Daniel Schmachtenberger recently gave a talk at The Stoa, titled, “The Pyschological Pitfalls of Engaging with X-Risks and Civilization Redesign.” It was fascinating; watch the whole thing now. Well, okay, it’s pretty long, maybe watch it after you read this post.
During the Q&A, I was able to ask him about the application of his thesis to parenting. He had a thoughtful response, as anyone familiar with his work would expect, but he didn’t key in on what was important to me. In hindsight, I fault my presentation of the question. It is polite to not tell people how to raise their kids, especially when you are not a parent, and Daniel exhibited this politeness since he is not a parent. But that kind of tip-toeing is part of what is holding back the discussion around parenting methods today.
I was trying to express how, when parents get involved in "redesigning civilization," it puts a burden onto a child to fix this world that we fucked up. This feels to me like a central theme to address in order to raise a kid today without deep denial, but I have yet to find parents giving it centrality.
So, what would my new question be, then? Maybe this:
Assume you perfectly use all the best parenting psychotechnologies but the world goes to such shit that your child still grows up asking, “Why did you bring me into this?" Would you say, "It was a mistake, and I'm sorry"? Or, would there be something else you could have done to prevent the suffering your child was now experiencing?
I think this starts to get to the heart of it for me. Just like it’s really important to have the deepest issues of your own childhood processed and manageable in order to justly raise a child, so too is it only fair to be honest with yourself about the psychological pitfalls endemic to the birthing of a child when you are convinced there’s a good chance the species will destroy itself within that child’s lifetime. In order to avoid this issue in good faith, you would need to either be wrong in that belief, or have chosen to not have a child in the first place.
But if we both believe in the multiplicity of planet-wide existential risks and choose to have kids, we have to figure out how to navigate this issue of the injustice to that child by their very birth. And to do that, we have to get our heads out of the sand.