The Mortalist
The bonds that connect us to each other and our world will always be stronger than the cult of death
At 11 o’clock in the morning of Saturday, May 17, 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus detonated a bomb in the car in which he sat, outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California. The clinic was damaged but the fertilized embryos, we are told, were saved. And although four people were slightly injured, the only fatality was Bartkus, who was blasted to pieces.
That was in accordance with his principles. Like most random shooters and bombers in this narcissistic age, Bartkus left behind a manifesto that has now vanished from the web; all quotations come from my copy of it. (In another typical move, he had hoped to livestream the bombing but was prevented by equipment failure.)
He was, he said, a “pro mortalist”—an advocate of death. The goal of the mortalist is to “begin the process of sterilizing the planet of the disease of life.” He meant that literally. Not only should the human race, with all its hopes and dreams, be exterminated for its own good, but so should the innocent beasts that walk, fly and swim among us.
“I think we need a war against pro-lifers,” Bartkus wrote to explain the attack on the clinic. “It is clear at this point that these people aren’t only stupid, they simply do not care about the harm they are perpetuating by being willing agents for a DNA molecule. This should not be seen as tolerable to any intelligent and caring person.”
What are we to make of this? From any normal perspective, Bartkus was a despairing young man driven to suicide by his inner demons. He represents nothing greater and deserves only our compassion.
But he was a mortalist—he was in love with death. He wanted to die but also to kill. And I’m troubled by the notion that, though typical of nothing, Bartkus stood at the end of an intellectual trajectory by means of which we have been progressively thinking ourselves into extinction.
The Vale of Tears
The human condition is inescapably tragic. We suffer a thousand varieties of pain; then, without sense or explanation, the flame of life flickers out forever. There are no happy endings.
The Buddhists console us with the thought that misery is illusion. Christianity promises a realm beyond the reach of pain. But most religions converge in the belief that this world—this narrow valley darkened by the shadow of death—is a place of tears and tribulations.
So what’s the point of living?
No one who has ever bounced a kid or a grandkid on a knee would ever ask that question. No one who has shared a life with a loving spouse would ask it. No one who has exchanged a secret laugh with a best friend, or enjoyed a brilliant conversation or felt a bond to someone or something that enlarged or even transcended the limited self—none would ask it.
This isn’t logical or rational, because the tumultuous “gale of life” precedes logic and reason. We find ourselves here, alive, aware, deeply in love with as many things as cause us to suffer. That’s the starting position. We can’t back away. We can’t be unborn. No doubt there are evolutionary and biological drivers attaching us to the world—selfish genes, electrochemical impulses, etc.—but this doesn’t matter; only the abiding feeling of love and attachment does.
Philosophers, whose self-appointed task is to explain the world logically and rationally, have made a hash of this whole question. From the time of the ancient Greeks, they have butchered the fragile bundle of human experience down to two blunt factors: pleasure and pain. Life then becomes a sort of game, won by garnering a lot of one while avoiding as much of the other as you can.
The Stoics believed that if one desired nothing, nothing would hurt. The Epicureans went after tiny harmless pleasures. Closer to our own day, the utilitarians translated “pleasure” into “happiness” and “happiness” into “money”—giving rise to an ethics of government based entirely on the assumption of individual selfishness. I don’t see how it could end otherwise. Once we accept the logic of pleasure and pain, selfishness becomes the necessary virtue.
The implementation of selfishness isn’t quite what Jefferson meant by the pursuit of happiness. Yet here we are—and there’s a terrible price to be paid. All those relations and connections that make life worth living are crushed under the weight of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” To the question, “What is the point of living?” fewer and fewer answers can be given—as there are fewer children, fewer marriages, fewer friendships, vanishingly few possibilities of transcendence. We are supposed to live for pleasure. If one isn’t a hedonist or a psychopath, contemporary life can take on the aspect of a spiritual desert.
The revolts against such sickly conditions are in themselves pathological. If the pursuit of pleasure is repudiated as a mere chasing of shadows, reality will be perceived in terms of pain. The earth will appear to be dying. Our fellow creatures will be tortured or harried to extinction. The human animal is rabid, predatory, destructive of everything in its path, including itself. The loathing we nurse against ourselves in our hollow hearts also is aimed outward with a vengeance.
And so the madness of the philosophers reaches its logical conclusion. Super-subtle minds, whose compassion arises from self-hatred and whose empathy is a form of aggression, desperately seek the formula for the cessation of pain in all things. Since they believe humanity to be the source of universal suffering, that formula writes itself. The human plague must be eliminated from the face of the earth.
Enter the “anti-natalists” like David Benatar, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who writes articles with titles like “We Are Creatures That Should Not Exist.” “Anti-natalism,” Benatar explains, “is the view that we ought to desist from procreating—that it is wrong to have children.” He offers a long list of reasons for this philosophy of nonlife, of which the following can serve as a sampler:
[W]hen we look closer we notice how much suffering there is. Consider, for example, the millions living in poverty or subjected to violence. ... Psychological distress and disturbance is widespread. Rates of depression are high. Everybody suffers frustrations and bereavements. Life is often punctuated by periods of ill health.
The world’s population is trending in Benatar’s direction—we have all turned into anti-natalists these days. But I have questions. What happens once the program is complete, when the last man and the last woman, trapped in a grim Anti-Eden, walk away not just from each other but from all the accumulated memory of joy and genius and—yes—horror and evil? Who, then, will make the moral calculus of pleasure and pain?
Toward Oblivion
Anti-natalists, Benatar assures us, aren’t heartless. They disapprove of suicide and murder. Yet that’s an illogical position: If eradicating humanity means the end of suffering, dragging the matter out over generations feels like an act of cruelty. Jiwoon Hwang, an anti-natalist from South Korea, a country in demographic freefall, took Benatar to task for his “absurd” inconsistency. He argued instead that “so long as one’s remaining life contains any pain, it is always preferable to cease to exist than to continue to exist.” Evidently persuaded by his own logic, Hwang killed himself in September 2024.
Bartkus, the mortalist, swam in even murkier waters. Whereas Benatar spouts rationalistic nonsense from the heights of academia, Bartkus was a creature of the digital underworld—of twitchy podcasters and bizarre subreddits. The distance between the two spheres is less than might be imagined. The obsessions of our elite minds, such as climate change and Israel (what some have labeled “the omnicause”), often trigger the spasmodic activism of zoomers who otherwise exist mostly online. The hierarchy of intellect provides a pretext for pseudo-political protests and occupations: It’s all performative in any case, content for someone’s amusement on the web. The professors who have replaced the philosophers feed vampirically on the confusion of the young.
The mortalist, almost by definition, is an emotionally broken person. In his manifesto, Bartkus claimed to suffer from borderline personality disorder. We don’t have to believe this self-diagnosis: The rage against life offers ample evidence of a tortured soul. Nevertheless, he bore his anger and his anguish within a specific social environment. He could exist, day to day, without attachments to the community that might have saved him, without connections to anything human or real that might have offered him solace, in a way that is only possible in this age of the laptop and the smartphone.
Bartkus, we can be sure, never went to the local bar, or the ballpark, or friends’ weddings or church, but he avidly linked to his favorite YouTube prophet and heard him proclaim, “Existence has a price, has a cost—and the cost is paid by pain and suffering. ... Now I argue that there’s no necessity for life.” (Although the true identity of the YouTuber is uncertain, there is some evidence that he took his own life.)
Bartkus never had a wife or a girlfriend—he was not “asexual,” he insisted, but rather “antisex”—but he seems to have carried out an online friendship with a young woman that meant a lot to him. Then, on April 20, the young woman’s boyfriend killed her, apparently at her request. That was a decisive moment in his slide “over the edge” to oblivion.
Sickness and isolation, ideology and digital unreality, all account for the self-destruction of these sheltered middle-class youngsters—but in what exact proportions, I’m at a loss to say.
You Will Never Persuade
At the start of the Spanish civil war in 1936, philosopher Miguel de Unamuno delivered an address at the University of Salamanca condemning the slaughter. In the audience sat fascist general Millán-Astray, already disabled and disfigured in combat. Enraged by the tone of the speech, the general stood and shouted, “Viva la muerte!” The translation could be the final, paradoxical battle cry of Guy Edward Bartkus: “Long live death.”
Unamuno responded by calling Millán-Astray an invalid. Spain, he said, was crowded with too many people who had been maimed in the “uncivil” conflict. That was true spiritually even more than physically.
The philosopher made two observations that bear on my subject. “The extremes ... can’t serve as the norm,” he said. Not just the mortalists, but the entire intellectual line of descent that reached its sorry conclusion with them, belong in the margins. The measure of humanity vastly exceeds pleasure and pain.
Unamuno told Millán-Astray, “You may win, but you will never persuade.” Even if the cult of death, in its many iterations, can turn the earth into a charnel house, the bonds will hold that attach us to each other and the world, now and always, in an irrational embrace of past, present and future generations.
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