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The Potential Suffering Index (PSI)
Suffering is bad.
It’s caused by raising people who are hungry, neglected, malnourished, and uneducated, among other things. But the first cause of suffering is the creation of conscious life that is able to suffer.
There will come a time in human history when thoughtful and kind people realize that one of the worst possible things one can do is magnify the potential suffering in the world by creating life that has little chance to thrive.
Right next to that on the scale of horrible things to do is limiting one’s ability to have children when they want nothing more than to do so.
So that’s a problem.
But one thing we cannot afford to do anymore, and that is supremely immoral to do, is to eject millions upon millions of humans into this world who have little chance of doing anything but suffer.
These are babies launched into the woodchipper of life in the name of tradition, convention, and nature-driven selfishness, and some unspeakable majority of them will have no education, be malnourished, have no access to good healthcare, and have either abusive or absent parents.
And that’s the life they’ll live.
Put differently, the 1% problem isn’t about the millionaires in first world countries. The real 1% problem is that only 1% of the world’s children are born into an environment where they have loving, attentive parents, who have great jobs where one parent can stay home with the kids, where they get all the good food and nutrition they need to become strong and healthy, where healthcare is decent and affordable, and where they can expect a respectable job after they graduate.
A tiny fraction of the people in the United States have this, let alone Asia, Africa, and South America.
So now—just using the United States as an example—let’s drop these millions of neglected, uneducated, and pitifully employed adolescent men into a society where the media is barraging them how much money, women, and fame that the 1% have access to.
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And we wonder why they shoot up the place.
The world is not for them. The world is for the superior, the privileged, and the lucky, and they’re only there to admire them.
People want to know how to stop gun violence, and war, and poverty? Stop making humans who are virtually guaranteed to fail in life. There are no jobs, parents have no time to raise their children even if they wanted to, and education is for the rich.
The brutal truth is that for the vast majority of Americans, and even more-so in other places, having a child today is virtually guaranteed to lead to not just their suffering, but the suffering of those around them.
And the alternative is not a bad one.
The empty space between galaxies is not filled with the suffering of never-conceived children. It’s filled with a peaceful silence.
If you want to stop gun violence and war—stop creating millions of people who are virtually guaranteed to live in pain and misery.
And while you continue to do so, expect public shootings. Expect terrorism. And expect war. These are expected outcomes when you collide millions of damaged and disenfranchised young males with a world that does not want or need them.