Nihilism: Advice for my Daughter, Advice for the Future.

you know why i'm clean-shaven
because i went to a job interview today the job pays minimum wage and does not require any university diploma and i'm not going to get it i think if they offer it to me i'd probably have to refuse to be clear but just so you know just so you know um had a productive conversation yesterday with a young man he says he's in his late 20s about philosophy politics and life if you're still in your teenage years when watching this it will probably sound completely meaningless to you to have an older guy like me say you know what philosophy it's not about logic it's not about abstract reasoning philosophy is really about life philosophy is really about how you are going to live your life how we are going to live our lives and you know what politics is not about abstract reasoning it's not about logic there's a sense in which politics is not even about right or wrong or correct or incorrect politics also it's really about life it's really about how you're going to live your life however i understand if you're 19 years old hearing this sounds a complete to you all right because when you say when you say this is about living my life are you talking about uh which bakery i go to to buy my bread are you talking about you know going skateboarding in your spare time like whatever it is you're like i understand when you're a young person what you think of as life and what that means to you it's something quite different from what it means to middle-aged people uh like myself there's another bias that creeps into all of this discourse discourse about philosophy discourse about politics the discourse about taking philosophy and politics and life and putting them together and getting something out of it getting something out of the next five years of your life for example you know there's a very strange bias that creeps in depending upon at what age you got involved in the game right so you know some people some people start reading about communism when they're like 12 years old all right there are red diaper babies there are people who are raised with communism from birth and there are people who like at the end of high school their last year they haven't even heard these terms i think i've told this story before i had a history professor at university and he said he had a student come up to him at the end of a lecture so this is a university level lecture and he said um during the lecture today you mentioned world war ii so does that imply there was some other war before that this was a white english-speaking canadian born and raised in canada he had literally never heard of world war ii before he had literally never heard of world war one before he was at university level there there are people who get involved in politics late their people start thinking about philosophy late in life in a lot of ways they bring a very detached mature perspective to to politics but getting involved away and there are people who form really deep sentimental and emotional connections to concepts to words to historical figures because they get involved with this stuff early now look there are advantages to getting involved early there are advantages to being becoming a well-educated person early in life rather than like there are also disadvantages to help you visualize this buddhism imagine a 30 year old man who's who's barely heard of buddhism he's seen it in some kung fu movies he has no familiarity with asian culture asian languages or buddhism and for in his 30s he starts getting interested for the first time and he walks to the library to get out some books on buddhism and he walks to a buddhist temple and has a conversation with a buddhist monk he is going to show up with a rational mature attitude towards buddhism even just implicitly he is going to be demanding that buddhism live up to his expectations as a rational well-educated middle-aged man he's going to be looking at these books he's going to be talking to this monk and like without even making a conscious effort there's like a filter there he's going to be filtering out uh purely superstitious um purely effective elements of the okay this is real uh anthropological jargon purely performative aspects of religion ritual is not he's not gonna in his 30s show up and say you know what i need a magical ritual to make me feel better about having a broken arm you know they do that in buddhism it's a real example you know he's not going to show you know what i need a ritual to drive the ghosts out of my own no right he's going to be approaching this in a certain way um and he may not be aware of it and i often see the buddhist monks and the university professors and so on and they all react to it without anyone spelling it oh here's someone approaching where we have to present the religion and the philosophy and this very rationalize okay what if the same guy had gone to the library and gone to the buddhist temple at age 16. it's different he would have brought something different to it he would have taken something different from it and his own desires his own needs would have shaped the discourse in a very different way okay what if he was born into a buddhist family what if he was first engaging with the religion as a child as a toddler even right the engagement with superstition completely different the types of questions you're asking and the answers you're being given when it's your grandmother answering your question where do people go after they die and you're a small child and she's an old woman it's completely different from your you're a man in your 30s and you go in you have to say hey you know i've i got these books at the library and it says you believe in reincarnation tell me can you can you explain technically how does this and that happen what do you completely different experience right yeah this is a case in which the observer shapes the experience more than they know right you're shaping the experience by the questions you're asking the answers that you're rejecting the answers that aren't good which books you take off the shelf the relationships of authority right sometimes that are completely unseen right if you got involved with left-wing politics in your thirties if you got involved with left-wing politics as a teenager if you were born and raised in left-wing politics these things shape you in a very different way but also what you know about left-wing politics and how you feel about left-wing politics will be very different because you have been shaping the politics and the philosophy at every stage just as much as or even more than our example taken from buddhism um a lot of you people in the audience young or old you won't be able to easily relate to my warning when i say to this guy in his 20s again and again stop thinking in terms of abstractions on a chalkboard stop thinking about politics and philosophy like you're drawing a geometric theorem on a chalkboard and start thinking about how you're going to live your own life first and foremost right to some of you that may sound as trite as a hallmark card you don't you don't get the point i'm trying to make you okay some of you will not really say do we start with a chalkboard and an abstract theorem in trying to define homosexuality and trying to come to a clear concise conclusion what is the true meaning of being a homosexual and do we then choose to live our lives trying to satisfy that ideal trying to live up to it no no most people progress through stages of uncertainty and conflicted feelings they may have a period of time where they feel like they're bisexual and then decide that they're gay or they don't feel that they know or they they think they're completely straight but then they happen to have one romantic relationship where they fall in love with someone of the same gender and they question their sexuality right there's a whole role of desire and ignorance and uncertainty and doubt and self-doubt and that's how people live through their sexuality right and then at some point in that process at the end of that process the middle april they can stop and look at the chalkboard and say oh hey what is the definition of homosexuality and what are my feelings and what am i experiencing then where do i fit but it's really an afterthought right why does even matter so we dealt with it something like this this example of a guy he thinks of himself as heterosexual he's married to a woman but he does actually have sexual affairs with men he only has oral sex with men he doesn't have anal sex should he think of himself as straight or gay or bisexual this may sound like a joke to you think about what i'm challenging the guy on the other side to do think about what i'm trying to get into i'm trying to get him to realize that he is again and again proceeding from abstract theorems on a chalkboard he's living his life as if the definition of socialism is something written on a chalkboard the definition of anarchism the definition of communism and then he turns around and looks at the real world he's demanding that the real world satisfy this definition he's demanding of himself he sees his role in life as living up to these definitions he's beholden to the definitions the abstract reasoning on the chalkboard is primary for him and for me it's not even secondary it's less than secondary it's nothing all right this is a really pragmatic element of nihilism what what is the meaning of homosexuality what's the point of taking a word like this and describing yourself what's the point of someone stepping forward at their office and telling their co-worker that they're gay all right it has nothing to do with any definition on any chalkboard or in any dictionary you've got a guy he wears a nice suit to work every day he has a female co-worker at first they just go out to lunch with a group of co-workers and then the two of them get along and they start going out to lunch just the two of them and at some point he tells her that he's gay all right now being gay means different things different people maybe this guy maybe his actual experience is that he's had sex with more women than he has men could mean all kinds of things right you know his actual lived experience of homosexuality you could get into all the nitty gritty of it and what he's dealing with now and what what his life was like when he was a teenager and the woman might even be shocked because maybe she's seen on facebook or on instagram that in the past he had a girlfriend or something you know they're all kinds of this is human complexity what what's the point of one human being letting another know that they're that they're gay obvious it's going to shape the future of that relationship oh okay she's going to think about him and her relationship with him in a different way the point is not for the word to give flesh and blood reality to the abstraction written on the chalkboard the word functions only for me to express something to you about myself if you call yourself a communist if you call yourself a socialist you're telling me nothing about communism you're telling me nothing about the facts of economics or the facts you're telling me something about you you're telling me something about who you are what kind of person you are above all else ethically you're telling me also about what kind of person you want to be what you're going to do in the future what kind of difference in the world you're trying to make it is just self-expression it's self-expression there's there's no question of trying to satisfy a perfect definition of communism or perfect definition of socialism and it is not just the case that it's pointless for someone like him this younger man was talking about it's not just the case that it's pointless for him to engage in this tit-for-tat game of saying well how precisely do you define communism and for him to then claim that the ideals of communism or the economic system of communism are not besmirched by the real world experience of what happened in the soviet union or communist china under the dictatorship of mao zedong right that is not harmless that's what i'm saying anyone who meets him and listens to him saying that who sees him playing those games on the chalkboard right they're going to react to that the same way i react when i meet someone on the internet who starts putting forward claims about the relationship between race and iq when i meet someone on the internet who starts putting forward the theory that an extraordinary number of jewish people have won the nobel prize for the following reasons when i meet someone on the internet putting forward the theory that the buddha had blonde hair and blue eyes all the time people raised questions and make factual assertions and open up lines of political and philosophical argument and they are not explicitly telling you that they're a neo-nazi they're not explicitly telling you that they're all alt-right and spend all their time reading crazy alt-right conspiracy theories they may even just make statements about the history of the roman empire or the history of ancient egypt you know like seriously but if you know your stuff if you know this material right away you can tell whoa this person is making an excuse for something that only neo-nazis and all right people make excuse for this person is engaging a sin that reflects what they've been reading where they come from in terms of their intellectual background right and that's who this person really is all right so this young man when he is playing games in this way with offering justifications for communism when he's saying positive things about the ideals of lenin even though he combines that with critical statements about lenin and critical statements okay the actual net effect of what he's saying it just makes me think he is a crypto communist and many people who watched my interaction with him and watched the comments popping up they said whoa this guy's whole audience seems to be comprised of cryptocommunist and that's how the internet works you know like attracts like the type of people who would enjoy hearing those kinds of mealy-mouthed middle-of-the-road statements rationalizing what mouse dong did and trying to rescue the pure definition of communism from the chalkboard a fundamental point here is that thinking in the first person thinking about yourself and your desires first and foremost all right and thinking about the abstract meanings of words on a chalkboard not even secondarily but really really it doesn't enter into our philosophizing and political theorizing at all right thinking about yourself as a creative person as a destructive person as someone who's gonna change history from your tiny pinpoint on the map and the tiny chronological span of your life and nobody knows how long it is right yes in theory you could get hit by a car tomorrow very unlikely but you know it's not reasonable to rationalize how you're living your life here and now in terms of grandiose abstractions whether you think of these as platonic abstractions or marxist abstractions frankly that exist at all times for all people right it doesn't make sense to rationalize what you're doing here and now with reference to some utopia that's supposedly going to exist on earth more than a thousand years into the future let's put a human face on that i've considered i've considered applying for and getting israeli citizenship to live in israel would be very difficult for me politically i think in israel ironically i would probably only hang out with far left-wing people those with all people willing to talk to me at probably with left-wing vegans you'd be living in a war zone and it's a war where i really don't have a lot of sympathy for either side in case the war i'm you know you guys have some sense of going i'm an atheist i'm a very active vocal atheist so it's very difficult for me to say anything good about any government that is openly theocratic all right i'm not real sympathetic for the government of saudi arabia the modern state of israel it's better than saudi arabia but it's a much worse government than the government of switzerland admittedly the swiss constitution opens by invoking the name of god switzerland is not a perfectly atheistic unfortunately unfortunately i wish with someone who were 100 atheists but it's not all right with that digression with that digression aside um a well-deserved boss hold on would it make sense for me to live my life in israel now with reference to some future utopia in which all the jews have ceased believing in judaism all the muslims have ceased to believe in islam and everyone embraces each other and in brotherhood even if you believe that's the inevitable future if you believe that's coming 500 years from now 300 years would be too too close right is it five years is it a thousand years even if you believe in that not as something probable but it's something definite and certain and inevitable right it would be a gross bizarre aberration in your life to live your own life to make your decisions here and now with reference to that future you dealt with that future outcome which is of course incredibly improbable you've got to make your decisions here and now based on who you are reality in the world around you and what you can accomplish in the next five years right what sense does it make for someone to live their life and make their decisions here and now with reference to a future communist utopia a future socialist utopia or in this kid's case a future anarchist utopia and to treat that to treat that as a certainty not as a fantasy but as something they believe in as inevitable as certain and then to make your decisions about the real world and what you can accomplish here and now with with references to to live your whole life in the shadow of this unreal ideal you guys have heard me say before you know atheism is not enough it's not enough to just reject the belief in a particular god or particular religious system you have to challenge the religiosity of our ways of thinking about everything right you have to challenge these fixed ideals that haunt us that shape our lives when we're dreaming as well as when we're awake all right what you have to do is learn to live with the dynamism of doubt all right do you think that one day in the future all muslims will just stop believing in islam and will embrace jewish people as their equals will happily let their sons and daughters intermarry with jewish people will see no invidious distinction between muslims between muslims and jews do you see that do you see that as the inevitable future you think that's definite you think that's certain wouldn't it be different to live your life acknowledging that that's a beautiful fantasy but that there's every reason to doubt that wouldn't it be better to live with constant gnawing doubt about just how bad the conflict is and that it could get worse and that it could get worse and worse and worse and that the future could actually be worse than the past that the future for the jewish people could be worse than what happened in world war ii isn't that something to fear isn't that something to doubt right all this horseshit that comes out of marxism all these certainties all these fables about the future right the problem is the impact they have on the present here and now right there's this old catchphrase in the academic study of history i'm sorry i forget who said it first it's probably john dewey or someone really boring like that you know we study history uh not to take something away from the past but for what it adds to the present right the problem is that people live with these fantasies about the future with these convictions about what's inevitable and certain about the future and it really takes something away from the present all right um the light motif of that discussion was my saying to this kid look the process we're engaged in here is not about setting up a perfect definition of socialism on the chalkboard a perfect geometric theorem it's not about defining these concepts precisely so that you can believe in them all right the point is to critique and debunk and discard all ideologies all ideals so that you can start believing in yourself the most fundamental insight of my teenage years was the realization that all authority is mere authorship karl marx was at one time a struggling author just trying to write a hit book okay some of you in the audience will know what that's like i'm right now trying to write a book i hope i hope as many as 1 000 people over 500 people i'd be happy with trying to hit book on a tiny scale trying to write a book that's appealing to and meaningful for a tiny tiny niche market and i pointed this out in an earlier video he had very specific examples of authors who'd been successful in in the decades leading up to this and he modeled what he was trying to do as a creative writer as an author and he came up with these stories with these fables and millions of people died because these stories set the human imagination on fire okay but they're just stories he's just an author he's just a storyteller and so are you so are you and you and you okay there's a very real sense in which the whole world's history begins and ends with your life your potential to make a difference in the world what you can accomplish in the next five years that has to be your concern not any geometric theorem not any definition of any set of concepts written up on a chalkboard