Atheism ☛ Nihilism ≈ Vegetarianism ☛ Veganism.

so this is in effect a Q&A video about
nihilism and my particular school of a particular brand of nihilism but I've kind of agglomerated all the questions into one so I don't know if you can relate to this now remember Mike my girlfriend doesn't represent my philosophy it's not like when we got together there was like a requirement that she had you know believe everything I'll or anything I believe but if she converts to Islam I'm breaking up there you know I mean obviously there are limits and every every relationship of how much you've got in common and this kind of thing but on the on the whole I've been surprised at how many elements of my kind of philosophical approach to life she can really relate to positively so you know even though it's a simple example when I was talking about that issue in in facebook comments of not having the attitude of wanting to be right and one through the other other person well some of those little elements of nihilism and what it means to me a price she could relate to right away she really saw like yeah this is an important difference been leading a meaningful life and leading a meaningless one and the way in which people's own anyway the people's ideology that's what it's about you know escalates conflict and what-have-you I wasn't able to put my finger on it as what philosophy but I mean it's in those little examples that you see you know the ways in which the critique of belief matters in everyday life and I think old philosophy needs to be like that if you're a member of a philosophy that doesn't anyway touch your daily life maybe you're not really uh maybe it's not really a philosophy and God knows I've known a lot of people with PhDs who are in that situation where they identify with neo-kantian ISM or something we ask them ok how does that actually change for what I was x-ray fit anyway not at all it's just just an academic topic that they that they study so kind of combining all the questions I got into one a lot of them boiled down to this I got this you know people have different ways to send me messages on patreon etc etc but they can be combined to boil down to saying do you really believe that the world would be a better place if nihilists were the majori if nihilist were in charge or if not less if everyone wasn't I unless of course you know impossible and with reference to some specific situation so in some cases it was like well do you really think there wouldn't have been as many massacres in the history of Russia if the nihilists had kind of won instead of the Communist cause nihilism is a historically existing real ideology in the history of Russia especially in the years leading up to 1917 what's called Russian nihilism as a school of thought you know do you think the world would be a loss of own place so team to step back here I think this is look to be a vegan I very often use this really minimal down-to-earth definition of veganism right where I say look I'm getting rid of kind of the grandiose ideological claims but I do think it's inevitable that if you are a vegan you believe the world would be a better place if more people were vegan right I think I think you know if you kind of get past the I don't know of any vegan if you are vegan it's not just a diet I think another element you know is that you you believe to go now atheism likewise I mean people criticize atheism say atheism is really a religion obviously atheism is not a religion however if you're keeping it all the way real don't you think that atheists in their heart of hearts believe that the world would be a better place if more people were yes and the stiff so fact though fewer people were Muslim and fewer people were questioned and Jewish and what-have-you you know and if you don't believe that I think it's worth questioning are you really an atheist like how can you believe a theism is just good for me and isn't good for the masses or millions of people or sadly thousands of people you know how could I possibly believe veganism is just good for me like I some kind of private virtue and not good for millions of people and the third example skepticism skepticism with a capital S if you really think about the ancient Greek meaningful use of the word skepticism not read it scepticism not internet skepticism you know what I mean but real skepticism likewise you know I think if you're a skeptic it's not possible that you think it's good for me but no the world like the world to be a worse place if more people were skeptical I think it's completely inevitable that if you really understand skepticism you value that you're only you know that you're gonna say yeah the world would be a better place if more people together so the bridge I want to make yours is this it struck me the other day and I never thought this before that in many ways the relationship between atheism and nihilism is parallel to the relationship between vegetarianism and veganism you know now sorry I'm vegan it's very easy for me to see that vegetarians are trying to do something positive they're trying to make the world a better place but vegetarianism when you really think about it really live with it really look at the inputs and outputs its incoherent it does not make sense it does not make sense to pay someone money to raise a cow in captivity and take its milk and turn the milk into cheese and then kill the cow and constantly impregnate the cow and kill any of its babies so that vegetarians can eat cheese it's morally incoherent it's ecologically incoherent it's athlete this doesn't make sense however I totally can recognize they're doing something they're trying to do something positive by becoming vegetarian and veganism by contrast is coherent and it's just you know I feel it makes sense it completes an impulse that's there in a partial and incoherent way in in vegetarianism in the same sense I really regard atheism as inadequate although it's they're trying to do something good I mean II theism all it is is a rejection of monotheism and polytheism that's it that's all it covers so it's very problematic I complained about this recently in some videos of meditation if you search this channel for the word meditation there are a whole bunch of videos talking about Buddhist meditation but you know it really kind of astounds me that you can go to these skeptic forums an atheist forms the internet they're these people they really identify with atheism or they really identify with skepticism but they still believe in we believe in Supernatural ideas about meditation right and sometimes it's supernatural ideas disguised as as pseudoscience sometimes not all right the meditation is one example homeopathy magical heal you can be an atheist to believe in ho me out that you believe in healing crystals you can believe in all kinds of alternative medicine being you probably know people like this I've seen it all over the internet and so on right um and the big one in my life and this is still a big deal in many parts of the world today but it's a big deal in Cambridge England you know I used to live in Cambridge England with the big University there and so on you can meet people or atheists and they support communism and I don't mean softcore communism they support mass murder like this regimes I've seen the whole range of course they're atheists are kind of softcore communists who'd rather not see people so I've met believe me I've met many many communists who still to this day support the policies of Joseph Stalin still support mass murder and so on it's not this you know this was a mainstream ideology until only so many years ago so obviously atheism in itself from my perspective is inadequate and incoherent and I really can say that skepticism is in a sense the the sequel of that that completes a something that's not fully thought out and not fully coherent within within just a theism and I think it's the same thing again in parallel but I'm off to repeat myself I think I can say the same thing again with with skepticism whether you're talking about kind of phony internet skepticism or if you're talking about you know a really meaningful ancient Greek notion of what skepticism is what it's supposed to be about because again you can be a skeptic and have all these other problems I think I mean out maybe I'm simplifying I think there are some people who would argue that skepticism is almost tantamount to nihilism that if you're really a thorough and consistent skeptic that it brings you up pretty close to nihilism Messiah I said to find it that might be an interesting conversation have I ever met anyone who represented ancient Greek skepticism but anyway it seems to be it seems to be a moot point you know but again I think scepticism alone where does that leave you and to communism or I will hope I'd hope any skeptic would reject homeopathy but that's not my experience my experience is people who embrace skepticism but who really believe in for example Transcendental Meditation so III don't know how they square that circle but if you're a nihilist you definitely do not even settle meditation and then this kind of thing right so look I mean you know I've said most what I have to say in this video this is short by my standards this video I said recently had a lot of reflections of the importance of sticking to historical reality rather than the principle of the thing so I'm asked this kind of question do I really think there will be a better place till really there be fewer massacres if more people were in ILS we can definitely say in terms of comparing historical reality to historical reality the historical reality of who who were the Russian nihilists that was a real political movement that really is a real charitable movement and so on they were interested in improving the lives of farmers and so on well if the the Russian nihilists had been in control of Russia in the year 1917 instead of the Communist Party and I shouldn't even say communist instead of the Bolshevik Party specifically Lenin's Bolshevik Party which is very different from other forms of communism I can guarantee you that after the elections of 1917 there were elections in 1917 and Lenin lost the party that won was a different left-wing party called the social social Revolutionary Party sure if if nihilus have been in power they would not have responded to the elections by hunting down and murdering every elected member of parliament and going from town to town and village to village and hunting down and murdering anyone who supported the winning political party in those elections that is completely inconceivable so not comparing ideals to ideals or not comparing an ideal to a to a lack of ideals but if you look at the historical reality of who the the Russian nihilists were and the direct alternative to them in Lenin's Bolshevik form of communism yes it's very easy for me to the world would be a better place if if nihilist had political power at that time and obviously they would have passed on political power to whoever won the elections you know we're not imagining a nihilist spectatorship it doesn't doesn't make any sense or possibly a parliament in which the nihilists won two seats there's a little tiny minority probably nihilism is not a very popular ideology and I think most people accept it's it's never gonna be it's almost by definition it's the perpetual outsider it's you know though it's always gonna be a gadfly and a critic in that Socratic sense of gadfly in relation to mainstream my believes but if you believe in atheism if you believe in skepticism just like if you believe in veganism is it possible for you to think that Saudi Arabia would be a worse country if it were ruled by atheists do you believe Saudi Arabia would be a worst country if it were ruled by skeptics or in my case by nihilists I find that impossible you know III don't in a sense I don't know how it can be coherent to be an atheist and not believe that Saudi Arabia would be improved by by atheism you know any any clear clear-cut case like that and you know you could look at other more difficult situations we have multiple religions look right now in Nigeria you know there's an ongoing war against Muslim extremists like Boko Haram in Nigeria if you don't think that you know atheism is better then again atheism or skepticism or nihilism wherever you kind of are on this perspective is better than Boko Haram and is better than the various forms of Christianity and animism and superstition that are competing with Islam in northern Nigeria I don't know what what kind of estar or how it's possible for you to live with such a fundamental contradiction within your your fundamental conditions