Tender is the Flesh Book Review

What happens when capitalism finally strips away every last pretense of civilization? What happens when human beings become just another commodity, their bodies reduced to inventory, their suffering transformed into profit, and their existence measured by their usefulness to the market?

Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh offers a grotesque answer: nothing fundamentally changes. The language becomes more clinical, the machinery more efficient, and the violence more socially acceptable, but the underlying logic remains disturbingly familiar.

In this dystopian novel, a virus renders animal meat poisonous, forcing society to embrace the industrial slaughter and consumption of human beings. People are bred, processed, butchered, and sold as meat. An entire economy emerges around the practice, complete with factories, regulations, specialized labor, and consumers who would rather not think too hard about where their dinner comes from.

The premise is horrifying, but what makes the novel so effective is that its world isn’t governed by perpetual chaos. It is governed by bureaucracy. The slaughterhouses operate. The workers perform their duties. The wealthy purchase their products. The government establishes regulations. Society adapts. And that is precisely where the horror lies.

One of capitalism’s defining characteristics is its ability to transform the world into something that can be bought, sold, and exploited. Land becomes property. Labor becomes a commodity. Time becomes money. Human relationships become transactions. Even suffering can be packaged, marketed, and sold when somebody discovers a way to profit from it.

Tender Is the Flesh takes this logic to its most repulsive conclusion.

Human beings are no longer recognized as individuals possessing an inner life. They become products with measurable qualities, market values, and designated purposes. Their bodies are assessed, processed, and distributed according to economic demand. The distinction between a person and a product disappears, not because humanity has suddenly lost its capacity for moral reasoning, but because an entire economic system has been constructed around the financial benefits of pretending that certain human beings are no longer people. This is the terrifying brilliance of Bazterrica’s premise. The transformation doesn’t require everyone to become a sadistic monster. It requires people to accept a new category of commodity. Once that category is established, the machinery can take care of the rest.

The slaughterhouse isn’t merely a place of physical violence. It’s the logical endpoint of a worldview in which living beings possess value only insofar as somebody else can extract something from them.

What disturbed me most about the novel wasn’t simply its graphic depictions of brutality. It was the normalization of that brutality.

The characters inhabit a society in which atrocities have been incorporated into everyday routines. The language surrounding the industry is sanitized, technical, and impersonal. Euphemisms conceal the reality of what is happening, allowing people to participate in horrific practices without confronting their full implications.

Modern capitalist societies routinely obscure the human cost of their comforts. The exploitation of workers occurs far from the eyes of consumers. The suffering behind cheap products is hidden within global supply chains. Environmental destruction is treated as an externality. Poverty is reframed as personal failure, while wealth accumulated through exploitation is celebrated as success. The distance between consumer and victim makes indifference easier.

We are encouraged to see products rather than processes, prices rather than consequences, and convenience rather than the suffering that may sustain it. The system functions most smoothly when its participants can enjoy its benefits without examining its foundations. Bazterrica magnifies this arrangement until it becomes impossible to ignore. Her fictional society doesn’t eliminate violence. It industrializes it, regulates it, and gives it a respectable place in the economy. The horror isn’t that violence exists. The horror is that violence can become an ordinary job.

The novel also exposes how dehumanization can become a prerequisite for exploitation. If the victims are understood as fully human, the industry becomes morally indefensible. Their suffering becomes impossible to dismiss as a technical detail. Their existence challenges the legitimacy of the entire economic arrangement. So the system depends on distinctions: between those who count as people and those who don’t, between lives worthy of protection and lives available for consumption. These distinctions are not simply personal prejudices. They are reinforced through institutions, professional language, economic incentives, and social expectations.

Once an entire population is classified as a resource, cruelty can be presented as efficiency. Exploitation becomes production. Killing becomes processing. The moral question is replaced by a logistical one. How many units can be produced? How much can be sold? How can waste be reduced? How can demand be satisfied?

From an anarchist perspective, this is especially disturbing because it reveals how institutional power can organize domination until it appears natural. People learn their assigned roles, obey established procedures, and reproduce the system through everyday actions. Nobody needs to defend the entire arrangement every morning. They only need to perform their individual tasks.

Oppression becomes routine. And routine is one of the most effective ways to make the intolerable seem inevitable. The banality of evil and the machinery of obedience

There is something profoundly unsettling about the novel’s emphasis on procedure. The people operating this industry are not all depicted as extraordinary villains. They are workers, managers, officials, and consumers occupying recognizable social roles.

Their participation raises a question that extends far beyond the fictional world: how much cruelty can a society normalize before its members stop recognizing it as cruelty?

We often imagine that evil announces itself. We expect it to look monstrous, to speak openly about its intentions, to announce its hatred of humanity. But institutional violence rarely needs such theatricality.

It can arrive in paperwork, regulations, workplace expectations, and the reassuring claim that everyone is simply doing their job. It can be defended as necessary, profitable, legal, or unavoidable. People can distance themselves from responsibility by insisting that the system would continue without them.

And perhaps it would.

But that does not absolve them of their participation.

One of the novel’s bleakest implications is that civilization is not necessarily the opposite of barbarism. Civilization can provide barbarism with infrastructure. It can make cruelty more organized, more productive, and more difficult to challenge.

What makes Tender Is the Flesh such an effective anti-capitalist novel is that its central horror does not depend on the existence of universal hatred. The people being exploited do not have to be hated by every person who benefits from their exploitation. They simply have to be profitable. That distinction matters.

A system organized around accumulation does not need to recognize the intrinsic worth of the lives it consumes. It needs only to identify resources, establish ownership, organize production, and generate returns. Human suffering can become an acceptable cost when it is borne by somebody whose interests carry little economic or political weight. This is why the novel’s world feels less like an impossible nightmare than an exaggeration of existing tendencies.

Capitalism has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to adapt to moral criticism without surrendering its underlying priorities. It can market ethical consumption, celebrate corporate responsibility, and turn rebellion itself into a brand. It can acknowledge suffering while continuing to profit from the conditions that produce it. The system does not necessarily collapse when its contradictions become visible. Sometimes it simply finds a new way to sell them.

Bazterrica pushes that adaptability into the realm of the grotesque. Even the unspeakable becomes an industry.

The novel is also interested in the psychological consequences of living inside such a society. Its protagonist, Marcos, occupies a position within the very industry that makes the novel’s world possible. His private life and emotional struggles unfold against a background of organized human exploitation. This creates an uncomfortable tension between individual feeling and systemic violence.

Can a person remain compassionate in one area of life while participating in cruelty elsewhere? Can private grief or tenderness compensate for complicity in a brutal institution? Does an individual’s capacity to care for particular people mean much if they continue to benefit from a structure that treats others as disposable?

These questions resist easy answers.

We’re often eager to judge ourselves by our intentions, our private virtues, and the people we love. But institutions are sustained by actions as well as beliefs. A person can experience genuine tenderness without challenging the machinery of exploitation surrounding them. Compassion confined to the private sphere may offer personal comfort while leaving the public world untouched. That is one of the novel’s most uncomfortable challenges: whether our morality extends beyond the boundaries of our own lives, and what happens when it doesn’t.

Beyond its political critique, Tender Is the Flesh is a deeply existential work. Its world offers no comforting assurance that human beings are naturally moral, that civilization steadily improves, or that technological and bureaucratic sophistication represents genuine progress. Instead, it presents a society capable of organizing immense cruelty while continuing to regard itself as functional. The result is a particularly bleak vision of humanity.

Perhaps the most frightening possibility isn’t that people are inherently incapable of compassion, but that compassion is fragile when confronted with convenience, conformity, and material incentives. People can recognize suffering and still look away. They can understand that something is monstrous and still participate in it. They can construct elaborate moral justifications for arrangements that benefit them.

The novel doesn’t allow the reader the comfort of imagining that barbarism belongs exclusively to some distant, uncivilized other. Its monsters wear ordinary clothes. They have jobs. They follow procedures. They live in a society that has decided certain lives are worth less than others. And they eat dinner.

Tender Is the Flesh isn’t a political treatise, and it shouldn’t be reduced to a simplistic allegory in which capitalism alone explains every act of human cruelty. Its dystopia is also concerned with conformity, institutional power, moral compartmentalization, and the disturbing ease with which human beings adapt to the unacceptable.

Nevertheless, its central premise lends itself to a devastating anti-capitalist interpretation.

When everything must justify its existence through utility, when every resource must be exploited, and when profitability becomes more important than the lives sacrificed to achieve it, the distinction between a society’s productive capacity and its moral progress begins to collapse.

A society can become more efficient without becoming more humane. It can become wealthier without becoming more compassionate. It can develop increasingly sophisticated institutions while using those institutions to administer increasingly sophisticated forms of cruelty.

Progress measured exclusively through production, consumption, and economic growth is a profoundly impoverished definition of progress.

As an anarchist, I find the novel’s portrayal of normalized domination especially compelling. It exposes the danger of accepting institutions simply because they’re established, laws simply because they are enforceable, or economic arrangements simply because they are profitable. Legality does not make something ethical. Social acceptance does not make something just. And the fact that a system functions does not mean it deserves to survive.

The most horrifying aspect of Tender Is the Flesh isn’t the idea that humanity might one day become meat. It’s the suggestion that we could construct a world in which this happens, surround it with regulations and professional terminology, turn it into a source of employment and revenue, and eventually stop asking whether it should happen at all.

Capitalism’s ultimate horror is not merely that it can turn everything into a commodity, it’s that, given the right conditions, it can teach us to mistake the commodification of life for the natural order of things. And once that happens, the slaughterhouse no longer looks like an aberration.

It looks like business as usual.

Heart of Darkness from an Anarchist Perspective

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness remains one of the most unsettling critiques of colonialism ever written. While the novella is often discussed in terms of race, psychology, or literary style, it also offers a powerful lens through which anarchists can examine the relationship between power, domination, and human corruption.

At its core, it’s a story about authority unleashed from restraint. The European powers claim to be bringing civilization to Africa, but Conrad quickly strips away this illusion. The colonial project is revealed not as a humanitarian mission but as a system of exploitation, extraction, and violence. The rhetoric of progress serves as a mask for the pursuit of ivory, wealth, and control.

For anarchists, this critique feels immediately familiar. States and empires often justify their power by claiming to act in the interests of civilization, security, or prosperity. Yet beneath these justifications lies coercion. The Congo in Conrad’s novella is not an aberration of imperialism but a logical consequence of concentrated power operating without accountability.

The character of Kurtz emodies this dynamic. He arrives in Africa with lofty ideals and grand ambitions. He is eloquent, educated, and apparently committed to humanitarian principles. Yet given near-total authority over his station and separated from meaningful social constraints, he transforms into a tyrant. The heads displayed on stakes outside his compound are not merely symbols of what happens when one individual gains unchecked power over others.

An anarchist reading rejects the comforting notion that Kurtz was simply an exceptionally evil man. The more disturbing possibility is that the structures around him encouraged and rewarded domination. The company admired him because he produced results. His brutality became acceptable as long as it served the economic interests of those in power. Kurtz is less a monster than a product of a system built on hierarchy and extraction.

Heart of Darkness also challenges the colonial distinction between “civilized” and “savage.” Throughout the story, it is the supposedly civilized Europeans who commit acts of extraordinary cruelty. Conrad suggests that civilization itself does not eliminate violence; it often organizes and legitimizes it. This insight resonates strongly with anarchist critiques of the state. Governments frequently claim a monopoly on legitimate violence, presenting themselves as guardians of order while engaging in warfare, repression, and exploitation on a massive scale.

At the same time, the novella is not a straightforward revolutionary text. Conrad offers little hope for resistance or liberation. His worldview is deeply pessimistic, often portraying darkness as an inherent aspect of human nature. Many anarchists would disagree with this conclusion. Thinkers such as Kropotkin argued that cooperation and mutual aid are just as natural to humanity as competition and domination. From this perspective, the problem is not humanity itself but the institution that concentrate power and reward exploitation.

This tension is what makes the novella so compelling. Conrad diagnoses the sickness of empire with remarkable clarity but remains skeptical that humanity can overcome it. Anarchists may accept his critique of authority while rejecting his pessimism about human potential.

More than a century after its publication, Heart of Darkness remains relevant because the questions it raises have not disappeared. How do systems of power corrupt those who wield them? How do institutions justify violence in the name of civilization? And what happens when economic interests are placed above human dignity?

Conrad doesn’t provide answers. He leaves us with Kurtz dying words: “The horror! The horror!” For anarchists, those words can be read as a final recognition of what lies at the heart of empire: not civilization, but domination.

Anti-Natalism is Not Class Hatred

Every time anti-natalism comes up in leftist spaces, the same accusation appears almost immediately: “So you think poor people shouldn’t have kids?” That’s not what anti-natalism is.

There is a massive difference between criticizing poor people for reproducing and questioning whether bringing anyone into existence is ethical under conditions of unavoidable suffering. Yet anti-natalism is constantly flattened into a caricature of eugenics, elitism, or “capitalist talking points.” That reaction often misses how deeply capitalism itself depends on endless reproduction.

Capitalism needs workers. It needs consumers. It needs renters, debtors, soldiers, and future laborers. A system built on perpetual growth requires a constant supply of new human beings to sustain it. Reproduction isn’t outside capitalism, it’s one of the mechanisms through which capitalism perpetuates itself. So when anti-natalists question reproduction, they are not necessarily attacking working class people. They are questioning the expectation that creating new life is automatically moral, necessary, or liberatory.

A common response from socialists and communists is that the real issue is material conditions. People suffer because capitalism creates poverty, insecurity, alienation, and exploitation. Therefore, the solution is not to discourage childbirth, but to build a world where people can thrive. Improving material conditions is obviously good. Fewer people suffering under poverty, medical debt, or homelessness is objectively preferable to the alternative. Anti-natalism asks a different question entirely.

Even in wealthy countries with strong social programs, people still experience grief, illness, depression, anxiety, aging, loneliness, and death. Even in ideal conditions, existence becomes packaged with loss and vulnerability. No amount of economic reform eliminates mortality or guarantees a meaningful life. The anti-natalist argument isn’t simply “the economy is bad.” It’s that existence itself imposes suffering on people who never consented to being born in the first place. That’s a philosophical argument, not a classist one. The distinction matters because people often confuse anti-natalism with selective breeding arguments. Eugenics says certain people shouldn’t reproduce because of who they are: poor, disabled, racialized, “undesirable,” etc.

Anti-natalism applies universally. It doesn’t target one class or group. The argument isn’t “poor people shouldn’t have children.” The argument is “creating sentient beings inevitably exposes them to suffering, and we should seriously question whether that is ethical at all.” Those are fundamentally different positions.

As a matter of fact, many anti-natalists are deeply critical of systems that pressure poor people into parenthood while simultaneously denying them healthcare, housing, childcare, and stability. Criticizing reproduction under oppressive systems is not the same as blaming oppressed people for existing within those systems.

Another issue is how deeply reproduction is romanticized across political ideologies. Conservatives frame childbirth as tradition and duty. Liberals frame it as fulfillment and personal choice. Even many leftists frame it as hope for the future or an act of resistance, but very few people interrogate the assumption that creating new life is inherently good.

There is immense social pressure to reproduce. People who don’t want children are often treated as immature, selfish, damaged, or nihilistic. Meanwhile, having children is treated as morally neutral or even virtuous by default, despite the fact that parenthood imposes life — and all its suffering — onto another person without their consent. Anti-natalism disrupts that assumption, which is why it provokes such hostility.

Human beings are biologically and socially driven toward reproduction, but inevitably it’s not the same thing as morality. People will continue doing many things that deserve ethical scrutiny. The fact that something is natural or historically common doesn’t automatically make it ethical. Anti-natalism isn’t a legislative project to forcibly stop reproduction. For most anti-natalists, it’s a philosophical position about harm reduction and ethical responsibility.

At its core, anti-natalism is often rooted less in hatred of humanity than in empathy for it. Many anti-natalists arrive at their position not because they despise people, but because they’re acutely aware of suffering, poverty, violence, trauma, disease, loneliness, exploitation, ecological collapse, and the quiet pain woven into ordinary existence. To them, refusing to impose life on another person isn’t cruelty. It’s restraint.

You don’t have to agree with anti-natalism to engage with it honestly. Dismissing it as merely “capitalist propaganda” ignores the deeper ethical question it raises: If life guarantees suffering, and no one can consent to being born, why is creating life treated as morally unquestionable?

The Strangest Thing About Being an Anti-Natalist

The strangest thing about being an anti-natalist isn’t the philosophy, it’s how angry people get about it. I’m not proposing laws. I’m not advocating forced sterilization. I’m not suggesting the state regulate reproduction. All I’m doing is saying I don’t think having children is ethically justified, and that I personally choose not to do it. Yet somehow that turns into accusations of eugenics, nihilism, fascism, or wanting to wipe out humanity.

This is interesting because the philosophy most people are actually arguing with — usually without realizing it — comes from thinkers like David Benatar, whose book Better Never to Have Been makes a pretty straightforward argument: bringing someone into existence exposes them to suffering to which they never consented. That’s it. That’s the core of it. And once you see the argument clearly, it’s hard to unsee.

Nobody consents to being born. That’s not rhetorical flourish. It’s just a fact. Every other major moral system we use in society revolves around consent. We treat it as one of the most basic ethical principles we have. Yet the biggest decision anyone will ever experience — the decision that creates their entire existence — is made without it.

Now, obviously, consent from a nonexistent person is impossible. Anti-natalism recognizes that, but that impossibility doesn’t magically make the ethical problem disappear. Instead it raises a question:

If creating someone exposes them to pain, illness, loss, anxiety, and eventually death … what’s the moral justification for doing it?

“But life is good!”

This is the first response. People say life is beautiful, meaningful, joyful. Sometimes it is. Anti-natalism doesn’t deny that pleasure exists. The argument is that pleasure doesn’t justify imposing suffering on someone who didn’t ask for the gamble in the first place. You can’t miss pleasures you were never born to experience, but if you’re born, you can absolutely experience suffering, and everyone does.

There’s also the eugenics accusation. One of the strangest criticisms I’ve heard over the past two days is that anti-natalism is a form of eugenics. This makes absolutely no sense. Eugenics is about selective reproduction. Deciding who should reproduce based on genetics, race, disability, or social status. It doesn’t say certain people shouldn’t have children. It says no one has a morally compelling reason to create new people at all. If anything, that’s the opposite of eugenics. Eugenics wants better babies. Anti-natalism questions whether creating babies in the first place is ethical.

Then there’s the whole “But what about the future?” This is another common argument that refusing to reproduce is defeatist. People say humanity needs future generations to fix the world. But this argument quietly assumes something strange: That the solution to suffering is creating new people who will inherit it. Imagine solving poverty by creating more poor people who might someday fix poverty. Imagine solving war by creating more soldiers. At some point the logic starts to look less like hope and more like a pyramid scheme.

The intensity of the backlash says something interesting. Anti-natalism isn’t just a philosophical argument. It pokes at one of the deepest assumptions our culture has: that having children is automatically meaningful, noble, and morally good. Questioning that assumption feels threatening. If reproduction isn’t inherently justified, then one of humanity’s most fundamental behaviors suddenly requires ethical scrutiny. That’s uncomfortable. So the response is often to attack the person making the argument instead of engaging with the argument itself.

At the end of the day, my decision to not have children doesn’t harm anyone. It doesn’t take anything away from people who wants families. But the philosophy matters because it forces us to confront a question most people never ask:

“Why do we assume creating life is morally neutral — or even good — by default?”

Maybe the answer is still yes. Maybe humanity keeps going forever. But if that’s the case, it should at least be a decision people think about seriously instead of treating reproduction as something automatic. If nothing else, anti-natalism forces that conversation. And judging by the reactions I’ve been seeing online the past two days, it’s a conversation a lot of people would rather avoid.

More Anarchist or Communist?

I’m firmly rooted in my beliefs as an anarcho-communist, but what does that mean? Am I an anarchist or a communist? How can one be both? Every political label has a built-in identity crisis, but few produce quite as much confusion as anarcho-communism. People squint at it like it’s a glitch in the ideological matrix: “Are they more anarchist or more communist? Which part matters more?”

Here’s the honest answer: you can’t pull the two apart without breaking the whole thing. Anarcho-communists aren’t halfway between the two. They’re the union overlap in the Venn diagram. Let’s break it down:

Anarchism: The Method

Anarchism begins with one foundational argument: hierarchy is not self-justifying. If someone claims the right to rule you, the burden of proof is on them. And good luck making a convincing case.

For anarchists, freedom isn’t something the state grants. It’s something the state obstructs. No kings, no presidents, no vanguards, no bosses, no landlords. Human beings coordinate their own lives without coercive authority. So when anarcho-communists talk about society without a state, they aren’t being edgy. They’re being consistent.

Communism: The Goal

Take the classic communist vision:

No classes

No private ownership of the means of production

No wage labor

No markets

No state

Marx called this the “higher phase of communism.” The endpoint. Anarcho-communists don’t disagree with that goal. They disagree with the path.

Where Marxists-Leninists picture a transitional state to shepherd you into communism, anarcho-communists see the contradiction immediately: You can’t build a stateless society by strengthening the state.

To them, that’s like saying the way to eliminate fire is to pour gasoline on it “temporarily.”

So which matters more? This is the fun part:

They’re anarchists in strategy and communist in outcome.

If you ask Marxist-Leninists then anarcho-communists are “too anarchist” because we reject the transitional state.

If you ask a market anarchist they’re “too communist” because we reject markets entirely.

If you ask an anarcho-communist then we’ll tell you the question is wrong. We see anarchism and communism as two sides of the same project: a society without domination, whether political or economic.

For us, you can’t be truly anarchist if you still allow economic hierarchy, and you can’t be truly communist if you preserve political hierarchy. Authority and exploitation are one machine with two gears.

So what’s the cleanest definition? Anarcho-communism is communism without the state and anarchism without the market. No bosses, no state, no landlords, no wage slavery, just cooperative, decentralized, freely associated communities handling things together.

The “more anarchist or communist?” debate only makes sense from the outside. From within, the two are inseparable.

The Lie of Glory

I started reading Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo for one reason: Republicans said not to. They said it was anti-American and socialist. What it is is anti-war and anti-imperialism. If the people who glorify war and worship a flag are afraid of a book then that’s usually a sign the book is telling the truth.

The book isn’t just anti-war. It’s anti-illusion. It’s about Joe Bonham, a World War I soldier who wakes up in a hospital with no arms, no legs, no face; he’s deaf, mute, and blind. His body is gone, but his mind is still very much alive. The entire book consists of his thoughts, his memories, his realization that he’s become a piece of government property in a bed.

There’s no glory in this book. There’s no heroism. There’s silence, darkness, and the sound of your own mind refusing to die.

The deeper I got into the book, the more it hit me: everything recruiters promise — pride, purpose, brotherhood — it’s all marketing. The same system that feeds you “honor” will turn you into cannon fodder the second you sign on the dotted line. When you’re useful, they decorate you. When you’re broken, they hide you.

There’s a chapter where Joe hallucinates Christ walking among the dead and mutilated soldiers. It’s not divine. It’s horrifying. Christ doesn’t save anyone, He just watches humanity destroy itself again, in His name this time. That’s when Trumbo’s message cuts through: war isn’t sacrifice, it’s slaughter dressed up as salvation.

Joe eventually figures out how to communicate: by tapping his head against his pillow in Morse code. What he asks for is simple: let him be seen. Roll him through the streets in a glass case so people can see what “sacrifice for freedom” actually looks like. Of course, they refuse. The military can’t afford truth. They sedate him and shove him back into silence.

That’s how the machine works. It eats you, then buries what’s left under words like “honor” and “duty.”

Johnny Got His Gun isn’t an easy read, but it’s the kind that wakes something up in you. It makes every flag-waving speech sound like a sales pitch. It makes every “support our troops” bumper sticker feel hollow. The book isn’t anti-American. It’s anti-lie. And that’s exactly why they don’t want you to read it.

Candide Through an Absurd and Anti-Natalist Lens

I finished Voltaire’s Candide. I bought it I don’t know how long ago, but I’d get distracted with other books as I often do and just forgot about it until recently. All I can say is “Wow!” It was an excellent satire of philosophy in general. Me, being who I am though, I read it through a lens of pessimism, absurdism, and anti-natalism. It’s surprisingly modern and disturbingly relevant.

Right from the start the main character — Candide — and his world are full of relentless misfortune: he starts out expelled from his home, pushed into a brutal army; he witnesses earthquakes, massacres, and hangings. Everywhere he goes, human cruelty and disaster dominate.

For someone like me that’s attuned to anti-natalist thought, the lesson is clear: life is unpredictably cruel, and no amount of idealism or hope can shield anyone from suffering. The character of Pangloss and his philosophy — “this is the best of all possible worlds” — is not comforting. It’s absurd. Voltaire mocks it precisely to show that optimism can blind us to reality.

Candide meets kings unthroned, slaves chained to oars, prostitutes forced by circumstance, and monks trapped in religious life against their will. From the sites of Libson to El Dorado and Paris to Venice, suffering is universal. It doesn’t discriminate by wealth, status, or virtue.

All of this perfectly aligns with anti-natalism. Why bring new life into a world so unpredictable, so cruel, and so universally painful? Voltaire’s stories of absurdly recurring disasters reinforce the ethical argument that procreation inevitably imposes suffering on others. Human ideas are fragile. Pursuits that seem meaningful such as love, wealth, status, and fame often collapse under the weight of reality. For an absurdist like myself, this is expected. The universe offers no inherent purpose and our “ideals” are more likely than not arbitrary constructs.

The end of the book says “We must cultivate our garden.” This is Voltaire’s practical work. Life is absurd and full of suffering, but we can still create meaning in small, tangible ways: tending to our responsibilities, helping others, or our own little personal projects. For an absurdist anti-natalist this means to me:

Accept the universe’s lack’s lack of inherent meaning. Do what you can to reduce suffering wherever possible. And focus on tangible, ethical, or creative work rather than abstract speculation.

So, what did I take away from the satirical work? I learned through its absurd coincidences, relentless misfortunes, and philosophical debates that it mirrors these truths: life is cruel, unpredictable, and often meaningless.

However, like Candide, we are not powerless. We can act, work, and cultivate our little gardens in such a chaotic world, and in doing so, carve out a fragile, ethical, and perhaps even joyful corner of existence.

Freedom, American-Style: Guns Over Healthcare

It says a lot about the state of America when you point out that the U.S. has fallen to 57th place in the global freedom index, and the response you get from a Trump supporter is: “Yeah, well, I get to own guns.”

This is the American illusion of freedom distilled into a single sentence. Forget healthcare, forget workers’ rights, forget privacy, forget the surveillance state, forget the crushing weight of debt—because hey, you can still buy a gun. That’s supposed to make us the freest country on Earth.

But what kind of freedom is that, really? Is it freedom when millions can’t afford basic healthcare? When a medical emergency can bankrupt a family? When corporations own politicians, and workers are trapped in jobs just to keep health insurance? Is it freedom when your choices are narrowed down to which corporate brand you’ll consume, which billionaire will own your data, and which politician will fail you more slowly?

The gun argument is really a confession. It’s saying: “We’ve lost so much freedom that the only one we cling to is the ability to arm ourselves.” Guns have become the consolation prize in a country where every other right and protection is chipped away.

You can’t afford insulin, but you can afford an AR-15. You can’t get mental healthcare, but you can stockpile ammo. You can’t get your child’s asthma medication covered, but you can walk into a Walmart and walk out with a weapon of war. This isn’t freedom. It’s a parody of it.

Real freedom isn’t just the right to own a gun. Real freedom is the right to live without fear of medical bankruptcy, to have control over your workplace and your government, to exist without being exploited by corporations or surveilled by the state. Real freedom is collective, not individualistic. It’s not about clutching a weapon in the ruins, it’s about building a society where weapons aren’t necessary.

The sad truth is that when a Trump supporter says “I get to own guns,” what they’re really saying is: “This is the only freedom I have left, and I’m going to cling to it no matter what else is taken from me.” But clinging to a single hollow freedom while the rest are stripped away isn’t liberty. It’s defeat dressed up as patriotism.

And that’s why America is 57th in freedom. Because we’ve traded healthcare for hardware, dignity for firepower, and genuine liberty for a cheap illusion of it.

Why the U.S. Hired Nazis but Hated the USSR

It’s one of the strangest contradictions in American history: right after fighting a war against Nazi Germany, the United States turned around and gave hundreds of Nazis safe passage, jobs, and paychecks. At the same time, it launched a global crusade against the Soviet Union, its former ally in the war. So why were ex-Nazis welcomed into the U.S. while Communists were treated like the ultimate enemy?

After World War II, the U.S. quietly recruited more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians through a program called Operation Paperclip. These weren’t just neutral “lab coat” types. Many had been members of the Nazi Party or had worked directly for Hitler’s war machine.

Wernher von Braun, who built V-2 rockets with slave labor, later became the father of the U.S. space program. Hubertus Strughold, the “father of space medicine,” had ties to medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Why hire them? Because knowledge was power. The U.S. wanted their rocket science, their chemistry, their military technology, and just as importantly, it didn’t want those brains falling into Soviet hands.

While the U.S. was willing to rehabilitate Nazis, it drew a hard line against Communists.

The U.S. was built on capitalism; the USSR was Communist. American leaders saw Communism as a direct threat to private property and global markets. Geopolitics: After the war, the USSR controlled Eastern Europe and projected influence worldwide. The U.S. wanted global dominance and couldn’t tolerate a rival system. Once the Soviets tested an atomic bomb in 1949, the competition turned existential. Anti-Communism fueled McCarthyism and justified military budgets, CIA coups, and repression of leftists at home.

In short, fighting Communism was about preserving U.S. power, not morality.

This is the big contradiction: The U.S. claimed it was defending freedom and democracy, but its actions told a different story. Nazis were a defeated enemy who could be repurposed. Communists were a living enemy offering an alternative vision of the world. So America struck a deal with its conscience: use the Nazis, fight the Soviets, and sell the public a story about good versus evil.

This history cuts through the myth that U.S. foreign policy is about values. The real driver is power. The U.S. was never “pro-freedom vs. anti-fascism.” It was always pro-Capitalism vs. anti-Communism, and if that meant hiring Nazis to help win the Cold War, so be it.

Bill Hicks and Joe Rogan

I’m tired of this whole bro culture that’s going on right now and Joe Rogan seems to be the man in charge of it. He never really amounted to much until someone decided it’d be a good idea to give him a podcast. Years ago I thought he was decent enough because he admired Bill Hicks and he was friends with Doug Stanhope. Hicks and Stanhope are two of my all-time favorite comedians. Then things shifted.

I think Hicks and Stanhope would have differing opinions on Rogan though. Stanhope openly says he doesn’t care if he bombs on stage. He’d rather be himself than pander to an audience. I don’t see this being Rogan’s attitude. However, the difference between Hicks and Stanhope would be Hicks would roast Rogan and Stanhope would shrug, pour another drink, and say “Who gives a shit?” That’s just who Stanhope is. Hicks though? He wouldn’t stand for it.

Rogan would always bring up Bill Hicks and call him a hero, a genius, a prophet. Hicks was all of those things, but if Hicks were alive today he’d tear Rogan to shreds. Hicks spent his career railing against corporations, conformity, American militarism, consumer culture, and the numbing stupidity of mass entertainment. Hicks wasn’t trying to “be edgy.” He was trying to wake people up. He was pissed off because we were all sleepwalking through a corporate-controlled nightmare.

Now look at Rogan. His whole empire rests on platforming reactionary voices, selling supplements, and playing culture-war middleman. He’s not smashing the system, he’s feeding it. Rogan is what Hicks warned us about: the corporatized, commodified version of counterculture. He’s a watered-down rebel packaged for the masses.

Bill Hicks didn’t attack “wokeness.” He attacked greed, imperialism, and consumer hypnosis. Rogan, meanwhile, obsesses over trans athletes while pretending that’s the frontline of free thought. Hicks went after presidents and generals. Rogan goes after strawmen and invited presidential candidates and billionaires on his podcast.

There’s a difference between using a microphone to question power and using it to launder power’s talking points. Hicks’ comedy was dangerous. Rogan’s podcast is safe. It’s safe enough for Spotify to cut him a $200 million check.

Bill Hicks wanted us to stop being sheep. Joe Rogan built a career herding sheep in new directions.

Bill Hicks was a prophet of rage against the machine. Joe Rogan is the machine.