient in and by itself - is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life.”

Pentti Linkola (1932) Finnish ecologist

Can Life Prevail? :A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. UK: Arktos Media, 2nd Revised ed. (2011). ISBN 1907166637 (English translation of Voisiko elämä voittaa) page 122

Sharon Gannon photo

“If yogis are to come to the realization of the interconnectedness of life, then we must free ourselves from the conditioning that has caused us to think it is all right to exclude all the other animals from our own goals of peace, freedom, and happiness. … By working to alleviate the suffering of animals you are working at the cause level of human suffering.”

Sharon Gannon (1951) American yoga teacher

“Sharon Gannon on Veganism”, in JivamuktiYoga.com (16 November 2016) https://jivamuktiyoga.com/community-journal/sharon-gannon-veganism.

Abraham Lincoln photo

“I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

“I am a rebel by birth. … I contest anything that is unjust, that causes suffering in humanity.”

Yip Harburg (1896–1981) American song lyricist

&quot;Yip Harburg: Secular Songwriter&quot; by Dan Barker in Freethought Today Vol. 22, No. 3 (April 2005) http://archive.is/20120711052246/http://ffrf.org/fttoday/2005/april/barker.php <br class="br">Context: I am a rebel by birth. … I contest anything that is unjust, that causes suffering in humanity. My feelings about that are so strong, I don&#x27;t think I could live with myself if I weren&#x27;t honest.

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“The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.”

Freeman Dyson book Infinite in All Directions

Source: Infinite in All Directions (1988), Ch. 8 : Quick Is Beautiful, p. 135
Context: The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

“Human life will no longer be regarded with the kind of superstitious awe which it is accorded in traditional thought, and the lives of non-humans will no longer be a matter of indifference. This means that human life will, in a sense, be devalued, while the value granted to non-human life will be increased. A revised view of such matters as suicide and euthanasia, as well as a revised view of how we should treat animals, will result.”

James Rachels (1941–2003) American philosopher

Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (1990), p. 5

“I believe, however, that humans are the only animals that we know who invents tools for working together - and they have done that as long as we have considered them human.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Gerald M. Weinberg (1992) cited in: Hannes P. Lubich (1995) Towards a CSCW Framework for Scientific Cooperation in Europe. p. 7

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