Why I’m No Longer a Christian Loser and Am Now a Vitalist Chad

A Modest Proposal Pt. 2: Electric Boogaloo

After reading all this “vitalism” stuff and thinking about the associated issues a lot I’ve come to realize that the whole “vitalist” thing really is sorely lacking. I don’t mean lacking by comparison to traditionalism or anything else, but just like, by its own standards—the versions of it that I’ve seen put forward are actually kind of lame. They tend to be incoherent and/or vague, and as I laid out in my previous post, the ideas that they try to brand as New and Exciting are mostly just the same old song and dance with a new coat of paint over them. What’s the point in that?

This got me thinking about what things might look like if these people took themselves more seriously and really had the courage of their convictions, which led me to writing this post as a way of laying out that little thought experiment. Here I’m going to take what I perceive to be some of the unspoken assumptions behind the “vitalist” stuff that I’ve seen, make them explicit as founding principles, and see where that takes us. Consider this my very own personal Very Online Vitalist Manifesto. Because everyone loves posts about manifestos and “Why I’m No Longer X.” Let’s get started with the founding principles:

1.       Traditionalism and religion really suck: This one might seem obvious, but it bears repeating, because we’re not trying to give any legitimacy to stuffy old stuff that doesn’t work anymore. We are right-wing progressives; we want to progress into a future that is actually different from anything that came before, something that properly takes into account the monumental changes that have swept over humanity in the past century or two. “Well that’s how we’ve done it for thousands of years” is therefore *not* an acceptable defense of anything. The only acceptable defense is whether or not something is vitalist. Who cares if your long-dead ancestors did it hundreds of years ago? They’re all dead and they were all squares anyways.

I want to emphasize this up front because it seems to me that, while “vitalists” have a certain disdain for and rejection of traditional norms, they are also hesitant to wander too far off the reservation. If tradcons are actually wrong and stupid though, then why continue to give their instincts any deference? Very Online Vitalism sets out to offer an actual alternative to traditionalism, and that means actually treating traditional norms as wrong, stupid, and to be discarded, wholesale. If you’re not willing to do that, then what are you really selling?

2.       Sex and reproduction should be completely disconnected from one another: We can extrapolate this one by working backwards from the assumption that “gay adoption” and “gay marriage,” along with casual sex, must be acceptable. If it’s totally cool for a child to be created and then raised by people whose sexual acts played zero role at all in its creation, and also totally cool for people to bang with zero intention to reproduce, then we land with this principle. We must therefore conclude that, when it comes to the CQ (Children Question), there is *no* inherent value in a child being raised by two people who actually birthed the child the old-fashioned way.

3.       Human life does not have inherent worth: Similar to principle #2, we can work backwards to discover this one based on the assumption that abortion must be allowable. If a human life is sufficiently inconvenient to other human lives, it is acceptable to terminate it. This also implies that the notion of “human rights” is mostly or entirely stupid and should be discarded, because if you don’t even have an inherent right to life, why would you have a right to any other less important things?

4.       Utilitarianism is correct: This one derives from #2 and #3. Since we are discarding religion as Fake and Gay, we are hard materialists up in here, man. Appeals to sappy shit like “meaning” or other esoteric bullshit ain’t gonna fly. No, there is no higher power, and only a loser who isn’t vital enough to enact his own will would have to resort to making that appeal. Something something slave morality. Combine this with the premise that human life does not have inherent worth, and we’re left with the whole maximizing happiness/minimizing suffering thing.

Now, one of the biggest problems you typically have with utilitarianism is that you still have to define what is utility? I.e., what does happiness actually look like? People often have common conceptions of things that make you unhappy, such as poverty or disease, but once all your basics are taken care of, you get wildly diverging ideas on where to go from there. Person A might want to be a tradwife with 7 kids on a farm while Person B wants to be a promiscuous gay man doing crazy amounts of drugs and living in San Franciso. Very different, both happy, at least in theory.

That’s where vitalism comes in. Our first principle is vitalism, and that means that here, utility means vitality. If it’s making the world more vital, then it’s increasing utility, and vice versa. Now, what exactly is vitality? Well, this is just too vague to try and nail down with exact precision, but I’m gonna try and extrapolate a bit based on the attitudes I’ve seen and the whole “Barstool Conservatism” thing that I covered previously. We know that sex is really really important to it though. It definitely involves a lot of sex, non-reproductive sex to be specific, cause y’know, principle #2. So let’s go ahead and make this a principle:

5.       Sex is really important and you should have access to a lot of it: This one mostly applies to men, because men are like, pretty horny. The male ideal involves lots of hot steamy sex. That’s not even a joke right? That’s literally what lots of men would take, if offered. Remember The Man Show and the Haha Based Conservative Women Bikini Calendar? This is how we incorporate those into our gigachad ideology. Indulging horniness is less applicable to women because female sexuality is much more restrained, but we can still posit a female ideal that fits in with everything so far, especially #2:

6.       The average woman should have complete reproductive freedom: Now at first this sounds redundant, because you see “reproductive freedom” and just think it means abortion. No, I’m going much more radical than that. What I mean here is that children should be mostly or entirely excised from public life. Childfree should be seen as not only a viable option, but the normal state of things. We can embrace the reality that Kids Are Bad, Actually, thus leaving adults truly free to simply do Adult Things (giggity!). So when I say reproductive freedom for women, I actually mean freedom from reproduction, in a literal sense.

Don’t worry, I have a plan to keep some kids around so we don’t just go extinct, cause that totally wouldn’t be very vital, if humans literally died out. This will represent the ultimate victory over the lame ass Christcucks and traddumbs that keep wanting to slow our roll by saddling us with miniature screaming poop factories. Changing diapers isn’t very vital, now is it? No, it isn’t. Enough with that nonsense.

Alright, now let’s get into the fun stuff. The exciting parts come when we start to really put these things into practice, in combination with each other. Let’s start by solving the CQ, the Children Question, cause that’s a really big outstanding one that everyone is afraid to really tackle head-on. Well as I’ve already shown, Very Online Vitalism ain’t afraid to tackle it, no sirree. Let’s make one thing clear for starters:

We don’t need that many children.

People these days are all up in arms about the fertility crisis. It used to be that you were supposed to have lots of kids because God Said So. We’ve accepted that was lame and done away with it, yet tons of secular people are still worried about this. It seems to me like they’re just clinging onto leftover religious morality for no good reason. Is population decline, so long as it doesn’t actually dip so low that extinction becomes a real threat, actually such a bad thing? Why would it be?

In 1800, the population of the entire world was one billion. In 1000 AD, it’s estimated to have been 275 million—less than the population of just the United States today! And at no point back then was extinction ever any kind of serious possibility. So why are we so worried about this? Very Online Vitalists aren’t bothered about this. The important thing in life is that life is vital. It’s better to have fewer lives that are lived vitally than to have many which are lived very un-vitally. So there you go, we can let the population just contract for generations, and eventually level it off with a nice tidy 2.1 kids per person.

That gets to one of the great features about my idea for solving the CQ, the ability to control fertility in a much more direct way. My proposal is that we should establish Birthing Person as a literal career for women—pay women money to be childbearers for society as a whole. Do away with the norm that a woman is expected to carry her own child, and perhaps more importantly, the norm that any woman is ever expected to “want children” just for their own sake. No, instead, formalize surrogacy as the ideal form of childbearing. There are a few ways you could arrange this, but the bottom line is to recognize that pregnancy super duper sucks, and women deserve to be handsomely compensated for it.

We have the technology for this now—standard practice should be that women, if they want to reproduce, simply go ahead and get their eggs harvested at a young age, and if they don’t want to be burdened by pregnancy, other women can be paid to do it for them. Now one objection might be, well what if women simply don’t want to be surrogates? Fortunately, we have real-world market-based data on this. Surrogate compensation currently ranges around $30-70,000, with the total cost of the whole affair apparently approximating $100,000. This shows that actually women are already willing to do this for basically just a year’s salary, and that is in the real world where surrogacy is not promoted as an ideal practice.

In Very Online Vitalist world, it will be seen as utterly essential to our way of life, so there should be no shortage of willing surrogates. This should especially be the case because one, remember, we don’t actually care about having very many children at all so we don’t need that many surrogates either, and two, I would contend that women should actually be paid much, much more for providing this service. I would propose minimum compensations in the range of $500,000, possibly even much higher than that. Undergoing such an important sacrifice should buy a woman years of freedom afterwards, and it should be possible for a woman to set herself up for life by doing nothing else, if that’s the path she wants to go down. People claim financial incentives aren’t enough to “fix” birthrates; I would contend that they are simply not being serious enough about the incentives.

Isn’t that gonna be expensive though? Who’s gonna pay for such high rates? Well gee, the government of course. If low fertility continues to be an issue with population maintenance, just ratchet up the surrogate payments. If numbers in the millions still aren’t enough, okay, maybe we have a fundamental breakdown at that point. But do we really believe women will refuse to be paid millions to bear a couple kids to ward off extinction? That isn’t very plausible. Likewise, if you end up with the supply of surrogates exceeding the demand (this is the more likely scenario IMO with such high compensation, but I am running with super dire assessments of how bad pregnancy is), then you just lower the compensation until things roughly even out.

Now I’ve yet to address what is likely to be one of the most obvious concerns in this whole thing: What about the inverted pyramid problem? If we just stop caring about having kids, won’t we be stuck with tons of old people and not enough workers to support them? This brings me to my next point which will address this problem, as well as free up plenty of public funds to use on things like surrogacy payments:

End all forms of government benefits for old people.

Why? Well, to put it bluntly, old people suck. They aren’t vital. What is vital about an 80 year old? Nothing. Quite literally, his vitality has, to a large degree, left him. Now if the 80 year old has been responsible and can still pay his way in the world, well, good for him. So long as he’s no burden to the rest of us, there’s no problem. But why would vitalism demand that the young and vital must be shackled for the sake of the old, whose vitality has long since passed?

I mean, old people don’t even have sex, right? And we know how important sex stuff is. So they’re basically shells of people at that point. Why not go with the solution I proposed in a previous post? After all, we know that euthanasia is a Super Duper Good Thing, Actually. Seems like the proper vital way to handle the whole affair, if you ask me; instead of pathetically clinging onto a life that is no longer vital, just accept that you’ve had your time and be done with it. Really, if someone is going to become a genuine burden on the rest of society, they kind of have an obligation to remove the burden, don’t they? Remember Principles #3 and 4: If human life does not have inherent worth, and your continued existence is decreasing overall utility, well…

We could even imagine a future in which ritual suicide becomes part of one’s funeral rites, a romanticized practice seen as performing a sacred duty. But if that’s too hardcore vital for you to swallow, don’t worry, we really don’t even have to go that far. There are very good and unironic reasons to do away with “gerontocracy.” So let’s just… do that. Instead of paying out the nose for Social Security, let’s pay women to compensate them for the trouble of childbearing. Honestly, sounds like a more just world, doesn’t it? And we can expand the surrogacy thing out even further. Why stop at just pregnancy and childbearing? If not enough people want to actually be parents, that’s fine. We can consider the following, again likely financed using the enormous savings from cutting the old people off:

Greatly expand government-run childcare to the point that it provides a full alternative to traditional parenting.

We already do this sorta halfway with keeping kids in government-run schools 8+ hours a day until they’re 18. Why not go all the way? Remember, a core tenet of our ideology here is to truly free ourselves of the constraints of children; to solve the CQ once and for all. Being responsible for little kids just isn’t very vital, and the notion that parents are responsible for their offspring lays at the heart of conflicts with traditionalists. It’s one of the main reasons why trads are so bothered by stuff like casual sex and abortion.

But this is the 21^st century man. We’ve got crazy capacity for social engineering. I mean just look how wild we went with the whole race thing, with DEI and all that! Our society can clearly handle a huge load of non-productive activity without anything really going too far off the rails. Imagine if all that wasted energy were channeled into something worthwhile instead, like solving the CQ? Now don’t get me wrong, if people still wanted to be traditional parents, there’s no reason to take that option away.

If not enough people are doing it the old-fashioned way, though, then after we’ve paid surrogates to make up the difference, we can hand the results off to the state, to be raised in state-run institutions and educated in state-run schools. No more pressure on people to ever deal with or raise kids, ever! This is completely possible if the social will was there. Now you might jump to the assumption that this will be cruel because the state institutions are going to suck and be abusive, but this brings me to my next point:

We should pursue eugenics full steam ahead.

Not only should we let the population decline naturally, but in the first stages, we may even want to help it along, in the sense that we should be actively encouraging only select people to reproduce. As the population contracts, we should do everything in our power to make sure that each generation, while smaller than the last, is also better. Obviously you’d have to start with IQ—pay smart people to have kids and/or donate their genetic material, and discourage dumb people from reproducing, pay them to stay childfree if you have to.

Maybe you even use force—remember, we’re utilitarians, and we reject the notion that human life has inherent worth. That means we can also reject certain notions of human rights. In the hypothetical world of Very Online Vitalism, we’re talking about setting up a proper vitalist future for the species indefinitely. That’s serious business. This is one area where you could differentiate vitalism from libertarianism—it’s always better to do things with consent where possible, but if a certain action is too anti-vital, stopping it by force may become justified.

Anyways, maybe we don’t have to go there, maybe you just use softer incentives and let the chips fall where they may. We should keep in mind that the poor reputation of things like the foster care system today is largely the result of irresponsible parents reproducing and then behaving inconsistently, trying to comply with the societal norm that they care for their children yet failing to adequately do so, whether intentionally or otherwise. Quite simply, full-throated government child-rearing would solve this problem. Minimum standards of care could be set, overseen, and enforced, all in the public realm, with full and formalized structures of accountability.

And by the time the population declines to such a degree that this even becomes necessary, we will have gone through multiple generations of eugenics in order to set up a population that is more capable of running such a system well. In this world there would be many fewer unwanted children as there would be no more pressure on people to reproduce if they didn’t want to, indeed, we would actively encourage people not to try and raise children if they aren’t super duper sure about it. And for those few unfortunate children whose parents still fail them, there would be a far more robust state-run system ready to accept them.

Alright, we’re making progress. Let’s move on to the next obvious point:

Prostitution must be completely legalized, normalized, and even viewed as a totally acceptable alternative to traditional dating.

This is how we solve the Incel Question. Why do we have so many incels? Well, that’s not quite the right question—why aren’t more of these incels just banging hookers? Because they are still caught up in outdated cultural norms that stigmatize prostitution and emphasize marriage, that’s why. I mean shit, the practice still isn’t even legal hardly anywhere, much less accepted and encouraged. Why shouldn’t it be? Remember, we’ve now totally disconnected sex from reproduction, we’ve solved the CQ, and we’ve rejected any appeals to higher purpose or any other silly shit like that.

So what is the argument now against prostitution? That it “sullies the human soul” or is somehow traumatic for women or something? Let the women decide that for themselves, right? Remember Principle #5—sex is really important and you should have access to lots of it. Consequence-free, even! It is an obvious fact of the human condition that the male of the species enjoys sex for its own sake, while the female more often engages in it for access to resources. Why not formalize that dynamic? Let’s get these incels laid already!

Now for the final point, the culmination of everything we’ve gone through so far:

We must completely do away with the traditional ideal of marriage.

Now this doesn’t mean that men and women can’t still get married, if they want to. Why not, right? But there’s been this overriding norm throughout human history about marriage, what it is, how it’s supposed to work, and how important it is as an ideal to live up to, one of the ultimate life goals that everyone aspires to achieve. This is also one of the biggest flashpoints with tradcons. And that ideal of marriage did make sense in the past given the constraints we had to work with at the time. But we can just do away with all that nonsense now.

Remember Principle #1? Tradition sucks? If we remove tradition and children as defenses for marriage, what value does it retain? Not much! Let people do it if they want, but it no longer has any of the social utility that it once did. With no more connection between sex and reproduction, no more norms that you must have kids and you must raise them yourself, there’s simply no reason to stay so attached to this ideal of one man, one woman, for life.

We’ve already opened the gates to two men and two women, why stop there? We can re-conceptualize marriage in much broader ways than just indulging The Gays. It has been common in human history for wealthy and powerful men to have harems, and today this already exists informally. Why keep tiptoeing around it? If one truly vital man wants to spread his vitality around, who cares. It’s hard to imagine anything more vital than an alpha chad having lots of wild sex with crazy (but super hot) chicks, after all. One might even say it’s the very distilled essence of vitalism.

Yes, with those pesky children finally removed from the equation, we would be truly free to indulge in full sexual liberation and make marriage, to the extent that it continues to exist, genuinely all about sexual pleasure. Divorces needn’t be nearly as nasty in a world where childfree is the norm, after all—men and women would be far more able to engage in flights of passion and then go their separate ways a short time after. In fact, we could even hope for a day where divorce basically ceases to be a thing, because the ideal of marriage as being for life has ceased to be a thing, thus rendering “divorce” into an utterly trivial matter. Really, the sky is the limit with this stuff.

And don’t worry about the low status men, remember, we’ve got them covered. All they need is to earn enough of a living to pay for it and they can get however much pussy they want. Sounds pretty vital to me, definitely a lot more so than the sorry prospects offered to them today. It’s cruel to keep telling low quality men that they too can have naturally occurring sexual variety, or a stable and fulfilling marriage, if only they do this thing or that. Let’s stop with the pretense already and just get to the heart of the issue.

Now I could extrapolate a bunch more points down from here. We’ve accepted utilitarianism and rejected tradition, meaning that we’ve accepted social engineering as valid, and we’ve given it an aesthetic to aim at. The number of ways in which you could thus use incentives to make society more vital is practically endless, I just hit on the really big, most important ones here. One you could go for is a total stigmatization and ban on porn, because sitting at home jacking it to a computer screen is definitely not vital. No, you should be having actual sex, with real women, just like you’re biologically hardwired to do.

A vitalist society would genuinely give every man the means to earn that, by making money, and to then go do it, and feel good about it. No more jacking off in the cuck corner while Chad bangs Stacy again. Another idea I have would be extreme penalties for being fat and out of shape. Is it vital to be a 400 pound land monster that can’t even get up the stairs without nearly fainting? No, it isn’t! It’s super dysgenic! Obesity has zero redeeming qualities and getting serious about eradicating it would obviously increase utility. One way you could do this would be to tie access to prostitutes to physical fitness—you get fat, no more pussy for you bro. That seems plenty vital to me. Combined with serious bans on porn, I feel confident it would give a lot of men some real motivation to stay in shape.

And maybe that’s the final point and part of the appeal of true vitalism. If you take this shit seriously, and I mean you really commit to it and you actually throw off the yoke of tradition-based moral intuitions, well there’s no telling how many interesting ideas you could come up with. Just look at how far I’ve gone letting myself run with it for a little bit. I don’t even actually believe in any of this stuff, it’s all just a thought experiment for me.

So why are all the people who actually identify as “vitalists” not offering ideologies that are genuinely different from what else is on offer, like my Very Online Vitalism? It’s honestly kind of embarrassing to characterize yourself as being all vital and shit but then your “ideology” turns out to be a lot of familiar talking points with milquetoast liberal sexual values. What fun is that? C’mon, give us something real to work with, get vital with it guys! Come at us bro! Because whatever other criticisms you might make of Very Online Vitalism, you can’t say that it’s not trying anything new.