New Nihilism for Old: Is Nihilism an Unchanging Idea?

nihilism is both blessed and cursed with
being an anti etiology first and foremost and not an ideologies unto itself so it's both an advantage and a disadvantage that by and large when people when people discover nihilism I can't say they convert to nihilism they don't become filled with this enthusiasm they don't become obsessed with the notion that they have to go around convincing everyone else did they also ought to be nihilists they don't come on the internet passionate about disputing the correct definition of nihilism and this is quite a contrast to just about every other ideology you can google in the 21st century to ask you in the audience to have a little bit of sympathy for the position of a nihilist someone who really positively identifies with the term nihilus and someone does take the time to explain to his loved ones friends and friends and family and people who want to listen the internet what nihilism means to me and why I think it might matter in your life yours yours and yours not everyone in the audience for at least some of you two really brief anecdotes one is yesterday someone wrote to me basically hate-mail a critique or harsh condemnation of my channel and it concluded by saying I don't think that you can reach the people you'd like to by telling them that everything they know and love is wrong and I I posted this to the internet because I encourage criticism I wanted my other viewers to read this criticism but added the footnote at that point it is very much the core message of my youtube channel like you could say it's like my mission and life in many ways is precisely to reach out to people and tell them that everything they know and love is wrong if you can't sympathize with that about three years ago there was a short video that went viral on the Internet and it was taken by a woman who was wearing the full Muslim prayer garb that covers everything but her eyes and she was at some kind of religious ceremony or event where all these other people were freaking out you know enjoying the holy spirit were caught up in rapture of this release man she moved her camera around like this showing the crowd of all these other people in full traditional Muslim garb and there was a caption basically just saying look I'm the only atheist here like how do you think I feel like how do you think I feel being in a society or being in this particular ceremony where everyone is motivated by and swept up in this ideology that I regard as bad and evil and wrong now it is worthwhile to reflect for me and for you in the audience how would my life be different if I were born and raised in Saudi Arabia how would my life be different if I were born and raised even in Thailand you know I mean if I were spending my time really in a kind of fierce opposition to the ideology of a profoundly Muslim society or profoundly Buddhist society it would be a very different struggle right but in this society here and now even though the alienation may not be as obvious to you in the audience I really do live with that kind of alienation from society I really do live in that kind of constant state of nihilistic opposition now it's true that nihilism goes beyond atheism nihilism goes beyond the rejection of any particular religion or the rejection of all religion in some but nevertheless I think that anecdote it's a good way to reach out to be once they locate you sympathize with a position I'm in and yes I mean on matters both trivial and profound and when I'm talking to people you know my own mother my own closest friends and colleagues very often whether I'm polite or impolite whether I'm flattering or confrontational actually what I'm trying to get across to them is that everything they know and love is wrong and if you have friends or relatives who are Muslim or Mormon or Orthodox Jews you also may have this this experience and whether or not I'm compassionate or whether or not I'm well-spoken or charismatic in getting that across that actually is the final situation right or wrong that's my struggle right so let's be honest about that let's be honest about that as nihilists and if you people are idiots to be honest about it in terms of your own ideology most people who encounter nihilism personally subjectively individually do encounter it as a liberating ethic as a liberating new approach to how to think about their own lives in the world I saw a kind of tragicomic example of this here on YouTube there was a youtuber who was a left-wing anarchist or a narco communist and like a lot of those people he spent most of his time defending the ideology I can't even say really discussing philosophy it's really about defending your own ego in as much your ego is attached to this abstract word and then someone else says oh well if your name is attached to communism communism killed millions of people and then they want to defend the word and the concept of communism oh no no you didn't define this word correctly I did and again as I said at the opening this video it's both of blessing and a curse for nihilists that by and large most nihilist wants to kind of get the message of nihilism they don't spend their time they don't even spare their time doing academic debates at universities about like what's the correct definition of nihilism whereas you know whether you're a communist or a Catholic you spend your whole life trying to define this ideologies and fix 3 and examine your own human heart and examine the sacred text you know it can the ideology can never be pure enough and you yourself can never be pure enough in the eyes the ideology this becomes your lifelong burden most nihilists kind of respond to this movement oh ok I get it you know that's not the meaning of life I have to actually direct all my focus and energy to me leading a meaningful life and my meaningful life is gonna be about me and what I can do you know it's not gonna be about my life being in service to a church or a political party or what's much more slippery it's not going to be in service to an abstract idea like God itself or Catholicism itself or communism self what have you there was this youtuber and he used to be a left-wing anarchist and suddenly in his relatively old age he discovered the philosophy of Max Turner so max Turner for many people is kind of a gateway to nihilism and he had this he had this Epiphany he had this sudden realization that the point of life is not coming on internet and defending and contesting these political ideologies he came to the conclusion that what really matters in life is how you live it as he put it daily practice what you actually do with your day he suddenly realized really matters and being in touch with your own creative nothingness where he's basically directly borrowing Max Turner as as translationally he realized that what he really wants to do is be a creative highly motivated person who's making the most out of every day and making the most out of the next five years of his life that he has to work on leading a meaningful life himself and a productive and creative life a unique life was a real sterner term putting a lot of emphasis on your uniqueness great and that really he's been completely wrong for the last several years of his life in service to these ideologies okay now as I say it was kind of tragicomic if you know the philosophy of Max Turner watching that particular YouTube video I have to admit was kind of laugh-out-loud funny but nevertheless I mean this is also as an anecdote that illustrates the blessing and the curse of what nihilism is for people I think kind of both subjectively and objectively okay so I'm going to run down here what I think is most important about the universal definition of nihilism what nihilism means in each and every case for all of us regardless of the particular ideology it's negating more than just a second and then gonna talk very briefly about the subjective reality which is what most of us care about it gets short shrift in this video you don't want the video to be too long okay and you may ask how is it possible there's something Universal about nihilism isn't it just the case that some people living under communism in the Soviet Union negative communism they rejected communism they were critics of communism they discarded communism and then they took the next step of kind of discarding all ideology and then that became one form of nihilism and meanwhile in the Muslim world some people are gonna reject Islam in the Hindu world some people are going to reject Hinduism and take that next step so it's not just the critique of a particular belief but is the critique and rejection of all beliefs why would that lead to something Universal I think it does and I think it does in the same sense that the numeral zero is universal regardless of the language you speak every language in the world has to have a word for zero no matter how the concept of zero was discovered or how it may be written in different notation systems different languages it's written differently in Chinese than it is in English so on and so forth still if there's one thing we have in common it's nothing the zero that's at the base of nihilism both as anti ideology and as a positive ideologies I think it is something universal even though people discover it in different ways and do different things okay nihilism of one kind or another and I'm reading text here which is very much you know nihilism of one kind or another can arise at any time in any historical context however the setting that nihilism arises from will give it distinctive features both as a private personal philosophy and in a larger scale that it might operate on so for example nihilism could operate on the larger scale of a group of authors a group of artists could be 15 people but it could also be a political movement you know it could also be an organization that's trying to destroy the Catholic Church you know it could be a specific negating political social religious mission that song in a different context but obviously it could just be one person alone reading max Turner one person with a youtube channel it's easy to imagine that someone who rejects Hinduism ends up discovering nihilism only to articulate a philosophy that's completely different from someone who grew up in Eastern Europe before 1989 and he was primarily concerned with the critique of totalitarian political ideology in their own process of discovering nihilism all right in these first few words we've hinted that there's something worth explaining here what do we mean in assuming that there is one thing called nihilism and different people can discover this one Universal thing in different culture contacts independently regardless of the particular set of ideologies and beliefs that they're negating the moreover what do we mean by saying that nihilism can nevertheless be significantly different in different times in different social settings alright and then we have to ask the question of whether or not it's useful to speak of new nihilism in contrast to old and perhaps your nihilism in contrast to mine alright subjectively the experience of nihilism is a critique of belief that goes beyond complaining about a particular ideology or belief system to ultimately reject belief as such the opposite position commonly espoused in American culture is that belief itself is virtuous and that being a believer is an important part of being a virtuous person even if people disagree on the particular beliefs in this sense a Catholic can approve of the faith of a Hindu even though they believe in different things because they recognize common elements of belief and this is very common if you study religion or no religious people it's very common to meet someone who will tell you that even though they personally are a Catholic or a Lutheran whatever their their religion is that they can still recognize the validity of what Muslims are doing or Hindus are doing some rival group because they recognize that prayer is still prayer you know the some abstract notion that they still recognize that these people in a rival religion they're in some sense of basing themselves before a superior being they'll articulate to you what they feel all religions have in common or at least two or three religions have in common right and they will affirm that faith is something they value about being a good person themselves and then they can they can discern that in someone else I don't know how many Christians can recognize that in communists or vice versa so it doesn't it doesn't bridge across all ideological gaps but nevertheless the common the common delusion that faith is virtue or even that all virtue relies on and derive from faith this binds these things together in one category right so they Catholics Hindus communists they hallow a similar process of thinking they have a parallel sense of sacredness self-sacrifice prayer purity they hone their minds in a similar way even though they do not worship the same gods and they do not recognize the same legends revelations miracles rituals and so on when looking at the religions in detail the good Hindu may easily praise the Catholic for being a believer and in doing so the Hindu approves of himself also as a believer the positive value of belief is upheld as something unrelated to the particular thing being believed in so the subjective experience of nihilism results from the rejection of these assumptions beliefs ceases to be a virtue that's what I'm asserting here as the universal zero point of what all forms of nihilism new and old yours and mine anti-clerical and anti-communist what all forms of nihilism have in common all right the process of training oneself to live in a state of pious ignorance become suspect or even loathsome once you have rejected this assumption that believing is virtuous the enthusiasm for sacred concepts or even sacred people that believers train themselves to feel starts to seem childish or insane from the perspective of a nihilist whether we regard this new attitude as shallow or profound as immaterial my point here is that it has implications far beyond the critique of any particular religion or any particular ideology with this change accomplished Annihilus could not possibly reject the Catholic faith to then accept the Hindu faith and this is an important point you know it's not just that you're rejecting communism in order to sign up with another similar competing political ideology it's not just that you're rejecting Christianity to convert to Hinduism because this is a very fundamental rejection of faith belief and the training of the mind that's associated with those virtues over time the way of thinking the way of living the way of acting that derives from you know ultimately those those habits of mind that that do include prayer and you know numerous other expressions indeed even when you talk to communists the extent to which some things are thinkable and others are unthinkable the way in which they really embody their beliefs and live with the tenets of communism as a kind of faith if you spent time in communist that also will soon enough soon become significantly okay does it matter that there's a difference between old nihilism and new your nihilism in mind yes but I think to a limited extent I have spoken to nihilus on the internet who said to me and I immediately understood with a met that they identified as a cosmological nihilist they look at the universe they look at biology they look at evolution they look at geological time how many millions of years have passed just to create a rock that's lying on the ground and they evaluate human life belief ideology in that context and then find human ideologies to do close to that that for them is the way they entered into nihilism and it's worth pointing out that is a perspective that's very easy to gain today in the year 2020 it was much harder to gain that cosmological perspective in 1920 it required real brilliance and independent research to gain that perspective in 1820 and a very very few people on the leading edge of science people who were aristocrats could have had that view of the world in 1720 and when we go back to 15 2014 20 maybe it becomes entirely impossible right so it's just worth noting yes this is profoundly conditioned by the historical and social setting you're living in right so cosmological nihilism is a new type of nozzle or relatively new it's probably the last 100 years people have increasingly felt this way and indirectly you know the discovery of the atom bomb the discovery of DNA many of these things will contribute to the okay now my version of nihilism I instead describe as historical nihilism that when you study and learn from the history of the world including Thucydides in ancient Greece including the failure of communism in Europe the failure of communism in China and so on I think that out of an understanding of human nature and real world history as a process I come to again the same conclusion I do think there's this one universal notion of one element I come to the conclusion that faith is not a virtue that believing is not virtuous and I step beyond the critique of particular beliefs to reject all beliefs entirely right and then the question remains how much common ground is there how much potential is there for cooperation between people who are in this sense members of different schools of thought within the nihilism I came to say within it's not it's not like there's a tent we're all standing of it right we're all mutually alienated but we share to some extent this experience we share some kind of negation of ideologies leading up to this realization and taking on this perspective of the world and again it's both the strength and the weakness of nihilism that most people respond to this discovery not by trying to convert others to nihilism but asking how do I lead a meaningful life now nail that I have to look within myself for the resources the motivation the direction that I have to make my own path I'm no longer looking in the sky I'm no longer looking above me of whether to a literal God or to abstract concepts or even to books you know idiot oceans come before I realize that it's it's my creative burden life to decide to to what a meaningful life is gonna be to do the work to create it for myself ex nihilo out of my own creative nothingness as Max Turner would say and I think each of us correctly feels that in that mission and in that challenge we are profoundly alone I think there's some potential especially with the ease of Association the internet for nihilus to discover what is they have and and perhaps there's an even greater potential for us to learn from our mutual alienation I would love to have a conversation with someone who grew up in a communist country like Laos or Cambodia and hear them talk about how maybe when they were a teenager they started questioning what the Communist Party was telling them and how they emerged in that ideology and how they view the history of the Communist Party now as opposed to what they were taught in school I would love to hear that I would love to hear a nihilist perspective on growing up in Cambodia or Laos and I defy you I think today that story is not told on any YouTube channel I don't think it's told on any website I don't know if it's told in any book right and you could then fill in the list with a whole lot of other ideologies including even anarchism including even feminism I would love to hear a nihilist perspective from someone who used to be a true believer in third wave feminism and then got disillusioned with that and moved on to a critique of belief analysis even if it's just learning from the alienness of our respective experiences I think that could be something tremendously powerful tremendously meaningful now in the 21st century