Written with the aid of AI.
On a spring morning in May 2025, a 25-year-old named Guy Edward Bartkus parked a sedan packed with hundreds of pounds of homemade explosives outside an IVF fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California. When he detonated the car, the massive blast gutted the building, injured four people nearby, and killed Bartkus himself—who had set up a tripod and phone to livestream the entire horror. A few months later, in August, 23-year-old Robin Westman opened fire at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, killing two people and wounding 17 before taking his own life. When researchers dug into Westman’s digital footprint, they found a chaotic, messy blur of online extremism, including a manifesto that openly idolized Bartkus.
These attacks echoed a much older tragedy: the heartbreaking 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20-year-old Adam Lanza forced his way into the building and killed 20 first-graders and six educators before committing suicide.
At first glance, these three events might seem like isolated acts of horrific violence. But if you look beneath the surface, a disturbing thread ties them together. None of these killers were motivated by traditional political or religious grievances. Instead, their manifestos and online logs revealed a deeply warped, shared logic: they truly believed that human existence is a state of pure, unadulterated misery, and they twisted philosophical ideas to frame mass murder as a twisted act of “mercy” or “rescue.” In their minds, forcing people to die was a morally justified way to save them from the inevitable pain of being alive.
To see just how broken this logic is, you have to look at the actual philosophies they hijacked: promortalism and antinatalism.
In academic world, promortalism is a niche, theoretical branch of ethics that suggests it is universally better for any sentient being to die sooner rather than later because life is inherently filled with a net balance of suffering. Scholars use it to debate the abstract value of existence or the rationality of voluntary suicide. However, when this theory trickles down into radical internet echo chambers, it gets dangerously co-opted by unstable individuals who use it to justify involuntary death and mass casualties.
The distortion of antinatalism is even more egregious. Real antinatalism is the philosophical stance that bringing new life into the world is unethical, primarily because an unborn child cannot give consent to inherit the guaranteed suffering and eventual death that comes with being alive. Because mainstream antinatalism places such a massive, binding premium on consent and autonomy, it is strictly and inherently peaceful. It fiercely rejects violence, murder, or forced sterilization. The philosophy argues that since we are already here, our bodily integrity must be protected, and the only ethical way to minimize suffering is simply to choose not to procreate.
So, how do peaceful, abstract philosophies get turned into ammunition for mass shootings and car bombs? The answer isn’t found in textbooks; it’s found in acute social isolation and severe mental health struggles.
Lanza, Bartkus, and Westman all retreated into deep physical and digital cocoons, severing real-world connections and stewing in radical online subcultures that validated their despair. Lanza spent years completely isolated in his bedroom, talking almost exclusively to anonymous strangers on internet forums. For these men, underlying psychiatric crises and intense, existential loneliness mutated into a toxic hatred for humanity. Unable to find a sense of belonging in society, they used fringe internet ideas like a psychological prism, refracting their personal pain into a destructive conviction that they had a right to end other people’s lives.
Blaming the philosophy of antinatalism for these attacks is not just factually wrong; it relies on lazy logic. In formal philosophy, this is called the genetic fallacy—judging the core truth of an idea based purely on the character of the broken people who happen to adopt it. It also acts as an ad hominem fallacy, because it attacks the horrific behavior of a few isolated outliers rather than actually engaging with the real, substantive ethical arguments about procreation and harm reduction.
Furthermore, this highlights a massive structural difference between secular philosophies and religious traditions. Many ancient religious texts contain literal verses detailing warfare, divine retribution, or the persecution of outgroups, which means religious extremists can easily point to canonical scripture to justify their violence. An antinatalist who turns to murder has no such luxury. Foundational antinatalist texts, like those by scholar David Benatar, consistently advocate for protecting living beings and reducing harm. To derive a mandate for violence from a philosophy explicitly dedicated to preventing suffering requires completely flipping the text upside down.
Ultimately, most religious believers filter their ancient scriptures to align with modern humanistic values, just as the overwhelming majority of antinatalists completely reject the violent, nihilistic edge-lords of the internet. A philosophical position has to be evaluated on its actual moral merits and logical consistency—not on the chaotic, violent acting-out of deeply unstable individuals suffering from extreme psychological distress.
